Time for Outreach!

We’ve officially finished the theoretical phase of the DTS and tomorrow the Outreach begins. Today I’m getting a haircut, packing for the next ten weeks (I’m not bringing much so expect to see me wearing the same clothes in all the upcoming pictures, and expect to see that uniform A LOT), and saying goodbyes to the half the kids that I won’t be seeing until we get back. Yesterday we went over our itinerary and I thought I’d share with you what we’ll be doing:

March 19th – 26th
We’re going to a very small town called Mantellis in Chile, near the city of San Fernanda. We were able to procure plane tickets to Ecuador at a cheaper price by only spending exactly 2 months in the country, therefore the first and last weeks of the 10 week Outreach will be in Chile. Apparently there are less than a dozen houses in this city and our team will be living together in an adobe hut in the mist of a huge apple orchard. This initial week does not seem very organized to me; we don’t have anything really planned except lots of personal time with our Bible, intercessory prayer, and exercises to build team unity. I’ve been discovering that reading my bilingual new testament out loud in Spanish has been helping conjugate verbs better and learn many new words so during this week I plan on doing a lot of reading if I can. Obviously God has this first week set up like this for a reason and I think it will be a good for our team.

March 27th
We’re heading to Santiago Chile to catch our 3PM flight to Quito, Ecuador. I think it will take roughly 9 hours to get there with the layover and once we arrive we’ll be received by the family of one of our base’s teachers.

March 28th – April 3rd
This first week is still up in the air. We’ll either be going to a town called Ombato or staying in Quito.

April 4th – 17th
We’re headed to an extremely hot coastal town right on the equator called Esmeraldas. We’ll be partnered with a church named Alcanzando Los Nacions and they’ve received a YWAM team before so we’re expecting to be living in different church members houses. Word on the street is that the stay YWAM team that went here worked like crazy because the pastor of this church gave them a million projects to do.

April 18th – May 1st
For these two weeks we’ll be in a small suburb of Quito named Calderon; the weather here is apparently like Miami, unpredictable and tropical. We’ll be partnered with a small 20 person church named Plentitude de Vida. They’ve never received a YWAM team before and our leaders told us that they’re very small and “uneducated”. In this town we’ll all be living together again (I’m guessing in sleeping bags in the church but hopefully not).

May 2nd – 15th
This block of time will be spent in a larger church in San Carlos, Quito, named Advancia. This church has received many YWAM teams in the past and it’s expected to be much more structured and organized. We’ll be living with church families here, and possibly going to a museum that’s located in the very middle of the world where you can do all kinds of crazy experiments like balance an egg on the point of a nail and watch how water how water flushes in different directions even though they’re only 5 feet apart on either side of the equator. If we go I get some video footage of this stuff. It’s been stressed to us a lot in this last week before the outreach starts that we are missionaries (NOT tourists) but apparently this is a place they like bringing YWAM teams to so I’m excited we’ll get to check it out.

May 16th – 26th
We’ll be leaving Quito again to a small town of 150 people called Pechinca in Santa Domingo. This place sounds like it’ll be quite the adventure, again it will be extremely hot and this time we’ll be in the jungle; washing our clothes and our bodies in the river. Don’t expect to see any blog updates during this segment of our trip but there are sure to be plenty of photo opportunities while we volunteer as teachers in one of their elementary school and work with famers as they harvest their crops of exotic fruits.

May 27th – June 6th
On the twenty-seventh we’ll be flying back to Chile, and while it hasn’t been determined yet how we’ll be spending these last days rumor has it we’ll be working with a church in Santiago.

June 7th – 10th
We’ll return to Pichilemu for a time of debriefing and classes on how to return to our home countries and avoid reverse-culture shock. The DTS graduation is scheduled for the night of 9th.

I’m honestly pretty intimidated by all of this, I’m not looking forward to living out of a backpack for so long and even the leaders have warned us about a “wall” that everyone hits on the outreach where you feel like you can’t keep going. I do however feel like God’s been reminding me this week that He’ll be more close to me in this time than He’s ever been before in my entire life, and that even though I can still sort of remember how tired I was in Rancagua, the blessings I received there and the things I learned far outweighed the inconveniences. I’d been praying that I would receive a specific word for the outreach and even though it’s a bit of a classic I still coincidently read it this morning during my quiet time (the day before the outreach, what are the odds since I started from Acts to Romans one chapter a day)

Romans 12:11-12 “11 Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. 12 Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.

Obedience was the key lesson learned in Rancagua and I pulled it off, but that was only for 10 days… let’s see how I do for 10 weeks. Everyone I’ve ever talked to whose done a DTS has told me that the meatiest part is always the outreach; this is the time where I’m supposed to learn the most Spanish and see the miracles. This is what we’ve been gearing up for the last 3 months and now it’s game time.

Pictures from my last couple days in Pichilemu for a while:

Had to say goodbye to my favorite morning buddy and to a couple of puppies that have been following me around for the last couple of weeks that I had to finally get a picture of.

Had a little BBQ last night but I didn’t stick around for the food. Instead I went to an English language worship night that was happening at the pool; it was a big blessing everyone laid hands on us and prayed.

Thank you Chloe Anderson for the free haircut(And the rest of the Anderson family pictured below)! I haven’t been very photogenic for the last couple weeks but hopefully I get some better pictures on the outreach :)