Footsteps of Paul

Hello from Turkey,

Our week studying Mexico with the kids ended on Friday with a fun Mexican Fiesta. Our craft throughout the week was putting together 3 paper mache piñatas which went over very well during our Fiesta. We also played some pin the tail on the donkey and enjoyed some Mexican food… or as close to Mexican food as we were able to recreate here in Turkey. Overall we all had a lot of fun and we are continuing to be encouraged by the kids’ enthusiasm.

Saturday night we got the opportunity to experience a traditional Turkish Bath (Hamam). It was quite interesting and memorable to be scrubbed down by complete strangers. It ended with a soap massage and we all felt squeaky clean.

The next morning we left Antalya and headed for Ephesus. Along the way we stopped in Denizli which houses ruins from the ancient city of Laodicea. We got to walk around in recently excavated market place and even saw a 2,000 year old stadium that would have held Chariot races. After that we stayed the night in Pammukale, a town famous for its natural hot springs. On Monday it was on to Ephesus. First we visited the Church of St. John and saw his tomb. The church was built up around his tomb centuries after his death. Seeing the city ruins of Ephesus brought to life Paul’s journeys, many of which included a stop in Ephesus. We were able to stand in the amphitheater that hosted the famous riots against Paul and his teachings. (Acts 19:23-41) After this weekend we all have a deeper understanding and appreciation of this land (Turkey) and its importance in early Christian History.

We are all exhausted from our 7 hour bus ride home to Antalya but are looking forward to being back with the kids tomorrow. We hope all is well at home, we hear the weather is just gorgeous! Keep us in your prayers,

Team Turkey

Malawi life

Hey all its the Malawi team checking in.
We have not given you a full update yet so here goes!
The three of us, Tracy, Amy and Sami met up with 22 other interns. Most of them are from the US but we have 8 from Malawi who are amazing help to us and its been great getting to know them!

Our weeks are really busy. Monday Wednesday and Friday mornings we do our service projects for COTN ( the organization we came through). Those afternoons we go into Mgwai a village that backs the compound we stay in. There are a couple hundred kids there that we get to play with and see God working through. We give a bible lesson at the start of the week and then follow up the other two days!

Tuesday and Thursday mornings we visit our host family, which has been an amazing experience. With our family we learn real Malawian skills. We attempt to carry water on our heads, “mud floors”, wash pans with dirt… oxymoron?… maybe. We are experts at washing clothes by hand! We can also make our own corn flour! Those afternoons we do our “personal ministry”. For some this means working with widows, mentoring or doing art projects. However for the three of us it means doing sports ministry. This includes going into a village and building the excitement around the soccer organization COTN has created. We give a bible lesson each visit and show Gods love by just playing with the kids.

Our living situation is pretty great! We have running water… most of the time. Sometimes its even hot! Our electricity comes and goes, dinner seems to be the best time for it to go out! We live in a single story dorm with 16 beds total in two rooms. We have a bathroom and a “laundry room”. The boys have the same set up. We have a big brick wall that surrounds the Njewa compound and the compound next door “Salima” houses huts for the one week teams as well as our lunch hall. Food has been a unique experience for us. We eat nsima, which is corn flour and water boiled to the consistency of mashed potatoes. You use it to pick up the “greens” which are veggies boiled down to nothing. We also have a good amount of rice and beans as well as corn porridge. Most of the Americans put peanut butter on everything in order to get some nutrients! We will probably never want to see it again when we get home! One of our best experiences was going into the market on a food hunt. We were given a Malawian budget and a shopping list in Chichewa. We had one Malawian with us and were dropped off near town. We all made it back, nearly all of us with the live chicken that was on the list. We then had to kill it, gut it and prepare dinner… eeek! We really are true Malawians! Some of us our vegetarians now!

Well God is growing us each and every day and we can see him working in the kids! Here are some prayer requests:
1) Health! We have gotten a bad bout of illness. All three of us have been fighting sickness but have come through it for the most part!

2) Here are some Malawian kids that have touched our heart, so pray for their health and that God would open their heart to his message: Krissy, Jennifer, Aisha, Ellen, Martha and Wezz

3) Team Dynamics. With 17 girls in one little dorm and no break we can get frustrated easily, especially with people getting sick!

4) Continued strength for ministry and connection with kids!

Mayonesa!

HELLOOO!



Sprawled across our makeshift "Cyber" slash internet café, we sit to write our next entry. The last few days have been long but good. Weekends are filled with church activities: prayer vigils, graduation thanksgiving parties, birthday thanksgiving parties nad 4 hours on Sundays. Quite an experience.



Recent exciting happenings: We went to an authentic Mexican Wedding last weekend! Although, now that its all over, we would like to retract our excitement from the last sentence... our expectations had been so high, but we were disappointed with a lack of dancing (not even one dance!) and food that was ALL smothered in mayonase. There was mayo in places where we never thought possible. Looks like USA wins this time. We also traveled to a Mexican "Rancho" yesterday (on Nicole´s birthday!) where we chilled with some cows, rode a horse and just got to experience the countryside a bit. Oh, and we had 20+ people riding in the bed of a small pickup truck riding to said Rancho. Don´t worry, lots of pictures were taken. Last big thing was a Cenote that we visited on Thursday. A Cenote is basically a big cave with real deep water that you can swim in. It was beautiful and extremely refreshing in our 95 deg heat. The best part may have been the horse drawn rail cars that took us to and from the Cenote. It was pretty sketch.



Construction, Bible classes and English classes coninued as normal also. A typical day for us here in Chapab includes us working on Geronimo´s house from 8-11am in the morning, resting until lunch time, planning after lunch, VBS at 4pm and English class at 7pm. Nights and afternoons are ours to do what we please - roaming around the town and possibly playing some basketball or soccer is a favorite activity. Its too hot to do so during the day. Activities are going pretty well, the house looks like it might not fall down dispite our best efforts... the kids are loving playing around and learning the song Pharoah Pharoah and everyone can now count to one hundred in English class.



Our team is plugging along here in Chapab, although it has been difficult at tmes adjusting to our new location and schedule. Patience is definitely key here... I´m assuming the word "punctuality" does not exist in Spanish. example... if church starts at 6pm, then you can expect there to be 4 or 5 people there by 6:20. Yeah. The record for late-starting-ness is currently an hour and 45 minutes. Besides patiance, we have all been learning how to best work together as a team and really support one another´s needs. Of course, things have been very different than expected also - this being both a good and a bad thing at times. We all already feel like we are part of the families with whom we live, and even the community to a degree too, which is great. Everyone (seriously, like everyone) in the 2500 person town knows our names and is not shy to shout out to us as we pass by. Its been neat to see how receptive and excited all the people here have been. We can already tell it will be very sad to leave in two weeks.



Thank you to all that have been reading and praying about us, as we are all healthy and no serious issues have been encountered. Please continue to pray for health, communication and direction for the rest of our time here in Chapab.


ADIOS, LOVE AND HUGS,

Team Yucatan

Malawi Update

Malawi team is alive and well. Things haven't changed too much except God is showing himself more and more! Please pray for health of our team. Sami got really sick and is on the mend but our team as a whole is getting run down.
Please also pray that God continues to open the hearts of the children and parents we meet every day!

For more updates on Team Malawi, you can also check out:
http://samionmission.blogspot.com/
or the intern team blog (of the Malawi interns from UPC and elsewhere):
http://malawi2008interns.blogspot.com/

Northern Ireland... fan-dabby-dosey!

Hey guys! Ok well, first of all... our apologies from failing to blog more than once thus far. I guess we are just having that great of a time! (also, internet access is surprisingly hard to come across in this first world country!)

Northern Ireland has been such a whirl wind so far! We started our first camp in a small farming town called Faughanvale. The people that we worked with were absolutely incredible and we were so heartbroken to say goodbye. We all worked with different ages, Kiel and Jenna had the ages 7-8, Nicole with the teens and Quinn had 9-10 year olds. The holiday bible camps are so great and the kids with the accents can break your heart in one sentence, or one lick in Jenna's case. (A little blonde girl named Grace had a problem with licking everyone). Each night we had programs for the young people in the town. This included a talent show with Kiel looking like a very pretty woman dressed up for our rendition of blind date, and Jenna was a little too scary as scary spice in a lipsync. We also had a barn dance, a treasure hunt and lastly, celebrated our independence with an enormous slip and slide rally.

Ireland is absolutely beautiful and the rain intends to always keep it that way! We have just had a couple of days to travel and have seen the best of the north, even with a little sunshine. We even spent an afternoon at our hostel buggie boarding in the waves! We are heading down south to Ireland on friday to start our second camp... and are excited to see the differences between the North and South. The accents have definitely been a humorous addition to our experience, we now and forever will pronouce Chicken as CHAken.

We miss you all and think about what the other teams must be up to while we are learning line dances to "cotton eye joe" with Northern Irish teens! I hope this blog doesn't make us sound as though we are only having fun... because we are having a LOT of fun! We still would love prayer for travel, understanding of cultures and for our team in general.

Team 'Beyonce' Update

Selam,

We are safe and settled in Mekelle! Mindy and Megan (the WSU team) are headed home tomorrow but we had a great time with them before they left. We are also working with Mike and Kenny (the guys from Northern Ireland, pronounced Norn Iron) and they will be here for the majority of the time we are. We are slowly adjusting to everything from the taste of filtered water, gross, to the way people tell time (it is a 12 hour clock which starts at our 6 am; e.g. our 8 am is their 2 am). We also learned of an elite list of Short Term Associates that didn’t get sick while here in Ethiopia. Matt has fallen short of it by being the first of us to get sick, he had a bit too much injera (the common food here) and it didn’t agree with him, if you know what we mean. But it wasn’t too bad and he is feeling much better now. It is highly unlikely that the rest of us will make that list but we are hoping to. In other words we could use prayer for good health and lots of energy bec! ause there are tons of kids that yell our names and want to play constantly.

Our first experience with the kids was humorous. Joey introduced himself and they thought he said Joro, meaning ear in Tigrinya, and since then he has been struggling to get them to call him by his actual name and to get them to stop laughing at him, the rest of us of course have been no help to him we think it’s just as funny. Everything has been great so far and has kept us smiling. When we are playing catch with a frisbee or football every kid comes up to you with the biggest eyes and cutest faces and basically begs for you to throw it to them next. The kids love attention and we love giving it, we’re hoping it won’t get too overwhelming.

The guys (Joey, Matt, Kenny, Mike) are going to buy a goat in the next week and work on fattening in order to have good food for an end of the summer celebration. The guys are also excited to buy some live chickens to kill and eat as well. They also have a dog (the guard’s dog) named Gorat who is the skinniest dog we have ever seen. He is very cute and is becoming happier and friendlier the more they feed him.

The girls are settling in well and are having a good time looking at potential meal ideas. It’s a little difficult with the limited range of food but they’re looking forward to being mad scientists in the kitchen by planning food experiments. They went with Megan and Mindy and some of the older girls from MYC to the blind school last Friday and played games with the kids. Daniel one of the kids sang Rihanna’s song Umbrella for them; it was super cute…all the kids were super cute.

Currently we are making our weekly schedule for our time here, so life here is tentative at the moment. As far as we know we will be having English classes with all age groups on a daily basis, planning tournaments of table tennis and other sports, and playing lots of Uno and bingo, no we are not working at a old folks home they are just obsessed with that game. We are all having tons of fun and laughing a lot! In fact the guys have been walking around town wearing cowboy hats and aviators. We all bought Beyonce t-shirts and have now officially changed our name from Team Ethiopia to Team Beyonce. We also found some sweet lighters that project a picture of Osama bin Laden, of course we bought those as well. Let’s just say life is fun.

We thank all of you, we appreciate your prayers. It is very comforting to knowing half way across the world people are praying for us and that God is ultimately in control.

Chow Chow!
Team Beyonce (a.k.a. Annalise, Joey, Matt, Mikayla)

TeamIndia Not 'Bad' but 'Wet to the Bone'

We’ll start from where we left off. After our exciting Mysore trip, we had a half-day at the school (they have a half day once a month where the teachers spend the rest of the day together so they don’t get burned out and they can build relationships). Tuesday Prem and Rita had a birthday party here at their home (and our home for that matter) for a good friend of theirs who turned 85. It was a really big party because they aren’t sure how many more birthdays she will see. It has been encouraging to see the devotion of the Christians in India. Even this woman’s birthday party had a sermon, worship, and prayer, granted she is one of the Christian leaders of India, but it was still interesting to see and meaningful to be a part of. Also, the food at the party was incredible; lamb biryani, chicken curry, naan, and concluded with a toffee cake.

Wednesday we were still full the majority of the day at school and that evening we experienced our first true monsoon. At about 8:30pm the rain started pouring outside. Rain here is such a refreshing escape from the constant drizzle in Seattle. Sheets and sheets of rain fell on us as we ran through the streets and into the park. We ran and laughed and splashed and jumped and were wet to the bone. The amazing thing is the next morning everything is dry. The ground here is so dry and thirsty when the rain comes it drinks it up within hours. From there we rolled on through the week until Friday.

Friday (as I’m sure you are all aware) was the 4th of July (United States Independence Day) and we had the privilege to sing our national anthem in front of the school. Did you know that there are like 6 verses to the Star Spangled Banner? We were relieved we only sing the first. For Independence Day we sought out to spend a very American day and decided we would go to the Hard Rock Café for cheeseburgers. The occasion was also marked as the last day at the school of Sonya, another volunteer who was also living here with Prem and Rita. So we made sure she was sent out with a bang. The burgers were incredible and we had a great time at the café, but it did make us all a little homesick.

Saturday we went on a safari and explored the zoo in Bangalore. The safari was fun, we were shuttled nearly arms length away from lions, tigers, and bears, but the real spectacle was inside the park. In the park there were all sorts of token zoo animals plus some interesting ones like deer, geese, and some seemingly pet shop fish in the “aquarium.” We enjoyed all these animals, but weren’t awed until we came to the elephant exhibit. There was a fence with a man and an elephant next to it and when you came up you could hold out a coin and the elephant would pick the coin up with his trunk give it to the man then pat you on the head with his trunk. There were also elephant rides, which we enjoyed in typical tourist style with pictures, giggles, and some generic altogether “whiteness.” The elephants were fun and we were all excited to be so close to them, but looking at how some of them were chained and forced to do tricks for show we felt pangs of regret that something has to be so unhappy for our entertainment.

Tonight (Sunday) we spent the evening with the boys who live at the school we work at. There are 12 of them and we spent time playing football (soccer) with them, telling stories, watching their magic tricks, singing songs, and just having a good time. It was really good to get to know, on a deeper level, some of the kids we see all the time at school.

We all miss our family and friends and have been blessed to be able to call home on occasion from the phone booths down the street. We are also really excited for the depth we are building in our relationships with people at the school and are hopeful to see tangible growth. Until next week.

--Teamindia

Gunaydin

Gunaydin (Turkish for “good morning” even though it sounds strangely like “goodnight”)
This last week and a half at the Kres’ has been encouraging and a complete turnaround from our first chaotic week. We have started our English conversation program as planned, and it is going very well. Our theme for the summer is “Around the World” so as were teaching English we’re also studying other countries. For the first few days we traveled around the US, and then finished the week by having the older kids present on Turkey. We were floored by the amount of effort and excitement the kids put into their presentation of their country. We were so proud to see them practicing their English. It made for a great ending to the week. The language barrier, which at first seemed daunting is less of an issue as we learn more about each individual kid’s personalities. With the little Turkish we know and the little English they know combined with some charades we can generally get our point across and it makes for a fun time. As we settled into the routine, we had more time to focus on building relationships with the kids and we are now realizing how truly hard it is going to be to leave them at the end of the summer.
We hope all of you at home had a good and safe 4th of July. We celebrated ours a day early at an international gathering hosted by a British couple….but don’t worry, they got out an American flag and we all sang the Star Spangled Banner (as well as some other “American” songs we’d never heard), and we were thankful to eat some American food.
We got to celebrate our first completed week of our scheduled program at the Kres’ by going on an overnight excursion to Olympos. We stayed the night in tree houses and night-hiked up to the famous naturally burning flames. We ended by visiting Demre, the town of the original Santa Clause, St. Nicholas.
Although the weekend was fun we were excited to go back to the Kres’ and see the kids. Keep us in your prayers so that we may show Gods love through our actions, and for energy because it is only supposed to get hotter before we leave, as well as Tans’ule (the owner of the Kres’ we work at) as she is under many stresses. It’s comforting to know we have prayer support back home.
Hope you all are having a great summer,
Caitlin, Mandy, Katelyn and Liz

Fiestas, Marquisitas y Familia Nueva

BUENAAAASS!

Hola from Chapab! We last left you in Mérida, itching to know about our host families in Mérida and Chapab. Will they survive living with different families? Will they survive the unbearable heat? Will they have any idea what the Mexicans are saying to them? The saga continues...

Thursday night until Sunday morning we spent time with families in Mérida. We had the opportunity to get to know the city a bit: did some sight seeing with our families, went out to lots of sweet restaurants, went to church, spent time with the families, and had opportunites to see what they do in their past time with amigos. Overall, it was like 3 days of fiestas - we had a blast, and even a pool party. The families that we got to know were soooo nice and giving and took care of us really well. Oh, and Anna got bosomed by her Mérida mom. (:

Byron and Inez then took us off with them to Chapab Sunday morning, an hour away from Mérida. Quick summary of our amazing time here so far: our families are INCREDIBLE - we have pretty much fully integrated ourselves into the family already. Stu and Josh live together in one house while Anna and Nicole live together in another. The families here, as they say, live very simple lives, but are some of the most amazing people we have ever met. Stu´s "madre" is one of the happiest ladies we have ever seen, and since Stu´s "madre" is the mom of Josh´s "padre", that makes Stu Josh´s uncle. Uncle Stu. We have a great time just sitting and talking with our families, even Anna and Nicole who don´t know very much spanish still have long and fruitful conversations with the little that they know. It´s amazing how fast they are learning.

We started work on the house we are building yesterday, and today they showed us how to put in the cinder blocks with a concrete mix. We aren´t good at it yet, but we will be. We just hope the thing stands up when we´re finished. We also had our first day of VBS and English Class, and today was Anna´s birthday! It was one of the best days ever: a band playing songs for Anna through her window at midnight (and then eventually coming out and dancing a bit), hot and fairly miserable work, lunch together, tons of fun with the kids and a fiesta after our English Class. Lets just say the party involed a lot of punching Pikachu in the face (pikachu = our piñata). It was a blast!

Everyone is in really high spirits and we can already tell that our time here is going to be incredible (since it already has been). We look forward to getting to know the people here better, each other better, and settling in even more to the culture here. Its amazing how much of a novelty we are here in this tiny town as Americans - the dirty looks, the weird looks, the laughs, and the interest that everyone shows in our presence. We love it though, because it gives us an easy way to make conversation.

For now, we sign off. Wish us luck as we walk past the dogs that seem like they want to kill us, the turkeys that hang out on the roofs and our friendly neighborhood iguanas. Please pray for safety, insight, healing and communication. We thank all of you for thinking of us and will talk again when time allows! And maybe someday we will be able to upload some pics...

¡Que Dios les bendiga a todos!
Stu, Josh, Nicole y Anna

Mangos, Monkey, and Mysore

Prem and Rita James
Children on the School Bus to Asha Kiran

Hello from India! We have had a full week with the kids at the school and what a week it has been. Kevin and Roderick have each been assigned an autistic boy to spend one on one time with. Kevin’s student, Samarth, is really quite brilliant, but lacks social and communication skills. Roderick’s student, Mahesh, has been frustrating and difficult, but he is hopeful that Mahesh will warm up to him. Heidi has been working in the office and getting to know the accountant Subhadra who is a Christian convert married to a Hindu man. Heidi also works with the hearing impaired students. Marykate has been working in the art room in the mornings making pottery to sell to raise money for the school. In the afternoon she works with the clinical psychologist. She has to watch the 6 kids and do activities while the psychologist spends one on one time with the kids. In her room there are students with epilepsy, with autism, with mental retardation, and with ADHD.

We had our first mango experience. We sat around the table after a full dinner and Rita cut big spears of fresh mango picked from the trees at the school. We sat, faces drenched in mango juice, slimy to our elbows, passing the spears and scraping the sweet, soft, orange flesh from the skin with our teeth. 5 of us ended up eating 8 mangos. Time stood still, we laughed and scraped and slurped, amazed something could be so wholly good.

We spent yesterday on a tour bus visiting Mysore, 135 Km from Bangalore, and to describe our experience we are going to play 2 truths and a lie (where we say two things that are true and one thing that is a lie and you guys guess which is the lie and we will tell you which one it is next week).

1. We visited 3 temples, a palace, and witnessed the famed “Dancing fountains” at the gardens of Mysore.
2. We saw monkeys, a big lizard, cows, warthogs, and huge swarms of mosquitoes.
3. We went rollerblading as a team and had a dance party. Hey Riley.

Although some of the mystique and awe has diminished, we continue to love this city. The more we travel the more we appreciate the shops, streets, and parks nearest Prem & Rita’s home. More and more we find ourselves identifying with and reminiscing about the kids at the school. And more and more Prem and Rita challenge us to find what God is teaching us and to reflect on our time here. We miss all of you and are grateful for your prayers and well wishes. Until next week.