| | We are finally getting a breather after a very busy fall. After Anna Sophia's birth, we returned to La Mesa and began to work on final details for the coming RAD team in October. RAD is a program for young people who want to grow in the walk with Christ through community living, intentional discipleship experiences, and service/outreach in an international context. A team of five young women signed up to come to Colombia this year for 8 months. Some of the things we needed to organize on our end included visas, service assignments, Spanish classes, and host families. We had most of the host families lined up by September, but still needed to find some. Once we had all the families we did some orientation meetings with them to prepare them for the cross-cultural experience of having a North American live in their home. The final hurdle was getting a week of orientation activities planned for the RAD team once they arrived. We wanted them to get the introduction we never had! They learned about culture, safety, the political context, and the Mennonite Church of Colombia.
Since the team has been here, we've been meeting with them weekly to help them manage situations, share about their experience, and organize their service assignments. They are a great group. There have been times when we've been able to counsel or encourage them as issues come up. For example, one of them went through some homesickness a few weeks ago. Another had some issues with her host family. Overall, it's been a rewarding learning experience for ourselves.
But...
It has also made us really, really busy these last two months. I had to keep up his classes at school during all of this, plus new challenges have come up at both church and the Anapoima project. On top of that, I was taking another online class at Eastern Mennonite Seminary. It all kind of converged in a particularly stressful way the first week of December. There were some moments where I felt like I seriously could not handle all of the responsibilities I had. Thankfully, we were able to escape that weekend to a retreat with MCCers, and have become progressively less busy since then. It was a good reminder to plan and prioritize carefully for these final six months in Colombia. We don't want to burn ourselves out!
I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and New Year. We'll see if we can't update this page with a little more frequency in 2008... |
| | Posted 12/19/2007 11:56 PM - 25 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
- recommend
  - recs0
- share
- email
 - sent0
|
