Quite The Adventure So Far ... :)

I don’t even know where to start right now! I’m just SO excited to be here!! Things have been going really well, and it’s been quite the adventure – I love it!

I guess I should start at the beginning. The trip getting here was quite the ordeal. I left Dayton at 10:50am, arrived in Chicago at 10:40am (haha time change), sat for about 5 hours and then found another intern. Shortly thereafter, we met up with the rest of the intern team. The flight to Frankfurt was long….. sooo long, but we made it… 2am our time and 7am theirs! After that, it was another 4 hour layover and a 9 hour flight. We arrived in Abuja, Nigeria at 7:45pm, eventually made it through immigration and customs, grabbed our bags and found our ride.

That night, we stayed at the Baptist house in Abuja and made the “3” hour drive the next day. After arriving at the B2B house, we made peanut butter sandwiches, had a mini meeting and went to visit the future site of the B2B campus. To do this, we hiked up this mountain made of boulders – it was so awesome! The view was breathtaking! Cori gave us each these beautiful handmade journals to log in while we talked to God and reflected on things thus far. A bunch of kids from the village also swarmed us on the mountain and just wanted to chat. They mostly spoke Hausa with a tiny bit of English. We’ll be working with them more this week.

I was on dish duty with Sara which was a whole ordeal in and of itself – it’s so crazy what you have to do when you can’t drink the water! We would wash and rinse dishes in one sink and bleach/sanitize them in another before letting them dry.

To hang out, we played squidge (or group solitaire) and then attempted to send emails to people letting them know we arrived safely.

Also – really fun fact: we have a guard dog named Rocky. Because of this, we are not allowed to be outside while he is on patrol – how crazy!

That brings us up to today –

Today we did a lot of training. We played get to know you games all morning, including human foosball. Then we went over house rules and went to the Guckenberger’s for lunch. While we were there, a mass storm rolled in – total downpour! However, it really cooled things down and was very refreshing

Later, we went to the CLAPAI house (formerly known as CLAF). It’s a school for kids who have been affected by HIV or AIDS. Some of them are orphans, some have the disease, others know people or are directly related to people who have it. There are about 20 kids. A few come to the school daily while others live there throughout the week. They’re really sweet kids who LOVE visitors. As soon as we got there, they grabbed our hands and led us around. It sounds like we will be spending much more time with them – I just hope I’m able to master all of their names! In the short time we were there, another storm rolled in – the weather is so fickle here haha

A really cool moment at the CLAPAI house was when the Ramos family was able to present a bunch of toys and stickers and rewards in a “treasure chest” to the kids. They were also able to give some boxes of muffin mix and formula to help out the staff. The most amazing part about all of these things was that everything was purchased with money that the Ramos boys received instead of birthday presents.

When we got back to the house, we (the interns) learned how to make water that’s safe to drink. It’s quite the process too! This was one of my favorite activities today – I think it was because this was one of our first big intern group efforts.

I’ve been really enjoying things so far – it’s so different here than anything I’m used to. We can drink the water, the electricity may or may not work at any given time, the water also decides when it wants to work or have any pressure. Grocery stores are literally nonexistent. There are so many quirks to everything.

I’m sorry this post is so very long. I figured it’s been a while and a lot has happened since I got here. I feel like a little kid, just constantly wide-eyed, trying to take it all in!!

I hope you are all doing well, and if you would like to email me, I suggest using Dizzygymnast4now@aol.com …. My emich address isn’t working, but I’d love to hear from you!