Making memories

I've decided to start a new Christmas tradition when I get home: making gingerbread houses. They are so much fun! Tuesday, Andrea, Lindsi, Chastity and I spent over three hours creating these crazy and colorful houses.

At first we we going to plan them carefully with the goal of making them exceptionally pretty, but we ended up sticking candy all over them and making halarious little candy creations to decorate the "yards" around the houses. Here are front and back views of both houses, but I think we may have added a couple of things (including powdered sugar snow) to the yards after these pictures were taken. We laughed so hard when we were making these!




This is the front of the "church." The doors are taffy, there's a little Mike-and-Ike and Dots nativity scene to the left. Joseph is a banana leaning over the pineapple Christ child, and Mary is the little pink heart. The pathway to the doors is Mike-and-Ike's and grape Nerds. There's a green Dots bush to the right of the doors and a Tootsie Roll and frosting bonfire to the right. A yellow fruit Tootsie Roll mailbox and Sprees line the front. The ginormous star on the front of the church is a leftover gingerbread cookie with green Skittles around it. Sprees and red licorice cover the roof.



The back of the church has a huge gingerbread candy cane with yellow Skittles. There's a cute little "pond" made of blue Sweet Tarts with a disproportionate Dots duck (with a banana bill) sitting on it. There's a green frosting-covered lollipop tree, anchored in a cookie, with fruit stuck all over it. There's also a little Dots evergreen tree on the side of the church, with a Sweet Tarts wishing well to the side of that.

This house has Skittles and Sweet Tarts stuck all over the front and another taffy door. To the far left is a Skittles and Sweet Tarts evergreen tree with a yellow "star" stuck on top. Below that is a little wagon on Whopper wheels carrying Nerds "coal" for the children on Santa's naughty list. Two green Spree bushes sit on both sides of the Skittles and Nerds path. There's also a yellow Tootsie Roll mailbox for this house, too, but the real star of this show are the three little Tootsie Roll carolers with Dots and Spree hats and standing on a frosted Nerds box. Just behind them you can see a green-frosted cookie bush with yellow and orange Skittles.

The back of this house has a Nerds-box choo-choo train, decorated with mini Blow Pops, bananas, Spree tires, and a fruit Tootsie Roll smoke stack. Behind that is a Dots snowman and another cookie bush, this time with Nerds. Beside that is another frosted lollipop fruit tree with a cookie base. Around the backyard is a licorice and Tootsie Roll rail fence, which you can't see well in this picture.

And everything was covered with a fine dusting of powdered sugar snow! We're quite proud of our cute, silly little edible houses!

Beach trip

One of the best things about Christmas vacation is being able to relax and having no responsibilities for a while. My brain was so ready for a break! I had submitted my last school assignment on Sunday, then Monday we all and Ryan and Caroline went to the coast for a day of toasting ourselves in the sun at the beach, reading, eating, and snorkeling. Winter in Jarabacoa can get damp and chilly because of the rain and the altitude, but you don't have to drive far to be in warmer weather again.

This part of the island is a hot tourist spot and the beach is lined with little touristy shops, and there are quite a few people walking the beach selling their wares. Grapes, tangarines, oysters, and huge shrimp are some of the foods you can get without ever leaving your beach chair. There were even a few women walking around offering to braid hair.

We girls put our collective genius together and made a cool sand castle. It was fun to be five years old again, lol!

The snorkeling here was really nice! There's a reef not too far from shore where we saw lots of weird and colorful fish. I can't wait to take my family to this beach when they come in a couple of weeks!

Christmas vacation!

Ahhhh, it's finally here! I've been looking forward to Christmas vacation for weeks! I submitted my last school assignment last Sunday afternoon, and what a relief!


Lindsi and Andrea Slabach, Nate and Maggie's other two girls, are home from college for Christmas and the house has been so much fun! Lindsi's boyfriend, Stephen, also came for eight days to spend time with the family. Lots of games, work, and good times! They spent a few days going around to several ministry sites to do maintenance projects like yardwork, painting, etc. Unfortunately, I was still stuck behind my computer at that time, finishing my last week of school, so I missed out. :-(

The Financial Concepts study all the SI staff have been going through for the past 10 weeks is finished, and last Saturday evening we had a party. A lot of staff members went home for the holidays, so the group was fairly small: only 22 people, I think. It was a great time of food, fellowship, and fun!

Maggie and the girls had put together gingerbread houses for people to decorate Saturday night. There were some interesting and colorful creations!

Alberto, Lindsi, and Andrea working on one:

Francisco and Alberto with their finished houses:

Lindsi and Stephen:

Ryan and Caroline got a chihuahua puppy recently and brought her to the party. Her name is Booper and she is SO TINY! Absolutely adorable!

SI Christmas party

Wow, I know I haven't been very good with keeping up with my blog lately! On December 5th, SI had their annual Christmas party for all staff and employees and their families. Everything was so festive and the whole dining hall was decked out with lights and candles!

The food was fabulous: roasted pork, Dominican rice, potato salad, bread, and another traditional Dominican Christmas food that I can't remember the name of.



Arlene, me, Caroline, and Ryan:



Everyone received a gift:



Names were drawn to see who would get the pigs' heads:



Karaoke:

Introducing the SI staff

I don't know why I didn't think of this before, but this staff photo has been on the base computer for a couple of months now, and I thought it might be a good way for you to match names and faces.




Here are the names and roles/ministry sites: (left to right) I don't know all of the Dominicans' last names, so I'll just list first names.

standing:
Nate --pastoral care/site management
Dan --physical therapy
Vanesa --denstistry
Alberto (behind Vanesa, in green shirt) --the school in Mata Gorda
Amy Green (blue shirt) --developmental therapy
Fausto (behind Amy G.) --special education
Francisco (in white shirt) --art
Katie (behind Fran) --the school in Mata Gorda
Amy Babb --art
Yajira (pronounced Jahira) --the school in El Callejon
Arlene (under the umbrella) --social work in Los Higos
Deisy (in green shirt) --social work in El Callejon
Anyely (pronounced Angelly) --the school in El Callejon
Tita (Fernando's wife) --secretary for special education school
Johana --school in Mata Gorda, will be starting a preschool in Los Higos soon
seated:
Lowell --director of the D.R. branch of SI
Luis --Nate's assisstant/site management
Jose -- (married to Vanesa; left SI this fall)
Fernando --medical site
Raul --sports

And we have two new staff members as of last month: Ryan and Caroline Holloway. Caroline works as an assistant to Deisy at the social work site in El Callejon. Ryan will be starting a micro-finance ministry, also in El Callejon.

Christmas tree

Thanksgiving night after everyone left, Chastity was itching to set up the Christmas tree, so she and I dug into the Christmas decorations and we spent a hour or so decorating the tree to the smooth sounds of Josh Groban's Noel Christmas cd.

Have you ever seen a lizard egg? Sometimes geckos nest in dark boxes and closets and places like that. These eggs we found in the Christmas decorations, and later we found one stuck on the tree stem as we were setting it up. The shells are extremely fragile.




Chatty and I struggling with the lights. (yeah, right!)


The finished tree!

Don't the lights just make you feel cozy and happy?

Quisqueya Camp

Our church in town, Amor a Quisqueya, hosted a two-day conference this past weekend at the SI base. The speaker was Jacobo Ramos, a well-known Christian singer/pastor from Puerto Rico. He gave a powerful message about the church being "united, called, and equipped." Nate and Maggie said it was excellent, though I couldn't understand a whole lot because my Spanish still isn't very good.

Here Jacobo is at the keyboard:

Thanksgiving in the D.R.

Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie....All last week we were looking forward to Thanksgiving dinner! Nate and Maggie had invited all the North American staff (Dominicans don't have Thanksgiving, of course) as well as the semester students to our house to celebrate. A few staff members already had prior committments and couldn't make it, but the rest of us had a great time.

Maggie had candles lit all over the dining and living room! It was gorgeous! Here's one of the table centerpieces:



No Thanksgiving feast is complete without pumpkin pie! Arlene made these:

After dinner we all played games. The guys dug into a strategy game called Settlers of Catan (I think that's what it's called):

Left to right: Ryan, Joel, Lowell, Nate, and Jon.

Maggie, Todd, and Cheryl playing our traditional hand-and-foot game (this is the best card game ever!)

The girls playing speed scrabble:

Left to right: Carrie, Sarah, Katie, Arlene, Caroline, Alicia, Chastity.

Girls' night/detox water video

Girls' night

So last Thursday we had the ladies over to our place. Thursday was the day for Ryan and Caroline's "apart" night (some couples have date nights; Ryan and Caroline have "apart" nights, lol!), so Caroline, Amy B., Amy G., Cheryl, Arlene, Alicia, Chastity, Maggie, Alicia, Chastity, and myself hung out at our place, eating dessert and chocolate and just chatting. (Nate and Ryan went to a restuarant downtown to watch a game on their big flat-screen TVs there.) Cheryl brought to our house a detoxification-thing that someone had donated to SI. I'm not entirely sure how it works, but there's this box-thing with a cord attached to it that has a metal coil on the end. You put your feet in some warm water in a bucket with a certain amount of sea salt and drop in the metal coil. The box thingamajigger somehow draws metal and toxins in your body out through your feet. It takes about 25 minutes and is perfectly painless, though your feet may tingle a little bit like when they are just starting to fall asleep. The whole thing was rather amazing; you start with a bucket of clean, warm water and 25 minutes later the water looks brownish and has all kinds of little floaties in it that came out THROUGH YOUR FEET! Kind of gross, but I posted the video above of what my water looked like when I was done.

Here's a picture of Caroline checking out her own floaties! :-)

Tuesday art class video

Tuesday art classes

I've been meaning to get the video above posted for some time now. Tuesday mornings I've been helping Amy Babb with the art class she teaches at the SI school in El Callejon. Having helped with Happy Day Club back in Indiana last year teaching 80+ kids makes this look like a piece of cake!

Riverbank/Chapel Team Video

The promised Manabao pictures :-)

Since I accidentally deleted ALL my pictures of our motorcycle ride, I had to copy these from my lovely friend Katie. :-) Sorry it took me so long to get these!

OK, so on Sunday, October 12, I went with a group of friends on a motorcycle ride up in the mountains to a river near a community called Manabao (our church meets in the afternoon, so we had plenty of time in the morning). The plan was to meet at Katie's house in town for cinnamon rolls and coffee for breakfast then head up to Manabao and cook lunch by the river. The guys drove, the girls rode. Here's the gang outside Katie's house, figuring out who was riding with who:

We stopped for a break along the way. Here's Laura (I've mentioned her in other posts, I think), Chastity, and Alicia:

Here's the river:

The guys getting the fire going: (left to right: Guillermo, Christian, and Melvin)

That's chicken in the closer pot (DELICIOUS!), and we had rice in the other one:

Katie, Alicia, Melvin, and Chastity:

Here's a picture of the whole group. Left to right: Joel, Alicia, don't know his name, Christian, Katie, Chastity, me, Guillermo, Laura, and Melvin. Alberto took the picture, so of course he's not in it.