Has it only been a week since my last post?!?

Seriously, I feel like it has been forever since last Tuesday. Here are some reasons:

- I got really sick last week. I was miserable. I laid in bed for 3 days, but it might as well have been 30. Yuck!!!

- My mom came to nurse me back to health. Seriously, she is awesome. We talked on Thursday morning at 4:30 my time since I had been up all night, and by evening she was here! It was such a blessing to have her here.

- We did a service project in downtown OKC on Saturday morning. We had 19 students show up to paint, sort, and organize clothing. The project was with a group called TEEM, which seeks to get people who are unemployed back on their feet. This includes GED classes, interview strategies (even interview clothes), computer classes etc.

This weekend is Easter, and RUF is doing a special Good Friday service. It will be held at a building on campus, with hymns and readings. I am really looking forward to celebrating Easter this weekend. Doug made a good point in stating today that Easter is one of the most important and yet under-celebrated holidays. Now that I think about it, I totally agree!

The second annual Norman Board Game Geek conference is this weekend. It will be at a local coffee shop. There is a group of students (and Doug) here that love strategy games. Saturday will be a full 12 hours of Agricola, Puerto Rice, Le Havre, Ticket to Ride, Dominion and many many more! I am definitely going to participate, but probably not for the entire time!

On an entirely non-ministry note, Chance is loosing his fur at a very rapid rate! Oh the pleasures of living in a state with such a cold winter. I think I am going to miss Furry Chance :)

Happy Easter Everyone! Christ has risen indeed!

Some Thoughts on Peru

Hello Friends!! Perhaps a more appropriate greeting would be "Hola, Amigos!" The OU RUF team of 13 has safely returned from Peru, leaving us all reflecting on the week we experienced, and what God is teaching us.

The images which I am struggling the most with, and I might even say are "haunting" me, are the following two. They are from the squatter village called "Clementina." If the squatters maintain this land for a year, then they are allowed to keep it under Peruvian law. Through these pictures hopefully you will realize that squatters are all in different stages of development. Some homes only have walls made of reed, tarp, and paper. Some have a tin roof. Some have cement walls. Some have dirt floors while others have stone floors. The missionaries told us that it may take as many as 15 years to go from a home made of reed to a home made of cement. This picture shows some of the more developed homes.

This picture, however, shows how primitive some of the homes are. I still have not come to terms with how these people are able to live in these houses. Regardless of the condition of the house, they take care of it. Even if they only have dirt floors, they still sweep them. I would be lying if I told you that these pictures make me want to move to Peru and help these people. These pictures made me uncomfortable, and made me long for the comfort of American life. I don't know what God would have me learn from this yet.
Peruvian food. Yum! Most meals were served with a large helping of rice, as pictured here. This particular dish was cooked by women at the mission. It is a Peruvian specialty, which includes beef and a version of the french fry.
A highlight of mission trips is always the team bonding. Here I am with Mary Rachel. She has just graduated from OU, and both her and her husband came on the trip. I loved getting to know them more!
Here are Josh, Megan, and me with some Peruvian children with Clementina. Interacting with these kids was wonderful. Even with my meager Spanish I was able to communicate what colors I thought would look good on their pictures, or talk about animals with them. I showed some of them pictures of Chance. I am not sure if they had ever seen a domesticated horse before, because they all seemed pretty confused by the pictures.
The picture below is one of the rooms of the church in Clementina. The building has walls and a roof, but no real floor. We helped prepare to dirt to eventually have stones laid. The residents of Clementina asked Peru Mission to plant a church in their area. This is a testament to the work of Peru Mission, and how the Peruvians recognize that the missionaries are seeking to serve the people in both practical and gospel-centered ways.
I am so grateful for the opportunity to go and serve in Peru. I loved seeing how God is restoring his broken world through this particular mission. I would love to talk more about this with you, especially since these were only highlights of the trip. Thank you for your prayers.

Cross-Cultural Experiences

My family moved to Sweden in March 1994. We moved to Soderhamn, where we were the only native English speakers. We knew no Swedish. This led to several interesting and very humorous experiences in the three and a half years we lived there.

Our first trip to the grocery store was memorable. Being fresh off the farm, my dad was still wearing his cowboy boots, cowboy hat and Dickies overalls. This caught the attention of many Swedish children who could not believe that the iconic American cowboy was there in their small town grocery store. Also, did I mention that my family is from Texas?!? This means one thing, that we are loud. So there we were, loud Texans in a very quiet, docile Swedish super market. No, those are not crickets you hear, it is my loud Texas family.

Since our first 24 hours in Sweden had already been filled with strange food, my parents attempted to buy things that were familiar to us. Tony the Tiger was one of them. I had never eaten Frosted Flakes in my life, and did not intend to start then, regardless of that Tiger's smiling face. I think that box of cereal was still in our cabinet when we moved. But I digress.

Not being able to read the language meant that my parents had to use other clues to figure out what things were. So, naturally, when my mom saw a carton with a purple woman on it, she assumed it was grape juice. When the contents were poured into a juice glass, it came out white. Since it was clearly not grape juice, she concluded it was milk and promptly poured it on my brother's cereal. It came out chunky though, so it clearly was not milk. Plain yogurt? Wrong again. It turns out that we had stumbled across a Swedish product called Fil Mjolk. Slightly soured thickened milk that tastes great with granola or jam. I eventually developed a taste for it, but at the time I could not help but long for normal American milk on my cereal.

Where exactly am I going with this? Well, in a mere four days 13 of us from OU RUF will board a plan for Trujillo, Peru and have our very own South American cross cultural experiences. Only two of us (present company excluded) speak any notable Spanish, so the language will be a barrier. I am excited to see what God has to teach us about the Peruvian people, and to see how His kingdom is growing in other parts of the world.

But I am also very excited to see what is in the purple cartons in Peruvian grocery stores.

"Julia Child Wasn't Always Julia Child..."

...and I wasn't always an RUF intern. In fact, just 10 short months ago I was turning in final papers and taking my last college exams. And yet now I often answer most questions of "How are you?" with things about my job. This is probably directly correlated with the fact that I LOVE my job, so I always have plenty of things to talk about...but I also want to be seen as a real person who has real thoughts and feelings. Why all of this rambling, you ask?!? Well, last week I spent a lot of time with people who were part of my life before I was an intern. I wanted to share some of the them (read: not all) with my blog readers :) God is good, I love that he created us for community.

Kaitie and I have been friends since the 7th Grade.

Abby (the red head on the left) is an intern at University of Washington in Seattle. We were history majors together.

I did not get to see Mark and Kristin on this trip, but they are too wonderful to leave out. Kristin and I lived together junior year and then she and Mark got married and they did a great job including me in their first year of marriage!

Are you really surprised by a picture of Wallace? I took him on a walk on the St.Johns River while I was home.

Brittany and I lived together for three years in college. Did we mention we lived on the same hall as Tim Tebow???

Katie and Josh welcomed and new member of their family...baby Jake!!! Katie and I lived together my last year in college.

The new baby...precious!!!

Here is Grace holding baby Jake. Grace and I lived together my last two years in college.

Well, there you are ladies and gentlemen...a snapshot of just some of the people whom God has graciously allowed me to share my life with over the past several years.

13 of us here at OU are preparing to leave for Peru in a week and a half. We will be doing some construction work and teaching some English lessons. I am very excited and simultaneously very nervous. Please be praying for us!!!