Off ya go

Whilst my group and Rebecca's group were toiling in the school 4 of the other groups were out and about in the country. These outings were termed mini-expeditions, and they could consist of anything that the group wanted to do, within distance and financial reason. Of course we were on pins and needles to hear how the other groups did, because we knew the next day we were off as well, free as birds for 3 days to traverse the country and see what God was up to. All the other groups returned, some interesting stories of course; sleeping outside, not being able to find shelter in a downpour, hospitality from people who offered their home for the evening, camping out on top of a mountain and staying in a nicer hotel in the main city. The essence of this exercise was to hear from God where to go, what to do there and then go in faith, much like the disciples in Jesus's day. My little group had a couple of meetings, heard some specific ideas - a city on the map, working with children and schools, a busy commerce area, power lines, English speakers. All of these were what we were going when we set off to find our destination. (I'll call it City 2) We found the bus to city 2, it was not terribly crowded, hence most of us fell asleep until Tony woke me up right before we arrived, the first thing I saw was a large power station with many power lines coming out of it. Then we all remembered the picture that Tony had seen whilst praying about me looking at power lines, we thought that we were on the right track. Next as we passed through the city it looked and felt like what Tash and myself had envisioned while praying for the excursion. We eventually got off the bus, and decided to pray, we were there, with no further plans, no ability to communicate in their language, and nowhere to rest our heads. Five Westerners, an American, Canadian, Norwegian, and two British in a city that we found out later never saw tourists or English speakers. We saw a couple of kids coming out from a side street and decided to amble that way, realizing that many more were streaming out, it must have been a school. Lo and behold there was a school at the end of the lane, many middle schoolers were coming out, staring at us as though we were from Mars. We started to pray for the school and a couple of girls came up to Abi and started trying to talk with her, before we knew we were in a sea of students, probably 50 - 60 all around us trying to talk in English, French, Spanish and Arabic, really whatever language they knew and thought we might have a clue in. Details are sketchy but within 10 minutes were ushered into the school, standing in the office area, waiting to be taken to the English class that was happening upstairs. It was all quite surreal, within 30 minutes of arriving in city 2 we had seen power lines, commerce like area, been in a school, talked with many kids, and were about to meet some real English speakers, wow God was blowing us away right off the bat. later
earl