Monday-Wednesday

Monday: Day Off.
But not really. Their idea of a day off was a 5 mile, 4 hour hike in 50 degree weather. It was beautiful, but NOT relaxing. Especially when you’ve been fed so well for the past few days. After that we were supposed to have the rest of the day off, but it ended up that we needed to have a quick meeting about the next day…which turned out to be a 2 ½ hour meeting. Oh boy. Not much of a day off but that’s ok…we’re young. We could handle it. That night our mom, (Me and Corinne’s host mom) took us shopping to Asda (The equilevant of Wal-Mart) and Matalan’s…which was just a nice, cheap store. It was a blast. I love our host mom

Tuesday: For the morning we split up and went to two different Primary schools (Elementary). We gave an assembly talking about: Jesus, Our Best Friend. It was fun. These little guys were SO CUTE! Then, we went into year 5-6 and did a 2 hour lesson on Who Jesus Is and How Jesus Changes People’s Lives. We had them write names that make them think of Jesus on post-it notes and had them place it on a cross. It was incredible some of the things these young kids could think of. After this and a few bible stories later, we interviewed…Jesus! Or our pastor dressed in a sheet. It was fantastic! They had so many questions and I believe we truly got some of their little hearts thinking. God is incredible how he can use such young kids to teach even me when I was supposed to be teaching them. It was great.
Later that day we started “Odd Jobbing.” Corinne, Friedi, Laura and I put on our full-body paper suits and began to paint a building that was being turned into a youth center. One of the guy who’s been working with it is a policeman who doesn’t go to church named Peter. This is just the beginning of the story, you’ll see him in other days.
Tuesday night we had house-groups. I absolutely LOVED it. I can’t wait to get back to wherever it is I’ll be living and get together with other believers and just discuss things and what God is doing in our lives. It was a great way to learn other opinions, put what you believe out there, and just know you’re loved. We spoke on getting out of the boat and how we were created to be water-walkers. Even though we were the ones leading it I was so challenged by it as well. Tea and biscuits, and then sleep.

Wednesday: This morning we put on our convict-yellow “Faith-In-Action” jackets and decided to spend 2 hours emptying the town of Caton of it’s rubbish……this was almost impossible as there was not a lot of rubbish, but we spent 2 hours doing it just the same. It was long and it got boring, but we had so many people thanking us for it and it was lovely to be able to show Jesus in such a simple way as little-picking. Corinne and I were partners as well, we had a blast making videos and picking up 4 BAGS of rubbish. Mostly full of beer bottles and, as Corinne would call them, Smoker-ette packages.
That afternoon we had a ladies meeting, where ladies from the ages of 60-97 would come and hear us speak. We each, the girls, chose a woman in the bible who was a testament of God’s faithfulness. 30 minutes later, we were finished. Whoops! It was all good though, because they still had their tea and biscuits to eat. We chatted away and enjoyed learning about their lives. For instance one lady was married at 18 and had 4 kids by age 22. One was married at 17 and had 4 kids by 23. One special little lady named Gladys Till, who was about 94 and still as feisty as ever, told us that in the morning, she wakes up and hops on a bus and goes wherever she wants and talks to people. She talks to them on the bus, at the station, in the tea shop. She could have a conversation with the telephone pole and she would have a great time. She was precious. That’s what I want to be like one day, so in love with Jesus that you just go and talk to anyone you can.

That night we had our first ALF course. We thought they were age 8-11, but, nope. Try 4-9. We showed them the Excusez Mwa videos. They loved it. However, one mom didn’t like all the sword-fighting and we had to switch things up for the next day. But the kids all loved the video and the characters and exclaiming “Excusez Mwa?!?” whenever it fit. I loved sharing the videos with them, everyone wants to come to Hume now. It’s pretty exciting. I live at the coolest place ever. There’s no doubt about that.