Life of a DTS Student

The past 3 weeks since minor outreach has been quite an adventure.  With all of the changes taking place our schedule and everything else has been very out of whack.  Out of the past 3 weeks we spent 1 week and a bit back in our old rooms, 5 days in the chapel (a small room inside the base) and 1 week on our medical ship that just came back from Papa New Guinea, the ship was by far my favorite.  There were about 35+ people staying on the old Japanese fishing vessel, the girls stayed in a portion on the bottom that consisted of a hallways with small rooms attached with 4 beds in each room, you had to put your stuff on the floor (a 2ft x 4ft area) and once we ran out of room on the floor the rest you would just shove to the top of your bed when you slept.  I loved the ship though, every night I would go sit on the bow and watch the moon rise and the lights from the harbor reflect on the water, it was truly beautiful.  

I am actually typing this blog post up from an airplane taking us to Sydney!  We are officially on major outreach now.  Our first stop is Newcastle (a 2 hour drive from Sydney) where we will be staying at a YWAM base.  I am not positive what we will be doing while we are there but I am guessing that part of it will be going to skate parks and other youth hot spots to hang out and do evangelism.  Next week we will be going to Canberra for a YWAM leadership meeting where we will be serving in different ways around there.  That is the first 2 weeks of our 6 week outreach.  It is so hard to believe that there are only 7 weeks left of DTS!  When we first got here major outreach seemed ages away and now here we are on a plane to Sydney, so crazy.  We have finished 15 weeks of DTS and all of our lectures.  Last week we learned how to study the Bible and the different approaches that you can use.  A lot of it was going through the book of Philemon and we studied it to figure out exactly what the book is all about.  

I typed the last part of this blog 2 days ago so I will just do a bit of recap on whats happened since then.  We arrived in Newcastle at 2am Sunday morning after having our plane delayed for 4 1/2 hours in Townsville.  Partly because of exhaustion and partly from the hour time change all of the girls ended up sleeping in until 10:30 Sunday morning (that is a first since arriving in Australia, normal wake up is between 6 and 7 every morning).  We had all of Sunday to relax and prepare for the week, and what could be a better way to do that then go to the beach?  We went to Newcastle beach and it was amazing!

That was most of our day and then we came back to base for dinner.  The base and all of the people are so nice, it is quite different than our base in Townsville so it is fun to see the differences.  Today we helped paint a mural for the community, helped around the base and then after dinner some of the people on base took us to a Uni (collage) nearby where there was a game of ultimate frisbee going on, they were really good but also very friendly and it was a super fun game (Since I know you are all going to ask, yes my team won ;).  Tomorrow we head into some schools to do some evangelism and community work, it should be great!

Thank you all for your love, support and prayers!
Selah