We're done with training and safely home!

We’ve been back in Ventura for almost two weeks now. It's nice to be back in our own home.

We had an enjoyable trip home over the course of about four weeks while visiting most of Rebecca’s family, who are spread out among the states. We traveled through Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington, Oregon and finally back down through California. What a beautiful country we live in! 

It was fun visiting, catching up, and sharing about our training and future ministry. There were a lot of questions about our time in the Missouri wilderness. We realize now that we didn’t commute clearly in our last update because most of our family thought we were all alone in the woods. That wasn’t the case at all. We were with our small group (18 people including kids) and 3 other groups - all of the 2nd semester class. One of the main goals was learning to work through team conflict while living in a difficult and stressful environment. Another way to prepare us for the field. 

Here are some photos of family we visited during our travels, including Rebecca's mom, grandparents, and brothers, as well as our nieces, nephews, and cousins. 
 

Visiting Mission Aviation Fellowship headquarters in Nampa, Idaho.
Rebecca’s aunt and uncle have served with MAF since the 80s.

Living in the Wilderness

Our time in the wilderness was great! It was raining and muddy most of the time so that was a challenge but overall things went really well.

Our small group would take turns cooking for each other. On one occasion when it was our turn to cook we had planned to make tamales. We had never made tamales before so it was taking longer than expected. It had been raining pretty hard and dinner was already late. The next thing we knew there was a flash flood and water was pouring through our camp. Everyone jumped up and rallied to divert the water around the camp while the tamales continued to cook.

Actually, we ended up putting too much water in the pot (we couldn’t see the bottom since they were so packed in) so the tamales were bathing instead of steaming! They were flooded just like our camp. We ended up pulling most of the tamales out of the pot and into a pan where we turned them into a tamale hash. The flood drill was a great team building experience and a few people in our group even said that the tamale hash was their favorite meal!

We’d like to talk to you more about our experience in the wilderness in person but in the meantime check out this video which gives an overview of our camp and living conditions: