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.

School and sleep

I guess it's high time I posted again! After the team left I had a lot of school (and sleep!) to catch up on, so school and sleep are basically all I did for several days--emphasis on school. On Sunday, however, I got to "join" my home church's service via Skype. It was fun to see everyone again! I even stayed for the potluck; my sister proped the computer up so I could see people at the table and I ate my lunch along with them!

I literally spent all day Monday writing a 4 1/2-page paper for my history class; I finally had it finished and posted by 9:30 that evening. My brain was fried.

I was glad Amy Babb cancelled art class at the preschool in El Callejon on Tuesday (though I'm not glad that you weren't feeling well, Amy!) because it had TOTALLY slipped my mind! When I came down for breakfast at 9:30 (hehe, yes I slept late, but I did also have my devotions before I came down) and Maggie gave me Amy's message, my first thought was: art class? What art class? Then: oh my goodness! Real dependable, I know.

Yesterday evening was staff Financial Concepts class (by Crown Financial Ministries). This week's study was on honesty, and it gave me more to think about than I had assumed it would. I became aware of how we sometimes let little things, like omitting parts of truth to make something sound better or borrowing something without permission, slip by with hardly a second thought. Yet these little things greatly limit our level of intimacy with God. A verse that stood out to me was Proverbs 3:32: "for the LORD detests a perverse man but takes the upright into his confidence." It blows my mind to think that God would want to confide in me, like He did with Moses! And it depends on me living in obedience and "drawing near" to Him (James 4:7-10).

Tomorrow evening our Financial Concepts small group is getting together for pizza and games. Fun!

I wanted to get the team video I made last week posted, but my flash drive was full when I was at the base, so I couldn't bring the project home to put on my computer. I'll try to get it tomorrow night so I can post it Saturday.

Some random pictures just for fun:

This is an elderly woman who lives in Los Higos. I think she's in her 80s, but I'm not sure...I'll have to check with Arlene.

This is Alicia filming at the preschool in El Callejon.

Maggie grilling chicken:

Challenges

This week I've been busy cramming two weeks-worth of school into 5 1/2 days. It actually wasn't quite as stressful as I thought it would be. Last night I even took the liberty :-) of staying up watching a movie with Chastity and Alicia until 2:30 this morning! I have had only six hours of sleep, but I don't feel too tired yet.

The reason I've been cramming with school is because we have a team coming in tonight (Saturday) that will be here for a week. It will basically be just Nate and me taking video for this outreach and I'm feeling the pressure already. I'm working on a schedule so we can hopefully cover all the sites Mon.-Wed., which will give me Thursday-Friday at 4:00 p.m. to put the whole thing together. We'll see how things go...

I had a brand new challenge this morning. Nate told me earlier this week that I need to get the oil changed in the little blue motorcycle before this outreach because I'll be doing a TON of running back and forth. The place where Nate usually goes to get the oil changed is a little tiny building--more like a room, actually--in town. That's right, in town. Or rather on the edge of town, but you do have to go through two busy intersections to get there. Not to mention I would have to go alone and I don't speak much Spanish. Very scary.

So...I had been kind of putting it off until today because I was rather nervous about the whole thing. But it had to be done. I had breakfast this morning, cleaned up a little, shoved 300 pesos in my pocket, Nate drew me a little map and wrote down what to say, and I headed off. I got through the intersections no problem, but I accidentally passed the place (as I said, it was small--smaller than I expected, and the sign didn't stand out at all) and had to go onto a different street and circle back around. When I came back around, I was at the second intersection again. It's very wide and curves around and there are no lane markings on the street, so when I stopped at the traffic light that no one listens to anyway, I realized I was on the wrong side of the street. But that's the great thing about Dominican drivers; nothing fazes them. They just went around me, no problem, and not even a glance. The traffic wasn't heavy anyway (thank you Lord). If you do something wrong, just pretend you did it on purpose. They all drive around each other because there's no driving laws anyway.

The motorcycle place was called De Leon Racing. I parked on the street and asked one of the guys there for Idani (not sure I spelled that right), the Christian guy there that Nate knows. I'm so glad Nate wrote down what I was supposed to say because I just pointed to what he wrote on the note and apologized because I don't speak much Spanish. A little awkward, but not too hard, I guess.

So one of the employees there changed the oil and checked and greased the chain for me while Idani worked on his bass guitar, lol! [For those of you who don't know it, lol means "laugh out loud." Mom said I should clarify.] Then the coolest thing happened. I saw a big Dominican guy coming across the street toward De Leon that I recognized. It was Daniel Suarez, a former SI staff member who speaks perfect English! (He was on staff when I was here in 2007) He was carrying a little container of mongu (Dominican potato-like dish), and he walked in and just started chatting with Idani and the employees while he ate his breakfast. I couldn't help but grin, I was so relieved! I asked him, "You're Daniel Suarez, right?" He looked surprised and asked who I was. So we chatted a little bit and he also translated for me and Idani. Oh, I was so glad I had waited until this morning to go get the oil changed! That kind of timing is "God-perfect!"

Today I have to do an outline and research for a 4-page history paper that's due on the 10th after the team leaves. This afternoon at around 4:30-ish I need to go over to the base and go through all the equipment and make sure all the cameras are working, batteries charged, tapes rewound, and the tripods are put together. The team this outreach is actually two separate groups and I want to be there when the final group comes at 5:00 p.m.