September 6, 2008
I've been out of town this past week. We had a small group of new friends from Texas come to visit us and get the "grand tour" of the beautiful area we live in. We took them out to my favorite small town, to smaller towns beyond that, and even to a brand new village we have never been to before. It was a great trip and a great time getting to know some new friends. While we were showing them around and explaining everything about our local friends and the details of our lives I found myself personally coming to a greater appreciation of the place I live and the people I know here. I have stumbled across a beautiful part of this country, and am in such a unique situation with how I get to live in a big city with some modern conveniences, but I also get to constantly travel out to the countryside to be surrounded by breath-taking landscapes and really friendly people.

It got me thinking about how I'm constantly living for the NEXT adventure in my life. In so many ways I look to the next step in my life with such great anticipation of what it might hold that I don't fully appreciate the step I'm currently in. My life here has been something amazing so far, and I have felt since Day One that it's where I've been called to be. But rather than living in the moment, I start thinking long term, and have been planning the details of going back to the States to get my master's degree and then returning here in a couple years.

I day dream all the time about going back to Iowa to visit my family and friends, and spend time with my young nephew who doesn't even know me right now. I think about the things I miss in the States that I can enjoy again when I return. But at the same time, I have a GREAT thing going on, right here, right now. And if I'm realistic I have to know it's most likely that if I return to this country in a few years I won't be able to return to the situation I'm in RIGHT NOW. It got me wondering about the possibility of staying here a bit longer. Maybe just 10 months longer than I have been planning, because I still want to go to grad school and do all of that. But a few things I know are that when I leave I will lose the momentum I've built up here with my relationships and with my language. No matter what, even in San Francisco, my language will not be as good as when I'm actually living in this country.

The longer I stay here, the more effective I am in the goals I have for my life here. It seems a shame to work so hard at it and then leave next year, just when I really start getting a handle on the language and culture. It's something I'm going to be talking to dad about A LOT, because I feel like he has laid it on my heart to trust him for the next step in my life, rather than rushing off to go find it the best way I can think of. He might have something different in mind. If that's the case then I can be SURE that it's a lot better than anything I might have planned.

So this past week of playing tour guide with our Texas friends was a week of reflection for me. The more we talked with them about our lives here, the more I felt overwhelmed with appreciation for where dad has brought me. I can easily see how my friendships with local people are growing week-by-week, and it's exciting to see the momentum that is building up right now. It's exciting to be in a time and place where dad is working and moving and USING us for his purposes. I don't want to walk away from that. I want to stay here as long as he will use me, and I gladly lay my own ambitions aside in order to live in his plan.

With that said, here are some highlights of our travels with our Texas friends this past week. We spent time in all my favorite local places. I didn't get my camera out very much, so I'll just show you a snippet of our adventures.

We had a few dinners with the English teachers at my favorite small town. We also ran into some other friends I have made over the Summer. At one of the restaurants a waitress came up to me and started speaking English. She spoke quite well, which was very surprising. Waitresses are often young girls who weren't great students, so they weren't able to go to college, and often didn't finish high school. But this waitress told me she was a good student but her family couldn't afford to send her to school anymore so she had to start working. It's a common reason to stop going to school in the countryside. We became friends and I'll be staying in touch with her in the future.
    

I saw a few huge spiders while we were hiking around.
    

We went out to a village where my friends know an old man. We hung out at his house for a while, watched a movie, and then he showed us around his town.
   
    

At the end of our trip we decided to explore a village we'd never been to before. We picked a spot on a map and then had a small adventure to find the place. When we finally did, it was full of a special minority group of people, and I was able to speak to them a tiny bit in their minority language. The village was surrounded by huge beautiful mountains and many friendly children who followed us everywhere. We went outside of the town to see the town's temple to their idols and the children followed us all the way, and then sat on some rocks to watch us until we left. It was a lot of fun and the people there were very friendly. I hope we go back soon.
  
  
     
   

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September 13, 2008
I started classes this past week. I went to school on Monday and found out that they gave me my ideal class schedule, which means I only have classes on Tuesdays through Thursdays. On these days I will go to class all morning, and also for a few hours in the afternoon. But this will give me 4-day weekends, which is ideal for traveling out to the countryside as often as I like to do. So I had class on Tuesday and then they told me that classes were cancelled for the rest of the week, for various reasons. So my first week of classes gave one one day of class.

I traveled out to the countryside for a short overnight trip. I had lunch with Lisa, my new friend that I first met when a group of people from Oklahoma were here visiting me. We hung out at her store after lunch and then met back up in the evening to play badminton. It was too dark to see the birdie, though, so we just went to dinner and then to another place for ice cream. Throughout the day we had a lot of time to talk, and I'm so glad to be developing a real friendship with Lisa. That will be even more valuable to me after my roomie goes back to America in a month and a half, and I'm here by myself. Lisa is a cool girl, and we had some very good conversations together.

I also stopped by BinBin's house for a visit. Last time I saw her, she pointed out my sunglasses and wanted to try them on. She told me that she wants to buy her own sunglasses. Considering that her family is so poor that they currently can't afford to send BinBin to school, I know that sunglasses for a 3 1/2 year old are not in the budget, so I bought a pair for her and her little brother, Didi. Didi was napping when I dropped by, so BinBin promised to give her brother his glasses when he woke up later. We did some modeling with our new sunglasses and had a great time together. BinBin had fun pushing the button on my camera to take pictures of her dad and her house.
 
     
   

I made a total goof of myself during this visit to BinBin's house. I often want to think of something I can do to help this family out, because they really struggle to sustain a basic lifestyle for their family. The husband has been out of work for months, and the mother sells vegetables for a miniscule profit. This weekend is Mid-Autumn Festival holiday, so there are moon cakes for sale on every street. When I got into town I thought it would be great to buy the BEST moon cakes I could find and bring them to BinBin's family for a little gift, along with the sunglasses for the kids. When I came to visit, only BinBin and her father were there to greet me. The mom was out working, as I expected she would be.
I presented BinBin's father with the special box full of moon cakes and he graciously accepted them. Then he told me that BinBin's mother is currently out selling moon cakes at one of the stores on the street. He was chuckling as he told me this, and as it sunk in how ridiculous it was that I just gifted them with the very thing they're trying to sell, I became so embarrassed. The least I could have done was buy a ton of moon cakes from their store, but instead I spent my money with the competition! What a fool I am!
So later that day I went out to find BinBin's mom at her moon cake store. I went with the intention of buying some from her too, and then giving them to other friends later on. But when I arrived she insisted on giving me the moon cake for free, so I only took one.
So that is my story of how I majorly put my foot in the moon cake!

This morning I took the early bus back home so that I could meet up with a friend for lunch. It's my old friend, Sunny, who used to be a student at my school. She has graduated and now lives in a city about an hour away from me. She's in town for the holiday, to visit her relatives. I enjoyed our lunch together and afterwards she came to my apartment to sing some songs and talk to Dad together. I am so glad to see that she is still reading her good book and doing her best to live as a child of the King. It's not easy for her because she still understands very little about what that means. She pretty much understands the bare minimum. But she's doing her best and it really encourages me to know that.

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September 22, 2008
This past week was a lot of fun. I have been going running regularly and the exercise has been enjoyable and energizing. I will write more about that on Friday the 26th.....

Last weekend I went out with some of my local friends for dinner and sports. Sports is what they call any sort of physical activity, like walking up a mountain, playing ping pong, etc. I had a great time hanging out with my local friends and many of their friends who I hadn't met before. Two of my American friends, a married couple, were there too.
After dinner we all drove in a motorcycle caravan to a remote place across town. We ended up right next to the railroad tracks at an abandoned warehouse. That's what it looked like. Inside it had been fitted to hold several badminton and volleyball courts. The people in this country are really into these two sports. I love playing volleyball with them because they use a larger, softer, rubber ball instead of the hard small one we use in the states. It makes it easier and gentler on the arms.
   
   

My school has given me a new classroom. Last year I was in an old building with concrete walls and floors. My classroom was on the ground floor and was slightly lowered into the ground. It often flooded when it rained, and the rest of the time it was full of mosquitoes and spiders and occasionally larger rodents. It had no temperature control and was totally exposed to the elements. The windows didn't close and left me sweating or shivering throughout the year. I talked with the president of the college about it at the end of last term, and apparently she took my words seriously.
I now have my own room in the administrative office building. I have two wall-fans and an air conditioner / heater. My teachers this term are Lucy, Rose, and Dong. I have had them all as teachers in the past, and we're good friends. I have one new teacher, ChiChi. I have high hopes that we'll become good friends. During my first class with her last week we were able to talk about many important things, along with my language lesson. She spent the last two years teaching in Indonesia and was exposed to many different ideas and philosophies while she lived there. Her openness to them, regardless of how flawed they are, leaves me optimistic about her desire to discover the truth.

I have started back up a weekly study group with the students at my school. We are all fired up to see what Dad will do in our lives as well as the students and teachers at our school. Here we are after our first meeting. I have high hopes for this group of fired up students!

This past weekend I went out to my favorite small town in the countryside. I hung out with some of the English teachers at the high school, which are my friends. They all love to play sports so we got our badminton on, and then went up to the roof of the school library to play some ping pong. These guys are both insanely better than me at both these sports, but they did a good job of playing down to my level on all our sports for the day.
   

The next morning of my trip to the countryside I got together with my good friend, Lisa. She and I climbed up my favorite mountain in the town. It was a pretty misty morning, and the mountains around us looked beautiful. Lisa and I had an amazing conversation the whole time we were climbing the mountain, and before I left town I gave her a book which she is going to be reading until I see her again. Then we will discuss what she thinks of it. How great!
   

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September 26, 2008
I just finished doing one of the craziest things I have ever done. I know, the list seems long sometimes, but this really does reach the top ranks of crazy things in my life. And the funny thing is... it started out so normal.....

Three weeks ago, I was hanging out with an American married couple that lives here in my city. I don't know how this came up, but we decided to have a weight-loss contest. They were both going to be heading to a beach vacation this next week, and I am leaving for a retreat in Bali tonight. So we were all motivated to lose weight, but lacked the proper motivation. All three of us LOVE to play games, all the time, any time, any where. So this seemed like a perfect solution.

We decided to have our contest be based on losing the highest percent of our body weight, rather than losing the highest number of pounds. So we all weighed in, wrote down our starting weight, and then planned to calculate our weight loss based on that starting number. We had weekly progress reports, and took pictures along the way. Here you see our "front shots" from week 1, week 2, week 3 and week 4.
             
      
By the pictures above you might not notice any huge changes, and might think that this was just three people trying to eat a little healthier, and exercise a little more, over 3 weeks. But in reality, our competition started serious and ended just plane INSANE.

We all started the contest by running every day and eating smaller portions with more meals throughout the day. We asked fitness and health experts (namely my brother and the internet) about effective weight loss strategies. But as we checked on our progress each week, the competition heated up. We started trying to figure out what we would need to do to win the contest, and as all of us went further and further in our exercise and ate smaller and smaller portions each day, we took it "to a whole nother level."

Sometime during week 2, we felt compelled to start two-a-day workouts. We were running a lot around a dirt track across the street from our apartments. Our times were getting faster and we were feeling stronger and healthier all the time!
     
        
      

By the end of the 2nd week, into the final week of our competition, we all started pushing ourselves further and further. We were researching weight loss ideas online all the time, looking up calories on one apple or a 1/2 cup of green veggies, etc. We started working out more and more, and would size each other up every time we saw each other. Now, don't get me wrong; the awesome thing about this contest is that we were all really really happy to see each other losing weight, so we were encouraging each other constantly. I was just as proud to see the married couple lose weight as I was to see myself begin to drop the pounds.

But going into this final week we got kinda nuts. We all decided we would need to go for a more professional cutting-weight technique, so we were looking up info about wrestlers and other athletes who have to cut weight for competitions. We were hardly eating anything by this final week, working-out in the heat constantly, and then we stopped eating all together. On the last day of the contest before our final weigh-in we stopped drinking and worked on dropping our water weight. It was ridiculous. I think we all thought we were going to die. We were checking in on each other all the time, just to make sure we were okay. I won't go into the details of the feelings of true dehydration, but I don't recommend them.

By the time we got together this morning for our final weigh-in we weren't thinking very clearly. All we wanted was WATER. It was way past the line of common sense. But it worked! We all lost a ton of weight, got in shape, and learned about weight-loss in a way we never had before. I had a lot of fun with this contest, and we all agreed to NEVER do that again! I don't know how wrestlers do it, but to me, nothing will ever separate me from my water again. I have a whole new appreciation for fruit.

Here are pictures we took after our final weigh-in. We were so happy we tried to do jumps for joy, but couldn't seem to getting the timing right with my camera timer. Also, we are holding up signs showing our total weight loss percent we lost over 3 weeks.
( I will let the results speak for themselves in announcing the winner of the contest. )
    
          

After our final weigh-in, we starting chugging down glasses of water and ate some juicy oranges too. Then at lunchtime we all ate our favorite junk food to celebrate - but didn't eat too much since our appetites weren't quite what they used to be. Me and the married guy went for Pizza Hut supreme stuffed-crust pizza, and the married girl ate a Big Mac and fries.
            
It was totally delicious, but I have to say.... it wasn't nearly as good as that orange tasted this morning. Hmmm..... I hope I can remember that for the future!

Here are our "Before and After" pictures from the contest.
                 

There are only a few people I know in the world that I could have had this contest with. This married couple is definitely a rare breed of awesome. We all REALLY wanted to win the contest, but we all were really happy for each other along the way. And no one gave up! Everyone went to amazing lengths to find their limits and give it their all. How many people do you know that could be that competitive and still be encouraging? I don't know many.

So my final words on this crazy weight loss contest is that I'm really glad to have "the married couple" as my friends. You guys ROCK! You could probably make just about anything fun.

As my reward for winning the contest, they will each be writing a song about how awesome I am, and also giving me $15 on iTunes. But this is one of those rare situations where we truly are all winners at the end of the day.....     and crazy.