Chat from Chad

Change of email

2010-07-02T07:40:00.000-04:00

Due to earthlink charging my parents exorbitant sums for using their
service, I am switching my email to the following jordankennedy911@gmail.com

Jordan Kennedy

Prayer works better...

2009-10-25T19:54:00.002-04:00

There is a quote that a pastor once said in a sermon I heard when I was little, and I still remember it to this day. He said "prayer works better when we gather together". I don't know why, but it's one of those quotes that I remember like it was told to me yesterday.

I've always know prayer was powerful, that it was talking to God like a friend and that He heard our prayers and answered them, but in only the last few weeks I have come to see prayer in a whole new light. I was at a campmeeting in Indiana a few weeks ago and my friends (Sean and Natasha Nebblet) were speaking on prayer and the effect it can have on our life. They were sharing how taking a specific time during the day to pray to God had changed there lives. Then my way home from Indiana I was listening to a Sermon by Pastor Gotez about Caleb and the power of prayer. He pointed out that the people who did great things for God spent a lot of time in prayer. Adoniram Judson for example spent 2 hours a day in prayer and won thousands of people to Christ in the unreached country of Indian the same for David Livingstone, Martin Luther, Jesus ect.

After hearing all of this during one weekend it really got me thinking. My entire life I've probably spent 5 or 10 minutes a day praying...pretty pathetic huh? From what I heard over that weekend seemed to prove pretty conclusively that there is a direct correlation between time spent in prayer and effectiveness in reaching people for Christ! After I got home I was reading thru the Testimony's by E.G.W. and was amazed at how much the early pioneers prayed. No wonder the church grew so fast. In a few of the chapters the book tells how the pioneers would sometimes pray all night for God to show them the way to bring souls to a knowledge of God and guess what? God answered those prayers. Somewhere in James 5 (I think) it says "The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much". My question is why don't we as personal individuals and a church pray more often? We wonder why we aren't growing as a church here in America, is it perhaps because we aren't fervently praying???

Anyway I decided to put prayer to the test. For the last few weeks I've been making a decided effort to spend at least 30 minutes in prayer a day and do you know what, it's been amazing! I've grown more spiritually in the last few weeks than I had in the previous months. Seeing the effect my prayers have on those around me such as family members and annoying schoolmates has been amazing, and I can't wait to see what else happens from my prayers.

In closing I want to tell you a story about George Muller. When he was a young man he picked 5 non-christian friends of his that he would pray to become converted. Well 10 years latter one of the friends he had been praying for was converted. Five years later another was converted and so on. By the time George Muller died, 4 of the friends he had been praying for were converted. A couple years after that the last friend he had been praying for was converted! Pretty cool huh?

I would like to challenge you, that if you don't already that you put God to the test and start praying to him as you would a friend during the day...and not just during the morning and bedtime. Start studying famous pioneers and bible characters learn from their example and get ready to see God start working powerfully in your life!

It's been a long time :P

2009-10-25T19:40:00.002-04:00

I was talking to one of my friends last night and she told me that I should post stuff on my blog more often...and she's right, especially since I've gotten rid of facebook. Now for those of you know me you're probably amazed to hear that I actually got rid of facebook but I did! I decided there were better ways of spending my time than playing stupid little apps or looking at my 400 friends status updates ect. Yes, facebook does have a place but unfortunately I was unable to control the time I was spending on it so I got rid of it and you know what? I'm amazed at how much extra time I have in the day to study or do whatever else that needs to be done. From now on I'm planning on posting on here once a week or so.

Anyway I figured I'd let you know what I've been up to since I got back from Africa. School has pretty much been my life for the last couple months. I'm currently going to school to become a Paramedic. I love Paramedicine! I love anything that has to do with blood, guts and gore, but I also enjoy helping the elderly people who think they are constipated and dehydrated lol.

Besides school I'm helping my parents on getting the house we bought into livable condition. Most of you reading this know that my family has been trying to move to the country ever since I can remember. Well right now we're working on the final steps of buying 37 acres with a little shack on it up near Caroga Lake. The little shack on it isn't really livable but by bro's and I are working on it and hopefully in a couple months we should be able to move into it. Our plan is to live in this "shack" until we get enough money saved up to build a "real" house on the property.

One week to go!

2009-08-05T11:19:00.000-04:00

July 29,

Today Jared, Walter and I were all doing different things...and I
think I had one of the better jobs :D. Today I kept working with the
guys on the wood flooring. The only problem is the 2 guys I'm working
with drive me crazy! They are really good carpenters but totally
unorganized! For instance when I cut the wood I stack it in it's
different widths. Well these guys take one and then when it doesn't
fit where they want they just toss it to the side and get a new one so
you end up have to re-stack all of them again! Also when they are
cutting they just throw them in a stack and when they want a certain
size piece of wood they have to go measure every single one until they
find one the fits. It is soooooo impractical. Anyway I'm trying to
get them to star organizing stuff and hopefully they are starting to
learn but we'll have to see how it goes tomorrow.

Jared meanwhile had the worst job! Digging out sewer
containers...that had sewer coming out of the top of them and beans
floating around...sorry if that was to graphic for some of you.
Somewhere some pipe is clogged so we're...actually Jared and a couple
Masai guys are digging up the tank and starting there. Jared said
that working there almost made him throw up...just a little side
note. Jared is really tough when it comes to most things, but when it
comes to blood and sewer he doesn't do so well :D.

Walter meanwhile worked on some miscellaneous things around camp, such
as putting in a new water pump for the spring, and doing some mechanic
work on a truck, and doing some electrical work.

Oh yeah, that's the one other thing I did today. I helped Walter put
some electrical outlets in our little rooms up at the staff quarters.
They don't have electrical outlets so when all the stuff were out
doing work (if they knew we had it they would want it and the camp
doesn't have enough power for 20 people to be using power at the same
time) we crawled up into the celling and wired up some electrical out
lets for ourselves :D. Now we have both lights and power in our room
which is ever nice.

I'm only here for 2 more weeks! I can't believe it, but I'm looking
forward to getting home. My family and I are going to be going
backpacking in Banff Canada and I can't wait to hike out there. I'm
been wearing my huge work boots the entire time I've been here to
strengthen my legs up so I'll be able to carry my backpack.

We got to eat in the tent we've been working on for the first time
which was cool. It's nice to finally progress enough to actually be
able to use something.

July 30,

Well there were clients here who didn't want to listen to us saw and
hammer on the floor all day so I got stuck digging up sewer tanks!
Wow is the only word I can use to explain it. Whoever did this job
last time did a horrible job. There are backed up pipes, raw sewage
just seeping up from the ground ect. It's not the nicest job in the
world, but it's something that has to be done. I learned something
new today during my sewer job. Did you know that there is such thing
as a sewer diver? Like when a huge city's sewer lines get clogged
these guys actually dive and swim down the pipes and break up the
blockage. They get paid something like $2000 an hour, yes I said
thousand. From my understanding it's very dangerous because if you
break up a dam and there is too much water...I mean sewage behind it
can literally flush you away.

I found out another reason why God has me in Africa right now, but I
can't really share it in public because it involves other people and I
don't think they would appreciate me posting it on the internet LOL.

The weather here is starting to get a little warmer. I'm not having
to wear my hat to bed anymore which is a sign that it's finally
getting warmer…or that my hair is starting to grow longer since I
shaved it all off.

July 31,

Worked on digging the sewer during the morning, and worked on the
floor in the afternoon. The sad thing right now is we're not going to
have enough wood to finish putting the floor down so Josh has ordered
more, but know Africa I guarantee you that the new boards he has
ordered aren't going to look the same as the ones we've been putting
down. Fortunately we're doing it in three different sections so if we
can get the 2 sections done at least we won't be starting in the
middle of a section and will look super weird.

I'm so glad that it's going to be Sabbath tomorrow I really need a day
off. Jared, Walter, and I are planning on going for a hike somewhere
tomorrow.

August 1,

A new month has began and I only have like 11 days before I leave
here :(. Today I was planning on sleeping in for a long time but no
such luck. For some reason when I'm out here I automatically wake up
at 7:00...if not before.

We went for a nice hike up a little mountain nearby us. It was
exactly 485 feet higher than our camp. I took my gps with us and I
was able to see how high it was. The elevation at the top of the
"mountain" was 6553ft.

August 5,

Sorry it's been so long since I wrote anything...but you know there
hasn't been anything interesting to write about...just work, eat,
sleep :D. Well, yesterday I got to saw open raw sewage pipes full of
sewer...NASTY!

Today I did quite a bit of different stuff. First of all I helped
Jared and Walter haul two pickup loads of sand from the river for the
guys to make cement with, then I helped the masons with some work
putting up a wall for a laundry room. Masonry is really primitive out
here...but as long as the walls don't fall down I guess it's fine. I
really need to learn how to do "real" masonry so I can do things
proper when I build stuff out here.

While I was helping make blocks with some Maasai somehow we got on the
subject of female circumcision. All I can say was that it was a very
interesting conversation. I mean you have to be careful how you
disagree with them because in their culture it is the norm, so trying
to disagree with them and showing them that it isn't in the best
interest of the girls is really hard.

I'm only going to be here until Friday night. Jared, Walter and I
decided that since we've been here for 5 weeks without a break except
for Sabbath that we would take a little 4 day trip before I have to
leave for the US. We're thinking of going up to Mount Kenya which is
north of Nairobi...but who knows we'll have to see where we end
up...it could be anywhere within 500 miles or so.

As I'm typing this I'm trying to connect to the internet but it's
giving me grief so I can't hook up right now (sigh). It's amazing how
the internet is here. When you want to use it, it never seems to
work...and when it doesn't matter it will work. Technology is an
amazing thing. I think next time I come out here I'm going to bring
an unlocked iPhone. I was talking to Ben and he told me that if they
are unlocked they work out here fine. An iPhone would be sweet to
have out here, I wouldn't even need a computer or iPod. I could have
a phone, iPod, computer, camera all in one! Oh well I need to stop
pinning for something I don't have the need for right now and be
content with what I do have :D.

I can't wait to get home and drive my truck. I'm tired of having to
ride in the back of the pickup while someone else drives.

Well it's almost time for supper and Ben wants me to help him look up
some stuff on the internet for him so I'm going to go. This will
probably be my last post until I get home so I'll be seeing you guys
all soon.

www.lmn.org
www.therebelution.com
www.youngdisciple.com
www.answersingenesis.org
www.ariseinstitute.org
www.frontlinebuilders.org
www.joshharris.com
www.chatfromchad.blogspot.com

Back from Nairobi

2009-07-28T13:29:00.001-04:00

July 24,

I'm so glad that it's Friday and that the weekend is just around the
corner, because I am sooooo ready for a day off. I was talking to
some of the guys working here and they work 7 days a week and then
have 4 days off at the end of the month! There is no way that I could
work for 26 days straight before taking a break. It is totally
wrong. I'm so glad that God actually commanded us to take a day off
and worship Him!

Today was more of the same of yesterday...trying to fit boards
together and make them look half decent. I have to admit though that
today was way better than yesterday we got twice as much flooring put
down as yesterday because we're getting better at choosing what boards
to use, how to plane them to fit ect. We had two of the carpenters
from here working with us and they were able to show me a few tricks
of the trade to make things easier. After putting this floor down
anything in the states is going to seem easy.

A guy within a mile of here was seriously injured by an elephant.
Initially word went around that he had been killed, but it turns out
that he was just injured badly. The Elephants and Buffalo are mean
around here for some reason. It's not the case in most places but for
some reason in this particular area they are not nice creatures.

I was going to study with the guy tonight, but they have to work late,
so I'm going to be studying with them tomorrow sometime. One of them
(Abel) told us the he has a verse he wants to study tomorrow so I'm
looking forward to seeing what verse it is. Abel has tons of Bible
verses memorized. I'm still working on James and making progress I've
got chapters 1 and 2 down and now I'm working on 3. For some reason
chapter 3 seems way harder to memorize than the 2 previous chapters
were.
I helped Abel write a bunch of emails today. He can't type and he was
astonished at my typing speed (100 wpm). He didn't know that people
could even type that fast LOL. Anyway I'm going to bed goodnight.

July 25,

I had a wonderful time today. In the morning I read my Bible and
worked on memorizing chapter 3 of James. I'm making good progress on
that and hope to have it memorized by the end of this week. Jared and
Walter went for a hike but I didn't go (you can ask me for the story
when I get back home or email me for it :D). While Jared and Walter
were gone on their hike, I helped Abel write a couple more emails. It
took me like an hour to send them because I had to wait for the
internet which was unusually slow (5Kb).

I spent a couple hours on the computer after helping Abel and caught
up on all my emails and facebook and army of youth ect LOL. You can
pretty much be doing 2 different things at once. Using the
internet...and doing something else while your waiting for the pages
to load.

In the afternoon when Jared and Walter got back we all took a nap...or
maybe it was a sleep I don't know what to call it since Walter and I
slept for 3 hours and Jared slept for 4 hours! It felt really good to
get some sleep in after working all week, but I don't know if I'll be
able to go to sleep tonight. Anyway, we're planning on going to
Nairobi tomorrow so I probably won't be on the internet for
while...unless I decide to take my computer with me, but I probably
won't. We have to buy supplies but I think we're going to be coming
on Monday night so it will be a short, crowded trip. We are going to
have 8 people in the one pickup going up to Nairobi so it will be
really crowded.

July 28,

I haven't had time to write since Sunday because we've been in
Nairobi. It was a crazy trip that's for sure! We left on Monday
night and headed up to Nairobi in the pickup. That's not to bad the
only problem was that there were 7 people riding in it...meaning that
3 or 4 (depending on how much you want to squeeze together in the
front) people have to ride in the back. I don't mind riding in the
back of the pickup usually, but on our trip up there it was probably
50 degrees and I was absolutely freezing...as were the rest of the
guys in the back with me. It took me about a hour of freezing before
my brain remembered that I had my sleeping bag in my backpack. So I
pulled that thing out and wrapped it around me (a hard thing to do
when your traveling at 50 mph) and was nice and warm for the rest of
the trip.

We didn't get there until midnight and didn't get to sleep at the
place we stayed until 1 in the morning. As you can imagine 6:30AM
came way to early for comfort. We spend all of Monday shopping for
car parts, groceries ect. Have you ever tried shopping for a camp of
30 people? I hadn't until Yesterday and let me tell you it was a lot
of work! By the end of getting everything on our list (3 pages of
single spaced text) we had 9 grocery carts full of groceries. All of
the groceries filled the entire back of the truck...and the trailer
that we were pulling. I was dreading our trip back because trying to
fit all of us guys in the back of the pickup and all the groceries was
going to be a real challenge, but then a guy that Josh knows asked him
to take one of his cars back down to the Mara so Josh took 3 guys and
Walter, Jared and I took the truck. You'll notice that it wasn't 7
people that's because 2 of the guys who rode up with lived up there
and were just going up with us, but then we gained a guy because he
was a mechanic and needed a ride down to a camp nearby ours so there
was a total of 6 of us.

Our trip back was uneventful...until we got off the main road and
started taking the dirt roads to get home. We took a wrong turn and
got lost for a whole hour! It was an adventure we had no idea where
we were. The moon wasn't out so we couldn't see the hills around our
area so we had no idea which way we were going or which was camp was.
After driving around for a hour though we finally found a road that
looked familiar and eventually got home at 2AM!

Waking up this morning was so hard. After 2 really late nights in a
row I just wanted to sleep for longer, but I woke up at 7 and stared
the day. I plan on going to bed early tonight so I can get caught up
a little bit.

We are now staying in the staff housing because there are people here
in the nice tents, so we are now living in a 8x12 concrete
house...cubicle. It's not as nice but I'm actually happy about it
because now we are actually living with all the workers. Which to
them is really cool cause they can see we aren't "to good" to live
right next to them and work with them. Hopefully we'll be able to get
some more studies going with them. We haven't had a study for the
last few days cause everyone has been really busy and we were gone,
but within the next couple days we want to have some more studies.

I just found out that the orphanage project is going to be starting
like right as I'm leaving back for the States! Oh well, that's part
of life. I've been able to be a blessing to the guys here just
showing them I care and that not all white people look down on being a
carpenter. Like today I was working with some guys putting down the
floor in the tent, and he said what is your occupation and I told him
that I was going to school to be a Paramedic. He was like "you won't
be doing this in America". He thought it was cool when I told him
that I worked part time doing building and construction in America
even though I'm an EMT and going to school to be a Paramedic.

www.lmn.org
www.therebelution.com
www.youngdisciple.com
www.answersingenesis.org
www.ariseinstitute.org
www.frontlinebuilders.org
www.joshharris.com
www.chatfromchad.blogspot.com

Anonymous

2009-07-23T12:15:00.001-04:00

July 19,

Today Walter and I worked on putting the sub flooring down for the
floor of the tent while Jared continued on his quest to fix the water
problem that we're having. Yesterday some guy here, decided he would
help out our water problem and cut the line from the pump to the water
tower and installed 2 little tiny pumps (the kind you would find in a
fish tank). He didn't seem to take in to consideration that those
pumps can only pump the water that is being pumped by the first pump
in the first place. Anyway, Jared went digging around and found a
pretty big leak at one of the water heaters, so hopefully now we'll be
able to have water...at least for a while. The problem is, that the
people who put the water system together didn't want to get a big pump
so they got this little tiny solar thing, and it can't keep up with
the demand of all the people here. Josh just left for Nairobi tonight
and he said that he's going to try to pick up a bigger pump that can
keep up with the demand.

For lunch our cook served us one plate of spaghetti! After I finished
that I was still starving as was Jared, so we headed to the kitchen
and scrounged around, but couldn't find much. We told the cook
(Moses) that we need more food for lunch, because we are working and
need to eat more than people who are just sitting around all day! He
said he would make us oogali and beans tomorrow, so hopefully I'll be
able to fill up tomorrow :D.

We all slept in today for some reason which was nice, cause since I
went to bed last night I was kind of tired. Usually I wake up around
6:30, but this morning I didn't wake up until 8 and when I did it was
to Jared's singing some country song as he got ready for the day.

We all put in some extra work today. Instead of quitting work at 5
like we usually do we worked until 6:30 because we wanted to finish
the row of plywood that we were putting down and now I'm beat. I'm
not going to bed late tonight that's for sure. Since I've been here
I've been going to bed at like 9 which has been really nice, because
at home I rarely get to bed before 10 or 10:30. Yeah I know it's my
choice of when I go to bed, but here there's not much you can do after
it gets dark anyway so I eat supper read a little bit and then head
off to bed. When I'm back home there's always tons to do such as play
games with my family, or do stuff on my computer, or go somewhere
ect. I like how simple people live here it's nice...at least for a
few weeks before I get tired of eating the same food all the time and
not being able to go to the store whenever I want.

Okay so get this. Tonight we were sitting around having supper and we
were talking about the park here and all the wildlife and stuff and
one of the guides here during this conversation said the following
about wildlife conservation "When you live in Africa you have to
choose to be either pro-human or pro-wildlife...and I choose the
wildlife." The amazing thing is that he wasn't joking. I had to
leave after he said that because I got so mad at him that I felt like
yelling at him for a while, but that wouldn't be the Christian thing
to do, so I just kept my mouth shut. Yeah wildlife is important but
humans are infinitely more valuable!

July 20,

Today we worked on putting all the sub flooring down in the tent and
then securing the edge of the tent down with cedar boards. Work went
along pretty smoothly. I am the official "sawer". Jared and Walter
would both rather use a handsaw than use a circular saw, and I flatly
refused to work unless we used the circular saw, so I got the job.
Which is nice because I'd much rather saw than figure out what goes
where and then screw it down. To find out the reason why Jared and
Walter are so scared you can read my blog post from my last trip to
Africa entitled "Alas I am Wounded". After I cut myself with that saw
Jared and Walter haven't wanted to use one, but I remembered the
cowboy saying "if you get bucked off our horse, get back on". So
that's what I did and I'm not scared of sawing at all...I just make
sure to keep my hands from behind the blade.

All day today, Jared and Walter were talking about 4-wheeling and off-
roading (they are really into that stuff back in the states). After
talking all day about that they really wanted to go for a drive
(pretty much any drive out here is off-roading), so we went for a
drive and saw a family of elephants, some baboons, zebra, skunk ect.
It was a fun little drive. On our way back we decided to take a short
cut thru the bush...well you probably know what happened. We got
"lost". I don't really like to use the word "lost" because we
actually knew where we were and where we wanted to go, we just didn't
know how to go about that, because there was so many trees and scrub
bushes in the way...and it was dark. Overall though it was a really
fun little drive.

Today the guy who were helping us put up the tent started asking us
some questions about the Bible. They noticed that we don't work on
Saturday even though they do, so I guess they knew we were SDA's.
They had a bunch of questions like why did God allow sin on this
planet and a bunch of others, but that was the main one. So Jared
asked them if the wanted to study the Bible after work, and they said
that they did. So after work tonight Jared and I went over there and
studied about the Great Controversy with them and why there is bad in
this world even though God is a perfect and loving God. They
completely understood the study which was awesome and they said that
it had answered their questions about that. They say they have a
bunch more so we are going to study with them again tomorrow night.

July 21,

Today we are still working on the same thing that we were yesterday.
Things are going in typical slow African way because a couple
carpenters here are having to make every board before we can use it,
so it takes a little while to get a good pile of boards to work with.
Then once you've gotten the boards, you still have to square all the
ends because they are completely not square then you have to try to
get them to fit where you want, because usually they are warped quite
significantly.

I'M LOVING MY VITAMINS!!! Thanks mom! For those of you who didn't
read my blog last year, I mocked my mom when she told me to take
vitamins with me to Sudan...Well I quickly regretted that. Here's a
warning to all you kids our there, Moms are always right. Well this
time I decided not to make the same mistake again and brought vitamins
with me. I thought maybe my friends here would mock me (Jared and
Walter are pretty much the biggest rednecks you'll ever meet), but it
was the other way around. They've been asking me for my vitamins.
Fortunately I brought along some extras so I've been able to share :D.

Tonight at the guys had some really tough/weird questions at the Bible
Study. They're too complicated to go in depth on, but anyway it was a
fun night of answering crazy questions. One of the guys knows more
Bible stories than anyone else I've met in Africa. After we were
about half way thru our study a couple more guys came and joined us
and wanted to study so we didn't end up finishing our study until
around 11PM. I was really encouraged tonight during the study as
well. One of the guys we were studying with told us "you are the
first mizungoo (white person) who I have ever met that reads and
studies the Bible", and his other friend then said "I know God has
sent you here for a reason, to encourage the people here"! It's
funny, cause when I went to Bible College I was always told by my
teachers "you never have a study for longer than an hour". Well that
might apply in the states but not here in Africa. Anything different
from the normal routine of work, eat, sleep, is enjoyable. They want
us to come every night, so that's why my blogs have been kind of
short, because I haven't been getting back until late and haven't had
time to write much.

July 22,

Today we got the tent all attached a the bottom of our frame and we're
going to be starting putting the tongue and groove down tomorrow
morning. It was kind of a hassle because half way thru putting it up
we found that we couldn't attach it in one place because it seemed to
short. Well turns out we just hadn't pulled it tight enough so we had
to take up all of the boards holding down the edge of the tent and
pull it tight and put it back down.

In the afternoon just as we were finishing work for the day, we got a
call from Josh. He's been up in Nairobi getting supplies. Well he
had so much supplies (3000 pounds) that he didn't want to try driving
on the horrible dirt road on the way back. So Jared and I went and
met him half way between Nairobi and here which is about 3 hours away
in a place called Narok. That's where the paved road ends and the
dirt road begins, so we loaded up our pickup from his and drove back
together. It was kind of nice, because I was able to get buy some
minutes for Jared's phone and was able to call my parents and brothers
and talk to them for the first time in almost 2 weeks. We were going
to study with the guys tonight, but we didn't get back until almost
midnight so hopefully we'll be able to study with them tomorrow.

July 23,
Today we worked on putting the tongue and groove down and let me tell
you it's been a HUGE pain! It turns out the guys who gave us the wood
must have given us wet and dry wood and when it dried the wet stuff
shrunk, so half of the wood is 13 centimeters and the rest is 13.5
centimiters! Any of you who have tried laying a wood floor will
understand that you have to have the wood the same width or there's
huge cracks in it. Well, my job today as been cutting and measuring
the wood and putting it in two stacks according to width. We do one
row one width and the next the other. It's slow work, but there's not
too much you can do about it.

It rained for the first time since I've been here which is nice.
Everything here is super super dry, so hopefully this will help things
out a little bit. Everything around here is eaten to the ground
because all of the Masai's cows and goats have eaten all the grass.

One thing I failed to mention last night is that Josh got all the
supplies for the orphanage ordered while he was up in Nairobi.
Hopefully work on that will begin soon. I'm super tired because I've
been getting to bed late the last few nights and waking up pretty
early so I'm off to bed. We're going to be going to Nairobi either
tomorrow or Sunday to pick up supplies and stuff.

working on putting the t&g down and it being horrible the wood is
off by about half a centimeter! Raining for the first time since I've
gotten here. Josh ordered all the supplies for the orphanage so
hopefully we'll be starting on that soon.

www.lmn.org
www.therebelution.com
www.youngdisciple.com
www.answersingenesis.org
www.ariseinstitute.org
www.frontlinebuilders.org
www.joshharris.com
www.chatfromchad.blogspot.com

Working Hard and Having Fun

2009-07-18T16:08:00.000-04:00

July 14,

We got a ton accomplished today. We got the fly on the tent. Let me tell you it was not joke. You might think that getting the fly on your screen porch at home is hard, well try putting a 30 by 50 foot canvas fly on top of a tent that peaks at 18 feet! It was crazy to say the least, the fly had to way at least 7 or 8 hundred pounds, so trying to get it up there was crazy. We had like 10 guys working on it with us, and we rolled it up and put in in the middle and then unrolled it. The system actually worked pretty good.

This morning before we started work on the tent I helped one of the mechanics put a new tube in a land cruiser tire. The only thing was, that it was a tubless tire that they put a tube in because it wouldn't hold air! Let me tell you, it took us like 10 minutes pounding on it with a sledge hammer and a couple pry bars to get the bead off the rim.

Last night I was able to get onto the internet which was really nice. I used a cellphone modem and let me tell you it is soooooooo slow (5 KB/s for all of you computer people). It took me 30 minutes just do check and send my emails! It literally took 5 minutes for my facebook page to load, so I don't plan on going on there very often. Speaking of the internet reminds me… if you read my blog from last year you'll remember that Jared and Walter kind of made fun of me because I liked staying in contact with my family back in the states, and I liked going to the internet once a week to email people. Well, Walter now has a phone that is internet enabled and he's on it all the time checking his email and facebook! Jared isn't doing that yet, but that's only because he doesn't have a phone that has that capability! I've gotten to goof on Walter about being on the internet which has been really fun LOL.

Today I injured my right foot again! I hurt it a week before I came out to Africa playing soccer. I had been playing barefoot and rolled my big toe under and then stepped on it. I've been wearing my work boots the whole time I've been out here to give it some support so it would heal. Well it's finally feeling better so I chose to wear flip-flops instead today because it was really hot. Well this afternoon I was helping the guys move some scaffolding and I had one corner and I let it fall on my foot. Now fortunately it didn't fall all the way on my foot and just skiffed the side, but I've got a huge bruise on the side of my food and it hurts to walk. I guess that will teach me to wear boots when I'm working doing stuff that has the possibility of doing damage to my digits.

Well, I'm off to bed. I remember that there was something else that I wanted to write tonight, but I can't seem to think of it, so I'll just have to sleep on it and see if I remember in the morning. Oh yeah, my writs is feeling much better also.

July 17,

ATTENTION! My spell checker is not working so if there is gross mis-spellings you know the reason. There's probably going to be a ton of errors on these post, cause I usually depend on the spell checker to let me know if I typed a word wrong. Anyway...

Well I haven't had my computer for a few days because I was over at a different place that Josh is working about 45 minutes away from this camp here. I was over there with Josh and Walter for the last couple days working on putting roofing panels on the roof of a house. The panels are all tongue and groove, and since they are "African quality" putting them together can sometimes be a big pain. I took a pad a paper with me so I could write down stuff so I wouldn't forget it by the time I could write it on my computer, so here's what I've been doing over the last few day.

On July 15^th we headed over to the other place to work with Jared. It's been fun working over there because I've been working along with 3 Kenyans and they've been teaching me a lot of Swahili...or at least trying. Like one time I said "Thank you" to them in English and they said "you have to say it in Swahili". So I've been learning keydogo (a little).

One of the guys I was working with is named Black or Blackie. I asked him why he was named that and he laughed and said "why do you think? I'm black! I thought that was kind of funny. During the day he nicknamed me whitey, since I'm the only white guy working with them, because Walter is Indian and after being here in Africa for 6 months he's really dark.

At the end of the day I played a couple games of checkers with some of the guys there. They are really good! I thought I was a pretty decent checkers player, but I didn't stand a chance against these guys. They have a checkers board made out of a board with squares made with a magic marker! They use bottle caps for the game pieces. In one game I watched Paul (one of the workers) on the game with a 4 jump move (neadless to say he is one of the best players there).

During the evening Walter, Josh and I were sitting around and Walter asked Josh if he could borrow his hair clippers to trim his hair so Josh gave them to him and he went to cut his hair. After he left I told Josh that I was tempted to shave all my hair off because I hadn't done it for a couple years, and Josh said the same. So we both decided to shave our heads. It feels so good not to have any hair, I'm loving it. I don't know how I managed to not shave or cut my hair the entire time I was in Africa last year. The only downside with being bald, is that my head gets really cold at night, so I have to wear a hat. Josh gave me a couple pairs of his socks, so now I have 3 pairs of socks...or at least did until Walter forgot his socks and had to borrow a pair of mine, so hopefully I get them back.

On the 16^th we just kept working on putting the boards on the celling of the house. Balanced precariously on scaffolding, and boards. In order to reach the ceiling we have to sets of scaffolding balanced on 2x3 and plywood and then we have wood going across the scaffolding and have boards on top of them with a 50 gallon barrel on top of that to reach the ceiling. It's pretty rickety, I've got some pictures of it. Oh on a side not, I probably won't be able to post pictures while I'm here, because the internet is too slow down here in the bush. I can actually check my email usually everyday because of the cell phone modem we have, but other than that I can't really do to much.

I'm learning tons about the culture here and how to direct building projects and stuff. So although I'm might not doing "real" mission work right now, I'm learning tons of stuff that will be very helpful when I start doing my own projects.

During work we saw a herd of about 40 or 50 elephants. The house we're building is on top of a hill and they were about 500 yards away running parallel to us. I think they we're probably being chased by a bunch of Masai who got tired of them eating all the grass, and being around the village…

Later:

ARGGGGGG. Okay I had like 3 pages of stuff written, and I closed the lid of my computer while I went to eat supper and I came back and my computer had froze and I lost all my stuff I had written. So I'm going to try to recreate it, but I don't think it will be as good as my first one. I was really on a role before supper. I'm bummed out, cause I usually always save my stuff before I close anything, but I forgot. It's a good reminder to ALWAYS safe your file before leaving your computer for any reason.

During the night there were leopards and hyenas outside our house. It's nice to know that they are outside and your inside. Actually though, the leopards and lions aren't really the dangerous animals around here. The dangerous ones are the elephants and buffalo. They have killed a few people here in the Mara over the last month.

Some of my friends are amazed when they hear that I share my bedroom with my 3 brothers. They think it's crazy that we all fit in the same room. Well, at least we all have our own twin mattresses. Josh was wondering why the beds for some of his workers were broken. Well it turns out that all the guys share beds because that's what they are used too. These aren't twin mattresses by the way, these are single mattresses. How they manage to fit on at all is beyond my imagination.

Time is passing here very quickly. I've already been here for almost two weeks, and I'm going to be heading back home in under a month. It's amazing how fast time passes when your busy doing stuff you really enjoy. I am getting a little homesick… I bet my family is missing my too. My Brothers are in Niagara Falls doing bible work for a couple weeks so it's just my mom and dad and two youngest siblings. I bet it seems pretty quite at home. I think Hannah might be a little happy, just because she doesn't have to cook food for us three starving boys! I really could go for some of your amazing salads Hannah, with all the stuff you put in them and maybe some cookies as well :D.

There was a bat in the the bathroom this morning that really startled me. I was brushing my teeth and suddenly something flew past my head. It turned out to be a bat. I was going to take a picture of it but it flew out the door before I was able to get my camera.

We had gone to where Jared was working for the afternoon, and then headed back to where we were working with Josh after dark. On our way back we came across a porcupine crossing the road, so Josh swerved of the road and started chasing it thru the bush for a while, but it finally ran into some thick bush and we weren't able to follow it in the truck. Josh told me that in the entire time he's lived in Africa he's only seen them twice so it was pretty cool to see.

Jared called today while we were working and told us he had done a "Seal Team Six Maneuver". There's a story behind the name. While we were in Zanzibar last year we had a game kind of like follow the leader in the ocean, where we had to different challenges such as getting sand from the bottom of the ocean like 20 feet down, or climbing some cliff coming out of the ocean, or swimming with our hands and feet tied together (yes there was someone there to make sure we didn't drown) ect. Well, today the water wasn't working so he went and no water was coming into the water take for the place we're staying. So he had to go on top of the water tank, squeeze himself in and fix some valve or something. Well, once he was finished he couldn't get out because he couldn't reach the top of the tank! Fortunately he was working together with another guy and he got the guy (Ben) to go and make, in Jared's words a "primitive antediluvian (spelling?) grappling hook, so that he could get out.

It got freezing cold last night, I nearly froze to death. I had my hat on at the beginning of the night, and I actually woke up in the middle of the night and had to zip my sleeping bag all the way up and snug the hood down on it. The place we were staying has a palm leaf roof and the wind whistles thru there like there isn't even a roof so it was pretty chilly.

Today, we did pretty much the same as the last few day. Worked on putting up the paneling on the roof of the house, then we came over to where we had been working on putting the tent together. Well, the water problem that we though Jared fixed yesterday evidently isn't quite fixed, because when Jared went to take a shower he had just hot water from the hot water tank, but no cold water! So he nearly burned himself to death trying to take a shower with just scalding hot water! Jared went and checked it out and he says the pump is pumping water up to the tank, but it's not a big enough pump to keep up with all the demand of people showering and people washing dishes at the same time!

Tomorrow we're hoping to maybe go on a little safari trip to the Mara and see the migration (my mom pointed out that earlier I said immigration instead of migration LOL). This is the time of year were all wildebeest and zebra ect.

Now we're just waiting for the money to be sent to us for the orphanage. Josh said his design has been approved and now he's just waiting for the money to be sent. Hopefully he should have it Sunday so that we he goes up to Nairobi this week he can start buying supplies and we can get the project started. Anyway my computer is about to run out of power so I've got to end this otherwise I might lose all of this writing as well.

July 18,

We had a good Sabbath today. It turns out that there isn't a church even close to where we are here in the bush so we weren't able to go to Church. Instead we went for a safari drive into the national park to see some of the wildlife. We saw some lions, and giraffe, warthogs, zebra, and a bunch of different kinds of gazelle.

On our way back from our drive we took a wrong turn to get back here to camp, so instead of following the road back to where we made the wrong turn (all the turns out here look kind of the same), we just turned off the road into the bush and headed in the general direction. Well all went well until we got into some thick bush that we couldn't drive thru. We spent 30 minutes driving around in the bush at night trying to find the road. Eventually we found it and were able to get home. I was kind of hoping that we wouldn't be able to find the road until morning and we would have to sleep in the land cruiser.

Josh just got the check for the orphanage project today, so he's taking it up to Nairobi tomorrow, but since it takes 5 days for the check to clear we're not going to be able to buy supplies until Friday or Monday. I just got a really encouraging letter from my mom about mission work telling me not to think that I'm not doing mission work here. Here's a short quote from long email she sent me :) "It's living your life for Jesus, TODAY. Wherever, whatever, whomever it involves. Do all to the Honor and glory of God! There is no such thing as preparing to be a missionary - you ARE a missionary. You may learn skills that will help you in a particular setting, environment, or group of people - but being a missionary is automatic when you believe in Jesus." I really needed to hear that today! Sometimes I'm tempted to get discouraged when I don't feel like I'm doing the "real" mission work I came out to do, but the email from my mom was just what I needed to hear to day.

Tomorrow we start laying the tongue and groove flooring for the floor of the tent so I'd better get to bed. It's already 11PM here and I need to get some rest. I wanted to get my blog and emails up to date though before I went to bed because I'm going to be busy the next few days working and won't have time to try to catch up on my blog about what happened last week. Now I'm back up to date, so I'll just be able to write about what I'm doing every day.

www.lmn.org

www.therebelution.com

www.youngdisciple.com

www.answersingenesis.org

www.ariseinstitute.org

www.frontlinebuilders.org

www.joshharris.com

www.chatfromchad.blogspot.com

My First Week in Africa

2009-07-13T14:27:00.001-04:00

July 9,

Today we worked on getting that huge tent sent up. To put things simply…nothing quite went according to plan...not that, that was surprising. First of all the truck didn't show up with the parts until noon! They were supposed to have been here last night, then they went to start setting it up, but the welder was broken so we couldn't weld a few things that we needed to weld before we set it up. Then guess what? We already have a frame of logs that the tent frame is supposed to bolt to, but unfortunately the guys making the frame made a mistake and the door was 3 feet smaller than it was supposed to be. Anyway we're going to be moving the frame tomorrow. Our goal is to have the frame up by the end of Sunday, but we'll have to wait and see. Our generator this morning didn't work so we had to saw all the floor joists by hand! Fortuantly when Josh came over this afternoon he was able to it fixed. I guess a couple of the workers here had been running a welder, and planer at the same time and it fired a couple wires in the generator.

The big immigration of Wildebeest is going on here in the national park, so we're planning on going down there on Sabbath to check it out. Hopefully I'll be able to get some good pictures and stuff.

There's really nothing interesting to write about, we just worked all day on trying to get this tent put up. It was beautiful outside today. I put on sunscreen, but I think that I still got sunburned. The problem is that it was like only 70 degrees today with a beautiful breeze so you can't feel that your burning to a crisp but you are.

I feel like I should be writing more. When I was in Sudan I could fill up a page or two every night. Maybe it was because everything was new last time I was out here and this trip I'm already used to things so I don't have as much to write about. Anyway I'll make sure that I think up some interesting things to write for tomorrow...or the next day :D.

Anyway it's 9 so I think I'll head to bed. I'm still trying to get aclimated to the time zone here. We are 7 hours later than easter time zone in the states. So say it's 6AM in NY, it's 1 PM here in Kenya.

July 10,

I love Sabbath! Especially over here in Africa. I don't know exactly why, but maybe it's because I work hard for 6 days straight, and I'm looking forward to a break just to be able to spend time with God and relax. As I write this it is already Sabbath and it's only 6:50. The sun sets here around 6:35 because we are so close to the equator.

I told you I would try to thing up some interesting stuff to write about. Well today I had some stuff happen to me, so I don't have to think, I just have to write what happened. The first thing that I found quite humorous happened last night around midnight. As you saw from my post yesterday I went to bed around 9. Well I woke up around midnight with the little lamp next to my bed on, and Jared moving around. I just lay there for a minute or two and Jared got back in bed...but without turning the light off. So I asked him to turn of the light and he said "Dude, you turned that light on a while ago and I haven't been able to sleep." Well I guess I must of sleep walked or something and turned the light on! I've never done anything like that in my life, or at least that I remember or that someone has told me about. I asked Jared why he hadn't turned it off, and he said he thought I wanted it for something! So I told Jared that if something happens like that again to kick me cause even if I had been doing something and even if it had been important it can wait until a reasonable time in the morning.

The other interesting occurrence today was that I almost got my foot cut of with a chain saw! Okay, okay, maybe that's a little exaggeration, but I do have a couple little chunks of rubber taken out of the sole of my boots, as well as a small piece of leather. I was helping one of the guys cut a 45 degree angle on a beam for the tent we're building and it was only 2 feet long so I had my foot on it trying to keep it still and the chainsaw jumped and hit my boot. Now don't worry I wouldn't of done it if I thought I would lose a leg. First of all it was a little tree trimming saw so it only had like a 10 inch bar, second of all I was wearing my huge leather logging boots with steel toe and super thick leather.

Another funny thing I might mention is that while we were working today around 11 Walter said to me "I want sugar!". I had been waiting for him to say something like that because I brought a bunch of reese's peanut butter cups with me (Walter's favorite), so I told him I had some and brought them out. He was very happy to say the least. I still have 3 more in my bag for another time when he wants sugar.

Okay now that I've covered all the interesting things now it's time to cover the normal/boring things. Today the work was absolutely back breaking. The frame for the tent is made out of logs for the legs and things and a metal pole roof. Well Josh got the roof custom made to his log frame and the guys messed up. We had to dig up 4 poles (these were actually tree trunks 12 feet tall), and dig new holes and put them where they were supposed to be. Then we had to custom weld a few brackets into different spots to make them work! A couple hours today I was sitting up on top of the wood frame trying to get the medal poles in place and let me tell you, I am very, very sore. I feel like I've been riding my mounting bike for like 2 days straight!

Oh, by the way. This isn't any normal tent. It's probably 30 by 50 feet and the peak of the roof is 20 feet in the air! I've been taking some pictures, but since I've had to be helping doing any of the cool stuff like trying to lift poles and stuff on the the frame and trying to keep them from falling on the guys on the ground, I haven't gotten as many pictures as I would like. Anyway, after working outside for the last 3 days I still haven't gotten sunburned (Prizm sunscreen is the best), so I'm happy. Hopefully it will stay that way.

I hurt my wrist today, I think I sprained it cause it really hurts. I jumped up and grabbed hold of a rafter to swing myself up and I heard a really loud pop, and now it hurts. I'll probably wrap it up in the morning if it's still hurting.

July 11,

I had a great Sabbath today. I got to sleep in a little bit (8:00) which was really nice, cause we've been waking up at like 6 or 6:30 every day so it was nice to get some extra sleep. After I woke up I read for a while then talked with Jared an Walter for an hour or so. Then we decided to go for a hike up this small mountian that is behind where we are staying, but we were told that we can't go there because there are lots of elephants and buffalo and a few people have been killed by them within the last couple months. So instead we hiked out to a dry creek bed along with a couple masai to guard us. It was kind of cool to have them with us cause they were able to show us a few edible plants and stuff like that. They pointed out a few elephants to us, but since they were on this hill at least a mile or two away I just had to take their word for it, because I tried to see them for 5 minutes and didn't have any luck seeing anything.

This afternoon I took a nap and then ate a huge meal of rice and lentils then got to talk to my family for a few minutes which was nice. I was using Jared's phone so I wasn't able to talk for very long cause I didn't want to use up his time but it was nice to hear their voices and let them know I was doing okay.

Last night Josh was cutting up a tree that was across the road with his chainsaw and an accacia thorn went into his knee. He pulled it out, but now he can barely walk. Accacia thorns have some type of poison on them that make the wounds they make hurt for days. One of the native guys told me that when that happens to them they put paint thinner on it and it makes it better. Don't know how that exactly is supposed to work, but I guess it does.

Anyway tomorrow is going to be a busy day, so I'd better head of to bed.

July 12,

Happy Birthday Mom! I think it's your birthday today, but it could be the 14th I'm not quite sure. Today wasn't as busy as I thought. We had a lot of tedious work screwing in screws and stuff like that to get the tent frame ready for the fly and stuff. The guys have to sew the fly together and they have a sweet sewing machine. It will sew thru like 4 layers of canvas like it's not even there, and super fast. I wish I had one of those for making leather vests and stuff.

It looks like it's going to rain tonight, but we'll have to wait and see. We're in the middle of a 6 month drought here, so the people here really need the rains. There's no grass and since the people here raise cattle it's been really hard on them because there cows have nothing to eat.

My wrist is staring to feel better, but it still really hurts when I lift stuff the wrong way. I'm hoping if I take it easy it should be fine in a couple days. The only problem is trying to take it easy when your trying to build stuff, and your constitantly lifting and stuff with it. Fortuantly it's my left wrist so I can at least hammer and stuff with my right hand.

The food here hasn't been too bad. Lots of rice and beans and stuff, but at least there's also been vegetables so there's been some varity. My one complaint is that the cooks where we are only cook exactly the amount they think that we need to eat, so there's never enought to really stuff myself, which when I'm doing construction and working all day I really like to be able to stuff myself so I can make it to the next meal without feeling like I'm starving.

I talked to one of the Masai tribesmen today about getting a native spear. They are really cool looking things, and I think if I took the spear head off the shaft I could fit it in my duffel bag. I can get one for like 700 Kenyan Shillings which is just under $10. The exchange rate here is better than when I was here last time. Right now the exchange rate is like 75 shillings to $1, when I was here last year it was only like 68 or something like that. I'm happy because this trip is really cheap, since I'm not having to pay to stay anywhere and food is really really cheap. So hopefully I'll be able to pick up some cool stuff before I come home.

July 13,

Today was an enjoyable day. This morning after breakfast Jared and I along with a bunch of workers went to a river about 5 miles away from where we are staying and picked 2 loads of fist sized river rocks to take to a place that Josh is building. He's going to use them to build a fountain, or something like that. While we were sitting there picking rocks from the river bed (it's dry this time of year) Jared got one of his typical crazy ideas and now has huge dreams for hiring guys to pick this type of rock and selling it in Nairobi! Now just in case you don't know Jared let me fill you in on a little back ground. I've known Jared for a couple years and I can't tell you how many hundreds of ideas Jared has come up with to make money...unfortunately none of them have panned out yet. Who knows maybe this one will actually turn out, it would be nice for him to finally find something that brings in money.

This afternoon got quite hot, probably 90 degrees or so. Jared and I worked on fixing a leaking solar water heater, and then propping it up because the boards it was built on where bending severely and we didn't want them to break. Fixing the leak proved to be quite the job, no sooner did we fix the leak then we promptly caused 2 more. You see, there is a release valve on top of the container so that when steam builds up in the heater it can just go out this valve, well water was coming out of this valve as well because it was broken so we put a different kind on it and it worked fine. That's when the problems began, then pressure built up to what it was supposed to be and it cause two more joints to leak so we had to try to fix those. We got one fixed, but there is still one joint that is leaking a little bit. The heater is out side so it's not too big of a deal, but hopefully we can fix that leak tomorrow.

Progress on the tent is going slow. I was kind of expecting it, but you know how it goes, you always hope for the best. The guys forgot a huge piece of in the roof in Nairobi so they had to ship it down, so today nothing got done on the tent because the guys had to go pick it up in a town 3 hours away. We're hoping to be able to start on the orphanage next week, but know Jared and Africa it could be a couple weeks. Fortunately the last time I was here I learned not to get impatient...or at least I learned that I shouldn't get impatient. I mean God worked it out that I was able to come here this year, and he has a purpose, so I shouldn't get impatient when things don't go as fast as I want them. I've already been able to become friends with a couple guys that I'm hoping to be a witness too. I'm also hoping that I'll be able to preach a couple times while I'm here. I already have 3 sermons prepared that I'm just dying to preach. I like preaching out here in Africa way more that I do in the states. I don't know exactly why, but one of the reasons I know is because it's translated and I get to think about what I'm going to say next while the translator is translating my last few sentences.

Oh yeah one more thing...I ONLY HAVE 1 PAIR OF SOCKS! I have no idea what happened to the rest of them. I brought like 4 pairs, and they have all disappeared and I have no idea where they went. I haven't lost anything else, just my socks. So right now I'm stuck washing my socks each night I shower and hoping that they dry by morning :(. Next time we head up to Nairobi I'm just going to have to buy some cheap socks to last me until I get home. Not only am I mad cause I don't have socks, I'm mad I lost them cause there not just cheap cotton socks, they are smartwool work boot socks! Oh well, I still have my flip-flops so I guess I can just where those if I have too.

Kenya!

2009-07-08T07:19:00.002-04:00

Hi everyone! Thank you for all you prayers for safe travel. I have arrived in Kenya after a safe...but long plane trip. I don't have long to write right now but I'll write as much as possible until I run out of battery :D. Anyway in case my batteries run out before I finish all I want to write let me first tell you what I am going to be doing during my time here in Kenya. My friends Jared, Walter, and I are going to be helping Josh (Jared's Cousin) start building an orphanage/rescue center down in Southern Kenya for Maasai (name of the tribe) girls. We are currently in Nairobi the capital city of Kenya doing all the prep work for the building down there such as pricing materials and buying them ect. When I find out exactly where it is and stuff I'll post more about it.

If this had been my first time to Africa my flight over might of caused me to panic. You see, I was supposed to leave NY City at 2 o'clock, but because of repairs and stuff we didn't leave until 4 which made me a hour late to catch my plane from Detroit to Amsterdam Holland. So I just prayed that everything would go alright and said TIA (this is Africa)... I had to start pretending I was in Africa even before I got there. In Africa nothing is ever on time so I figured I'd just start pretending I was in Africa early. Anyway as it was everything worked out fine and my luggage even made it too!

We spent the night at Maxwell Academy here in Nairobi which is the SDA Academy here. Yesterday we spent all day searching for building materials ect. One thing you need to know about Nairobi is that the traffic is horrible. For instance, yesterday morning Josh had a bunch of errands to run. Well when we met up with him at 1 for lunch he had only gotten to the bank! The traffic is horrible here!

Today we are getting a bunch of different errands done then we're heading down to the Mara, which is the national park here in Kenya. We are going to be helping Josh for a couple days. He builds tourist camps here in Kenya and we're going to help him finish up a few things this week, so that we can hopefully start on the orphanage next week.

The weather here is crazy. Guess how cold it got the last couple nights? 45 degrees! It's absolutely carzy, I came to Africa planning on hot weather, but I've been having to wear a jacket and hat during the evenings cause it's been so cold.

Anyway I'd love to write more, but right now we're in a hurry cause we've got to go pick Walter up at the airport. He's coming back from a cousins wedding in England. I don't know when I'll be able to post more, cause we're going to be in the bush, but I'm guessing we'll be back in town next week, and I'll post stuff. I'm going to be getting a cell phone so even if I can't post stuff I'll be talking to my family, so I'll have my brother Parker post stuff for me if I can't.

God is BIGGER!

The Struggle Continues

2009-06-30T21:00:00.002-04:00

Howdy everybody! I get the title of this post from my friend, who always says that before he begins a trip. I am reviving this blog for my upcoming trip to Africa. I am going to be leaving on Sunday for Nairobi Kenya. I'll be meeting my friends Jared and Walter from my last trip. Our plan is to head up to northern kenya to do some scouting of land to see if we can find a good place to build a mission base with an air strip. Our dream is to someday start a mission clinic with an airstrip up a desert region of Nothern Kenya.

This trip is going to be a short one compared to last time cause I have to be back before school starts up this fall (I'm going to Paramedic school). I'm going to be out there for just under six weeks, but I'm hoping to accomplish a lot in that time. I'm going to be posting as much as I possibly can. Unfortunately since we're going to be doing a lot of traveling this time I'm probably not going to be able to post as much as I like but I'll be doing my best. I'll also be posting pictures on facebook and flicker.

Anyway that's about all I have to say for now. I'll elaborate on how the whole trip came about when I'm on the trip and have lots of time for writing. Right now I'm trying to get unpacked from my trip to MI campmeeting this last week, and pack for my trip to NY campmeeting this weekend, and getting my bags packed for Africa at the same time. It's been pretty hectic, but I'm enjoying it.

God is BIGGER!

What I'm up to

2008-11-15T14:55:00.003-05:00

Here it is. The post I was supposed to write 2 or 3 months ago is about to arrive. Today it's raining outside so it's not a great day for hiking, so I figured I'd write out what I'm doing now that I'm back from Africa, what my future plans are, and what my reactions were once I arrived back from Africa.

I arrived back to the states on the 1st of August. It was a long, long flight back home. I was awake for a total of about 48 hours (I can't sleep in airplane seats for some reason). I did manage about an hour nap in the Amsterdam Holland airport, but that was it. The trip as a whole was uneventful. I made went thru a total of 5 airport security check points, and didn't get searched once. My parent's were surprised, they say I looked suspicion with my beard and work clothes!

I was so excited to get home and see my family! That's probably the other reason I wasn't able to sleep, I was too excited.

I got home on a Friday night and just sat on the couch and enjoyed spending time with my family. I thought that I was going to really enjoy having American conveniences, and I did, but not nearly as much as I thought I would. I think it's probably due to the fact that I now know people personally who are sleeping on the mud floor or a mosquito ridden hut. Why should I be enjoying all these things when these people have nothing and are actually content with them? I can't wait to see these the reaction when these people get to heaven. For us in a Westernized society heaven is going to be good, more than we can imagine, but for people who have never had a bed, or running water ect. it will be paradise!!!!!

Now that I’m back from Africa, it sometimes seems that I did actually go. I have to look at pictures, or go back and read what I wrote while I was there to remind myself. It’s so easy to go back to the way everything used to be now that I’m back living at home. I’ve learned a lot during the last year of my life, and I don’t want to forget all that I’ve learned.

It’s harder for me to do God’s will here in the states that in Africa for some reason. I don’t know why, but I think it’s because Satan doesn’t want me to go back and he’s going to do all he can to discourage me, and to keep me from going back to the mission field. Please pray for me, that I will follow where God is leading my life right now, and that I will be patient and wait on is timing for going back to Africa.

Currently I'm going to school to become and EMT. As I mentioned in other posts before, the need for medical personnel is huge! I'm starting to find out though that EMT's don't know that much, and it's making me yearn for more training. What is that training going to be? I don't know. I'm going to have to wait for God's guiding.

This next month, I'm planning on taking flight lessons. I'd love to do Medical Aviation work. With a Pilot's License it would make traveling in Africa... or anywhere for that matter, way easier.

My dream is to do mission work full time. I don’t really care where I go, as long as it is where God wants me. I’d really like to work in a 3^rd world country. I love traveling and living in 3^rd world countries.

I can’t wait to see what God has in store for my life in the next few years. I believe we’re living in the last few years (or months) of earths history. God has a special work for us to do in spreading his gospel to the world, and I want to be part of it!

God is BIGGER

Update

2008-10-01T13:45:00.003-04:00

My mom keeps telling me that I should update this with my post Africa experience, and I have to admit she is right. So I'll be posting that "soon" which hopefully means this weekend.

God is BIGGER

Home

2008-08-03T00:55:00.001-04:00

Well I'm safe and sound and back home. I don't have time to post more, but I must say that this is probably the end off my posting stuff on this blog for a while. I might post something short every week or two, but that is all.

Thank you all for your prayers and support while I was out in Africa.

4 More days until I'm home: Pictures

2008-07-29T15:06:00.002-04:00

I added some more photos under: Links of Interest

4 more days until I'm home

2008-07-28T14:00:00.000-04:00

July 25, 2008

I’m super happy to have my computer back. It feels good to finally be able to type everything I’m think while I’m still thinking it, instead of having to slowly write everything down. I’m just going to type down what I wrote while I was traveling for you to read.

July 2: Our travels were safe but long. How long does it take 4 guys to pack for a trip? The answer is all, and I do mean all day. We woke up Sunday morning and packed all our stuff, but it took us all day. We didn’t hurry, because hey, this is Africa, and we have lots of time to do everything so there is no need to rush around like crazy! Actually, though it took us all day we actually wanted to leave Sunday night, the reason being, that the border guards are tired around midnight and it’s easier to get thru the border (usually). Our reason for going late at night was because the paper work for the vehicle. For some reason Kenya doesn’t allow vehicles to stay in the country for more than 3 months, because their afraid that people won’t pay taxes on it or something like that, so for every day past 3 months it’s in the country you have to pay 3 dollars. Well our vehicle had been in the country for over a year, closer to two if I remember correctly, so we didn’t want to pay a huge fine to try to get across the border.

We left around 6pm and arrived at the border around 11pm. Then we ran into a little problem with the paper work with the vehicle. We had been expecting that, but we were hoping, that people would be tired so we could just pass through, but alas, they said that we would have to spend the night at the border and wait until the boss came in the next morning. So we simply spread our mats on the parking lot and slept for the rest of the night. The next morning we were finally able to cross into Tanzania, after only having to pay $100. We were very blessed, because at the beginning of the morning the boss had been saying that they were going to impound our vehicle if we didn’t pay $500, but God worked it out and we only had to pay the $100.

We drove all day, but we didn’t make it to Yessa’s house like we though we would. The reason though was because we were driving slowly to conserve gas, because it is sooooo expensive here ($8 a gallon). When we were getting the cuiser to leave, we stripped off some stuff to make it lighter and more streamline. WE took off the 300 pound roof rack, the huge radio antenna, and part of the rear bumper. To further lighten the load, we only brought one bag of stuff with us, and left the rest of our stuff back in Kenya to pick up when we get back.

The trip took us so much longer that we thought, but the reason why was because we only drove 70kmp all day. 70kpm is the perfect speed to get the ultimate gas mileage, and since we’re not in a hurry it doesn’t bother us. We could go faster cause all the roads here are paved, but we got really, really good gas mileage (24 miles to the gallon to be exact)!

We drove all day as I said before, but it got dark and we were still along way from our destination, so we pulled into a gravel parking area in a little town and spent the night. I barley got any sleep that night, we were “sleeping” right next to a steep hill, so when the trucks drivers came along they had their trucks in a low gear and it was super loud. Add to that the music that was blaring from across the street all night (literally), and thousands of mosquitos, and the bumpy gravel parking lot, and it was a very sleepless night!

We “woke up” at 6am and left cause we couldn’t “sleep” any longer. We drove all day and as the night wore on I got colder and colder. It was probably 50 degrees outside. I’m not used to the cold weather at all! The reason it was so cold is that where we were in Tanzania we were at 6200 feet elevation. We finally got to Yessa’s house. It is a very nice house, but doesn’t have electricity, but that doesn’t really matter, because I don’t have anything to charge. I left my computer in Kenya so that I wouldn’t always have to lug it around and keep my eye on it to keep it from getting stolen.

Tuesday night I got the best sleep I’ve had since I’ve been in Africa. I don’t know if it was because it was cold (I love sleeping when it’s cold), or if it was because there were no mosquitos, or maybe it was because I hadn’t gotten a good rest the night before. Whatever the reason I had a great sleep, and enjoyed it immensely.

Yesterday which was a Wednesday we didn’t do too much. We spent a good part of the day in town buying some food to last us the next few days. We did go see Yessa’s saw mill. Let me tell you I have never seen a more dangerous piece of machinery in my life! It looks like a huge table top saw, but has a huge 24 inch blade, open pulleys going to the engine ect. I got a video and pictures of them working so when I get home you’ll be able to see what it looks like. I didn’t eve like to get close to the thing. It looked like ti would fly apart at a moments notice.

July 3: I just got up, I just wrote about yesterday. We have lots of work to do around Yessa’s farm, so we’ll have plenty to keep us busy until we leave for Dar es Salaam, in probably 10 days.

July 4: Yesterday we worked on helping Yessa around his farm. We slashed a bunch of his yard, worked on repairing a lot of his fence and helped him put a door on one of his enclosures for his tree nursery, so animals can’t get in.

In the afternoon we went for a hike to see all of Yessa’s property. He has a lot of land, it is very pretty. There is this small mountain on his land that ha a lot of springs coming right out of the side of it, and you can just walk up to them and drink out of them.

Just past his property there is a water project at on of the other springs that are around the area. It is really cool, all it is is a little handmade dam, then a pipe that runs for over 30K supplying 7 villages with water as it goes along. I think it would be cool to do those same kind of water projects. The funny thing about this specific project is that the Catholics did this project and when they finished, the entire village at the end of the line became Catholics. It’s too bad that we didn’t make it there first. LOL.

In the afternoon we burned fire breaks around Yessa’s land, we have some more to burn, but we’ll finish Sunday hopefully.

July 5: Yesterday was the fourth, and I wish we could of had some fireworks. Walter and I tried figuring out a how we could make some kind of explosive, but we weren’t able to figure anything out. If we had been in Sudan we probably could of found some gun powder, but here it is impossible to fin ammo (sigh).

Yesterday we wanted to collect firewood for Yessa, but he had to call the missionaries to ask permission to collect firewood. The guy at the mission said we could collect wood for the day, so we went to collect wood. We found a small tree and cut it up with shockers (axe), and Pongas (machetes), then put it in the cruiser and brought it here to Yessa’s house. Then we got thinking, if we can only collect for one day lets make the most out of it. So we took the tow strap out of the cruiser hooked it up to a huge tree and pulled it back. We pulled back two whole loads of wood, so he should have enough wood to last quite a long time.

In the afternoon we went to this little pond that Jared used to swim around in when he was a kid. Unfortunately nobody has been keeping it up for a long time so it was full of weeds and stuff, but we still got in for a second. It is spring fed so it was freezing cold, it felt nice. It would of been perfect if I hadn’t smelt very strongly of fish afterwards!

Friday afternoon we went to one of the missionaries house for supper. The food was really good.

It has been cold in the night here. During the day it gets warm but in the night it gets really cold…. At least cold enough to wear long sleeve, and still be chilly.

Let me tell you Yessa is one great guy. He is the most generous guy I’ve met in a long time. He was telling us about all the people he’s hauled to the hospital because nobody else will take them. He takes them on his dirt bike since that is all he has as transport. Today he took a boy to the hospital who had cut his foot open with a machete, when they got to the hospital they are so understaffed that Yessa had to help the doctor sew the kids foot back up! He even has taken a pregnant lady to the hospital and had to stop half way for her to have her baby right there! He’s constantly helping people with medicine and stuff, and he doesn’t make much money at all. It makes me want to be more generous myself.

July 6: Church yesterday was good. It was the first sermon that I’ve heard preached in Africa that I actually understood what was being talked about! The singing at church was also good. I’ve never heard a congregation sing better than at church yesterday.

In the afternoon we went for a long, long hike. I have no idea how far we hiked, but we walked for over 2 hours at a good pace so it was quite a ways, that’s for sure.

It was Walter’s Birthday yesterday as well, and he is 25 years old. We didn’t do anything special for his birthday. I hope he doesn’t feel bad :).

We went to one of Jared’s African friends house to visit in the evening and stayed there for quite a while then came home and went to bed.

I’m looking forward to going home. I’m really starting to miss it, but at least I don’t have a long time to wait. We leave in under a month! YEAH!!!

July 8: The last couple days we’ve been busy visiting friends of Jared and eating!

It’s been nice because we’ve been having people invite us over to their houses everyday sometimes we’ve gone to two peoples houses in one day. One for lunch, and one for supper. I’m starting to get fat AHHHH!!! LOL

On Sunday we went to town to see one of Jared’s friends, who’s name is Moses. This guy is amazing. He grew up in a mud hut and now owns 5 houses, a carpentry shop for orphans, a saw mill, and he also teaches school. His motto is “No sweat, No sweat”. He builds everything himself, he even had to put a sign out by the road where he was building that said “No Work”, because he got tired of people asking for work.

On our way back from Moses’ house we stopped at the house of one of Yessa’s friends. We were supposed to have eaten lunch at her house, but Jared forgot so we had super at her house instead. While we were eating supper the woman’s husband came in very, very drunk. He provided the best entertainment I’ve had since I got to Africa. He just talked nonsense and I changed my name each time he asked for it and he kept promising to remember it. I say it was funny and it kind of was, but it was more sad than anything else. It’s sad that people will drink alcohol that will make them do things that they would never dream of doing when they were sober.

Monday we went to two peoples house to eat. Thomas’s for lunch, and Ben’s for supper. Ben is a pilot so he took us up in the little mission plane here. It was really fun. I can’t wait to get home and start flight lessons. I really can’t wait until we leave for the US. I’m starting to count down the days until we leave.

July 9: Yesterday, pretty much all we did was visit people, and eat LOL!!! Actually in the afternoon we dragged in a couple more trees to cut up for firewood.

I’m starting to really gain weight. All this eating at peoples houses all the time is packing on the pounds. It’s a good thing that when I get back home my Family and I are going to be going out to Moab to do mountain biking for a few days in the desert!

Jared found a climbing rope he head left here in storage so we’re hoping that when we get back to Nairobi we can git in some rock climbing while we are waiting for our plane to leave on the 31st.

I’m not making much progress on memorizing James. For some reason I’m stuck in a rut, hopefully I’ll get out of it very soon. I have up to James 3:12 memorized.

I’m really craving my computer. I hate writing this out by hand!

July 10: My parent’s bought me a used Jekyll 900 mountain bike at home, so now when I get home I’ll have a bike which is cool. I can’t wait till we head out to Moab, it’s going to be really fun… as long as I don’t break any bones!

Yesterday morning I finally got to work off the extra weight I’ve been gaining. We worked on digging a firebreak around Yessa’s farm. We only did half of it last week. Yesterday was the hard work. Today we get to do the fun work… BURN!!!

Yesterday we ate at peoples houses for lunch and supper. I still crave American food, cause even though we have tons of vegetables now, we still usually eat rice and beans and the main course (sigh).

Last night we ate at a guys house who’s fathers feet have huge fungus type stuff on them and the son won’t help his father! Jared and Yessa went the other day to help the father and the fungus turned out to be thousands of egg sacks that Jared and Yessa had to cut out with dikes!

July 11: Yesterday we did Kazi (Swahili for work) all day. In the morning we worked on digging more fire breaks. We’re almost done with the fire break all around his property. In the afternoon we got to do the fun part…burning. The burning wasn’t crazy though, so it wasn’t as fun. There weren't any heart stopping moments hoping a fire would stop at the fire break of not and things like that.

We also burned in the evening until almost 10:00pm. A funny thing happened while I was burning. I noticed this little grasshopper on my shirt so I brushed it off. Then it started following me. I would walk 5 or 6 feet away and it would follow me and try to climb up my leg. I had to run 20 feet away before it wouldn’t follow me. Maybe it thought I was a tree and would be a safe way to get out of the fire.

Today we dig more firebreaks, tomorrow we go to church, then Sunday we’re out of here. I’m ready to keep moving. It’s only 3 more weeks until I’m home.

July 12: Friday we finished digging the fire break we were working on, so tonight we are going to burn the grass between the break and the road. IN the morning I did my laundry for eh first time by hand since I arrived in Africa. It was a good experience but I’m glad that I don’t have to do it all the time because it takes a long, long time.

We ran out of toilet paper a couple days ago so we’re now dow to using whatever we can get our hands on, whether it be water, leaves ect. Tomorrow morning early we’re heading for Dar, then from there to Zanzibar. Hopefully we’ll also be able to pick up some toilet paper.

July 14: Dar es Salaam! We made it here on our first uneventful trip since I’ve been to Africa. We left at about 4:30 in the morning and we got here around 7 in the evening. There isn’t much to say about the trip down. It was really cramped cause Yessa is with us, so there were 3 of us all crowded in the back of the cruiser along with our luggage. Tyson, Walter and I were all crowded in the back and after being there all day, my butt and knees hurt a lot.

When we got close to Dar we hit some serious city bumper-to-bumper traffic. We were stuck in it for over an hour, and it actually made me really wish for little tiny Mundri up in Sudan.

We finally, after driving around for a while and calling Jason (a missionary that Jared knows) for directions, found the YMCA. We were going to stay there for the night but they were full so we drove over to the YWCA who still had available rooms. They cost 25,000 shillings ($23) a night, but they were really nice and clean. They even had a nice big celling fan in them. All I can say is that I slept like a preverbal rock with that big fan going like crazy.

This morning we had a tiny breakfast that the Y provided and then Walter, Tyson and I headed out to walk the streets of Dar and see the sites of the city, while Jared went off to do some errands for his cousin who’s still in Kenya.

I saw tons of cool stuff while walking around the city. I passed a Subway restaurant but restrained myself, because I don’t have much money. While I was walking I passed a Levi’s store and stopped to look in just for the fun of it. Guess how much I found a pair of Levi Jeans for? $215!!!

Also during the day I went to a place across the road from the Y that had internet, and checked my email. It had been a while so I got to enjoy reading all my emails that I had received.

During my rambles I also bought a couple pairs of board shorts since I didn’t bring swim trunks with me to Africa. I got a couple pair that looked like they had been slightly used, but hey, they were cheap! I had a guy try to sell me a north face day pack for really cheap, which made me think it was a rip off. I looked at it closely and let me tell you it was a good fake, the only thing that let me know it was a fake, was that it didn’t have a tag inside, and when I when to shut the zipper it fell of in my hand! The guy was quite disappointed when I told him that I didn’t want it!

I had a really funny thing happen today. While I was talking to some guys selling stuff on a street corner a guy came up to me and whispered that he needed to talk to me about something important, but it was secret and he wanted me to come with him where it was quieter. I was immediately wary, and told him that if he had anything to say to me he would have to say it to me right where I was, he came close and whispered “I have a skin for sale”. “A Skin!” I said loudly. He cringed and again whispered “yes”. When I asked him what kind of skin it was he said he had a tiger skin for sale. Thinking that it was probably a fake I asked him if he had killed it in Africa. He said yes, so I immediately knew he was lying, since tigers don’t live in Africa! LOL I thought it was quite funny. I had lots of fun bartering with all the guys around, and trying to get them to sell me things at lower prices, it was my most fun day in quite a while.

July 15: We arrived at Zanzibar today. Yesterday we went to the wharf in Dar trying to find the cheapest tickets over to here. We found a boat that takes passengers to here for $20, so we bought them. The guys who try to recruit us though are so annoying. I think quite a few of them were high on Bongy (marijuana).

Today our boat left at 12 o’clock African time. Since I didn’t want to take my whole duffel, I actually managed to fit all the stuff I’d need for a whole week into my little camlebak. Which if you know me you would know is astronomical, because I usually like to pack very, very heavy!

Around 11 this morning we headed for the wharf and got on the boat at around 11:30. Guess what though? Even though it was supposed to leave at 12 sharp it didn’t leave until 12:30 LOL! We arrived at Stone Town (the main town) at around 4:00.

I got quite seasick on the boat ride over. I didn’t think it was possible for such a thing to happen to me. I actually though that I had malaria. The boat was rolling back and forth, and I had a head ache, felt really hot, and thought that I was going to throw up. Walter and Tyson were fin, but Jared even felt worse than I did…if that is possible!

Stone town is an awesome place. All the streets are probably only 4 or 5 feet wide, and there’s such a maze of streets it’s crazy. We’re going to be staying at a place at the north of the Island, but got here to late to go tonight, so this Rasta man found us and took us to a little hotel that only cost $10 a night! It’s actually quite nice, with a fan, clean beds, and mosquito nets.

This evening we walked to the beach and bought food at a cool little market nearby. When we were at the market Walter bought Tuna and I tried a piece. It tasted HORRIBLE! It tasted exactly like it smelled which was horrible, but for some reason people like to eat that kind of stuff, I don’t understand! The only problem with this Island is it is too touristy, and things are more expensive than in the rest of Africa. If you know how much things should cost though, you can usually talk the guys down to a reasonable price.

The water here is crystal clear, I can’t wait to go swimming in it tomorrow.

June 16: Today I woke up to the blaring of prayers or whatever from the big speakers of a nearby Moslem mosque at 5:30 in the morning! Zanzibar has a huge Muslim population, I asked a guy how many muslims were on the Island and he told me about 99% of the natives are Muslim. I can actually believe that because, every native guy I talked to was a Muslim.

I had my worship then had breakfast, and waited for our taxi to come to take us up to the little town of Kendwa on the North end of the Island. We had arranged for someone to pick us up the day before and they said they would show up at “8 sharp”. Know what I do about “African Time” I was expecting them to be really late, but they showed up at exactly 8 o’clock. I was extremely shocked LOL.

Once we arrived at Kendwa we started looking for places to stay. Jared’s cousin Josh told us that there were places to camp there but that turned out to not be the case. You're actually allowed to camp at certain times of the year, and unfortunately this isn’t that time of year so we started looking at all the little places around, but they were all full so we prayed about it, and then headed off to the ocean to go swimming. Unlike in the states all the beaches here are public so we just started swimming in the water. It was very nice, after not swimming in anything but a muddy little stream for 6 months!

After we had been swimming a guy came and tried to recruit us to stay at a place that he worked for. We bargained with him and were able to get a really cheap price. There was only 1 room available so all 5 us (Yessa came with us), had to pack into one tiny room, but we didn’t care. After swimming with schools of fish and stuff we went to a small village near by to get food cause food on the beach is for tourists and are very, very expensive, compared what you can get in the village. To get back we decided to walk along the beach because it was a lot faster that way, and there are cliffs all along the way back and the tide was coming up and we actually had to swim part of the way. It was kind of hard to swim because I had to hold my wallet and stuff above the water with one hand, and I had a big pineapple in the other hand!

Tomorrow we are going to be going snorkeling at some national park island on the other side of Zanzibar. I hope the weather is good.

July 18: Yesterday we went on a snorkeling trip. It was quite the experience. The guy came at 8:30 and led us to the native boat that we would take out to the national park. He said that we were going to wait for a big rain storm to blow over that we could see on the horizon, but we didn’t want to wait probably 2 or 3 hours, cause then we wouldn’t have time to snorkel as much, so we put out. There were probably 20 other people in the boat as well.

Then the rain hit. The boat had a roof on the other half, but we let the other people sit there, while we sat up front in the rain. It was a boat that could us sail or engine, we used the engine. I was freezing cold , cause there was a big wind and cold rain. The waves picked up until they were big enough to put our bow under every-now-and-then. Fortunately I didn't’ get seasick, like I though I would, but one of the girls on the boat did throw up on our way back.

There was a guy from Germany who was a Canadian that had used to be a sailer, he was cool. It was fun being on a boat that didn’t care about what you did, unlike in America. You can sit on the edge and dangle your feet in the water, you can stand on the very front, and frankly do pretty much whatever you want to do.

The snorkeling was awesome! We had lunch on a nearby Island that was included, we told them we were vegetarians and they brought us vegetable salad, beans, and fruit and rice. It was very good. I did eat some fish, it actually tasted good. It tasted nothing like the Tuna I tried a few days ago.

The weather cleared up as soon as we got to the Island we were going to swim by, and it was nice out for the rest of the day.

In the evening I found a book about the English Navy, in their war against France in the 1700’s, and read until almost midnight, which is when I finished it. When I finished I was really bummed out because it was missing a couple of the last pages, and I was I didn’t know how it finished, but I managed to find them this morning otherwise I would of had to buy the book when I got home so I could of know what happened LOL!

July 19: Yesterday was Friday so we went with this Rasta Guy (their everywhere), to town. We walked along the beach to get there and looked at all the ships being built exactly the same way they’ve been being built for the last 2000 years. I got some cool pictures, we also had to buy food for Sabbath.

We came back as the tide was coming up so I really had to hurry Yessa along. The guy never seems to hurry, but I knew if they tide got higher we would never make it with Yessa, cause the guy is a horrible swimmer and it would of been over a half mile swim thru a lot of waves, and also my bread I had bought would get all soggy and been ruined! We made it just barely without having to swim, and I did keep my bread dry. Jared who had stayed in town a couple minutes after we left, said he had to swim the whole way!

In the afternoon Jared, Walter, and I swam from the beach in front of the place we are staying all the way to a restaurant that is built on stilts in the ocean which was at least a mile down the shore. On our way we played we were navy seals and did a bunch of different stuff like swim to the bottom and get sand, swim under a dive boat (the guy was in it and actually let us do it, that would never happen in America), follow a rope from a boat and find it’s anchor at the bottom. Great exercise, and great fun.

I went to bed early because I had been up late the night before. This morning Yessa woke me up by yelling how are you this morning! Sleeping in is totally foreign to Africans ARGGGHHH! LOL

July 20: It is now 8:30 pm Sunday night, and we’re in for a long, long night. Why? Because we’re taking the all night boat back to Dar to save the money of having to stay somewhere.

Yesterday we spent a nice Sabbath. I read, and tried to memorize more of James (I finished chapter 3), then in the afternoon did a little bit of swimming. We did a little more “navy seal training”. First Jared had us tie his hands behind his back and he swam out to a canoe. Not to be outdone I had both my hands and my feet tied, but I couldn’t go anywhere, and neither could Jared when he tired. So I practiced without the actual ropes,s then did it again, after practicing and I could actually move along pretty good using a type of dolphin kick while laying on my back.

Today we woke up and headed out. We were supposed to met our taxi at 9:30 according to Jared, and 10 according to me. We waited until 9:37 but he didn’t show up so we went with another guy. I wanted to wait until 10, but Jared said he was right so we went with the other guy, and guess what? We saw the guy who was supposed to pick us up hanging out in the nearby town Mafinga. He pretended not to even see us LOL.

The rest of the day we wandered around Stone Town until it was time to board the boat. I managed to buy a cool native kisu (knife) for cheap. It should make a good gift to give one of my brothers. All my siblings wanted me to get them some gift while I was here, so I got them all knifes. I know my brothers will really appreciate them. My sister might of been hoping for some native dress, but I never saw anything I liked, so I got her a knife too.

July 22: The boat ride back from Zanzibar was crazy. It was packed and I didn’t have room to stretch out until around 1:30 in the morning, when guy moved and laid on the floor. People around me were barfing like crazy, it was not a pleasant experience at all. Next time I’ll spend the extra couple bucks and take the fast boat.

The waves were Huge on our way back and I was afraid that I would get super, super seasick. I prayed though that I wouldn’t get seasick and I didn’t. Tyson and Yessa weren’t so fortunate though. Tyson was throwing up a lot of the night, as was Yessa.

We arrived at Dar at 6:00 in the morning, packed up and headed towards Nairobi. It took us 1 ½ days to get here. We’re staying at a guest house at the Adventist academy here, it is nice.

July 24: We’re not doing anything anymore. We are all out of money, so now we’re just waiting for our plane to leave on the 31st. I have my computer now, so I’ll be able to start working on presentations when I get home and things like that, so the time won’t be totally monotonous.

July 27, 2008

Nothing really has happened to write about the last few days.

Yesterday I watched a couple sermons in the morning, and in the afternoon went for a jog. Then in the evening I worked on getting my computer organized with all my pictures and videos and things like that.

Today we all went to look at land with Josh (Jared’s cousin). He’s looking for land to put some containers on and a small shop. It was a fun little road, but I’m really tired of traveling. I’m looking forward to getting home in 5 days!

waiting

2008-07-24T08:14:00.000-04:00

Well I'm back in Kenya safe and sound. I"m going to be writing what's been happining this week so hopefully I'll be able to post it soon. I can't believe that I'll be leaving Africa in only 1 week. I can't wait to get home, I'll miss Africa, but I miss my family, and friends more. Anyway I'm trying to catch up on my emails so I'll try to have a bunch of stuff to post next time I come to the internet.

Anoth3er day

2008-07-15T02:35:00.002-04:00

Hey guys here is the rest of the story from a few weeks ago on our trip down here. We're heading off to zanzabar, so I don't know the next time I'll get to the internet, but we're all doing well, and had a great time yesterday walking around the city.

After driving for about 5 or 10 minutes I was just about to go to sleep when… To be continued tomorrow.

June 24, 2008

When I heard our tires lock up and skid, then I felt a slight bump. I figured Jared hadn’t seen a pot hole until the last minute and had just tried to slow done so we didn’t rip out all of our suspension. When we didn’t keep moving though, I thought something was wrong so I got out from under the tarp and there were the 3 guy who were riding in the front of the truck out in front of the truck.

I turned out that Jared had been turning into a gas station and had collided with a motorcyclist, that was coming the other way. Jared says that he turned even farther to the right to try to get off the road, but the motorcyclist also turned farther off the road and they collided when they were both off the road. I immediately jumped out of the back of the truck and came to the front. The guy was unconscious, but he was still breathing, and didn’t seem to be bleeding from anywhere. We were just about to pick him up and get him to the hospital, when from out of nowhere it seem about 20 guy came, and started yelling at us that we had killed the guy and that we were in huge trouble, and all kinds of nonsense. A few of them were even armed with these native clubs that some of them are always carrying around with them.

I can’t quite clearly remember what all happened with in the next couple minutes. Everything happened so fast, but I’ll see if I can try to tell what happened.

The guys immediately said we had to get him to the doctor, so guess what they did. They stopped a mini bus that was passing us at the time, then a guy grabbed the unconscious man by a leg and a foot and dragged him into the bus. It made me cringe just to see them pick him up like that. If anything was wrong with him, they had just made it way, way worse. I wanted to try to organize people to pick him up properly, but people were in to much a frenzy to think about that.

As soon as they got the guy into the bus, they forced Jared in it too, and took off. At the same time this was happening Walter got into the cruiser to move it off the road, when guys swarmed around the truck to keep us from moving it. One guy actually had a sharp stick pointed right at Walter’s throat. Walter got back out of the truck just to try to keep peace, then at the same time he was getting out a guy came in from the other side and took the keys!

Well anyway while all this was happening I was just standing to the side keeping an eye on things to see what would happen. Since it was still raining the guys told me and Walter, to come with them under the roof of the gas station which was only a couple hundred feet away. For some reason Tyson was able to sneak away and stay in the cab of the truck, which was good, because he was able to keep an eye on our luggage which probably would of been plucked if he hadn’t been able to stay with the truck.

Once we got under the roof of the gas station everyone started yelling at Me and Walter in Swahili. I kept telling them I didn’t speak Swahili, but they just kept yelling. I kept asking if somebody spoke English, but nobody would answer me. I could see that I was getting absolutely nowhere, so I called out and told everyone that I was going to pray. So I started praying out loud, and everything immediately started getting quieter, and by the time I said “Amen”, everyone was primarily quiet. When I opened my eyes, a couple of the guy I noticed had even taken off their hats.

Almost immediately after I finished praying, standing right next to me was a guy who spoke English almost perfectly. I told him that I had no idea what had happened since I had been in the back of the truck when it happened, and I told him that the rest of them would have to wait until the driver (Jared) got back from the hospital. The big guy who spoke English started talking to the crowd of guys in Swahili, and I don’t know what he told them but they started to calm down. Then the big guy told Walter he should go to the police station, and get to police to come, so Walter went with a couple guys on a motorcycle to the police station, to get the police, leaving me with the guys by myself.

I don’t know if that guy who spoke English was an Angel or not, but I like to think that he was. He stayed with me primarily the whole time until the police showed up with Walter, and Jared. He stayed next to me which I was happy about, because there were still guys standing around that still seemed like they wanted to knock me on the head!

It takes a quite a bit of space to write everything I wrote before here, but it actually all happened with in the space of about 2 minutes.

Finally after standing out under the roof of the gas station for over an hour Jared and Walter finally showed up. Jared had gone to the police station after going to the hospital gotten the police, and picked up Walter and came back. When he got back Jared told us that they guy had a fractured arm, and possibly a fractured leg, but beside that the guy was going to be fine. It was fortunate for the guy, because he turned so hard that he slid in sideways when he hit the truck so the bike took most of the damage. The bike was totally totaled, but all that happened to our cruiser is it dented a little piece of the front bumper and that’s it.

When they finally got there the police started looking at what had happened. While the police were looking at the accident and stuff, all of us except Jared who was looking with the police, had people come up to us and ask us for bribes to not get the police involved. The police were already there, I guess the people just hoped that we would be stupid enough to give them money, because all they would of done was take off with it!

After the police finished looking they told us to put the motorcycle in the back of our truck and bring it to the police station. We brought it to the police station, after we dropped it off we waited for them to finish the accident report, and by this time it was like 11:00PM at night. Since the police said that we would have to hang around tomorrow because the owner of the bike would be coming (he had lent his bike to the guy we crashed). We didn’t have anywhere to stay so we just asked to police if we could set up our tents in the yard of their compound for the night. We figured we couldn’t stay anywhere safer, since the police always have armed guards there all night. They really found our tents amusing, I don’t think they had ever seen backpacking tents like ours before.

We all woke up around 6:30 in the morning, read our Bibles, then Jared had to go off to one of the police offices to talk to them, and guess what? They discovered that the guy driving the motorcycle didn’t have a license, that it wasn’t our fault, and they told us that we could leave. We immediately just though all of our stuff in the back of the truck and left. We wanted to leave before the people who claimed to have “seen” the crash came, and filled to police’s minds with lies. They told us we didn’t have to pay a single red cent for anything, but Jared still gave the police money to give to the guy in the hospital to pay for the expenses. All the police wanted was to check the damage to our vehicle and after they had taken a look we were on our way to the Masia Mara which was about 3 hour drive from where we had had the accident. We arrived at the Mara at about 2 in the afternoon, and I’ll write about what we’ve been doing for the last few days tomorrow.

Dar es Saalam

2008-07-14T03:06:00.002-04:00

Hey everybody sorry I haven't been able to post for so long. I've been in the middle of Tanzania, and have had no way to post stuff. I have been writing stuff down so I can post it once I get back to Kenya next week.

We have been busy working and eating at Jared's friends (Yessa's) house. He has a small little farm with some trees and corn and stuff like that so we were busy building fire breaks aroudn the whole thing so that if a fire came thru it wouldn't burn the whole farm down.

I don't have my jump drive with me so I can't post the rest of the story about what happned traveling down from Sudan but hopwfully I can post it tomorrow or next week.

I'm going to be home in less that 3 weeks and I can't wait! See you guys all soon!!!

Traveling South

2008-06-29T20:12:00.000-04:00

June 21, 2008

I could write a book about all that has happened to us on our trip from Mundri to

the Southern part of Kenya. So much has happened, ranging from having to deal with

drunk police, to border guards trying to steal one of our computers, and to having

to deal with a mob of 20 angry men some of which were armed with clubs! I'm glad

to say that every step of the way God has been with us. And our Guardian Angels

have been working overtime to keep us safe! Now, with that said let me try to write this

story in chronological order. Hopefully I'll be able to write it in a somewhat

easy to read way. This kind of story is much better told in person, but

since I'm not going to be back for 5 weeks, and by then I'd probably would forget

somethings that had happened, I'm writing it down for you guys to read and to help

me remember what happened so I can tell the story when I get back.

As you know from reading what I wrote on the 16th, we weren't able to leave for

Kenya until the 17th. The reason being that we weren't able to finish up getting everything ready for us to leave until then. It wasn't until the time came for us to leave that we started noticing things that needed to be done before we left. We had to clean out our shed and get everything stored in it. We also had to have a group meeting with

the men who will be staying at our compound and keeping an eye on everything while

we're gone. After that was done we just had to put away all the dishes that we've

been using, as well as the tool ect. Finally at around 3:30 in the afternoon on

the 17th which was a Tuesday we were ready to go. After saying goodbye to all of

our workers, and our faithful cooks who fed us the entire time. We hopped into the

cruiser and we were on the road again (two of us in the cab, two of us in the back

sitting on the luggage.

I was so happy to be on the road. I have loved the time we spent at Mundri, but

I was ready for a change, especially in my diet. Jogo, one of our workers came with

us as far as Juba. Juba was the town that were going to spend the first night in,

it is about an 4 or 5 hour drive depending on road conditions. Jogo has relatives

that he wanted to go see in Juba, so we took him with us So we actually ended up with 2 people in the front and 3 in the back. The trip to Juba was uneventful, until

we actually got to Juba itself. There is a road block there by the SPLA to make

sure that people aren't hauling stuff… I guess. I actually can't quite figure out

what all these road blocks are for but anyway. We got to the road block about 7:30

at night. We pulled up to the road block and stopped our vehicle and then a solider

came up and wanted to know what was under the tarp covering our luggage. Jared told

him that it was camping gear, but that answer didn't satisfy the soldiers they demanded

that we untie it so the could see everything. This all would of been fine, but they

were all drunk (as soon as it gets dark they start drinking). So they were really

agitated. They pawed through a bunch of our bags, and stuff, but didn't find anything

that they would consider contraband, but they still wouldn't let us go. So we just

implemented our usual tactics with these type of guys, and pretend that we had all the time in the world, and talked with a few of them and just waited. You have to learn to

wait here in Africa because if you act like your in a hurry, angry or peeved,

it makes things way worse. After waiting for a half hour or so, they came and talked

to Jogo, and took him to see their leader. Afterwards Jogo told me the leader asked

him why he was working with the "Mizungu", who were destroying Sudan (For some reason Sudanese always think we are coming to their country to take something, even though they don't really have anything worth taking). Jogo told him that we weren't destroying the country and that we were actually trying got make it better, then he gave him a 2 pound "tip" for tea, and they let us go. We didn't get away totally unaffected

though, because the soldiers had "borrowed" Jogo's light, but when he asked for

it back they wouldn't give it back, and also when we were pulling away they tried

to grab Tyson's Camelbak, but he managed to keep his grip on it and pull it away.

We were very happy the way it all worked out, because when we had first pulled up

and the guys were searching thru our luggage things were looking bad. They were

all drunk, and all mad and angry. They could of easily confiscated all our luggage

and even our truck if they had wanted to, but praise the Lord they didn't.

After being at the check point for an hour we were finally able to leave, and headed

into town. We spent the night the SDA church compound there in Juba. We just set

our tents up in the field there, and spent the night. While were at the compound

I wanted to see if they had internet, so I went outside the main building to check

if they had wireless and they did, but it was all password protected (argh). I was

disappointed that I wouldn't be able to hook up, but then Jared knew a few guys

in the building so we were able to go in, and I just unhooked an Ethernet cord from

one of the desktop computers there that wasn't being used and hooked up. I was glad

I was able to hook up, because I was able to chat with my parents, who were a little

bit worried about me because I was supposed to have talked to them on Saturday,

but was unable to because I had trouble with the phone.

That is what happened on the 17th. It's already 10:20PM and I'm really tired, because

I haven't gotten much sleep the last couple nights, so I'll write more tomorrow.

I'm not going to be doing anything tomorrow so hopefully I'll be able to finish

writing this story.

June 22, 2008

Today all of us just sat around doing pretty much absolutely nothing. Anyway let

me continue with my story.

The following morning which was a Wednesday, we left around 9 in the morning, because we wanted enough time to stop at the market and buy food for the day. We stopped and stocked up on about 20 chapatti and egg things, and a bunch of banana's and pineapples.

We got on the road about 10 o'clock. Our goal was to reach the border of Sudan cross

it, and stay in a town across the border in Kenya called Loki-Choggio. You have

to understand one thing about the route we took. This route is kind of notorious

for bandits, and we didn't want to have to spend the night in the bush or some little

dinky town, so we were hoping to make it all the way to Loki. All day we drove on

mostly good roads, for some reason they were good, we weren't expecting them too

be, but we were glad, because riding in the back of the pickup on bumpy roads is

not the most fun thing in the world. The terrain we drove thru was semi-desert, and

blazing hot. We traveled all morning and stopped under a tree along the road to

eat lunch. For lunch we had chapattis and eggs, along with tomatoes, onions, peppers,

and avocados. After what we've been eating for the last few months the food tasted

absolutely fabulous. We continued driving all afternoon, stopping in the middle

of the afternoon to buy water at a little shop along the road, because we hadn't

passed anywhere where we could pump water… or at least pump water and know that

it was safe to drink! At about 6 o'clock we stopped at a gas station to buy diesel,

since we didn't know when we would be able to get to a station again. The guy who

owned it was a really nice Kenyan guy that had come to Sudan to start up a gas station

and store. After we filled up we continued on our way and just a mile past where

we had filled up with gas we came to the Sudan Border. We stopped, but the gate

was closed. One of the SPLA Soldiers came up to our vehicle and told us that the

border was closed from 6PM TO 8AM everyday, because it was to dangerous for anyone to travel on that road during the night, because there were too many bandits, and the chance of getting attacked were very high even with an armed escort!

We had nothing else to do but turn around and try to find a place to spend the night.

We went back and asked the Kenyan guy where the best place to stay would be, and

he told us of a little place in the town, but we didn't really want to stay there,

because first of all it would cost us money, and second of all we didn't know how

safe all of our luggage would be in the back of our pickup truck. The guy could

see we were kind of hesitant and asked if we had tents. We told him we did, and

he offered to let us pitch our tents in the front of the station he was building.

We felt safe spending the night there, because there was a camp of nomadic cattle

herders across the road, and they all were carrying AK-47 to protect themselves

from bandits, plus the Kenyan guy had 2 armed guards who spent the whole night guarding the station. It was an answer to prayer. Before we got our tents out, we asked the guy it there were mosquitos, and he told us that there weren't because we were in

the desert. So, instead of pitching our tents we just laid our stuff on the front

porch of his shop and went to bed. It was a clear night, and there was a big wind

all night, and I actually got cold! There was probably a 20 MPH wind all night with

some gusts getting up into the 30's! Right before we went to bed on of the guys

who was working there came and asked us if we wanted goat milk tea. Walter and I

told him we would, but Tyson and Jared passed on the opportunity. I was a little

worried what it would taste like, but it was actually quite good, it had a little

bit of sugar in it, to sweeten it a tad, and it was very nice to drink especially right

before bed time.

In the morning we woke up packed up our stuff and got ready to leave and get to

the gate by 7:45 so we could be the first one's thru. Right before we were about

to pull out of the station, one of the guy who was working there came and asked

us if we could take him to Loki, because he needed to get a couple parts for his

truck. Since we had some extra room in back we told him to hop in and we headed

off. We got to the border a couple minutes before 8 and, around 8 some soldiers

came up and that is when trouble began. You have to understand one thing before

I continue. Sudan has been in civil war for over 20 years, and has only had "peace"

for the last 3 years. The way that they think is, that since they have been in

war so long there is really no technology in the country, so the only way to get

technology is to let it in, but not let it out. Now that you understand there mindset

I can continue my story.

As soon as it was 8 the soldiers came up to us and demanded to see ALL of our stuff.

They made us take off the tarp on our load and take all of our stuff out of the

back of the truck, and they started searching thru all of our luggage and stuff.

They opened every single bag, every single container, and searched thru the front

of the cruiser as well. I guess I should rephrase that last statement, they searched

thru everything except my computer case (another answered prayer, you'll see why

in a minute). There were two guys searching thru our stuff. One was a police officer,

and the other was a solider. You can be sure that we all kept a beady eye on the

guys searching thru our stuff to make sure that they didn't take anything (very

possible when your dealing with these type of guys). The police was very nice, he

would open a bag and look in it a little bit and then go on to the next bag. The

soldier on the other hand was a complete pain in the neck. Anyway he searched thru

about 2 of our bags, the reason being is that he took everything, and I mean everything

apart. He made me take all the stuff out of my camelbak so he could look at it.

When he got done looking at every little thing he motioned for me to put my stuff

back. When I started to put my stuff back in my bag he motioned for me not to put

my knife and running shoes back in (he wanted them for himself). I immediately called

over to Jared who was keeping an eye on things and told him what the soldier was

doing, and the soldier immediately said that I could put the stuff in my bag, which

I did immediately. After looking thru my bag he came to Walter's computer bag, and that

is when the trouble started. The soldier looked at it and asked Walter where the

paper work was that said he could take this computer out of the country. Jared came

over and told him he didn't know you have to have a paper saying that (which of

course your not supposed to need), but the soldier said that he needed the papers,

and since we didn't have them that he was confiscating the computer. So he whisked

the computer away and put it in an army car and sat guard over it for a while.

We were all completely outraged, but of course we didn't show it, because if we

did things could of gone very, very badly for us. Instead Tyson, Walter, and I sat

down by the edge of the road and just started talking to some of the guys who were

standing around, pretending like we were in no hurry at all to go anywhere.

In the meantime Jared was trying his best to get the computer back. Jared told my

afterwards that you can usually get everything back, the key is that you have

to be able to out-wait the border guards. Since they said they had taken it because

we didn't have paper work, Jared decided to give something a try. He pulled out

a 10 page document that he had happened to have the truck with him that Jabel (Jared's brother) had written to the SSRRC about our work in Mundri, and gave it to the border guards telling him that it was documents. He didn't say what kind of documents they were, but just told them that they were documents. We waited around for about an hour or a little more. Jared showed his "document" to a few more people, and waited around for a hour or two, they finally came back with the computer (we didn't even have to pay them money, which we thought we would), and we headed on our way; that is we did once we got our 3 armed guards in the back of our truck.

The reason we got the guards is because there is a section of no-mans land between

the border of Kenya and the border of Sudan, and it is chuck full of bandits, and

if you don't travel with armed guards the chances are very good that you will be

attacked by bandits. It doesn't look like there is a no-mans land on a map, but

were the map shows the borders meeting is actually where the border of Sudan is,

and the border of Kenya is about 20 miles south of where it shows it on the map.

Once we got our 3 guards loaded in we set off into the bush. Before the guards got

in they all chambered a bullet in their guns. When I saw them do that I thought to myself, "man this must be pretty dangerous". We of course prayed

before we left, and then we were on our way. Between the border of Sudan and Kenya

is 20 miles of the most desolate kind of country. All it is, is sand, rocks and

little scrub bushes here and there, it is not a place that I would like to break

down that's for sure.

About half way between the two borders on of the guards pointed out to me a place

right on the road that had a ring of rocks around it and said nonchalantly "we shot

a guy there"! At about this time they said that this was the most dangerous part

of our road and actually all of them unslung there guns from their sides and held

them ready for action! I actually got a picture of them that I'll have to post when

I get the chance. Fortunately God sent his guardian angels to protect us and we

were able to get thru the area without any problems.

At the Kenya side of the border things were a piece of cake. Jared went to the little

office there told them we needed visas, because we were coming for vacation (you

have to use terms that they will understand), and that was it. They stamped our

passports and we were off. They never even asked to see any of our stuff, they just

asked what it was and we told them it was camping gear, and we were off. We then

wasted 2 hours trying to find the right place in Loki to get the paper work for

our vehicle done, but after going to 2 or 3 different offices we were finally able

to find the place, and then we were on our way again.

I've already written 3 pages and it's getting really late, so I'll make sure that

I continue writing my story tomorrow morning.

June 23, 2008

It is 7:00 in the morning, and I just woke up, and I am freezing cold. I was nice

and warm until I got out of bed because I had a bunch of blankets. I looked at a

thermometer and it says that is is 60 degrees! I guess I'm just not used to cold

weather, because back at home 60 degrees would of felt like nothing. Now, lets continue with the story.

We arrived in Loki around 10AM on the 19th. Then, as I mention before, after searching

for the right office to get the paper work for the vehicle for 2 hour, we were finally

able to get it and head out of Loki at around noon.

The driving that day was relatively uneventful. We traveled thru the most desolate

country I have seen in a while. Northern Kenya is just desert. I was amazing how

many kinds of deserts we went thru. We went thru deserts with sand and thorn bushes,

we went thru deserts with just rocks and scrub bush, we went thru deserts with just

sand and scrub, we went thru deserts that was just sand ect! It was really cool.

I made sure to get pictures of the different kinds of desert so hopefully some of

them turned out, since I took them while the vehicle was driving down the road.

There were tons of wild camels along our route. For lunch we actually pulled off

the road, onto an area of just sand and ate lunch, with camels not 100 feet from

where we were eating. I tried to get close to them, but it was impossible, they

were too shy to even get close to. I did get some pictures of them though, I was

glad about that.

This area we were driving thru was the land of the Turcana Tribe. They are a tribe

of nomadic people who raise goats in the deserts of Northern Kenya. It must be a

desolate life, just herding your goats and trying to survive in that barren land.

The way these people get water is amazing. They go into stream bed and dig hole

in them to find water. Driving along, a lot of times when we came to a stream bed

we would see 3 or 4 people gathered around a whole in the ground scooping out water

to drink. Some of these holes were close to 10 feet deep! I got a picture of people

getting water for one.

We had no idea where we were going to sleep for the night. We knew that we couldn't

make it to Jared's Uncles Camp, since it was still 14 hours away so we stopped at

a little dinky town, and asked them if the road was safe to travel at night. They

told us that it was safe for the most part, which out there was the most that you

can ask for!

Since they said it was safe we drove on for a little while, then found a dry river

bed and drove up it for a half mile or so and stopped for the night. We didn't know

if there were any natives around, but thought that it was highly probable, because

these people pretty much live almost all over the entire desert. We went and collected

some wood and made a fire and were just getting ready to start making fried potatoes

and onions, when two Turcana guys came walking down the river bed towards us. They

had been collecting water at on of the holes in the river and were walking back

to there house. One of them spoke a little English and the other one spoke strictly

Swahili. They came up and watched us make food for a while. We were probably

the most interesting thing they had seen in the last 10 years. Jared spoke to them

half in Swahili and half in English. Since we have been out here Jared has been

getting his Swahili back. He used to speak it when he was a kid, but he hasn't used

it for so many years that he was starting to lose it. Now that he is back using

it though, he can get on pretty well, in my opinion.

Later:

After we finished making our food we a gave a bowl of it to the Turcana guy, whose

name we found out was Paul. After we ate we just put our pads on the ground, wrapped

up in our blankets and went to bed. For some reason Paul decided to spend the night

with us and wrapped up in his blanket and just laid down in the sand right next to

us.

Friday morning we woke up at around 3:30 in the morning, because we wanted to be

able to get to Jared's Uncle's camp before sundown. The morning was relatively

uneventful. As the day wore on we gradually transitioned from driving thru the desert,

and started climbing into the mountains. By about noon we were up in the mountains,

which were covered almost with a jungle of trees. It was freezing cold (at least

in my opinion) since we were up in the mountains and I was wishing for my hat, but

it was packed way in my bag, and I didn't want to spend time trying to dig for it, and

then packing the bags up again, so I just road with a cold head. This area of Kenya

we drove thru, unlike Sudan had people living everywhere. We were going thru towns

every 10 minutes, and it was actually hard to find a place to stop and take a bathroom

break along side the road because there were so many people around! In Sudan you

could go long ways without ever seeing a house or even a person. Around 6PM then

sun was just about to set, when it started to pour rain. Jared stopped in a little

town and Tyson and I jumped out of the back of the truck and ran and sat under the

roof of a little shop until it stopped raining so hard. When we got ready to leave

the little shop it was still raining so I told the rest to sit inside because there

wouldn't be room for them in the back, then I went under the tarp, and stretched

out to go to sleep.

(I've been asked not to write about what happened friday night for a couple weeks),

so your going to just have to be patient and wait.

June 25, 2008

As I was saying yesterday we got to the Marra around 2 in the afternoon last Saturday.

Jared's Uncle and everybody there have left for a few months so the only one who

was there was the staff and Jared's cousin Josh. The first thing I did when we got

to the camp was get out my soap, and shower. It felt really good to shower, because

since we had left Mundri we hadn't been able to shower, and I couldn't even bear

the smell of myself.

The rest of the day we just sat around in the couches, talked, read, and of course,

ate. The food at camp is AMAZING. For our first meal we had Salad, Spaghetti, and

bread. It was super good, especially after not having a salad for over 3 months.

I didn't use to like to have tomatoes, peppers, and things like that in my salad,

but since I've been so long without eating vegetables I ate them raw!

On Sunday we just hung out, ate, and tried to recuperate from our hectic trip. In

the afternoon noon Josh took us up in this little two person plane. It was super

cool, he left me fly it and even try to land it! I didn't do such a good job trying

to land it, he had to help me out quite a bit, but it was really fun. It makes me

really want to go back home and get my pilot's license.

On Monday we came to Nairobi, the Capital of Kenya, and are staying here a couple

days, so we can get our vehicle cleaned up and put away, and get out the other

land cruiser to use for our trip. We should be ready to leave either tomorrow or

Friday, but since you never know here in Africa, I'm guessing we probably won't

leave until Sunday. So for the last few days we've been here I've been doing absolutely

nothing. I've just wrote down this story, and watched a couple videos, read a little

bit, and of course eaten A LOT!!!

Every morning here, I walk down the road a mile or so and buy breakfast and lunch.

There is a place down the road where I can buy 10 mendazi (grease balls), 5 bananas,

and 4 oranges all for $2! That is enough for me to eat breakfast and lunch, and

then for supper, we usually all pitch in and have either haystacks, or pizza! A

little more expensive? Yes, but really, really good, especially all the salads we've

been having. I think I was starting to get scurvy while I was in Sudan!

On The Road Again!

2008-06-17T14:56:00.001-04:00

We've left and are now on the road. I don't know when I'll have another connection. We are now in Juba. Anyway got to go.

June 13, 2008

As of yesterday I have been away from home for 4 months. That is the longest period of time of been away from home so far. I'm loving my time here, but I can't wait to get home and see my family again.

Sadly I'm running out of things to talk about. Yesterday was exactly the same as the day before, and the day before that. I helped Tyson build a bed, Walter and Jared worked clearing some land, and that's about it.

Last night we made popcorn to supplement our main course of porridge. I nearly burned all the hair of my arm making it, because I was doing it over the fire and the flame was way to big, but I was impatient so I didn't want to wait. It was worth it though.

After eating supper and stuff we were just sitting around the campfire talking, when Jared suddenly mentioned he had a book that we might be interested in reading. My ears immediately perked up because, I'm out of reading material now except the Bible, so Jared brought it out and I read it out loud to the group. I read until my voice was hoarse, then we called it a night. I'm glad Jared remembered he had that book, because it will keep us in reading material every night until we leave here.

It looks like we'll probably be leaving here on Monday or Tuesday we still have few things that need to be done, so we'll probably postpone it a couple days. It doesn't really matter to use exactly when we leave. One reason that it won't be bad that me might be here an extra day or too is that Moses isn't back from Yea yet. He went to go see his family before we leave because once we leave he is going to be staying here to keep an eye on things, and won't be able to go visit them for a while. He was supposed to be back last Thursday, but he's still not back, it's been over a week. Moses is usually very punctual so we are really worried about him, we have no idea what has happened. If you could pray for him that would be great.

June 16, 2008

I'm sorry I haven't written for a few days, but if you were here you would understand why I haven't written anything. There isn't really anything going on, and there isn't really anything to write about.

Friday Tyson and I made another bed while Jared and Walter worked on organizing our storage container. Tyson and I have made a total of 9 beds in the last week. We have sold three of them and are keeping the rest for using here. We have had so many people come to buy beds it's crazy. Some of the people who come, drive me crazy because they won't take NO for an answer. On Friday a guy came and wanted to buy 2 beds, we told him to come back on Sunday, but that we didn't think we'd be able to build them. Well he showed up yesterday for his beds. Tyson told him that we had one that he could buy that we didn't have the second one for him. The guy said that he had lied to him, because he said Tyson and promised him that he could have them! That's one thing you have to understand about these people here. If you say anything but NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, they take it as you making them a promise. Anyway, the guy wasn't really happy, but he took the one bed.

The Bible Training went well Friday night. There were quite a few people there so that was encouraging. The people asked tons of questions, most of them having nothing to do with the subject, but that was fine with me. After the Bible Training on my way home, on of the elders of the church stopped me and asked me to preach the next morning for church. He told me that it was the custom, that when people where leaving that they preach at church. I told him no, because he asked me at 8:00 in the evening on Friday night! He has know that we were going to be leaving for over a week, yet he didn't ask me until Friday night! I hate refusing to preach, but when they only give a couple hours to prepare, I can't do it. I'm not good at just winging a sermon together, it takes me a little while to get an idea and then get all my thoughts together.

On Sabbath, we went to church, and then went to the prison in the afternoon. Jared went thru a few text trying to help them more fully understand who the anti-christ is, and things like that. After that Tyson did a short little study on why there are so many denominations.

While we were at the prison, one of the guards told us that the mine demolition crew was working on destroying mines in the area so not to be scared if we heard a blast. Well, about half way thru Jared's talk we heard a guy who was with the mine crew shout to us "TAKE COVER! TAKE COVER!". Jared and I looked at each-other and asked where's cover. We were all sitting under a mango tree in the middle of the prison compound. Everyone looked at each-other and we just moved so were standing directly under the Mango Tree. Evidently the guy across the street thought that the Mango tree was sufficient protection because he stopped yelling at us! About 30 seconds after we moved under the Mango Tree there was a HUGE explosion that you could feel the concussion of very distinctly. It made me jump even though I had been expecting it, then we all laughed (because, who doesn't like a big explosion?), and got back to our subject.

Well since that guy came back yesterday, we built another bed for him. We were supposed to leave yesterday, but you know how things go, you keep finding things that need to be done before you leave. Our plan is to leave tomorrow, and head for Juba, spend the night there, and then drive to the Kenya border the next day, and then the next day after that to drive to Niarobi.

Yesterday on of the guys who we've been letting have a garden here, killed a baby cobra. Tyson got some pictures of it, so when I get them from him I'll make sure to post them so you can see it.

Yesterday while we were making the bed, Tyson and I got bored, so we made a bat and ball out of some wood, and tried to teach the neighbor kids how to play baseball. It was fun, and one of the kids was really good, I wish I could of seen him play with some really equipment instead of our makeshift stuff, but it was still fun. I made the 'bat' out of a pice of 2x4 that I cut down a little bit and planed. It actually looked more like a cricket bat, but it still served the purpose. For a ball, I took a piece of 2x4 planed it down into a ball like shape (it wasn't round), and then rapped it with string, and then rapped all of that with electrical tape, and it worked perfectly. The only downside was that when you hit it really hard with the bat that it really hurt your hands. I wanted to take pictures, but right before I went to get my camera we lost it in the long grass, and even though I spent 15 minutes looking for it I couldn't find it (sigh). I was kind of disappointed because it took me close to 45 minutes to make that ball, and I was kind of attached to it… oh well.

Yesterday while Tyson and I were making the bed, Walter and Jared organized our big shed, so that it would be all clean when we left. They had just finished emptying everything out, when a huge rain cloud rolled in and it started pouring. We were just able to get all the cardboard boxes and things in before is started pouring. Everything else got wet but that didn't really matter.

Anyway I'm hungry it's 9:00 in the morning, but I knew that if I didn't write this now I probably wouldn't remember anything, and also I don't know if I'm going to write tonight, it all depends on all that we have to get done today so that we can leave tomorrow. Anyway, I'll write more later. I'm hoping that I can get to the internet this afternoon on last time, so that I can post this, and check my email, because after we leave here I have no idea when I'm going to be able to check me email and stuff again.

Later: Things are looking like we'll be able to leave tomorrow. We've been all working hard so that we can get everything done, because we really want to leave tomorrow so that we'll be down to Niarobi by the weekend, instead of having to spend the weekend in some little hut along the road.

This morning I finished the report I was writing to give to the government here. The government asked that all the NGO's give them a report on what they've done over the last year, and also their future plans for this coming year. Since I'm the one who does the most writing of the group Jared asked me if I would do it. I tried my best, and since nobody here has very good English anyway I don't think anyone will notice my grammatical mistakes. I just wrote what I did write with a lot of big words and things to make it sound important and that was all. When I went to print off the report this morning, the printer was out of black ink, and since there is no such thing as running to the store to get a spare cartridge I did the next best thing, I used a different color. It just so happened that the color cartridge wasn't out so I was able to make one blue (then it ran out), and the other one red. I don't know what the commissioner, or secretary will think, but I'm hoping that they will think that it is artistic license!

Today Tyson and I worked on just organizing stuff, while Jared and Walter worked on getting the vehicle ready for the trip down and stuff like that. This afternoon we took the vehicle down to the river to wash it before Jared and Walter worked on changing the oil in the diff, and greasing a wheel bearing and things like that. The river was really swift, and I couldn't swim against it at all. It was probably 5 or 6 feet higher than it was last time I was there. After we finished cleaning the river, I was about to jump in and try to swim across it, when Jogo said that there were Crocodiles in the river! I guess he could of told us that before all of got in the water and cleaned the vehicle instead of after. I don't really know if I should believe him because supposedly they aren't supposed to be up here, but I sure wasn't going to put that to the test.

This morning Tyson and I both worked on getting all of our stuff packed up. I was hoping that since I've been here for 3 ½ months that my bags would of felt lighter since I haven't bought anything and I've been using up all my stuff like soap, bug spray, ect. I was able to fit everything in easily though, which I couldn't say when I got here.

Today when Tyson was packing his bags, guess what he found in the bottom of one of duffel bags? Four, yes I said four, packages of instant burger mix! He said he forgot about them. I have no idea how anyone in their right mind could forget about food, when all we've been eating is beans and porridge. I must admit that I had forgot he had brought them as well, because let me tell you if I had remembered that he had those packages in his suitcase, I would of stolen them instantly LOL!

It is 9:15 in the evening right now and I am getting read for bed as well as Tyson, but Jared and Walter on the other hand are planning on burning the midnight oil. They want to get the truck finished and to accounting tonight. That is fine with me, but I don't like it when they try to get me to stay up until the wee hours of the morning working, when I could do all the work that would take me 2 hours tonight in about a half an hour in the daylight. Jared wanted me to go pick up all the jerry cans, and chairs and stuff tonight, but I told him that it would be better to wait until the morning when we can see and stuff. Jared doesn't seem to understand that not all people can stay up all night and still keep their Christian character the next morning LOL! If I lose a lot of sleep I get really irritable and argumentative. I told him I'd wake up really early, but that I need to go to bed on time in order to be of any use the following day.

Since I won't have a good way to charge my computer after we leave here, I probably won't be able to write very much for a while. I'm bringing a pad of paper with me though so I can right down all the main events, so I can expand on them as soon as I get somewhere where I can charge my computer and also hook up to the internet.

Julius, one of the Elders at the Church in Karika stopped by the other day to say goodbye to us, and he brought with him a 5 gallon bucket full of honey for us to take with us. It has distinctly different taste that the honey I'm used to at home, but it sure tastes good. It has a bunch of the honey comb in it too! Now it wasn't refined like the stuff in the states so it has a bit of dirt, and even a few dead bees in it, but once you pick your way around those your fine! Have you ever wondered what the Bible meant when it said that the land of Isreal was flowing with milk and honey? Well the people here believe that when it was talking about milk that it was actually talking about the little white bee larva in the honey comb!

www.lmn.org

www.therebelution.com

www.youngdisciple.com

www.answersingenesis.org

www.ariseinstitute.org

www.frontlinebuilders.org

www.joshharris.com

www.chatfromchad.blogspot.com

We're leaving Sunday.

2008-06-12T08:24:00.000-04:00

June 9, 2008

You'll never guess what happened today. This afternoon as Tyson and I were working on making a bed a couple guys came into our compound and came over to us. One of them didn't speak english, and the other had come to translate for him. It turns out that it was the guy who stole a bunch of our pineapples. He came and said he was sorry and that he would bring them back in the afternoon! This evening he showed up with a sack full of the pineapple plants, plus he brought us some other types of plants (I forget what they were), so plant also! God takes good care of his property, as long as you will let him!

Tyson and I have been making beds the last couple days. We had quite a bit of spare lumber left over from the desks, so we've been trying to see if we can make any money off of selling beds, door frames, and window frames. People are buying beds like hot-cakes. There are quite a few that are shocked at the price, but the more reasonable ones understand that it costs a lot just to buy the wood. Just the wood to make a bed costs 85 pounds, and then when we put in the labor we charge 110 pounds for a bed. We do a nice job of them, we plane them, and stuff like that so they look really nice, and we've already sold 3 of them, and a bunch more people want them. We've actually had to refuse people because we don't have enough time before we leave to make all the ones that people want.

This morning I organized my bags. Since we are going to be leaving in a few days, I figured I'd sort thru my bag and leave the stuff that I wasn't going to need here. I'm bringing back most of my stuff, but I don't feel like lugging 6 bottles of sunscreen with my when I'm traveling. I'm taking 2 bottles and leaving the 6 other bottles here, I'm also leaving a ton of bug spray, since I'm not going thru it nearly as fast as I thought I would. My goal is to be able to have both my bags below 50 pounds so I don't have to pay extra to get them to take them on the plane like I did on my way over here from the states.

This afternoon I went to MRDA and used the internet. I had a 6 pound credit there because they didn't have change last time, and today when I finished they didn't have change again, so I told them I'd bring the money this week sometime (it's much easier for them to remember that I owe them money, than for them to remember that they owe me money). I was able to talk to my siblings which was fun, the video wasn't working, but I was still able to talk to them, just not see them.

This afternoon after I got back from the internet I went to check out the area that we've been working on clearing. It is full of guava trees and I was looking up at the branches trying to find a new route to climb when suddenly it felt like I had stepped on a thorn or something, then my whole foot seemed to burn. I was standing in a HUGE nest of army ants (by huge I mean the ground for 20 feet was totally covered. I took off running, and got away from them and then had to swat all the ants that were stinging my feet. One of them was the big army ants with a huge head and it actually drew blood! After I got them off of me the stinging went away almost immediately, the only problem was that in my haste I had lost on of my flip flops and it was sitting on top of all the ants (sigh). I had to go to my house grab my big work boots and then go and retrieve my flip flop.

Today Jared and Walter fixed a the fence post by the well. A truck from SEM (Sudan Evangelical Mission) had hit our fence and bent it all up. Jared went and talked to them and they were really nice about it, and gave us all the stuff to replace it with, then while the cement was setting Jared had to stand there for a couple hours to make sure that no one hit the post, or hung their clothes on it.

June 11, 2008

Yesterday: Since we're about to leave we're kind of running out of things to do, so we've been taking things kind of easier than that last few weeks, when we've been rushing around all the time.

Yesterday morning I helped Walter plant the pineapples that the guy who stole them had brought back. While I was slashing the grass so we could dig a hole I stepped on a big ant nest, and got my foot eaten AGAIN!!! I've been having bad luck with ants the last couple days (sigh). Even this morning I almost stepped on a huge line of army ants that were crossing the road. If you want to do a math problem here is one for you to work out. This morning there was a line of Army Ants. There were probably 20 or 30 ants per square inch, and the line of ants was about 200 or 300 feet long. I haven't done the math, but all I know is that, there was a TON of ants. They were going right under the container and since we are working on organizing it, they were really in the way, so Jared got a can of paint thinner, and lighter and we burned a 20 or 30 foot section of them.

Jared is a man of many talents. Yesterday Walter said he was tired of his hair being long on top and that he wanted a Mullet, so Jared said that he would do it. I was amazed, Jared did a great job, and all he used was a pair of hair scissors. I'll get a picture of Walter later and make sure that I post it so you guys can see the good job Jared did.

Yesterday afternoon it poured rain, so we didn't do anything all afternoon. I just read and listened to my iPod. I had a few music album on my computer that I didn't even know I had so I've been listening thru those, and listening to a few sermons that I've never listened too as well.

Yesterday I finished memorizing Chapter 2 of the book of James. For some reason the second chapter took me way long to memorize than the first one. Maybe it's because I'm having to repeat the first chapter all the time so I can remember that as well. I'm still going to try to finish by the time I get home, but I don't know if I'll be able to finish ll the way.

I'm out of reading material, and that is driving me crazy. I so wish that I could of brought a few more books with me, but if I had I probably would of been wasting my time reading them, instead of my bible, or instead of working when I should of been :).

The food situation here is getting desperate, but fortunately I know where they sell food so I don't really worry about it. Jared doesn't want to buy more food because we are about to leave, so we're just eating what we have left. I have to confess right now, that we have plenty of maize flower, left and vegetables, but just that day in and day out gets really nasty. This morning I couldn't eat just porridge, so I went up the road and bought some grease balls, anda also had some fried bean stick doo-dads (ground beans, with flour and seasonings). They were quite good, I had never had them before, because I had never been brave enough to try them, but they were a really welcome change from porridge.

Later:

Tyson and I made another bed today. Our goal is to make 5 for our own use here. We made a few to sell, and when we come back I think it would be a great way to make money to support ourselves, but we need a few for our own use when we come back so that is what we have been working on. Today while we were making the beds, we ran out of 3 inch nails, so we sent Jared to go get some for us in town. He came back with a 5 gallon bucket with about 3 inches of nails covering the bottom. Do you know how much it cost him to buy just that little bit of nails? Twenty-five Dollars (not pounds)!

People actually showed up to the bible training today, I was very encouraged, because even though there was a huge thunder cloud coming towards us, people still showed up. The study tonight was really fun, the people asked tons of questions and I literally spent half my time answering questions that didn't have a thing to do with the study, but that they wanted to know!

Today Tyson built a table for a guy who wanted him to make one. Tyson said it was going to cost 55 pounds to make a table, but the guy told him just to make it with just one 2x4 plus a couple 1x12 the he would provide himself, so it would be cheaper. Tyson then told him that if he wanted a table like that it would cost him 40 pounds so the guy agreed. Tyson made the table this morning and when the guy came to pick it up, he was mad because it wasn't super nice! Tyson told him that he had said to use only one 2x4 for the frame, and that is what he had done. The guy wasn't really happy about it, but he took the table. Tyson said he is never going to do that again, he said he'd rather have someone go away because the price is to high that to make a piece of junk and still have the people made because they didn't like it.

There seems to be a leak in our food supplies. Today our cook told Jared that we only had a half bag of flour left to make chapattis. That's all well and good, but what she failed to mention was that we had 3 bags of flour 3 days ago, and we've only eaten a half bag since then, meaning we still should have 2 ½ bags of flour! I can't really blame the cooks, though because in Sudanese culture if someone wants something you have to give it to them or they will disown you. In this culture you can't say no, it just isn't the way things are done. I assume a few people have come to our cooks asking for flour and they have just given them a bag and told them to take it! I'm not complaining though, I have plenty of food, and plenty of money if I need to buy food, and most of the people here don't have very much to eat.

It's raining again tonight, and you can actually see your breath, even though it is probably 65 or 70 degrees! I don't know if it's because of the humidity or something, because I don't remember it ever being like this at home. On my way from the fire to my house I almost stepped on another huge line of army ants, these things seem to be everywhere right now. I actually wore my boots all day, that way if I did step on some ants they couldn't bit my toes!

I forgot to mention a sad incident that happened this morning. Yesterday I put my big rat trap outside because the bait was attracting a ton of ants into our house, so I put it outside hoping to catch a mouse with it. This morning I went outside and there in my trap was a yellow song bird :(. It had had it's wing totally crushed by the trap, but it was still alive. I had to kill it, and let me tell you it was not a fun thing to do. I don't think I'll set the trap again. I haven't managed to catch a mouse with it yet anyway, all it does is eat the bait off it and leave, without getting caught, and I don't want to kill anymore birds either.

www.lmn.org

www.therebelution.com

www.youngdisciple.com

www.answersingenesis.org

www.ariseinstitute.org

www.frontlinebuilders.org

www.joshharris.com

www.chatfromchad.blogspot.com

Only One More Week Here :( Pictures

2008-06-09T13:08:00.000-04:00

I added some more photos under: Links of Interest

Only One more Week Here :(

2008-06-09T09:15:00.000-04:00

This may be my last post for a little while. We are leaving Sunday to head to Tanzania, so I might not be able to get to the internet for a couple weeks, so don't worry if anything isn't posted for a couple weeks.

June 4, 2008

Yesterday nothing much happened at all. I helped Tyson rip some 2x4's that some guy wanted ripped. That took us all morning since there were eighteen, 14 foot boards. After we finished ripping the boards we had lunch and then went to the internet.

I though that when I came out here I would learn the words for "what's for lunch?" and things like that but I haven't, because there is absolutely no reason to ask since I always know what there will be for the next meal, it never changes.

We were at the internet for 2 hours last afternoon. I was trying to send a video of me reading my graduation speech to my mom, but the internet was soooooooo sloooowww that it wouldn't load. I spent a whole hour and it had only uploaded 2 meg worth of video, and the video I was trying to send was 10 meg! I might try going to MRDA on Friday and seeing if the internet there is faster.

Right now Jared is gone to some town that is to the South of us. Yesterday a guy from the WFP (world food program) came and asked Jared if he could take a load of vaccines to a town 60 miles to the South. Now you have to understand one thing about the WFP, the specifically don't have vehicles so they don't have to maintain them, they just mooch off of other NGO's. Jared told him to go ask some of the other NGO's, but he said he had gone to all of them and they were busy, so eventually Jared decided to take them, even though it will probably be a 3 hour trip there and a 3 hour trip back. Jared left at 9:00 this morning and he still isn't back and it is 6:40 now. Jared had said it was only going to take 4 hours round trip, but Jared is notorious for underestimating the time it will take to drive somewhere. I'm hoping that wherever he went had different food, and that he was able to pick some up.

Today I painted our entire storage container with a 3 inch brush! It took a looooooonnnnng time, but this is Africa, time doesn't mean anything LOL. It's going to need a second coat, so if it doesn't rain tomorrow I'll finish it up. I look like a leopard now, because my hands are all spotted with pain, and since it is oil based paint, it won't come off even when I scrubbed it really hard, so I guess I'll just have to wait until it wears off.

While I painted the container Tyson worked on making some door frames and window frames for a guy who wanted them made. Walter is working on this truck that's frame is broken and he's welding it together. It is turing out to be a bigger job than they expected though and it is taking them a long time. The owner of the truck is getting a little antsy, but he should of taken a littler load, so the frame didn't break. It is amazing how often people come to us with broken frames on their vehicles. They always drive with way to big of loads, and they drive way to fast for the road conditions.

This afternoon while I was working a few army guys from the UN stopped in they just wanted to get an idea what our goal is here in sudan, if we had any security concerns and things like that. They were really nice. Two of them were from Poland and the other one was from Ecuador. It was kind of nice to see white people for a change, since I haven't seen another white person since we went to Juba last time.

Right now Tyson is at the Bible Training, he is doing a study on the Anti-Christ tonight. It should be an interesting study to teach. Hopefully the people here will be able to understand it. Tyson is way better at telling things in a simpler way than may… usually. When he was at the prison the other week speaking, he said "Okay, lets rap up the sermon with a prayer". The translator looked at him with a totally puzzled face, he had no idea what Tyson meant. I made me burst out laughing, I couldn't help it.

I could write more, but as time passes here I'm getting more and more unmotivated to write anything, I don't know why. It is a good thing I'm going to be back home in a little under 2 months, because if I stayed out here for another 6 months, I can guarantee you I wouldn't be writing very much everyday.

June 6, 2008

Yesterday was a really busy day. It was a beautiful day yesterday so I was able to put the second coat of paint on our storage container. It was a lot faster than the day before because it was the second coat, and I didn't have to be as careful trying to get a even coat. The only problem with the paint is it is a dark grey. The container was light gray before we painted it, so now it gets really hot. When I was on the roof painting on the second coat, I went to kneel down on the roof and actually burned myself, not bad enough to get a blister, but enough to hurt.

Meanwhile, Tyson was building a door, and window frames for a guy. He charged 60 pounds but found out that it wasn't enough. He worked all day yesterday, and still has one window frame to make. The guy did provide his own lumber, but still Tyson says if another person comes and wants him to make a door and window frames he's going to charge at least 80 pounds.

In the afternoon I went to MRDA and tried uploading my video and it worked! The internet is way faster there than at the bank, for some reason. Let me tell you, nobody here knows anything about computers. For instance when I went to MRDA they told me the internet hadn't been working for a couple days, but I asked them if I could give it a try with my computer. I hooked my computer up to the Ethernet cord, and nothing happened it said there wasn't a signal. I then walked over to the wall, and checked to see if the cord was plugged in, and guess what. It was loose, I put it back in and it worked perfectly. I think they should of let me use the internet for free for the day but they didn't (sigh).

Jared and Walter worked all day yesterday, trying to fix this truck that has been in our compound for the last 2 weeks. The guy who own it were starting to get ansy so Jared and Walter worked like crazy men yesterday trying to get everything welded, and put back together. They weren't quite able to get it done, but they got most of it done.

Today I helped Tyson make a bed frame for some guy. A guy came to us and asked us to make a bed frame, we told him it would cost 130 pounds and he agreed. I was kind of surprised, because people usually complain when they hear how much it will cost, but this guy seemed happy about it. You have to understand that just the wood alone for the bed cost 85 pounds so we aren't making that much profit. We worked really hard to get it done today, because they guy said he needed it by today, but then he never showed up. It rained this afternoon and nobody goes anywhere when it is raining.

The bible training was supposed to bed tonight, but since it poured rain all afternoon, when Tyson showed up nobody was there (sigh). He's going to go to sabbath school tomorrow and see if they will let him do it as part of sabbath school.

Walter and Jared finally finished up the truck this morning, and then had a fight with the owner. All along the owner has been a happy old man, that is until it came time to pay. Right up front Jared told him it was going to cost 200 pounds for labor, and 15 pounds per rod for welding. Well it was a HUGE welding job because the frame was broken in multiple places, and the total for the rods came to 405 pounds, so all together the bill was 605 pounds. Jared was really nice to the guy and told him he would deduct 105 pounds from the bill so that it would be only 500. When the guy heard that he said he would pay 300 pounds now and then pay 200 later, because he didn't have it. Jared told him that since he didn't know him and since we are leaving next week, that he need the money today, the guy was all angry at him and stomped away but came back with the money. All would of been well, but then the guy decided to take back a sheet of metal that he had said Jared could keep. It is a really nice piece of metal, that is great for making plates to repair frames and stuff, so Jared had told the guy at the begining that labor would be 200 if he could keep the metal, the guy agreed, but after he got mad today he said he was taking it. Jared was mad that he was going back on his word, but told the guy that God knew what he was doing, and he would be judged later. I guess that kind of scared the guy because he immediately didn't want it anymore and actually was nice again. Something about Jared brining up the fact about God knowing what we are doing, and keeping a record changed the guy completely.

I'm still trying to decide if I should go to bed and set my alarm clock and hope it wakes me up or just stay up until 2:30 AM. My parents are going to be calling me so I can talk to the people who are going to be at my graduation. I'm afraid that I won't wake up, so I think I'll just stay up until 2:30… actually on second thought, maybe I'll set my alarm clock and hope it wakes me up.

Walter had a interesting experience that I though might be worth mentioning. A couple nights ago he was in the outhouse, and he was just heading out when he met a 4 foot snake coming in. It gave him a start that is for sure, and he picked up a piece of bamboo we have in the outhouse and tried killing it but it slithered away and tried to hid under the cover for the hole in the floor. Well, the snake fell into the hole and landed in the bottom of our outhouse! As far as I know he's probably still down there. That's fine with me because although I like snakes I don't like them hanging around where I can step on them, because I have no idea which ones are poisonous and which ones aren't.

Just the other day Moses was cutting down some brush, when a big python dropped down from the tree. Moses said he ran one way and the snake went the other way. I don't mind pythons because I can tell what they look like but besides that I give the rest of the snakes here a wide berth. I don't like killing them because I think they are cool, but Tyson and Jared have no qualms when it comes to that. Whenever they see a snake the automatically kill it. I don't agree to that all the time but here in the compound I do like to keep it snake free. Ever since that day I almost stepped on the tail of one at night, I've wanted to keep them out of our yard.

June 7, 2008

Today was the first day that I've been in church and not been really hot. It rained all morning so it stayed relatively cool, and a lot of people didn't show up because it was raining so people weren't so crammed together. I actually understood what the sermon was about today, it was about David, and Goliath. The preacher was saying that we needed to be like David and have complete faith in God. The guys facts were a little messed up about the story, but oh well. For instance he said that Goliath had a helmet that weight 75 kg. Do you know how heavy that is? It is around 150 pounds!

Tyson went to the sabbath school this morning as was able to do his sermon doodad. Tomorrow night I am doing a study on the Second Coming of Jesus, and the 1000 years we are going to spend in heaven going over the record books of heaven.

This afternoon we went to the prison, and Tyson answered their question from last week which was "who is the anti-christ). I was kind of surprised that all the people there understood it, but they seemed to enjoy it. Next sabbath is going to be our last time going to the prison before we leave, and I'm going to be doing a bible study with them to help them understand why there are so many denominations and things like that.

I set my alarm last night to go off at 2:30 in the morning and it actually woke me up, which I was really glad of, because I wasn't quite sure wether it would or not. My dad put his cellphone on speaker phone and I was able to talk and have everyone in the whole church hear me! It's amazing what technology can do! It was kind of hard trying to talk to everyone one way. It so hard to talk, and not have any feedback, but my parents said it was good… hopefully it was LOL! They told me that even a bunch of my neighbors and lawn mowing customers came to my graduation. I think it's cool that even though I wasn't there they still came. My brothers got the whole thing on video so when I get home I'll be able to watch it.

This evening we all just sat around the fire and talked. We first started out talking about all the trials we've been having and laughing over some of the struggles we've been having. We also had a little group meeting just making sure that we're all aware we need to be careful not to let ourselves get fed up with each-other. This morning before church we were all having breakfast and got into a huge theological debate over some issue. It actually started to get quite heated and people started tog get angry. Fortunately we were able to catch ourselves and realize that we were arguing over a biblical issue without our bibles which is stupid, and we shouldn't be getting mad over some discussion we were having. We resolved that issue this afternoon, and fortunately we are all back on good terms with each-other. I'm glad to be here with a group of guy who are willing to just sit down and talk things over, and resolve issues, instead of just stewing over them. Keep praying for us, and especially Jared. This last week has been really hard on him dealing with different people and different situations that are always trying his patience. Since he's the leader of our group the responsibility really rests on his shoulders and it can be a struggle sometimes. Over all though, even with our little struggles things are going really well.

Our plan for this week is to put up the rest of the wire on our fence plant a few trees, and that is all we have left to do. As our time here is drawing to a close, I've been looking back on our experience here and I wouldn't trade this experience I've been having for anything. Sometimes it seem like we've been here forever and sometimes it seems like we've only been here for a couple weeks. It's amazing how it seem different at different times, but I guess that's the way it is.

June 8, 2008

Today Walter and I burned holes in the fence along one entire side of our property. It was blazing hot work, but I'm glad we did it today, because we are done with that job. Tomorrow we are going to start stringing up the new wire so the goat will have nowhere to get in.

I showed up at church tonight because I was supposed to be teaching tonight and nobody was there! Do you want to know where they were? They were all at the football game in Lui between the Lui team and the Mundri team. One guy did show up but that was all so he told me to postpone it until Wednesday. You would of thought that they guy who was supposed to unlock the church would of found someone else to do it, or at least told me he couldn't make it, but this is Africa and that's the way things work.

On Friday a guy around 20 years old came to our compound asking if he could work for us, because he needed to earn money for school. We told him to come back on Sunday and he could work. Well he came today at 2:30 in the afternoon, and only wanted to work for 2 hours. Jared said that would be fine and that he would pay him 5 pounds for 2 hours of work, because he's using it for school. He said he wanted 10, when Jared heard that he was kind of fed up with the guy and told him people on our compound here are working 8 hours for 10 pounds, so he should be happy. Well he said he would work and Jared put him to work slashing. After he had been working a while I glanced over at him and guess what he was doing? He was slashing sitting down on a bed that Tyson and made! This guy was the laziest worker we've had since we've gotten here. Not only did he half heartly slash he took a huge break and just sat in a chair, he even asked Jared if he would give him a soda (which we didn't have, and if we had we wouldn't of given him one) to give him energy! At 4:30 he quit and again asked Jared for ten pounds Jared told him no and gave him 5. After he left Jared vowed never to hire him again.

Lawrence was telling us tonight that 3 days ago the LRA (Lords Resistance Army) attacked a SPLA (Sudan People Liberation Army, it is the national army of Sudan) camp and killed a bunch of soldiers. They had absolutely no reason too, and now they have the whole Sudan Government mad at them. The place they attacked is only about a 100 miles from us, and is right near the road that we traveled on to come up here from Uganda, but there's nothing to worry about, they've never come as far as Mundri because they are based out of Congo. The LRA is an army that claims to be up holding the 10 commandments, but they clearly aren't. I'm not going to write some of the thing they do, but I have no idea how they can claim to be upholding the 10 commandments. I have story to write about the LRA, but I don't have time to do it right now because it's late, but I'll make sure to write it down one of these days and post it on my blog.

On a happier not it looks like the fighting between North and South Sudan has stopped. Lawrence was saying to night that they are negotiating, and it looks like the fighting should be done… at least for now.

We're really not doing anything interesting right now, so it's been kind of hard lately to write a bunch of stuff, simply because there is nothing to write about. Things here are about the same every day, eat, work, sleep, and repeat LOL. Anyway I'm looking forward to going to Tanzania it will be fun to have a change after being up here in Sudan for 3 ½ months.

Hey Parker, you'll never guess what I scored on brick. I scored 1199 points! I'm posting the picture of the screen so you don't think I'm lying. I also scored 1000 points on parachute. Let me know if you ever beat those scores (you never will).

I just want to clarify that I don't play games on my iPod all the time, but when it is pouring rain outside all afternoon and I get tired of reading I'll listen to some music or a sermon and play a little game of brick while I'm listening.

www.lmn.org

www.therebelution.com

www.youngdisciple.com

www.answersingenesis.org

www.ariseinstitute.org

www.frontlinebuilders.org

www.joshharris.com

www.chatfromchad.blogspot.com

Done With the Desks: Photos

2008-06-05T11:37:00.001-04:00

I just added some more photos under: links of interest.

2008-06-05T11:05:00.002-04:00

Done With The Desks

2008-06-03T10:48:00.000-04:00

May 28, 2008

Today I actually didn't do that much. The day started off with a bunch of rain, and nobody does anything in Africa while it is raining. So instead of working I worked on memorizing the book of James, and took a nap. I think I'm starting to get affected by the environment around me, because I take a nap whenever I get the chance. Whenever it rains here, I'll read for a little while, and then take a nap. I get tons of sleep at night, but it doesn't matter how many hours I may sleep during the night, I can still manage an hours nap during the day, if the weather allows it.

We were going to paint our storage container today, since it is starting to get a little rusty in a couple places, and needs a new coat of paint, but since it rained it ruined those plans, so after a little nap (yes it was just a couple hours after I had woken up), Tyson and I worked on writing down all the verses for every study we've done so far in little notebooks to give to all the people who are coming to our Bible training that way it will save them having to write all the notes, since most of the people have horrible writing. My hand was so cramped up after writing the notes into 16 notebooks that it hurt. I am horrible at writing, I am much more in my element when I am typing on a computer and then hitting the print button, but here you can't do that, so I guess I'm going to have to learn to write!

As I'm writing this a huge cat fight is going on outside. We have 2 or 3 cats that like hanging around our compound, but they are always fighting each-other. Well all is quiet now, but from past experience I expect them to start yowling again momentarily.

This afternoon we went to the internet. Even though the president left yesterday, the people are still partying (don't ask why). One of the guys working for us couldent come, because in the words of one of his friends, "He was dancing all night long". This afternoon we went to the internet, and I was able to post some stuff. I also tried sending a couple videos of me saying my speech for my Graduation back home, but they bank closed down before I could send them, so I'm going to have to try another day (sigh).

Here is a bad thing and a good thing. As you know we are supposed to be doing the Bible training thing on Wednesdays and Fridays. When I got onto the internet I lost total track of time and was only reminded by Tyson asking me what time it was. It was already 6:25 and I was supposed to have been there at 6! When I got back I asked Lawrence (who was supposed to show up and translate for us) if he had shown up. He said no! There was a big football game going on and everybody went to watch it instead of going to church, so nobody showed up at church at all, so at least me being late didn't effect anyone else. That is good, but I really hate the thought of completely forgetting that I had to speak somewhere.

Tomorrow we are going to be going to Karika in the afternoon to finish the desk project. Then we are going to spend the night at the school and then continue on to Mariti which is where we are going to be buying pineapple plants. Hopefully I'll be able to find some good tasting food in Mariti as well!

Tonight I had a great meal. On our way back from the internet we passed a guy on the street selling chapattis and eggs. He would take two eggs fry them with onions, and then put them between two chapattis (yum). Add a little hot sauce, and a little salt and it tasted really good, especially after eating just porridge for supper for the last few weeks!

May 31, 2008

Wow it was quite the trip! Thursday we of course left for Karika around noon and finished building all the desks by around 6:00. It's kind of unfortunate that this was our last set of desks in a way, because we can now all build really fast so it hardly takes us any time at all to build 20 desks. I can usually build 5 desks an hour and so can Tyson. Jared and Walter are getting faster even though they aren't quite up to our speed. Yesterday since we were spending the night there we didn't work as hard though so it took us a few hours. I'm glad we are finally done, now we don't have to worry about that anymore which is nice.

We were going to spend the night in the church, but Zadok, one of the elders of the church wanted us to stay with him, and since it would of been really rude not too (in Africa anyway), we did. It turned out that it wasn't a bad choice either because he has a huge orchard and we were able to eat tons of tangerines and mangos.

Tyson took his tent with him, which we pitched it in Zadok's yard to sleep in, because we didn't want to get eaten up by the mosquitos. Jared and Walter just slept inside one of Zadok's spare huts/house's. I like sleeping outside much better whenever I get the chance because at least there is a breeze. None of these native huts are equipped with big windows all they have are a couple little square windows cut out to let enough light in to see, and that is it.

I went to bed as soon as it got dark (7:45) because I was really tired for some reason. I was awakened by a call from Jared letting us know that a big storm was coming in and we might want to move inside. I looked at my watch and it was 2:30 in the morning. Since we were going to be leaving at 4:00 in the morning anyway Tyson and I just took the tent down, laid our mats on the floor and slept there until it was time to leave. We left for Maridi at 4:30 in the morning, because we wanted to be able to get back here in time for the Bible training at 6:00 PM.

It was a miserable trip! There wasn't room for the 5 of us to ride in the cab, so Tyson, Lawrence, and I rode in the back of the pickup on top of a load of grass that we were taking with us, which was nice because it kind of absorbs all the bumps on the road. What was bad though was the rain. We hadn't been on the road for longer than 10 or 15 minutes when the storm Jared was talking about broke on us, and started POURING! These were those HUGE rain drops which go right through you… or at least feel like that LOL! Plus it was only like 60 degrees out, and we were traveling at 30 M.P.H. It was freezing cold and absolutely miserable, but there was nothing to do but continue on our way. About 5 minutes after the rain started we saw a little empty hut by the road, so Jared stopped, and we sat in there waiting for the rain to abate. I was praying like crazy that God would keep it from raining so we could have a enjoyable trip. Almost no sooner had I prayed that prayer that the rain stopped, and we continued on our way, and even though there were huge dark clouds all around us with lightning, we didn't get rained on, the entire rest of the way! Praise the Lord!

We got to Mariti around 8:00 AM, it is about 4 ½ hours from Mundri here, but since we were already at Karika it only took us 3 ½ hours. Once we were there we went to the guy who we were going to buy to pineapple plants from and see if he had them all picked. He only had 200 picked, so we told him we'd be back at noon and then headed to town to find some breakfast. We were able to find a guy selling chapattis and eggs (it turned out he is the brother of the guy who sells the same things here in Mundri). We bought 10 of them and they made quite a good breakfast that's for sure.

After buying to food we went to the house of the Pastor in Mariti, to wait until noon, when the pineapples would be ready. I fortunately had thought to bring my iPod with me so I was able to listen to a couple really good sermons by a couple of my favorite speakers to pass the time. One of the sermons was on ethics which was really good, and the other on was on Christian Apologetics (by far, my all time favorite subject regarding Christianity).

At noon we headed off to the guy's plantation (that's what they call them here), to buy the pineapples. He had been able to pick another 300 in that time so we were able to come back here with the back of the pickup truck full of pineapples. The trip back was completely un… actually it wasn't completely uneventful. One event happened on our way back that just goes to show that living out here can wear on you sometimes.

I can't really tell you what happened, because it would embarrass some of us here in our group. All I can say is that one of our group got really mad at one of the other persons in our group over a really small thing (in my opinion anyway). Once you've been here for a while small things sometimes start to be big things. That can happen very easily here, and during these last couple weeks we are here, we are going to have to be on our guard not to let stupid little things make us mad at each other. Besides yesterday I don't think we've gotten mad at each-other (often anyway) but we've argued over stupid, stupid stuff, just for no reason at all. It is ridiculous, but we talked about it yesterday and now that we are aware of it, we can now be on our guard to prevent it from happening. I know that Satan would love us to leave here mad at the the Natives, mad at each-other, and mad at God. We don't want that to happen to us, and in the words of some patriot from the revolutionary war (I don't remember which, is it Sam Adams?) "So help us almighty God" we won't!

We got back from Mariti with 15 minutes to spare, before the time that our Bible training was supposed to start. Tyson and I showed up with all the notebooks we so laboriously wrote the notes in, and a box of Bibles to give to the people and nobody showed up. People have just completely blown the training off. I don't know what we are going to do, but Tyson is going to be making an announcement in church and hopefully it will encourage people to come to the training. We're going to be doing it 3 times a week now, because if we don't we won't be able to get in all the messages we want.

Anyway I'm going to be late for church if I keep writing anymore, but I'll make sure to write more tonight.

Later:

I thought I was going to be late for church, but I wasn't. Church is supposed to start at 10:30 sharp, but today we didn't start singing the doxology until 11:00! Oh well, this is Africa so I guess I'll just have to get used to it. Actually it wasn't that bad today, I went prepared for that to happen and brought my bible along with a book called "apologetics in 5 minutes a day". I love reading apologetic books and reading that makes time pass super quickly.

Tyson popped up during the announcements, and told the church about our Bible training and tried to make it sound appealing, but I don't know if it will work. I guess we'll find out tomorrow.

After church today we had a good lunch for a change LOL! The cooks made bread yesterday so we were able to have bread along with the lentils they cooked. It was really good to eat bread. Our cooks hadn't made bread forever because they said they didn't have wood (it's their job to collect it), but we didn't want to hear that excuse any longer so Jared headed out in to the woods with the chainsaw and cut down trees for them to use, so they no longer have an excuse.

I spoke at the prison today and loved it. I love going to the prison, because the people are so friendly and receptive there. Even the guards are really friendly and ask questions and get involved in any discussions we might have. Today I spoke on the Sabbath because last week they asked a us why we keep Saturday holy instead of Sunday. It kind of rattled a couple people to here it but most people just nodded there heads saying they understood. One of them then asked me a question saying that he had been raised up that way and what could he do now? For some reason my mind drew a complete blank. I don't know why, but I think it might of been God putting a stopper on me, because when I couldn't think what to say I looked back towards Jared and Tyson, and then they took the lead. Tyson said a little something, and then Jared pulled out his Bible and preached a great sermon. Let me tell you, Jared might not like to preach in a church, but you put him in front of some prisoners or just a guy on the street and he can reach them way better than I can. I loved listening to him, I wish that I had been able to record him, but they wouldn't of appreciated that at the prison.

While we were at the prison Walter did a really cool thing, that I am going to adopt next time when I'm not preaching. Instead of sitting in chairs with us facing the prisoners, he went and sat on the tarp on the ground with the prisoners and helped them find the difference verses in the Bible. What a great idea! I wish that I had thought of it. The prisoners absolutely loved it, and when Walter went and sat down with them a couple church members followed his example.

This afternoon we didn't do to much except climb up the Guava tree and sit in the breeze. It is much cooler twenty feet in the air the it is on the ground so that is where we usually hang out for the afternoon on Sabbath. A few of the neighbor kids came over and played around in the tree with us it was ton of fun. I'll make sure that I post some pictures of us all playing in the trees.

Tonight for supper we had popcorn! It was a welcome treat to just porridge and lentils. We also picked up some pineapples and oranges in while we were in Mariti so today we ate really good, unfortunately they are all going to be gone by tomorrow, but oh well.

We are only going to be here in Mundri for 2 more weeks. We are going to be leaving here on the 15th of June and head down towards Tanzania. Jared grew up in Tanzania and knows a ton of the missionary families down there as well as a bunch of Africans. So we are going to go down there to visit them and help one of Jared's friends with his farm for a little while. After that we want to do a little traveling around and see a little bit of Africa before we go back to the states, so we plan on going to Malawi after that, then back to Kenya to fly home.

June 1, 2008

I can't believe that is already June. Time is passing so fast, that I can barely keep track of it.

Today we planted all the pineapples. We have now close to 900 pineapple plants! A couple of them are actually already starting to grow pineapples, so in about another 3 or 4 months we'll actually have a few that are ready to eat. It's too bad that I won't be here (sigh). The reason there coming so fast is that we bought plants, so they only have to mature. The guy we bought them from says that even the smallest plants we have will produce in 18 months. Jared's goal is to get even more later on and export them to Juba to sell. We're trying to figure out ways we could support ourselves while we're out here so we wouldn't have to have money always coming in from the States. In Juba you can sell a big pineapple for 10 pounds! That is quite a bit of money, so Jared wants to get a whole farm going with these things.

Slowly but surely we're making progress on clearing land. We have a couple people that wanted land to garden on so we told them they could use it this year if they would clear it, but that we would be using it next year. They were happy with that, and have been clearing so much land it's crazy. Next year we're hoping to have the entire compound mostly cleared. It takes a lot of work out here when all you have is an axe and machete, but since we're in Africa, time doesn't mean the same thing it does in the States.

Even though everyone here wears watches nobody is ever on time. I can't quite figure it out. Tonight we had the Bible training and the guy who was supposed to open the church didn't even show up until 10 minutes after we were supposed to start, and people kept trickling in the entire time I was speaking! I was glad to see people show up, because I didn't think they would. There was supposed to be a big soccer match between Mundri and Lui, but the team from Lui never showed up, which turned out to be a blessing for me, because people actually came to the meetings. If the game had gone on I can guarantee you nobody would of shown up.

This afternoon Tyson worked on making a bed. We had quite a bit of spare 2x4's from building the desks, so we're going to see if we can make and sell beds with the rest of the lumber to make a little bit of extra money. Tyson made a master piece today, so we'll see if people will be willing to pay the price that it cost us to build. There is a guy in town who sells beds and he charges 75 pounds for some pretty primitive beds, the one Tyson made is much nicer, because it is planed, and cut straight, and pre-drilled so the wood isn't cracked. He's hoping to get a 110 pounds for it, so we'll see when the guy comes tomorrow if he'll be willing to pay that much.

Hopefully it rains tonight. Since all the pineapples were just planted they could really use the rain. We really don't want to water them because it is really hard to haul bucket loads from the well to water 500 pineapples especially when the pineapples are already good sized so they take a good bit of water. I've been hearing thunder in the distance so hopefully it does. If not I'm going to have a really sore back from hauling water by tomorrow afternoon.

Tomorrow we are going to be going to the internet so hopefully I'll be able to post a bunch of pictures. I have 100 pictures all ready to post, but I never have time to post more than 30 so I'll see if I can post more than that tomorrow.

NOTE FROM PARKER:

Unfortunately he was unable to get us the pictures this week. Sorry!

June 2, 2008

This morning when I woke up it was pouring rain, which I was really glad for because the pineapples needed it. I was also glad because it let me sleep in a whole extra hour. When it rains here we don't usually do much work because all the work is outside. I did have stuff to keep me busy while it rained though.

Last night at the Bible Training thing, one of the guys asked me if I could give him all the notes for the presentations we are going to be doing, because he is leaving tomorrow to go to another town to the south of us. He wanted them because he said he's going to go home and teach them what we've been doing here! It was so encouraging to hear him say that because it has seemed to me that no one has been listening to anything we have to say at the church. Then this guy comes and want the notes because he is going back to his village and wants to teach them what he's learned! So I wrote all the notes down in a notebook. I took me a couple hours, but it was well worth it.

I rained on and off all day. Walter and I welded holes on the fence to string up more wire on one entire side of our compound. It took us a couple hours, but now we have that done, so tomorrow we are going to string up the wire, so the goats can't get in and eat all our trees. They got in a couple weeks ago and ate the top off of our Umbrella Tree. Walter wasn't happy about that at all.

There is a pack of dogs that are hanging around our compound for some reason. Today I saw one dog laying in the grass, and I looked over towards the pineapple field and there was about 10 dogs all laying in the grass. They don't seem mean, and you can't even get close to them without them running off. Dogs here are much more dignified than the dogs in the states. I have yet to see a dog bark at anything. I don't know if it is because they are trained that way, or they just don't bark much. Sometimes at night I'll here them howling a long ways away, but I've never heard a dog bark during the day.

We decide go to the internet tonight because we wanted to work while it was daylight. They are supposed to be open from 8 AM to 6 PM and from 8 PM to 10 PM. Jared even told they guy that runs it today that we were going to be coming in the evening, and he said he would make sure that it was open. Well we showed up at around 8:15 and it was locked up tight, and nobody was in sight (sigh). I was really looking forward to going to the internet today for some reason. But I guess I'll just have to get used to it :).

My finger is healed!

2008-05-28T10:30:00.001-04:00

May 19, 2008

Walter wasn’t feeling good today, so he took things easy and slept most of the morning. Meanwhile Tyson and I got to work with the desks and managed to get 10 of them cut out in only 2 hours! We then had to plane the boards and drill them, but still we were finished by around 3 in the afternoon. The reason we wanted to get done early was so that we could go to the internet this afternoon. We are expecting Jared back sometime tonight or early tomorrow, and since he is brining fruit trees with him we won’t be able to go anywhere the next couple days, because we’ll have to be planting all the trees he’s brining with him.

My finger is kind of driving me crazy, because I can’t really work out with it the way it is. Tyson works out every morning, and he’s going to be way strong than me by the time my finger is healed enough to work out too. I told my brothers back home that I was working out a few weeks ago so now they are working out and I’m afraid that they are going to be stronger than me by the time I get home (sigh). Hopefully in another week or two my finger will be good enough for me to work out with, and I’ll have about 2 months to catch up with my brothers.

For breakfast this morning we had as usual Chapattis, and porridge, but we didn’t have any sugar. Porridge without sugar taste horrible, because it isn’t like oatmeal or anything like that it is made out of Maize so it doesn’t taste good at all (at least to me), so this morning before breakfast I headed up the road a little ways and bought a container of sugar. It cost about 2 pounds for a quart jar full, so it was quite cheap. We don’t get sugar all the time because the Africans here eat it like crazy. This morning I saw Christopher put in a huge scoop of margarine, and 3 or 4 scoops of sugar into his porridge! It’s crazy, but oh well, I bet you the sugar is going to be gone by tomorrow, but I can’t help that. I told Jared to bring back a 50 pound sack of it, but I don’t think he will, but I guess I can go without sugar in my porridge until we leave. I’ll porbably get cavities from it anyway LOL.

Walter went to a meeting this afternoon for NGO’s. Jared was supposed to go, but since he isn’t here Walter volunteered to take his place. He said it was extremely boring. All he did was listen to people talk about how the couldn’t find anyone who had two hardtop Cruisers, and would lend the for the WHO (World Health Organization) to use. I’m glad I haven’t had to go to one of these meetings yet. Tyson went to one when we got here a couple months ago, and since then Jared has always gone to them.

I was at the internet 2 hours today! I was able to video chat with my family, and even though it disconnected every 3 or 4 minutes it was still fun to see them. I was able to post a bunch more pictures. My mom keeps asking me for more pictures, the only problem is, I’m running out of things to take pictures of. I’ve already had to borrow all of Walter’s pictures so I’d have something to post every week. I still have enough for a couple more weeks, but then I think I’m going to be out of stuff to take pictures of.

On our way back from the internet we passed a bunch of army tanks parked out in the football field. They were huge tanks, with guns on turrets mounted on the top. The trucks that were pulling them were amazing, on of them was a huge armored 8x8 truck. I wish I could of gotten pictures of those things, but as I’ve said before anything that is related to the government is off limits for taking pictures.

I tried playing the guitar tonight and surprisingly I could. I’m a little slow when it comes to switching cords, but besides that I’m fine. My finger still can’t bend all the way and it hurts when I press the strings down, but at least I can play it. That’s good, because I really wanted to play a song on the guitar to put on the video I’m sending home to show for my high-school graduation.

May 21, 2008

Yesterday I was going to write but I was way to tired, so I just went to bed. The last couple days I’ve been exhausted. I think it’s because I didn’t do any work for a week and half right after I hurt my finger, so I have gotten a little weak. It has actually felt good to go to bed exhausted, because then I fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow.

There is so much I could write about the last two days that I could probably write 3 or 4 pages, but I don’t think I’ll have time to write that so I’ll just write until I’m tired LOL! Let me start by telling you what happened yesterday.

You should remember that on the 19th I told you that we were expecting Jared home, but by yesterday morning he still hadn’t showed up. This usually wouldn’t of caused us to worry. Roads here are awful and you can never actually be sure about when someone will show up. This time it did cause us to worry though, because Jared knew that he had to be at the police station on Tuesday at 10:00 AM give the guys the mirror that we “broke”. If he didn’t show up to the meeting “there would be dire cirmustances”. Those were the police chiefs actual words.

We prayed like crazy and asked that God would help us deal with the situation wisely. By 9 Jared still hadn’t showed up so Walter headed to the SRRC (I forget what it stands for) Secretary. He’s the guy who is in charge of the safety and over all conduct of foreigners. The Secretary wasn’t there, but his helper was and told us that he had written to the police chief telling him that 2 bridges were broken and Jared would be 2 days late! Praise the Lord! The Secretary is a great guy that I really like, and he was real answer to prayer. When Walter came back and told us what the Secretary had done, we immediately stopped what we were doing and thanked God for answering our prayer, and delaying the meeting.

We were still wondering where Jared was so we tried calling his cellphone but there wasn’t an answer, so we called his brother Jabel. Jabel told us, that Jared had left that morning, but that since it had taken him 2 days to get down to Arua it would take him just as long to get back… if all went well.

This all happened in the morning, then for the rest of the day Tyson and I worked on cutting out desks. Walter had something pinched in his neck so he just took things easy and laid around for most of the day. Tyson and I managed to cut out another 10 desks so we now only have 10 more to go! We could off finished in another day, but we ran out of wood, or estimate was slightly off, so we are about 30 boards short.

I don’t really remember what else went on yesterday, because the whole morning kind of kept us on our toes and the rest of the day kind of floated in to oblivion. I can tell you that all we did was work and eat. Then for the evening I read my Bible, and worked on memorizing. I was able to finish reading the OT last night, and was also managed to memorize the first 5 verses of James. I’ve been convited that I should be memorizing. That verse in Psalms that says “thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin agains thee” kept coming to my mind. So I’ve decided to try to memorize the book of James before I get home. It shouldn’t be that hard, if I memorize 5 verses a day.

Today was the first day in a couple weeks that Tyson, Walter, and I have all been feeling well at the same time, so we were able to get a ton of work done. I started the day off by eating 8 chapattis. Actually I started the day with reading my Bible, but after that, I then ate chapattis. The only down side with the meal was that we are out of sugar, and Mangos, I really like a little sprinkle of sugar, and cinnamon on my chapattis. It doesn’t have to be much sugar, just enough to give it a little taste. A healthier alternitive is of course to eat Mangos in my chapattis, which I usually do, but Mango season is now officially over, so besides maybe 2 or 3 stray Mangos at the top of the 60 foot trees, there are none in reach. When I first got here I usually ate just 4 chapattis, but now for some reason I eat huge breakfasts. I think it’s because I don’t eat big suppers in the morning so now I’m actually hungry when I wake up. All I can say is we never have left over chapattis anymore like we used to, because I eat them!

Today I need all the chapattis I could get to fuel me for the day, because today we had some serious labor planned. Since we knew that Jared should be getting back today, and was brining close to 100 fruit plants with him plant we had to get some land cleared. So we got out the machetes, slashers, saws, axes and got to work. I kind of drove me crazy to begin with only to have these tools to work with. I’m used to doing this kind of work with a chainsaw, and weedwacker with a blade on it, but once I got into the swing of things, I perked up to the job. We do have a chainsaw, but since gas is so expensive, and we can’t really get parts for it we save it for cutting BIG stuff.

We cleared a lot of land today. I got pictures of everyone clearing so you’ll be able to see us in action. We got Jogo and his friend to help us so the 5 of us got to work and made quick progress. We are working on clearing the land all around the compound, because the government really likes to see land in use, and if it’s not in use they want to know why. They are really pleased at the work we are doing here. We have got tons of land cleared, and have planted tons of fruit trees, pineapples, bananas ect.

After clearing all morning we were so tired that we decided to plant some bananas instead to give us a break. We have some banana plants scattered around our compound so we have been working on transplanting them into orderly rows, so it actually looks like the belong there. A few of the neighbor kids came over to watch, and actually ended up helping us which was nice. There were 3 or 4 of them, and they sped things up quite a bit.

After planting the bananas, I went off to take a shower, because the bible training thing was supposed to be tonight, and I still had transfer all my notes from my computer to paper so I could have them at the church. Just as I was finishing my shower (with my nifty sun shower), the prodigal returned.

Jared showed up dusty with a weeks worth of beard, and with the back of the truck full of stuff. It turns out that it took him 2 days to get to Arua! A trip that only took us 12 hours on our way here now took him almost 40 hours of driving time! He said that the trip was unreal. He said the roads were absolutely horrible, and that there were trucks stuck everywhere. He is going to be writing everything that happened on the trip, and when he does I’ll make sure to post it on my blog. It would take way to long for my to tell you just the few things that he told me happened on the trip.

Jared brought tons of stuff back and part of the stuff he brought back was… FOOD!!! I’m so glad to have food. He brought back some homemade bread, banana muffins, and homemade grape jelly from Pastor Mike’s wife. He also brought back 15 containers of peanut butter! Wow we had a great supper. Let me tell you peanut butter and jelly sandwiches have never tasted better in my life. I have to admit at home they weren’t my favorite meal, but today they tasted absolutely heavenly. He also brought back Tangerines, that were also really good. It was so nice to have a meal that wasn’t rice and beans! He also brought back supplies such as hot sauce (yes!!!), potatoes, ketchup, garlic ect. We should be good to go until we leave here at the end of June.

When Jared brought back he also brought back some news. I had been wondering what those huge tanks had been going thru town for. Well we found out from Jared that the South is fighting the North again. You don’t have to worry about us though, because although the country we’re in is fighting it’s not close to where we are. Even during all the fighting before this the fighting has never made it all the way down here to Mundri so the chances are small it ever will. Now I have to admit that they could bomb our town, but that is very unlikely since the fighting isn’t on a very big scale yet. Anyway we are trusting in God. As long as we are where God wants us we can’t die until he says so :).

Well I’ve written more than I though I would, but my computer battery is lasting longer than usual so I was able to. This paragraph is on the 100th page of my blog. I’m writing my blog in Microsoft Word, and this in the 100th page! I never dreamed when I started writing this blog in February that I would actually writ this much, but I’ve been enjoying writing it, and my Parents have been telling me that they’ve been enjoying reading it, as well as others. I’m glad that you guys like reading it, and if at some times you have no idea what I’m saying don’t worry, because I probably don’t know what I was saying myself at that time. Fortunately for me, my mom usually reads my blog as soon as I post on it, and she usually can catch any errors before the public reads them! Thanks Mom!

May 22, 2008

I HATE SHARING MY FOOD, WITH UNINVITED GUESTS!!! You might be thinking that my statement is a very selfish statement and it is, but I hate sharing my food with... worms! I have worms again and my stomach hasn’t felt good since yesterday afternoon (sigh). Fortunatly Jared was able to get me some worm medicine so I should be good to go in a couple days, but today I’ve just felt like sitting around, because my stomach didn’t feel good at all. I also was up most of last night because my stomach hurt and I felt like throwing up, so I’m really tired even though it is only 8:30. This is a horrible time to get worms since Jared got back with all the good food, but I did manage to eat some food today, so I did miss out completely on the bread, chips (french fry’s), oranges ect.

I forgot to mention that Jared had a small miracle happen on his way back from Arua. As you know he was trying to buy Bibles to give to the church members and prisoners. Well in Arua all he was able to find was King James Version Bibles. Which was great, but since it is old english, most of the people here have no idea what they are reading when they read KJV Bibles. Jared really wanted to find another version, but he couldn’t find any other kind of Bible in Arua. On his way back from Arua he stopped at Yei and it just so happend that there was bookstore there that was supposed to have Bibles. The only problem was that it was shut. God worked it out though, and Jared was able to find the guy who had the key’s (a miracle) and he was able to purchase 50 NET (New English Translation) Bibles for $3 a piece. We are going to be going to the prison this week to give the Bibles to the prisoners, I can’t wait to see their faces, when they get the Bibles, and the other stuff that Jared brought for them. Jared bought them pens, notebooks, a volleyball and soccer ball, so they should be quite please. Hopefully I’ll be able to go over there one of these days and play volleyball with them.

Today all we did was clear a bunch of land, and plant fruit trees. I was really happy because today I was able to use the chainsaw to cut down a tree and cut it into pieces. It is way nicer to use the chainsaw to cut stuff instead of my little Sven Saw. Even though my Sven Saw is nice, it’s not nearly as effective as a big chainsaw.

My finger is healing really nicely. The problem for me now, is trying to keep myself from picking on the huge scab. I love picking scabs and it is all I can do to keep my self from picking on it. I have to admit that I’ve already picked it more than I probably should of, but so far it hasn’t bled or anything so I think it’s okay. I’m really curios of how it will look when the scab is off. Oh well, I guess I’m just going to have to wait and see.

It has rained the last 2 afternoons in a row, which has been a huge blessing. Even though it is the rainy season, it hadn’t rained for close to 2 weeks until yesterday afternoon where it poured rain for a couple hours. It did the same thing today, so now we have plenty of rain. Tomorrow our plan is to plant the rest of the trees Jared brought from Arua, and then on Sunday we’ll drive over to Karika and finish building the desks over there.

May 25, 2008

Sorry I haven’t written for three days. I’ve been so tired every night that I just haven’t wanted to take the time to sit for close to an hour and write stuff. Since I’m planning on going to the internet tomorrow I figured I’d better write what we’ve been doing for the last couple days or I won’t have anything to post on my blog for you to read. So let me see, I haven’t written anything since Thursday night so I’ll guess I’ll start with what we did Friday.

Friday we mainly just cleared more land to plant fruit trees on, and planted them. Jared bought tons of different kinds of fruit trees. He got passion fruit vines, mango trees, avocado trees, jack fruit trees, papaya trees, umbrella trees (not a fruit tree), and last but not least he bought a couple palm trees to plant along our driveway coming into our compound.

Since I like chainsawing the job of cutting down a couple trees fell to me. Now usually I LOVE chainsawing. I don’t know why, but there is something so satisfying in watching a huge tree fall down after cutting thru it with a chainsaw. Friday though it wasn’t much fun, although I’d would of much rather of cut, then planted trees. The reason I didn’t really like that much was that I had to cut down two, 40 foot trees, but these weren’t any ordinary trees, these were thorn trees. They were totally encased in huge half inch thorns that were hooked so when a branch caught on your clothes you could only pull it off one way. I now know a little bit of how the disciples felt when there we scourged by the authorities in the Bible, because while I was liming on of the trees I fell down, I cut a limb that was sticking most of the way up and misjudged where it was going to fall. Instead of falling away from me which I though it would, it fell right on to my back (OUCH). It took me a couple minutes to pick it off of me because all the thorn are hooked, but I finally managed, but not before leaving a few marks on my back! Moving the branches after I cut them was a huge pain in the neck. I had my SOG knife with me so I usually just cut the thorns off where I wanted to grab and then took it to the brush pile. Later in the day I also sliced my finger open on a thorn, but besides that I didn’t get any major injuries. Actually I have to admit that the thorns kind of did me a favor right at the end of the day. Just as I was finishing up, one of the little branches I was cutting fell onto my hand, and a thorn from the branch caught under the scab from the cut on my pinkie from the saw and tore it off. I had been afraid to take it off, because I wanted it to heal fast, but I guess God knew it was time to come off so he helped me out a little bit. I’ve been praying like crazy about my finger, and God healed it super fast. It has been 3 weeks today since I hurt it, and now it is almost completely healed. I still can’t bend it quite all the way, but I think in another week or two I’ll have complete motion in it as well.

So that is what we did on Friday, on Sabbath it was my turn to stay home and keep an eye on things here at the compound so I read my Bible and worked on memorizing the book of James. So far in the last week I’ve been able to memorize the first 25 verses of the first chapter of James. James is such a great book! There is so much practical advice in the book of James, which is one of the reasons I figured I’d memorize it. Besides reading, and memorizing I don’t think I did anything else. It rained all afternoon so we all went to our respective houses and either slept or read.

Today we went to Karika to build the desks there. We built 25 desks today, so we have now built a total of 160 desks, and are going to build 20 more desks at Karika probably at the end of this week or the first of the next. Our plans for the desks have changed a little bit and instead of building 200 we are going to be building 180, the reason is way to long to try to explain, but to put it into one sentence. The reason we are taking the other 20 desks to Karika is because there is so much corruption going on in the school here at Mundri that we don’t want to give them anymore desks, so we’re taking them to Karika instead.

While we were at Karika a guy came over and asked if we could come help him “jump” his truck because the battery was dead. So we went over, and since jumper cables haven’t been invented here Jared just took the battery out of our car hooked it up to his truck and started it that way. That wasn’t the main thing wrong with the truck though. It turns out that this truck has been here for 3 weeks, and the owner has been to Kampala 3 times in the last 3 weeks (it is a 6 day round trip), looking for a mechanic that can tell him what’s wrong with it, and also to get spare parts he thinks he needs to fix it. Jared and Walter took a look at it, but even though they are both mechanics they couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Walter is still rolling it over in the back of his mind so maybe he’ll figure it out while he’s sleeping or something. It wont’ shift for some reason, and it’s not a problem with the clutch or anything like that… at least as far as they could tell.

Well tomorrow we have to do some more community service. The President of South Sudan is going to be coming to Mundri on Tuesday for the ceremony of opening the new bridge across the river. Since it is a huge thing to have the President come to your town, the town want’s everyone to come and help clean the ground up, and set up the shelters and stuff like that. So it looks like we’ll be busy tomorrow.

I guess that’s all I have to write. I think more happened, but I’m way too tired to write anymore. We didn’t get home until close to nine at night because Jared and Walter were trying to get that guys truck fixed and right now it is 10:20 and I’m exhausted, especially after building 9 desk by myself today. Anyway I’ll make sure that I stay on top of writing stuff on my blog in the future.

May 27, 2008

Morning: Well I the president is in town today for the opening of the bridge. This town is going to be completely fully of soldiers with machine guns and other weaponry. I think I’ll probably go to see a little of the festivities, but I don’t want to go until all the speaches are over. There will probably be at least 2 hours of speaches, probably closer to 3 or 4 if you ask me. Everyone is going to have his 2 cents worth to say, and trust me, all they have to say is super super boring. This bridge that is being opened is an important bridge, it connects a lot of the towns in South Sudan. If this bridge wasn’t here. During rainy season you would have to take a 250 mile detour to get to any of the other towns on the other side of it.

Yesterday I was awakened at 6:30 by the blaring sound of the BBC News being blared out full volume right in front of our door. Moses was listening to his radio right outside our door on the front porch and we couldn’t sleep our concentrate on our devotions, so Tyson went out and asked him to got sit by the kitchen instead.

We discovered yesterday morning that someone had come in the night and stolen 21 pineapple plants of ours! Lot’s of people here want pineapples so I guess the guy just figured he’d steal them. Jared wanted to find out who had stolen them so we could tell the police so he put a couple kids that we are friends with on the track, telling them he would give them a 100 pounds if the found out who stole them. For them that is a ton of money, it is about the equivalent of working a full month. Well they came last night and they told us they had found out who stole them. It is a guy who lives 4 miles in the bush by walking. We might be going there today to see if we can find the guy. The thing about living here in Mundri is, everyone knows what everyone else is doing or did. For example we can’t go anywhere without people finding out about it and wanting rides. A better example happened yesterday. A person from the government came to ask if they could have one of our umbrella plants that we still haven’t planted, because the president wants to plant one today! How in the world did they know we have umbrella plants?

Yesterday Tyson and I continued on clearing away that thorn tree. I hate it! It couldn’t be a worse job. I’m constantly getting poked pricked ect, by all the thorns. If it was me I would of just left the tree standing. True it was ugly, but it didn’t look that bad, and moving it is taking forever, plus it is costing me a lot of pain to move! I’m really happy for my work boots, and double knee carharts when it comes to moving this tree. The only thing I wish I had was a good pair of work gloves. I don’t know why I didn’t bring a pain, but I’ll know for next time. They would of made this job so much easier.

I was going to go to the internet yesterday, but everything was shut. The reason was everyone was working on cleaning up the town for the coming of the President. So in the afternoon I kind of just took thing easy, because I wasn’t feeling very well. Tyson is sick and I think he has worms, but we’ll see if he still feels that way tomorrow, if he does it will probably mean he has worms. He’s taken a bunch of charcoal but I don’t know if it has helped him any.

While I was laying in bed yesterday night, I was listening to my iPod and playing the little brick game they have on it. I made a new high score for myself. I scored 895 points (Try to beat that, Parker!). If you don’t believe me I took a picture of the screen to show you. Once you get to that high of level half the bricks are invisible, and you can’t even see them, so you kind of just have to pong the ball around at random and try to find them. It was quite cool, maybe someday before I leave I’ll be able to get to 1000.

Night: I didn’t end up going to the festivities at all. The reason was we needed someone to stay here and keep an eye on things, and since this a huge Sudanese Holiday none of the Africans we have working for us were here for the day. I didn’t mind though especially after Walter, Tyson, and Jared got back from the celebration. They were gone for 4 hours and all they did the whole time was listen to speeches!

Tyson had the right idea when he went. He took his iPod with him, and put in is pocked and put one earbud in so he could listen to something else other than the person speaking! Nobody really has an idea what earbuds even are so he had no problem listening to music and sermons. It was a great idea, I admit that I might have to adopt when I get back to the states LOL!

This afternoon we worked on clearing more land and planting more trees. I personally think Jared bought way too many trees when he was in Arua, but now that we have them we have to find a place to put them.

This place is finally starting to look like someone is living here. We have cleared a ton of land on our property, and planted tons of fruit trees, fixed the fence ect. We’ve also put on new roofs on the kitchen and Jared and Walters hut, as well as cut down a bunch of ugly trees to make things look neater. Now, if we ever decide to expand and add new buildings and stuff like that, we’ll probably have to dig the trees back up and move them, but since we aren’t planning on that in the near future we planted them around. We’re trying to look forward so we planted them where we thought they would be out of the way, but you never know where we might want to build something in the future.

It drives me crazy when the cooks only tell us that were out of food, when we are actually completely out of food. They never bother telling us until everything is completely out then they tell us when it is time for them to be making the next meal (sigh). Take today for instance. We had as usual for breakfast porridge, and for lunch we had beans and Oogaly, but when supper time came along they told us they were out of Maize Flower so they couldn’t make anymore porridge. Jared told them to just us regular flower until tomorrow when he can go to town and buy some, but the flour porridge tasted absolutely horrible. It tasted like eating raw bread dough that was really runny. I am starting to get really sick of the food here, and I mean REALLY SICK!!! I shouldn’t be complaining though, since we actually have food, and 6 million kids in Ethiopia are starving because there isn’t any food to feed them.

Tonight Walter and I were sitting by the fire (Tyson isn’t feeling well, I think he has worms), and Jared came out of his house towards the fire in his flip flops because he was going to take a shower, when I heard him exclaim “WOW take a look at this”. When one of us says that here we all usually go to look, but I wish Jared had warned us what were were going to look at. There were literally hundreds of thousands of army ants marching across the driveway. In one part they were probably a foot wide by 4 or 5 feet long, but there were hundreds of other little armies making there way across the same area. About 50 feet were literally covered by them. Jared had been wearing flip flops and hadn’t really noticed them until he stepped on a couple and they bit his feet. I came to look and fortunately I noticed them before I stepped on a column of them, because I too was just wearing my flip flops. These things can bit too. I got bit by a few when I was at Karika the other day. They had a bunch of them there that had a few paths across the road and I was trying to get pictures, and in the process got too close and got bit a few times. The kids there thought it was really funny to see me jumping around trying to get my sandals off and get those biting things of my feet. The were laughing like crazy, and first it made me kind of mad, but then I had to admit to myself that I would of been doing the same thing if I were them. I probably made a pretty funny sight jumping all around trying to take my sandals off. The pain was worth it though because I got a few good pictures of them. Tonight there were way to many of them for me even to think about getting pictures, unless I had been wearing my work boots with jeans and my jeans tucked into my socks, I wouldn’t of been will to go near to the area. Especially since it was only the little army ants I got bit by and they hurt. There are also these huge army ants that guard the little ones and these ones have jaws that are as big as the rest of it’s body!

Well tomorrow we plan on going to the internet so hopefully if there aren’t any interruptions we should be able to hook up. I have to teach again tomorrow at church. I am going to be covering the Law of God, and the Sabbath. It should be an intersting topic to teach. Hopefully I can condense it all down so I can do it in an hour, because since the meetings start at 6:00 PM and after 7:00 PM it gets too dark to read my bible, I have to have it done by that time. If I don’t, since the church doesn’t have lights, we will have to continue it on Friday night.

The desk project is almost done all we have to do is build the 20 desks in Karika and we’ll be done with the 180 desk that we’ll be building. I’m looking forward to being done with that and not have to be worrying about getting that done. After we are done with the desk project we’ll start working earnestly on the fence, so the goats won’t be able to get in and eat all of our little trees that we’ve worked so hard planting.

Alas I am wounded!: Video

2008-05-21T22:00:00.003-04:00

Right after I cut my finger on the circular saw...

Just Stuff: Photos

2008-05-19T11:32:00.000-04:00

More pictures posted, click link on the left.

Just stuff

2008-05-19T10:33:00.001-04:00

May 16, 2008

I was going to write last night, but I didn't get to bed until late so I didn't feel like staying up even later. Walter and I got talking around the campfire, and time flew and before we knew it, it was 10:30!

My finger is getting a lot better I don't have to have a splint on it any more, and I'm even starting to be able to move it. I can actually use it to type, so I'm back up to being able to type nearly as fast as I could with my finger in completely healed shape. It is all scabbed up, so it is really stiff, but I can still bend I about a quarter of the way down, which is enough to hit the key's on my keyboard.

Yesterday Walter and I worked on putting holes in all the fence posts so we can string up more wire, so the goats can't get thru it and eat all of our baby plants. We took the welder and used it to make the holes, and besides Walter getting burned a couple times nothing tragic happened. I really wanted to weld, but it is kind of hard with my hand not being completely functional.

After that we went to the bank and used the internet. I was glad to check my email, and stuff. My mom has been sending me all kinds of advice on my finger, so I read all of those, and it sounds like I'm doing the right thing.

I KILLED THE MOUSE!!! I'm so happy that I finally got that rascal. The way it happened was I woke up around 5 in the morning and got up to go to the bathroom when suddenly, I saw the mouse running up the wall. I quickly grabbed the bamboo pole by the door and got ready to smack it if I got the chance. That was when the mouse made a strategic mistake. Instead of running into the other room via the cpace in between the wall and the roof it ran on to the wire running to our light bulb and just sat there looking at me. It was then a piece of cake to hit him off the wire, stun him, and then kill him once he fell to the floor. I took a picture of him afterwards. I have to admit he was a quite little mouse. He had a tale that wast twice as long as his body.

I had quite a scary experience… at least until I figured out the reason. After I killed the mouse I went back to bed, and was on that verge of wakefulness, and sleep when suddenly the air was filled with the sound of bursts of machine gun fire! I jumped and though "what in the world, it must be the LRA (Lords resistance Army) or something" Then I dawned on me, it wasn't some fight, it was a celebration. Today is the 25th anniversary of the SPLA (Sudan People Liberation Army), and the the fight for freedom of South Sudan. I'm glad I came to that conclusion, other wise I don't think I would of slept the rest of the night. I wouldn't of know that except yesterday we got a letter from the SRRC Secretary inviting us to the celebration in the morning.

The Celebration was booooooorrrrrrriiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnngggggggggg. All they did was have a bunch of speeches which I couldn't understand, but at least they gave us free sodas that was something at least. All the army guys from here were there. On my way to the place we were going to sit, I passed a soldier that was on gaurd with a huge machine gun all loaded and ready to go. If you don't like loaded weapons pointed towards you don't come to Sudan. None of the Soldiers that were doing security ever paid attention which way their gun, which was slung on their back was pointed. Half the time it was pointed at people standing around, instead of being pointed in the air! One guy on guard duty was seriously armed. He was carrying a machine gun with probably a 150 round clip, and he had an extra line of cartridges slung over his shoulder and wound a couple times around his waist. I wish I could of taken pictures, but here you can't take pictures of anything related to the government or Army.

While we were at the meeting Walter started getting chills, and has now confirmed it is Malaria. He hasn't been feeling really good the last couple days, but didn't think it was Malaria, but today after he started having the chills and stuff, he took Malaria medicine and is now sleeping up in their hut where there is a breeze, because it is so hot today.

This time of the year is supposed to be cooler than February and March, but it has only been getting hotter. And even though this is supposed to be rainy season it hasn't rained for 1 ½ weeks, and we are in desperate need of it. It's almost like the seasons have been reversed. It rained more when we got here in March which was dry season than it is now. I guess that's what we should expect though, because Jesus said that one of the signs of his coming would the erratic weather patterns.

Fortunately, Tyson feels well enough to preach tonight so I don't have too. He is going to be doing a study answering the question "If God is so loving why is there so much bad in the world?" He already preached it once, but he is going to show people tonight how to give this study to others, since this is one of the questions that I run into most from people who aren't Christians, and even people who are. Then he is going to preach the same Sermon tomorrow at the prison! So Tyson is going to have this one sermon almost completely memorized!

May 18, 2008

We had a great time yesterday. In the morning I went to church, and as usual didn't understand a single thing that was said, but I tired to listen for a while then I read my Bible instead. It was blazing hot in Church. I remember every summer in the states hearing people complain about how hot it is in church. You have no idea what hot is until you come here. Try packing in about 200 people into a room that is about 30 feet by 50 feet, and then have the sun shine on the metal roof. It gets crazy hot, and yesterday was especially hot. I almost got up and left in the middle because I felt like throwing up, but I prayed that God would help me feel better, and he did so I was able to make it thru the service.

Yesterday afternoon Tyson and I went to the prison to preach. It was good. The sermon Tyson spoke was really good, and easy to understand. We had to walk, because Jared is still in Arua and he of course has the Cruiser. It was good exercise, but it was so hot, that it was kind of annoying. It is about a 1 ½ miles to the prison. The Pastor was supposed to interpret for us, but he went to Lui and never told us so when we went to where we were supposed to meet him, and found out he wasn't here, we we wondered what to do. Eventually we just decided to go, and hope that we could find someone to interpret in town on our way to the prison. Fortunately we were able to find one of the Church members in town who was able to interpret for us.

Besides that we didn't do to much yesterday. Walter still is trying to recover from Malaria, and Tyson is as well. My finger is getting a lot better I can now bend it about half of the way, so I'm quite pleased about that. I don't know how long it will take to completely heal, but hopefully it doesn't take too long.

Today we are going to start working on the desk project again. We've kind of had it on hold because of everyone being sick, but today Tyson and I are going to start working on them. I don't think that I'll be able to cut because I don't want to get a bunch of sawdust and stuff in my finger, but I can at least plane the boards and drill the holes in them. I can also build now, so that will really help when we go to Karika, because Walter, and Jared aren't really fast at building desks yet, because they haven't built very many, so it usually ends up that Tyson and I end up building about 8 or 9 each and Walter and Jared build 4 each. They're getting faster though, so they'll probably be able to build more this coming time.

Later:

Well I actually ended up cutting today. Walter slashed all morning in the blazing sun even though I told him it probably wasn't a good idea right after having Malaria. After slashing for an hour or so he didn't feel good so he wasn't able to help with the desk today. The cutting wasn't bad at all, I kept my hands out of the way that's for sure, one cut on my hand is good enough. It didn't bother my finger at all, I actually think it helped it to move it around and use my hands. It now is all scabbed up and I can bend it about half way now, so I'm really pleased with the results so far. I've been praying every day that God would help it heal well and quickly and so far he is answering that prayer! Tyson and I were able to get another 10 desks done today by ourselves. That was a really good days work for just the two of us. We only have another 30 desks to cut and we'll be done. YEAH!!!

This afternoon after lunch we were taking a little break in the shade before we started working again, and Jogo came to us asking us if we had medicine because he had a headache. Walter gave him a Tylenol, and told him to take it easy. I told him to go drink water, because he was dehydrated. He had been working in the sun all day and hadn't drank any water the entire time he had been working in the 100+ degree heat. He told me he didn't like drinking water, but I told him that he had too or the medicine wouldn't work (true in the sense that it won't fix the problem). He drank a cup but that was all, next time he comes asking for medicine, he's going to have to drink 5 glasses of water before I give it to him, unless something is noticeably wrong.

We had a fabulous meal tonight. Walter wanted to cook it so we let him, and let me tell you he did a great job. He fried a bunch of onions until they were clear then he put in the fry chick and heated it up. While he was doing that he had Citi make some rice that we bought specifically for this meal, then we put the fry chick on the rice. WOW it was good!!! I think I ate it too fast even thought I was trying to savour every mouth full! It was a welcome treat to just bean and Oongaly which is all we have been eating for the last couple days. I wish that we had more of it, but Jared should be home tomorrow night so hopefully if he remembered, he brought some good food back with him.

Malaria season has started. You can get Malaria any time of year, as we have discovered, but now that it is rainy season the mosquitos are starting to come out with a fury. Before now I never really bothered about putting on long sleeves or pants, just because there were never any mosquitos around, but now I'm starting to see them so I think even though it is hot at night I'm going to have to start wearing a long sleeve and pants when I'm not under my mosquito net.

The other day I saw a really sobering scene. We were driving home from the bank, and were talking and laughing together, when in front of us we saw a procession of 4 or 5 women walking down the road, the on in the front carrying a bundle and crying at the top of her lungs. It took me a minute to figure it out, but then it dawned on me, she was carrying her baby that had died, and they were taking him/her to the grave. It reminded me how fragile life is here. It's nothing compared to being in the states. Here where we are there are no real medical facilities, so there isn't much people can do when they get sick. During the month of November (worst month for Malaria), I've been told many babies die from Malaria. Seeing that made me all the more want to come back here with medical experience and help these people out.

OCI already has money raised for building a clinic here, but they don't know anyone who is willing to come out here and run it. I'm not going to school to become a doctor, but even with the limited medical knowledge I'll have as a Paramedic, and with whatever other medical stuff I'll be able to learn, I'll be able to help these people out a ton. We are all praying that we'll be able to find someone who would be willing to come out here and run a clinic. I wouldn't be easy to live out here full time I can tell you that. Even just being out here for the last 9 weeks, has been difficult at times. It has it's rewards, but it also has it's hardships, and it is only thru having a relationship with Christ that I have been able to make it thru a few times.