So, we're finishing week 3 in Ireland, and outreach will be over! We fly back to Biarritz on Saturday, and have a final debrief week there, then I will be heading home.
Dublin, where we have been for the last 2 weeks.
Hiked here, this was in Rostrevor, and we joined their ywam base for a week of teaching.
The balcony of our Dublin apartment, booked with airbnb. Small, 2 rooms for the 6 of us, but really nice.
More of Dublin.
So yeah, we spent our first of three weeks in Ireland in Rostrevor, staying with the Ywam base there. It was great, we heard teaching from possibly my favorite speaker to date, Stefan, from South Africa. Enjoyed what he taught and how he spoke so much. It was a great week for our team to sort of refresh and re-connect with Ywam. Great week.
The past week and a half, we have been working with 2 main groups of people. One is with a church called St. Catherines, and with an afterschool homework club.
What is really cool is that we had no plan, and no ministry connections before coming here. I think we got here on a Saturday, and so the next day we went to the nearest church which was St. Catherine's. We tried to make any connections we could to see if any ministries were in need of some people, or anything we could do. We got connected to a guy named Paddie, who was super stoked to have us, as he said they were about to cancel their Kidz Club at the church that afternoon, because they didn't have enough volunteers. So we have helped with that Sunday club on sundays, and it has been good. One of the women that helped Paddie, was helping run this homework club in another part of town, and we got connected to her, and every day for the past week and a half we have been helping kids with homework, and playing around with them with this ministry at this community center. The kids are between grade 2-grade 7ish. They are really great kids and I've really enjoyed spending time with them. It's interesting to see the different types of kids that we have worked with. In Marseille, the children were on the difficult side, and also had the toughest lives, with incredibly big families and very low incomes. The kids usually get married at around 16-17 and start the process all over again. It's sad, but Deborah has an amazing ministry and is changing lives, week by week. In Bosnia, I found the kids hard as well, partly because i had 0 of of the language, and they didn't seem as open as the kids in Marseille, and because they were older and more difficult to connect with personally. The Marseille kids were rambunctious and crazy, but younger and I could communicate with them at least! And now in Dublin, the kids seem very open, super easy to connect with, a lot of them have super bad language and call you and each other all sorts of stuff, but in general they are really good kids.
It's surreal that outreach is almost over, that DTS is almost over. But it has gone pretty slowly for me, which is good, and I'm pretty ready to make the move back home.
Thank you for all your continued support and prayers.
For now, our team could use prayer to finish up strong, and that the last week in Biarritz would be awesome. Also for guidance in my next step, not sure what I am doing after coming back home.
Thanks!
