Day two in Abaco by Amelia Boender, a student with Pella Christian’s team
Well, the start of this grand journey did not go as planned for me. As we got to camp the reality of being away from my family and friends sank in. I was very homesick and am finally today starting to get rid of the headaches and am able to keep my food down after meals. When I keep busy then I think less and that really helps so I’ve been trying my best to go out and do things even when I feel drained and tired. Today when we got to the church we started painting and got our assignments to start out with for the day. I started out with painting. We take breaks about every hour to drink water and just rest from the work and the heat.
During these times we have people talk to us about their life stories and how they got to where they are today. JD and his wife Sue talked to us about their life before ministry and Sue’s story really helped me. She talked about how she was deployed to Afghanistan and that it was not really a beautiful place. The dirt was like super fine cocoa powder she said and the place where she was staying was trashy and did not have a good smell because they burned all the waste and trash. One day as she was walking out the door she noticed a little flower that was starting to grow under the air conditioning because of the water drip. This really inspired me because she helped me see that you need to look for the beauty even in the ugly. She later talked to me personally and we went on a walk and just talked and prayed and that really helped with my homesickness. The rest of the day was really good. Later in the day me and a couple girls got to go with Laura and Lisa to pick up some kids from school. It was really cool to drive through parts of the town and just see what had already been fixed and what was still being worked on. When we got to the school we stood outside and waited for them to come out, it was really fun and we even had a couple kids walk up to us and talk. We had 7 kids come back with us to camp. We played games and had lots of fun before we went inside and had devotions and supper. After that we dropped the kids off and we sang so many songs along the way which was super awesome and made my day even better. We then did our little booklets with our groups and sang more songs and now people are slowly starting to go to bed and who knows what. As much as this trip is growing on me, I think I’m going to stick to Iowa with the crazy weather and corn.
