We Survived!

This is me on the boat ride on the way back to Iquitos. As you can see, I survived our first trip up the river with only one or two (million..) bug bites! Don't worry, I've kept up with my malaria pills so I probably won't die even though my skin looks pretty awful.

I also survived translation! It wasn't as horrible as I expected. I even enjoyed it at times. God spoke to me a lot through those times, and I feel like my confidence as a public speaker has grown a TON. I think God really wants to use that in the future which is intimidating for me but apparently I'm a lot more capable than I give myself credit for. Of course I spent a lot of time making up words I didn't quite know and making a fool of myself but I asked God for a good dose of humility before I went up there each time so I didn't beat myself up about it. Actually it made for some good laughs with the youth that were listening every once in a while :)

So like I said in my last blog, we dug our first well in the community of MonteVerde. We were able to bless them with that and also spent 4 days doing a youth camp sharing teachings -on Purpose, Intercession/Prayer, the Father Heart of God, Committment, and Missions-, performed and taught them how to do dramas, Waldir (YWAM Iquitos staff) led worship, we watched a movie called Fireproof which I actually enjoyed a lot, and we had an awesome dance party to end the whole thing on the last night. It was a really good time and we built really solid relationships with the kids/teens there, we laughed a lot and taught them words in English like... monkey. Reason being = we ate monkey twice.  It was quite the experience! Don't worry, I have pictures of that too :)

Anyways, it was a pretty sweet trip. We'll have a couple days of rest now, then another week of working with a church here in Iquitos. Not sure what we'll be doing yet, but soon enough we'll be leaving for our second river trip! Then home!

Some general prayer requests for the team.
Sickness has been going around again and as you can see there's plenty of itchy bug bites, so physical healing for us would be awesome.
Continued prayer for team unity and love and patience for each other.
And that we would be more than willing to let God use us in ways that will stretch us out of our comfort zones!

Thank you guys so much for all the encouragement as I've been here and for your continued prayers. It means the world!
Chau until next time!