Last Weekend...

After a 4 ½ -hour bus ride, we spent 2 hours at a dim clinic playing thumb wars with kids and dodging racial comments while waiting for our turn for outreach immunizations. At 4pm we finally headed up the narrow mountain road as far as our bus driver dared to carry us. It takes tremendous skill and guts to drive the road through those mountain villages with blind turns and drop-offs and potholes and crazy drivers. Most of the people who drive there disconnect their speedometers so they can claim that it’s “broken” and get out of speeding tickets.

Steve gave the final back-out option, pointing to the dark clouds overhead before we loaded off the bus and onto the dirt path near the river bed. And upward we trotted as the rain came down. Night fell on us within an hour.

It was a grueling four-something hours with hardly any stops until the ranger’s station at Portland Gap and it’s a good thing it was too dark to see the incline of the trail. No wonder my legs were screaming at me half way up. We reached the ranger’s station sometime in the night and crashed on the bunks until the dreaded alarm woke us up at 2:30 in the morning. More uphill.

And it was all worth it for this…

Lisa & Em (she's on the Gambia team)

Em & Shane (he's on The Gambia team, too).Then down amidst the coffee-growing slopes in daylight. We met some guys from Vancouver who were as high as a kite. We purchased coffee while they bought marijuana, the other thing Blue Mountain is famous for, great weed. Later, we met a Rastafarian who insisted that George Bush is the devil.

The trip was exhausting yet rejuvenating and thankfully just what I needed. I still feel I am in my element when I’m hiking. I see God’s might in a mountain and His tenderness in a flower. It was a sweet time to bond with the students who came. Every once in a while I remember that I’m like 5 years older than most of them and then I think, “Hmm. Weird.”

4 minutes

Hi Everyone!

Thanks for coming to my blog again...it has been a challenging couple of weeks. I am learning about grace and humility and Philippians 3:7-14 has come alive to me in new way. More on these later...

Our outreach team is doing well. We've been visiting orphanages, doing puppet shows and songs with the kids, etc. I'm eager for us to develop as a team, especially when we go on our local outreach in mid-December.

My fundraising is coming along for the Gambia trip with some gifts and some pledges, thank you so much! I'm still looking for people to commit to particular days for prayer. Oh, and since our dates have changed a little and all the flights from here to London are booked through mid-January, the last ticket an agent quoted me was $4896 per person, yikes! I'm confident we'll find something cheaper eventually.

Tomorrow we are taking the jolting, up-and-down journey to Kingston for those who need yellow-fever shots and then we're off to hike Blue Mountain over the weekend. It should be adventurous with 3 of us staff and 12 students trekking up the arduous road/trail from riverbed to peak with a chance of thundershowers on both days. I'm still banking on a spectacular sunrise.

I'll let you all know how it goes when I get back!

Peace,
Em =0)

Here we are on our bus ride to Mandeville a couple of weeks ago. Someone usually has to stand up at the back and secure the luggage on the downhills. One time last year I was sitting at the back and a duffel bag came hurling at my head as the driver braked at the bottom of the driveway. It's always a tight fit but at least there's air conditioning!






Ian chased down this pufferfish and caught it with his hands in Negril! It looks normal until gets scared and then it blows up with all its spikes sticking out. Poor little guy must've been terrified with all of us peering at it. Ian is a student from Wisconsin who loves marine biology He knows all about all the creatures we find in the sea and he always manages to find the coolest ones. I poked this fish's lips. They felt gummy.






This is the view from the Great House at Stone's Hope around 5:30am. I have my best mornings up there.












Here is my smallgroup. Clockwise from the bottom: Kathryn, Ashley, Judith, Breanne and Nicoline. We get together to talk about what they're learning and going through. I also get to hang out with each of them one on one every week to process with them a little deeper.















Stone's Hope YWAM Campus in Mandeville. This is the place that got torn apart in hurricane Ivan in 2004. Still much to do but it has come a long way thanks to God's provision through the many teams that have come to help rebuild.







Kathy-Kay gets dunked. We had baptisms at the pool last month.










Check again soon, there are more pictures to come!