Relaxing

After Molly graduated from DTS, she spent a week in Montellano with me. We got to go into Caraballo and walk around, do some shopping at the art co-op there, go to the beach, and hang out with Lauren. We also spent a night at a nearby resort (Molly's Christmas present) complete with air conditioning, pina coladas, and water slides! It's good to take a break from life, relax, and pamper yourself a little every once in a while! We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves!

Christmas party!

Each year the Care Center throws a Christmas party for the kids. They get a fancy lunch, enough to take some of it home to their families. This year we killed one of our giant pigs to eat for lunch... it was all going fine until Jessi found the pig's head sitting in a bowl of pig intestines in the freezer... gross. I still ate it, though, and it was delicious! After lunch, the kids brought their parents back for the presentation: acrostic poem recitations, the Christmas choir, special awards for the 50 kids with perfect attendance, pantomimes/interpretive dances, and a Christmas message. Then we got to give the kids their gifts - candy, fruit, and underwear - and give the parents a piece of cake and a soda. The kids were really excited about the party (they call it "Kids Day") and about their gifts! Here are a few pictures from the event. Clockwise from the top left: the choir backstage, eating lunch, perfect attenders, making the balloon arch, and the "Navidad" acrostic.

Molly graduated (again)!

Not many people have two graduations within six months, but Molly did! I am in Jarabacoa this weekend for her graduation from YWAM's Discipleship Training School! This morning she and 15 Dominicans and Americans finished their five month Bible/missions classes and outreach around the country. The ceremony included worship time, dances, testimonies, a video, and the handing out of the diplomas. Then we all had lunch and Molly and her DTS friends left for some fun in the capitol. I am staying in Jarabacoa until Monday to go to the Kids Alive Christmas party and spend time with the missionaries up here. Then Molly and I will spend the week at my apartment before returning to the states.

We held our Christmas program at school last Tuesday, then spent a day on a staff retreat/party on Thursday. Look for pictures and more about those days soon!

Please be in prayer this week for rest and relaxation for Molly and me. Pray for our re-entry to the US after a few months away. Pray specifically against cynicism toward American culture or our church. Pray for Lauren and the Makarios staff as they still have school this week. Pray for the children and their families, that they will understand the true meaning of Christmas and that they will feel the hope and joy of this season.

Molly's DTS classmates with Val, the DTS director.

Codetel

Codetel is the notoriously anti-customer-service internet company here on the north coast. We signed up for internet about a month ago and were promised that within 7 days it would be installed and working. Right. Our friends waited three months to get theirs working... Friday they called and said they were coming to install the internet in 5 minutes, so I hopped on a moto and sped through the cane fields. They didn't come. But...

Today they came! And we have internet!

Lauren bribed the Codetel man with the promise of Christmas cookies if he got everything to work. I don't know if he really wanted the cookies or if he had been given orders to get everything done with the obnoxious gringas that called Codetel every day for a week... either way, he got everything working for us! A little Christmas present from Codetel!

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

This is what we did for Thanksgiving... Brian, Julie-Anne, and I hiked to a waterfall with the American team that cooked us Thanksgiving dinner!

It’s been a while since I blogged. That is a testament to the fact that the Dominican internet company does not value customer service. But besides that...

It’s Christmastime! Some days I want to believe that maybe if I listen to enough Christmas music, read the Christmas story enough, watch Charlie Brown and Rudolph, bake some cookies, that it will magically drop 50 degrees and start snowing! I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the fact that it’s Christmas. I love Advent and Christmas, and being here, on the beach or at school, dripping in sweat and looking at palm trees, is worlds away from December in Wheaton and Quakertown, full of snow and cold and the stress of finals and juries. And I feel worlds away. I remember that this was Christmas Festival weekend, that I have a lot of friends preparing to take juries soon, that it’s snowing at home and there are Christmas pageant practices, and something doesn’t click. I love my life here, it’s just different. I’m thinking about whether the kids at the care center will eat over Christmas break, how we will get enough sponsors to bring in a new class of preschoolers in January, whether the power will stay on long enough for me to finish washing my clothes. I’m preparing to give our kids underwear and a bag of fruit for Christmas, accompanying the Christmas choir, decorating the cafeteria for our Christmas program. I’m wondering how many of the kids won’t come back after Christmas, wondering how I can help sponsors understand that sometimes parents move away and take their kids to Haiti and there’s nothing we can do about it.

I have been blessed with wonderful friends and good fellowship over the past few weeks. I had two Thanksgiving dinners – one with the Makarios/Kids Alive/La Tienda crew in Puerto Plata, and one with all the Kids Alive DR staff in Jarabacoa. I spent two days in Monte Plata learning how to teach English. I was reunited with Lauren after she spent Thanksgiving week in the States, and we baked Christmas cookies while watching Sweet Home Alabama and blasting the fans on us to keep the bugs and heat away... life is different here. Missionary life is not as glamorous as it sometimes seems...

Last night we took a plate of Christmas cookies to our next door neighbors, who have been incredible and helpful, and they told us they are moving across town later this month. I am sad about this, not just because they helped us move in, but because they are genuinely nice people and they have been good friends to us. We’ll still see them because they own a fish shop close to our apartment – the mother has already said she’ll teach us how to cook fish (it’s whole and still has its head and scales…) if we teach her how to make the Christmas cookies (we made peanut butter blossoms)! We are excited for them, though. They currently are a family of 6 living in a 2-bedroom apartment, the same size as the one Lauren and I share, and they are moving into their own house! How wonderful that they have been able to save money to build a house and that they will have the space they need.

At school I have been doing child histories lately, which means I bring the kids in one at a time and talk to them about their families, lives, school, personalities, etc, and then write a history to send to sponsors. One of the boys I had taught when I was here for the summer was a fighter then with terrible behavior. I have noticed an incredible change in him since then, however – now he is pretty well behaved and friendly and smiles. While I was talking to him to get his history, I asked him what he wants to be when he grows up. He responded, “Quiero ser el director.” (I want to be the director.) Turns out his career goal is to become the director of the Park Care Center! Amazing – God’s transformational power at work. I told him I was proud of how he has changed and I think that’s a great goal!

Two weeks from today I will be back in Quakertown, going to Bob White’s to chop down a Christmas tree, trying to stay warm! I will be home for 3 weeks (get your Skype dates and coffee dates in…). I am excited about going home, but also starting to get nervous – how much have I changed since I left for language school? What will be hard about being home? What will I miss from my life here? Will I forget my Spanish while I’m home? As I begin to feel the anxiety once in a while, I try to remember that who I am does not depend on where I am living, that it’s ok for me to have two homes, and that stretching and feeling uncomfortable is often good and growth-producing.

Please be in prayer for me (and for my missionary friends) as I prepare to come home for a few weeks. Pray that the transition would be smooth and that my time at home will be refreshing and encouraging. Also pray for the students as they go a month without school, that God will provide food and keep them safe. Pray that we feel Christmas here and that we can spend time meditating on the incarnation and how our incarnational ministry is rooted in Christ’s first coming and anticipates his second coming. Pray for Molly and me, that as we spend our last week on the island together here in Montellano, we will encourage each other and be able to talk and process what we have felt and learned over the past few months. Pray for safe travels home on the 19th. Thank you so much for your prayers!

Kyle, me, Jenilea, and Julie-Anne roadtripped to Monte Plata to learn to teach English!

Yay Ducks and Yuck Ducks

Sometimes, life here is really great. Like spending two days in the coolness of Jarabacoa with Jenilea and Julie-Anne, watching English and reading classes and relaxing. Or dinner parties with friends (I have been to about five of those since I arrived!). Or spending some time with Brian this week. Or getting laminated fall leaves not once, but twice, in the mail. Or FINISHING my very first sponsorship project and handing it to the people from the Kids Alive home office today. Or getting a kitchen table, a stove, and a refridgerator all at once!

But sometimes life is not great. Like when the same strange bugs invade your living room every night at 7:00 or so and you break all the rules about applying DEET. We may or may not have sprayed it into the air multiple times in our living room and into a fan... you do what you have to do! Or when the power goes out right when you want to cook dinner. Or when the tour bus company is running an hour behind. Or when you are trying to convince yourself that it really is November 13th even though it's 95 degrees outside. Or when you have to go to the ER with your roommate because she has a giant infection in her leg. We did that last night. She's now taking antibiotics and we'll probably make another trip on Sunday to get it drained, and the ER was a fairly traumatic, tearful experience. Thankfully Brian was there to keep us laughing, and Alberto and his family met us at the hospital to drive us to the pharmacy and home.

Please pray that Lauren's leg will heal quickly. Pray for our transitions - we learned about the Chaos stage of culture shock at SPLICE, but learning about it and trying to survive it are very different things! Pray for Lauren's upcoming trip home for Thanksgiving, that it will be good and restful. Pray for our work and our life together, that God will continue to encourage us and guide us.

Why snackrifice?

Where do I even begin? The past week and a half has been a whirlwind. It already feels like I've been here forever! I guess I'll begin by explaining my post title... Lauren and I went to La Sirena, the Dominican version of Walmart, to buy pots and pans and groceries, and we spotted a box of Wheat Thins. This was VERY exciting. And on the back of the box it said, "Why snackrifice?" So we asked ourselves the same question and bought the wheat thins. Definitely a good choice!

I arrived in the DR last Saturday and spent a few days in Jarabacoa getting oriented and translating for a dental team. I spent the day and night Sunday with Molly at the YWAM base, which was great fun and a good birthday treat for her! I arrived in Montellano on Tuesday (a little over a week ago). Lauren and I have been having fun setting up our apartment, which still lacks a lot of furniture, and just spending time together. We spent Friday night sitting on the floor eating dinner by light of a citronella candle, and it was wonderful! The power has been terrible here, so tonight we are getting an inverter. Essentially that means that when the city power goes out, we can power our lights and fans with two car batteries. We're hoping that means that the fans will stay on ALLLLLL night and we won't get eaten alive by mosquitos any more - I seriously look like I have the chicken pox right now.

My daily routine... I get in the gua-gua (that's a 15-passenger van) to go to school at 7:35 every morning. Normally I will spend my mornings working on sponsorship stuff and my afternoons teaching English or music. Just today I found out that I am going to get the chance to start a reading program here in Caraballo to help the kids learn to read and learn to like reading, which is exiting because I love to read!

I spent this week doing our Christmas sponsorship project. Each sponsor receives a Christmas card from his/her sponsored child, and I am responsible for making sure the kids make their cards. We think they came out pretty well!

I feel so blessed to be back. It was really fun to have kids that had been in my class see me, give me a funny look, and then ask "What you name? Did you come before?" (the second one in Spanish). Then I tell them my name and they say "Oh yeah, you were my teacher!" One boy even remembered that I had taught them about Australia! Amazing! I have felt at home here since I arrived. I am blessed that I can communicate and get around on my own, I am blessed to have a wonderful roommate in Lauren, I am blessed that I get to go to school every day and spend time with beautiful children.

Please continue praying for my adjustments to life here. Pray that Lauren and I would get our furniture soon, for our physical health and safety. Pray for wisdom and patience and grace as I figure out where I fit in at the care center and in Kids Alive. But mostly, praise God for his blessings and provision.

The pictures at the top are from our card-making extravaganza and also of my desk in the office. The picture below is what the apartment looks like when Lauren and I are eating/living by Coleman lantern and citronella candlelight!