"I knew you were American because of your teeth."

Chalk one up for the nazi American Dental Association!

It's been a busy week. It doesn't stop until I'm on my flight back to Adelaide on Tuesday morning! Andrew has been in Sydney for a couple of days too, for work, so it's been nice to catch up over dinner and hot chocolate in the evenings. The neighborhood we're staying in has heaps of great Thai restaurants so we've been having our fill! He left tonight and I'm off tomorrow as well for the weekend, for a missions conference and to speak in another church (and a bush walk!).

During a Skype meeting yesterday I felt the thrill of possibilities with what we're trying to do here (re: an ITeams Australia anti-trafficking ministry). Admittedly, it's one of the first times I've felt that since this whole thing began. I think it's in part to news of some potential teammates - makes me realize just how much I was NOT feeling inspired to do this on my own. Monday night, back in Sydney, we're having an important meeting with several interested people to attempt to set some vision and see "who wants in" ... I feel like a lot is resting on this and I'm feeling hopeful for the first time.

Earlier I was browsing some photos and found this from Greece:
I miss my friends - but was encouraged tonight as I had a coffee date with a couple new girlfriends here. :) Now off to bed - first time before midnight all week!

Well hi!

I am sitting inside as it pours rain and thunders and lightnings outside with ferocity! (I hope that is a word!) Lovely to be in a winter storm, knowing my compadres in Greece and the US are still enjoying nice warm summer weather (it's ok, I am in Australia!). :) We did have nice weather in Sydney last week though.

I am staying with Andrew's sister and her husband, and spend much of the mornings on my own while everyone is at work. As I have some down time here in Adelaide to think and pray and dream, I'm feeling good about the next couple of months. I know God has closed some doors in Greece, so looking forward, I feel excited about possibilities here. Obviously Andrew is here, which is a big draw ;) ... but also I am excited about the IT national director's heart for justice and her desire to see how we can begin to use our gifts and resources here.

As I know more, I'll fill you in, and ask for more specific prayer! For now, here are some photos of Sydney last week, including the Opera House from every possible angle, and some shots from our adventures to Manly and Bondi Beach... It's a beautiful city - and I'll be back soon...

Ha ha, Andrew hates this photo, but I love it:

(We had great weather - a far cry from what I'm listening to now as the sky unleashes its vengeance - but it's a perfect day for hot chocolate and a movie! There are good things about winter.) :)

Thank you, Sydney, for not letting me get killed.

Very helpful crosswalks here! :)

***
Well, I wish I had more to tell you ... I went to an interesting social justice conference here this weekend, attending workshops on the sexualization of culture and how that affects young girls, and one about counseling with sexually diverse clients (working with gay/lesbian/bisexual clients). Both of those were so interesting they had me thinking and talking about them for a long time after.

I don't know what's happening here as far as work with ITeams...need to think and pray more, meet more people, and keep talking about it. There is a lot happening here as far as anti-trafficking (a lot more than Greece, anyway), and IT is looking at where the community needs are and where they might fit in. It will be a several month process, involving other organizations and exploration with them too. I guess what I need to know is if I'm going to embark on that process with them.

We've got a couple more days in Sydney and then back to Adelaide for another week. Then back to Greece, potentially to pack up my life and leave a month later. It would seem providentially and circumstantially that life is leading me to work in Australia, however the details have yet to be filled in...

Sydney

We arrived in Sydney on Monday morning. I hadn't really felt like I was in Australia at all yet until we walked down to the harbor and saw the harbor bridge and the opera house. :) There it was, and ok, I'm really in another country. (I think it helped that I touched my first Aussie money yesterday, too. Haha. Foreign currency generally equals presence in a foreign country.) Yesterday we saw the Opera House & Harbor Bridge again with blue sky (Monday was overcast and the opera house blended right into the sky) and took a ferry to Manly (below). We're having a great time seeing the city and I am being well taken care of. :)
Tomorrow I meet with Janice, the IT Australia president, for lunch, and more meetings with others. This whole week feels a bit weird...it's a big city and I can't even imagine myself here. Not because I don't like it, but just because I have no idea where I would live or what life would even look like. Hopefully tomorrow will give me a better idea. Things are very expensive, and rent will cost me about half my current monthly salary (and that's in a far out suburb). Anyway, meetings tomorrow (and conference Fri/Sat), prayers appreciated, updates will come at some point.

In the meantime, I'll upload some more Italy pics to post tomorrow. :)

I'm here...down "undah"

And I'm even eating a Tim Tam. How very Australian.

So...I arrived, here in the country/continent of my possible future residence. Freak me out. It's winter, and I'm freezing all the time. When you leave 100 degree temps you pack the coats and sweaters but forget about little things like scarves, gloves, etc. So we've spent a couple days getting me all set up with the misc. items I didn't bring, meeting people, and wandering around Adelaide.

It's funny to look at people and realize they are all speaking English. Just a bit differently. But I can understand them! I am still getting used to throwing my toilet paper in the toilet, and I continue to try to enter the car on the wrong side (and look the wrong way before crossing the street). I feel a bit backwards and upside down, but in many ways it feels like home (in the USA sense of the word).

We leave for Sydney on Monday. I'll spend a day with Janice, the IT Australia president, and together we'll have several meetings with prospective coworkers and others who have expressed interest in working with the anti-trafficking ministry. The two following days I'll go to a social justice conference with her, put on by the Salvation Army (the "Salvos" - Australian abbreviations for everything, coming in another post!!). That will be good for meeting a lot of people and networking. Andrew is working five days in Sydney so I'll have some time to explore and be with Janice and others. It will be interesting being there, as that is the city that I would be living in and the people I'd be working with...so hopefully next week I'll be able to get a good feel for it and a sense as to whether it could feel like home.

Knowing my world could be (literally) upside down as soon as October still feels like a foreign concept. It's a lot of change to process all at once, so I think my brain is just avoiding it at the moment! .....

last night

Nigerian girls visiting our outreach table ...
and our friendly neighborhood security guard taking a load off in one of our chairs!

Tonight is the last of our late night street outreaches with this intern team. Before we start, we're putting on a party in the office for the Nigerian girls. The interns have spent the last week planning, talking with the girls on the street, inviting them, passing out invites and maps, and praying that a few will show up! If none come, we'll take the party (and the food!) out on the street to meet them when they come to work. So it will be a party kind of night, regardless.

I've been really blessed the past few days by this team! Yesterday they did presentations of the projects they've been working on. I'll write more about them on my ministry blog, but I was so excited to hear of all the work they've been doing! We learned about trafficking and sport (like the Olympics & the World Cup), dance therapy for trafficking victims, more on Romania as a source country, and had a few photo journals.

Today, at our last official "class" time, I wanted to spend some time in prayer for each person as they leave here and take this all home. It turned into two hours of prayer, with each one getting specific attention. They even prayed for each of us staff members. I was so encouraged!

After tonight's outreach, we'll have a debrief tomorrow and a final team lunch, and our first official anti-trafficking summer internship program will come to an end! I am really looking forward to a month of rest (& travel), but it has been a great great time with these guys here. I'm encouraged, and I've learned a lot from them and how we can improve things for next time.

Off to the party!

This is Andrew.

He found my blog the other day, which caused me (us) to go alllllllllllllllllll the way back to 2006 (!) and look at some of the earlier postings I made, way back then, in my youth. I had an obsession a totally healthy fervor for working out and counting calories. I wrote about a lot more spiritual things. I was SO BUSY. This makes me look at my couple of hours of teaching a day these past few weeks and my resulting exhaustion with a small amount of feeling pathetic. (Except, way back then, it wasn't 100 degrees all the time and I didn't have several looming major life changes and I wasn't working until 4am three nights a week and there weren't a bunch of interns needing help navigating through a country I don't even know that well myself! Ok, I'm off the hook.)Andrew got to come in May, and we did it all - an island, Corinth, lots of ancient Greek stuff and plenty of yummy food. He brought me a kangaroo and a boomerang. And in a couple weeks I shall again be in his presence in his natural habitat ... Australia. I'm still trying to think of something very Greek to bring along. Ouzo? The acropolis?This trip will include several days in Sydney visiting with the president of ITeams Australia, to discuss the possibility (which seems to be a probability at this point, unless I totally hate it there, a distinct possibility since it will be the dead of winter [ha, just KIDDING]) of moving down there to help them set up their anti-trafficking ministry. They are in the networking, awareness and training phase, quite similar to the job I had with Salvation Army in Los Angeles, with partnerships being formed around the country and into Thailand and Cambodia.

Who knew joining ITeams would prove to be such an intercontinental adventure? Um, I didn't. I guess it really is about following WHEREVER God leads, however unexpected the circumstances may be. Might have been simpler for him to just move me straight to Australia, but I would have missed out on so much here in Greece. Plus, I never would have gone to Australia back then... ;)

[somewhat disjointed] thoughts on leaving

I didn't go running tonight, like I was (noncommittally) thinking about doing. I sat on my couch reading blogs, in the dark, and ate. Chocolate. A whole freaking bar of chocolate. And a small plate of nachos. That little salad with carrots and beets and a little grilled chicken and balsamic vinegar? Never saw the light of day.

I feel like I haven't blogged in a long time. Like, really blogged. Wrote about feelings and thoughts and stuff. Which is fine; most of those things don't necessarily need to be for public consumption. I guess I wrote a post a few below about indifference vs. passion and things like that, in which I included an obligatory "but I'm a missionary" happy, moral ending. Good for me.

So, anyway, I might leave Athens. Not sure on the if/when, but it's something I'm beginning to process and understand more the more I feel I'm settling back in here. Like yesterday I had to call the phone company and ask why my phone/internet weren't working. The girl didn't speak English so I got the whole thing done in Greek. Ok, so I didn't understand half the words she said, but I got the drift, and we figured it out, and today it's all back and functional. And I'm having a good time with my friends here. It feels like home more than anywhere else does at the moment, I'm learning to get around (though that's not without its frustrations, still), and I have good relationships. Also, have you seen Greek beaches??

But those aren't the reason I'm here ... it's the work. And it's the work part that might be moving me on. Exciting, new opportunities, ones that might possibly reignite my passion somehow and be a better fit for my skills, etc., but ones that aren't here. Of course, there are a lot of pieces to this puzzle, and that will all come out over the next couple months, but for now I'm still sitting on my couch in Greece surrounded by my own crap (stuff! books, mail, bags, nail polish, half empty glasses, papers, that chocolate wrapper, a stuffed kangaroo ... what crap were you thinking about?) pondering how quickly life can change and what it could mean to start life over ... again ... in a third country...

I have melted chocolate on my arm. Awesome. And I thought it was all gone.

They're fun, these kids

I stole this picture off facebook. That's what FB is for, isn't it?

These are some of the interns. I like the interns. And Annette, our new Aussie at Nea Zoi, here for two years (on the left). I like Aussies.

(I will stop calling them kids now; they certainly are not.) And I will wish that I were fun enough to be in a jumping picture at Corinth. ha ha :)

here they are...

Here are my nine children.
(Of course they are not all children, but I feel somewhat responsible in that way!)

I think we pretty much ran them into the ground this week, poor kids. Monday and Tuesday were full of class sessions, Wednesday we took them all day to Aegina for some fun team building time, yesterday more class and then we completely did them in with outreach last night. Many didn't get to sleep until 4 or 5am, after which we met at noon today and had a dinner tonight, and tomorrow morning they depart for Corinth at 8:00.

I'll be revising the schedule a bit for next week. :) They are all great, getting to know each other and bonding, interactive, excited, and generally pretty positive about being here despite the 100+ degree temps (with no AC where they're staying). I found one of the girl's blogs tonight and have read the whole thing, appreciating her fresh perspective and enjoying seeing what she's learning. She is also hilarious (read this).

I am happy it's Friday, I need a weekend!!!

living for the weekend...

I'm not gonna lie, it's kind of tough being out here in the middle of nowhere with no car for three weeks. And I'm only 10 days into it. I'm used to living in the city center with the metro stop just out my door...having to bum rides to the grocery store and Target - not my favorite!!! It's a great facility here, with the offices and meeting rooms and apartments all in the same building...except that means the only time I leave the building on some days is when I go for a run! Strange to admit it, but apart from having pretty places to run, I prefer the city to all these trees! Sad! :)

So, it was GREAT to have some friends come and rescue me this weekend!! (I had about seven exclamation points there but thought that was a little excessive.) Saturday, Janice, a friend from college (SPU) and supporter drove all the way out to Elgin to pick me up and take me into Chicago for the day. It was great! We got rained on (what is with this midwest weather?!) but not before we got to check out the bean, do a little shopping, and have some really yummy deep dish pizza.(Ok, I may have been a little obsessed with the bean.)


It was fun to catch up with Janice; we knew each other in college but have reconnected over the past couple of years. I'm glad I could make it into her general area to be able to connect! Thanks for the great day! :)

Sunday, I got to see my friend Suzie from California and meet her new husband Juan. Suzie and I taught together at Whittier Hills while she was home going to Talbot for a couple years. She's lived in Costa Rica for nine years (missionary with ITeams) and just got married and moved to the Chicago area. Great to catch up with her and hear their story!Suzie is doing a cool thing and taking a photo every day for the first year of their marriage. They're only two weeks in, so they've been successful so far. ;)

So...back to the grind today... A full week of classes again, although this week we'll be able to participate in some inner city ministries and get off the ITeams base a bit. I have a new roommate this week, and still enjoying getting to know the others here.

aren't I cute

They took our photos today, pointing at where we're going on the big ITeams globe. Cheese.

Hi there!

Well, if you are following along, now I am in Elgin, Illinois (greater Chicago area). I flew in a few hours ago and haven't slept in, oh, 24 hours. Surprisingly I am awake and coherently navigating around the world wide web.

Last weekend ITeams Greece people had a retreat in a different part of Greece, and this past week I had a friend visiting. We both flew out of Athens (to separate locations) this morning, and now here I am. I'll be here about three weeks for ITeams training/orientation, then a couple days visiting friends in LA, then back to Athens.

I am not mentally in the United States, since I have not had any spare seconds to think or prepare myself. So it doesn't feel weird; I've been traveling so much lately that it just feels like another place to be. Only this one happens to speak my language and have York Peppermint Patties. I've got a pretty free day tomorrow to sleep and relax, then training starts tomorrow night.

So, bye for now...

oh yeah,

I found out this week that I have been officially accepted by my new organization, International Teams. Good to know I passed all my psych tests and I'm not crazy (whew)!

I also seem to have come through this rough patch - slash - month of culture shock. Things are good - extremely busy, but good. (Come to think of it, it's a good thing I didn't have to take those psych tests last month!) Now I am just preparing like mad for the three day seminar I'm teaching in Cyprus later this week, and I have two more weeks of Greek, and then I'm going on a little mini weekend vacation to get the heck out of here relaaaaaax!