AMAZING trek!

hello!


wowowowowowow. what a day we had on saturday.
it was called "amazing trek" - and amazing it was, but also hard and challenging and exhausting and disgusting and fun and bonding and everything in between.
we were told the night before that this race would start anywhere from 4-6 am on saturday morning, and that we should dress for the weather as this would be an all-day thing. we were going to be participating in our assignment teams - so just the 2 teams against each other! the prize was dinner out with your team, paid for by trek.


the next morning we all woke up at - you guessed it - 3:30am in order to be ready for 4, seeing as there was no wake up call and any delay on our team's part could result in loss.
after that we proceeded to do many tasks, most of them pretty difficult and all of them challenging in some way or another. the day was about 13.5h long in total, plus supper afterwards and debrief at my mentor's house! it was INSANE.
some of the events included:
 - eating lots of really gross food (look up "balut" and you'll get the idea; ewwww)
 - geocashing (which is pretty much finding a location by using a gps and a set of VERY specific coordinates) for a couple hours
 - eating at a sikh temple for lunch (that wasn't hard, that was awesome!!)
 - doing some puzzles - brain teasers, sudoku, crosswords, etc
 - building a fire to burn through a rope in order to get a bag of cooking supplies to cook a raw egg we'd been carrying around all day
we walked around the whole day to get to all our stations. we ended up walking something like 15k and were driven around a bit in the evening too. it doesn't sound so hard when i write it all out like this, but it was REALLY challenging. i wouldn't repeat the experience, but i did learn a lot about my team and working together. this was, i believe, the point of the day.


and now i am into week 4! this is crazy; it feels like i've been away from home for so long.. and at the same time, no time at all!!
this week we leave for a 4 day stay at a cabin on an island close to here! this will be so much fun; i LOVE LOVE LOVE cabins and being in nature and meeting God there! we get to take a ferry too, which i've never done! yay for more new experiences!! we may even get to do some painting/upkeep work at this cabin (the owners have graciously allowed us to stay for free!), which is exciting too :) i love painting!


i think the thing that i love most here is community. being with people all the time and loving them and getting to know them and learning from God's influence in their lives and all those things all rolled into one - i thrive on it. being able to know these people so deeply is such a blessing. God has so much to say to me through each and every person, and i love it!!!


we are also memorizing scripture here as a part of our every day. i am memorizing romans 12 and i have gotten through verses 1-15! i recite tomorrow, so that will be nerve wracking :P i'm looking forward to it though! memorizing scripture is so good for me; i should take more time in my every day life to do so... it's hard though you know? not that that is an excuse of any sort, but it unfortunately is why i don't.


tomorrow is our second team time! it is very exciting to begin training as a team and i am loving every minute of it! i will always appreciate prayer for our team and their dynamics as this is very new for me, as well as the rest of us!


ciao for now,
tejal :)