1st blog onsight! Basic Info, etc.

We’re here and if I put off writing any longer I’ll be too overwhelmed with the challenge of conveying everything and probably will just avoid trying… So I’m writing now. Internet is really slow and they pay by the minute so I probably will only update once a week or so.

The girls are staying with Leslie and Loopie Williams who have 4 sons, 2 of which (Tate and Thomas) are at home, and an adopted daughter, Bailey. The oldest son, Logan, is going to be a sophomore at Western Christian College in Canada. He arrives this afternoon. The boys are staying with Craig and Jerri (sp?) Ford until they leave in a couple weeks to have a baby on furlough. Then they will go to Marcus and Diane Reese’s house, and David and Jenna (Marcus brother and sister in law) will live in the Fords house. David and Jenna are not technically interns, but they came too and will do a lot of the same stuff as us. All the families are great, it’s fun to see how they interact. They have fun and a lot of respect for each other.

Traveling took about 30 hours from start to finish and we were all pretty beat. We all had dinner here at the Williams house and then went to bed. 7:00 pm here is 4:00 am central US time and that is what Loopie calls “pumpkin time”. I think being so tired from travel actually helped jumpstart us on getting on schedule here. I still wake up very early, but I stay in bed until 6 and then it’s nice to have time to get ready leisurely and read my Bible before the family is up. I’m going to try and stay on that schedule. It’s such a slower pace of life here, there’s no overwhelming sense of rush and stress like at school. It’s nice.

We skipped Monday flying over the international date line, and then we arrived Tuesday here and Wednesday was a “groove day” as Leslie called it. Basically nothing was planned and we rested. A coconut tree in the yard fell down at lunch and Susan, the woman who works around the house, showed us how to husk a coconut. The women, especially the young women and girls, are very shy here, but Susan talked with us plenty.

Yesterday we went over the tentative schedule for the summer and drove out to the location for the youth camp we’re doing in July. Luke and I rode in the back of the truck on the way out there and enjoyed to GORGEOUS scenery and the friendly people who all wave. People walk everywhere here there’s always lots on the road. We drove out of town about ½ hour and saw more of village life and bush houses than we had so far. At the village where the camp will be we met the man who translated the new testament into T’wala, one of the village languages nearby. There’s about 6 languages just in this Milne Bay area, but pretty much everyone speaks English.

Every update won’t be this long, but there’s some basic things I needed to explain so anything else would make sense.

Pray for: us to have wisdom and boldness and not be selfish. I’m kind of slapped in the face with how selfish I really am. That won’t work here. And pray for the church here.