Papua New Guinea!

These two weeks we have been back on base have absolutely flown by and yet again we are saying our goodbyes, but for a month and a half this time! :( In about 48 hours time, my team will be heading to the airport to fly to Papua New Guinea. Even now, we're not quite sure what we are going to be doing, but I'm positive it will be nothing short of an adventure. Please be praying for our safety and that God does some great things in the time we are there! We won't have computers or internet, so I'll be talking to you guys in 6 weeks!

Hope, it is a glorious certainty

OUTREACH!!! Man oh man, wow oh wow. What an experience!! Outreach was incredible, but it's also so great and refreshing to be back on base and not have to pack our things up every other day. The second two weeks that I haven't gotten the chance to write about were fantastic. We left the little town of Middlemount on Sunday afternoon and had a full day of driving. We stopped for the night in a town called Gympie and crashed at one of our girl's sister's house. The next morning we finished our drive and ended up in Brisbane. That whole week, we stayed on another YWAM base called Island Breeze. The vast majority of the people there were from the Pacific islands like Samoa, Fiji, Vanuatu, etc. I don't think I've ever been exposed to that amount of culture all at once and it was so much fun. All the islanders were so kind and hospitable to us the whole time we were there. Their base had so much open space with trees and nature everywhere and they even had sheep, pigs, and cows, with the occasional kangaroo hopping past. The whole week was really relaxing and such a nice contrast to the chaotic first week. Throughout the week, we spoke at a few different schools and youth groups and met some awesome kids. It was encouraging to see how excited the kids got. After one of the programs, a group of girls ran up to us, spilling over with ideas of fundraisers they could do to raise money for Not For Sale against human trafficking! So cool. This week was also really important for us as a team. I felt like we became a lot more unified and I got a lot closer to everyone as a whole. We had some great life talks and in my opinion, there are few things that are better than that. It was just fantastic. We made some great friends there and had a lot of laughs. I miss them already! For our final week, our original plans fell through so we ended up driving even further south into New South Wales to a little town called Wauchope (pronounced War-hope), stopping in Byron Bay on the way, where we stayed at the same girl's parent's house! We did one church and school program, and the rest of the time, we spent in a town called Port Macquarie. We didn't have plans, but we would just walk around and talk to people and see how we could bless individuals or the whole town. We bought people coffee, gave out free hugs, picked up trash, and had good conversation. It was awesome to see that the second we became available and actually stepped out of our comfort zone and were open to conversation, people completely received it and were willing to be open to us too. Another highlight was having home cooked meals for that week, so delicious :) We finally began our drive home on Friday and drove all day Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, stopping to sleep in a hostel in Brisbane and a rest stop in the absolute middle of nowhere and arrived last night! All in all, it was quite the adventure, exhausting, amazing and rewarding. It was great to actually be out doing hands on stuff instead of just sitting in lectures, as beneficial as those all were. Now, we have 2 weeks on base before we head out to Papua New Guinea and I couldn't be more excited!!