Well..we have arrived! WOO HOO! I am so pumped. We had an amazing time in Ft. Lauderdale preparing for this journey. My teammates and I are being called to live a life of high consideration for others, to prefer(forfeiting what I want for someone else's needs), high safety(safe place for people to work out problems and process), and high honor(honor and love God and love myself knowing who I am in Christ). It is great knowing we are all on our own journey, but we have people here who want to walk through it with us with no judgement.
We woke up at 5am on Friday morning and started our travel day. We walked with our packs about 25 min to the bus, took a train and finally flew to Santa Domingo. When we arrived in Santa Domingo we took a bus 4 hours to San Juan. We stayed the night in San Juan with 3 other teams in a house. We met our contact, Miguel in the morning for a cultural briefing while 4 of my teammates went to buy groceries for the next two weeks since we didn't know what the food options would look like when we got to the village we were going to.
We left San Juan on Saturday afternoon and headed to Arroyo Cano. Our team contact, Gregorio has an amazing heart for the Lord and to lead his people in a deeper relationship with Christ. We have had the opportunity to attend 3 church services so far where our team leader, Rachel translates for us. The village is filled with loving people who are so open and willing to share all that they have with us. It is definitely a very humbling experience.
We are staying at the church, sleeping in the sanctuary where we push benches together for beds! We have a had a couple of screams from huge spiders, rats and lots of bugs:) We have water for an hour every other day or so, so we store the water in huge bins to use when we don't have water. Bucket showers are definitely easier with no hair:) ha. by the way..I chopped all of my hair off:) pictures to come soon.
We are here to encourage the church as well as work with the Compassion International school located next door. Today no children showed up in the morning, so we went with a brother from the church to his field..more like forest..filled with oranges, lemons (they are surprisingly super sweet!), and avocados. He then welcomed us into his home and made juice from the fruit we had picked. Delicious!
For those of you who were worried that I would not get my coffee fix for 11 moths, toss your cares aside!!! Every home we go into makes us delicious coffee!!! They actually grow coffee here and lay it out to dry in their front yards. I am usually a cream and sugar girl, but here they put ginger in their coffee. Super delicious!!!
Please be praying for my teammates as we continue to get to know each other and dig deeper into each others lives. Pray that we would gain deep relationships quickly. I am quick to get frustrated with the language barrier, so please pray that I would allow the spirit to lead me into conversations and use the little spanish I know to encourage, comfort, reveal hope and peace to the people here.
We are sharing an internet modem with our contact's extended family as well as the 5 other people on my team, so updates might be farther apart this month, but to get a better taste of the big picture, check out my teammates blogs:
Suzanne Bradford
Regan Taylor
Rachel Williams
Matt Blair
Tyler Hamiliton
LOVE you all and am so thankful for you!
Thank you for all of your prayers. Love and miss you! PEACE OUT
