A Whole New Adventure

I know this started out as a record of events during my Chile trip but I have been asked to extend this blog to include the Dominican Republic trip that I just returned from and perhaps impending adventures in the south come July. We'll see about the latter, but I am happy to oblige the former. I'll start by saying that I was a student leader for this trip so my duties began months before departure in the form of weekly leaders meetings, weekly 2-hour big group training meetings and copious hours spent opening contributions letters and recording each students financial progress. Since I was not attending classes during Winter quarter and only working part time at a daycare then I was able to commit to all of this work with minimal stress. Some facts about the trip:
-We left March 16 and returned March 26th
-There were 66 of us all together; 5 DR coordinators, 7 other leaders, 54 students (all of whose first and last names I know by heart)
-We served in 3 Haitian refugee villages in southern Dominican Republic; Los Robles, Algodon and Don Bosco
-We worked under the organization of Children of the Nations (www.cotni.org)
-This is the best spring break mission trip ever
So, I was glad to have spent 5 weeks in Chile not that long ago (see previous entries) because I was more confident in my Spanish skills and became one of the groups go-to translators. Everyday my fellow student leaders (shout out to Jeff Hoover and Kirsten Hawkins!) and myself received about 45 questions a day and, on average, 20 requests that we were about 95% equipped to answer or fulfill. If anything this trip has really honed my leadership skills which wil be helpful next year in San Antonio where I will be an intern in college ministry for 12 months. Here are some highlights from each day of the trip; we left Seattle on Thursday night, arrived in the capital of the DR, Santo Domingo, then drove 4.5 hours west to the city of Barahona on Friday afternoon. On Saturday we saw two of the three villages and prepared for Monday's teaching lessons at the hotel where we were staying while the boys played their first of five baseball games. Some more memorable moments were attending a very lively Pentacostal church service on Sunday where loud music and 'slaying of the spirit' were the prominent manners of worship. On our first official day in the villages, Monday, all of the busses were 2-3 hours late picking us up from each village, but that lowlight was quelled by the fact that most of the kids in Los Robles whom I had known for three years remembered my name. Tuesday we watched the boys play their third baseball game that had to be paused on account of a run-away horse entering the outfield. On Wednesday some of us girls played a competetive softball game versus the reigning Dominican champions and I had some sweet catches at third base. Thursday I slept after teaching. On Friday we met the older kids of Los Robles at a water park about an hour and half from where they lived that most of them had never been to. After taking a big group picture we left for the capital on Saturday morning and toured the city that afternoon. We spent the night in a NICE hotel and woke up Sunday for another day of travelling toward the Northwest. Our flight to Atlanta was 2 hours late which made them have to hold our connecting plane there to Seattle. Unfortunately they didn't tell us that they had changed our gate in Atlanta so when we got there half of us rushed... to the wrong terminal. My only thought was that we had come so far in the trip for there to be a snafoo literally minutes from our last leg, but the airlines knew it was their mistake so they waited for our entire party to be informed, take the shuttle to the right terminal and run to the right gate. So upon arrival in Seattle there were only two students who had to go to the ER, which in my book still constitutes a successful mission trip. (One guy had gotten hit by a wheelbarrel earlier in the week and didn't realize that he had fractured his ankle while still doing construction the remainder of the week while the second victim had a cut on the bottom of his foot that got infected by the DR shower water.) They're both doing better today.

So, that was my trip in a nut-shell and I know I left a lot of details out but for the most part it was a trip that taught me a lot about my abilities as leader, how to stay calm in uncontrollable situations, how to be confident in decisions, how to maintain relationships with students even though I had a million things to do before the next day, which leads to, how to function properly on a maximum of five hours of sleep per night and most importantly how to trust the Lord in the small and big things. Thanks for all of your support.