Now, for the stories I'm sure you've been longing to hear:

Our second day in the Amazons our group and another group loaded up all of our bags and all 12 of us and got into one small boat to travel about an hour and a half down the river. It involved many of us and many of our things getting wet. Then we arrived in a community where they speak an native language and Portuguese. We couldn’t really understand the woman in the house where we were staying and her husband, the pastor, seemed to change his mind frequently about what we were doing and what we shouldn’t do. There’s nothing like stepping off on the right foot! Our team had a series of unfortunate embarrassing moments there. Des happened to walk out the back door, which was the way to the bathroom, to find the pastor’s wife there… right there, bathing. Another night Stephanie was talking to the man of the house and his little daughter Sara runs up and throws her arms around Steph’s legs, resulting in her pants falling slightly…

For a while it has been Stephanie’s dream to hold a monkey. She had an opportunity, actually two. The first time she is holding it and I’m petting it’s head. It took a good 3 minutes to decide that we actually were the enemy and it needed to go into defense mode. AKA pee on Steph’s shirt which actually is borrowed. So, she had high hopes for the second chance she got to hold a monkey. Different monkey, different community, different country actually. It still peed on her shirt, and again, it wasn’t even her shirt.

Later in the outreach, in Macedonia, Desteni and I were walking to the little store by the river and a man walked by us. Now, it’s the amazons so people walk by with fish all the time, some are alive and some less so. Well, Des and I were walking and I turn to look at the man passing us and ended up jumping right into Desteni when I saw he was carrying a baby alligator. I guess it was my bad for not expecting to see one.

The last epic takes place in Macedonia, where there is no electricity. So we use candles after 6:00. Our team was helping with an event for pastors in the area and so there were a lot of people sleeping in the building we also were sleeping in. Since we all had to be at the devotional at 5 am, showers were going to be a problem. Thinking ahead, we decided to get up at 3am, shower, and then go back to bed. Desteni got up first and then would wake the next girl up. When it was my turn, I sat up in bed and felt like I was entering into some weird horror movie, I even got goose bumps. Now what you should know about Desteni is that when she goes to sleep she lays on her back, places her hands on top of the blankets on top of her stomach, smiles at the ceiling, and sleeps. Desteni at this point has gone back to sleep (picture that in your head), but left two candles lit so we can see. She placed one candle on each corner of the head of her bed. I have never seen a site that looked so much like corpse in that dim light. I was scared to check if she was still breathing or not, and then I remembered that I’m an adult and a counselor and a missionary and deal with tarantulas and peeing monkeys, so of course I can deal with my pasturing sleeping with candles at her head. However, if I had had a mirror to talk into I might have been forced to give myself self-counseling, but I’m sure that would have been even more creepy to the other girls than Desteni sleeping in the first place.

The things you learn on outreach!

I will be back in the states from December 10th until January 12th. I can’t wait for Christmas, cold and all! And a late Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!