Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Week two-ish.

Well, hopefully I will be able to keep up on this blog more now that I feel like I have a schedule. We will have a lot of free time in the afternoon which is great and lame at the same time. Great because I have more time to write and take pictures but bad because if I don’t have anything to do I will just sit around or go to Penny and eat. I’m hoping I can find more stuff to do around here.

So we had our first normal weekend in Herrnhut and we all did our own thing. Saturday I sort of slept in. Around 10:45 a group of us went on a photo adventure. There is an abandoned ware house 15 minutes away from town and it was beautiful. I love that God can create something so beautiful out of something so broken. It was so good to walk around and explore. I spent an hour and half there and then walked back to town to just hang out. I cleaned the room, organized a little bit, and did my laundry. It was such a great feeling to have my laundry done- my refugee camp clothes did not smell too great :) The rest of the day I spent at the apartment and I watched Harry Potter (thank goodness BH loves HP as much as I do!)

Sunday I woke up and hung out with Joyce in the room and listened to a podcast from Mars Hill. I’m glad they have them available even though it makes me miss home. I then walked to the castle and waited patiently for my mom to get on Skype ;) FINALLY she did and even though the connection sucked, it was great to talk to her. I’m hopefully going to get internet at home soon so I can Skype in the comforts of my own room. Here’s to hoping! After skyping I had dinner and walked back home because I was feeling sick. A lot of people at the castle and the apartment are sick. Makes me miss my mom, even though she never made me soup when I was sick ;)

And then starts week two. I can’t believe I’ve only been here for a week, it seems like it’s been forever since I’ve got here. For lecture today we listened to a story from one of our school leaders and a past student. They spoke about their DTS outreach experience in Ethiopia. They and their team went to Ethiopia to help a native tribe leader and his tribe. They practiced an age old custom concerning a ‘witch craft’ practice called mingee. When a child has mingee they are killed. There are three ways a child can have mingee: they were born out of wedlock, their parents didn’t tell the tribe they were trying to have a child and then conceived, and when a toddler’s teeth came in the bottom first, not the top. They then would either throw the baby in the river for the alligators to eat, lock them in a hut until they died, or (in the case of toddlers) tied them to a tree for a wild animal to eat. Wow, what a way to start out a story. My heart immediately broke for the children and their parents. I couldn’t imagine standing by as tribe leaders left kids out in the wild to be eaten. KT told us that more than 300 children were killed in a year. Is your heart broken yet? Because mine crumbled when she said that.

Her and her team then felt the Lord telling them that they needed to go and help this tribe because a child was going to die in the next two days. Long story short, they saved this child from being killed. Along with a total of 5 children just that trip. They also set up an orphanage while they were there for the children rescued from this horrifying practice. In three years 25 children have been saved. Even more wonderful is that the hearts of the tribe have started to change. They are starting to realize that maybe this practice isn’t the best. Unfortunately, a church from California came in for a mission trip and ended up taking over the orphanage the YWAM team started. A lot of things can be accomplished when you have money. The church ended up leaving the orphanage and since then KT and a couple of people from that original team have been trying to re-establish that trust they had.

These stories make me want to go out and do great things. I guess that's what is supposed to happen, right?

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