Getting Started

Well, as we are catching up with old news, I'll try to add in some current thoughts too.

Sign Tori designed for our room!

There is no one at the camp - except us... literally. We live here.
We arrived during a week when there are no groups working so it's just the two of us and Sugar in the evening.

During the day this week the rest of the staff is here at Camp Symonette working with us.
We have Brenda and KP who lead everything. Tori who is also a long term volunteer helping out with office work. Pauline has come in this week to help out too. Mostly her job is just to cook for the groups and take care of the linens. TJ and Leroy are on staff too. TJ works on all of the vehicles and Leroy helps out where ever he is needed.

KP going through a box of donated clothes for the community.

Yes, this is where we live. We basically have a room with a bathroom and... 

... an outdoor shower. 

It only has cold water for right now. It did have a solar hot water connection but it needs to be repaired. However, you need a couple of hours of sun for the water to get hot. We are currently using the indoor showers of the camp. David is going to connect it to the camps hot water system soon.

Each morning one of our jobs is to feed the chickens and collect the eggs. We have 13 laying hens and one rooster.

Tori and Brenda in the camp dining hall greeting Lilly, a new baby in the community, just two weeks old.

I'll up load more photos as soon as I take some.
We've been too busy working for me to get out the camera more.

How Many Shells Can One Person Need?

So many lessons learned already about what you keep and what you save.

As we were packing up our entire life to take is all to storage, I could not believe the number of seashell we continued to come across. I mean bags and bags of shells we had collected and I kept. Some I had on display on the bathroom counter and some in glass in the living room. Most were just in bags in the office and in the garage. We even had some shells out in our flowerbed.

We have always had a fondness for visiting the beach. For years we would go to Lewes, Delaware on Memorial Day weekend. We are not the sort of people who go to the beach to worship the sun and lay on the beach reading a book. We are more the beach comber type. We enjoy walking along the surf as it meets the beach. Always picking up pink pebbles and shells of significant color or complete shape. In Lewes we would watch for sea glass and pottery shards washed up from the shipwreck nearby. All sorts of cool stuff smoothed down by the power of waves against the sand.

Conch Shell in the Dining Hall at Camp Symonette

Most of the shells came from our many trips to Florida to visit Grandma and Pop-pop over the years. That is where we would find most of the whole shells not the bits and pieces you find on the eastern seashore. We had even collect enough one year to fill a glass lamp with shells for the spare bedroom.

So why did I keep all those shells?

Maybe it is not so strange after all that we have landed on a mission on a tropical island. Maybe God’s been giving us clues for years.

Leaving Home

Written on Weds. January 21.

So many stories to write about our journey to get here. Some good – some not so good. I think the whole transition won’t feel real until we are here two weeks – and not packing to go home. There is still so much to do. Get the house sold, WRITE THANK-YOU NOTES, shut down our home phone and internet and cable. We needed to have our connections running up until the very end. Now we have to cancel from here. The dog arrives tomorrow and the car sometime in the next 3 weeks.

I feel like an exchange student. They all say how they delay packing until the bitter end. Us too! I know we are in another country but I don’t know if it will feel so far away or not. Right now we are still so connected to home.

We still worry about Mason. We’ve really launched him into the world. I guess no more then he launched himself when he moved away for 18 months to be in Brethren Volunteer Service. I’m sure it is odd for him living nearby his home but not being able to live in the house that was once his. It’s hard to know another’s thought, struggles, concerns, and even joys. He’s a bit alone in his situation. I don’t know if he knows any other 20 something’s whose parents moved away and left them at home to make their own way. There must be someone in the world who knows what he is going through. This is a very non-traditional way to live.

We have moved 3 times around Lancaster. From our two places to the townhouse after being married, from the townhouse to the farm and two years later from the farm to the house we built in 1995 on Browning Road. Mason only remembers ever living at the house on Browning Road.

For us it’s no big deal to be moving again – just another stop along the way. Before being married I moved from my house on Pine Street to college, then back and forth for 4 years to end in Lancaster. It’s just what most people do as they get older – move from one place to another. I grew up in one home until college too, so I can relate to Mason.

There were great memories made in that house! 5 foreign exchange students living with us, Alan (our little from Big Brothers/Big Sisters) stayed there too. Mason grew up there. We had his kindergarten birthday party in the basement. Painting on the wall in the powder room, Mason’s sky ceiling. Working in my office. Campfires in the back yard. Good Times!

We prayed a lot before leaving the farm house dream behind. We knew God gave us a house with four bedrooms for a reason. We didn't have children of our own to fill it but we invited others in. I loved that home and it was a dream to design it and have made it our own. Now it is a dream fulfilled.

Now we have a new dream to follow and a new call to answer.

Bring you all up to speed - BLAST OFF

Here goes!

So long since I've written (Dec 10!!!) but so much to say. Let's begin ...

The whole month of December was a blur. Christmas cards got out. We got our new mailing address after the cards were printed so I had slipped a business card in the envelope with our new contact information. We had a house showing AND got an offer at 8:00PM on Christmas Eve. (that since fell through - just another story to add) David and I both had to work (in addition to doing our regular office work) to train the persons replacing us. Mason was to stop working soon after his college course completed but the weather was good so they still had work until the end of the month.

We had to find a storage unit to keep all of our treasures while we are gone... a task of several days and several stops! We made arrangement for Sugar (our 8 year old dog) to catch a flight with our mail plane to get to live on the island with us.

THEN - on December 27 was our BIG BLAST OFF!!!!

I can not say enough about what a special event this was. So many people came to show support. All month long, checks had been coming in to help support our work for the next two year. We hoped to raise $6,000 before leaving.... I'll share the photos....

This was a Multi-cultural Event. The church hosts a Sudanese congregation and they came to bless us with a song. We had never personally met them but, they have pledge to support us on our mission.

The choir from our traditional service sang.

The words to Joy To The World were changed and the entire group sang a special new version to us. Including a verse for Mason too!

The Youth read a poem (Edison shared one in Spanish and in English).

Maranatha Youth sang too!

We had a special candle lighting. David and I were Blessed!

Middle of the Story of How we found Eleuthera

So, I'll pick up the story at our first trip to Eleuthera, in June of 2012.

We had been saving our money for the trip to Europe so the funds were there for us to spend for this different trip. We wanted a place to relax with beach in walking distance and things to see, like historic sights (always a favorite) We wanted to get some time on the water and we found a place (a villa), Bahamas Breeze, to rent that came with 2 kayaks. It was right at Rainbow Beach and the photos online made the place look very inviting. The people who own the home were in Amherst, MA in the states. A year or so before I had rented a house in Florida through a real estate agency for travel with our student Beate's family so I was more familiar with finding a place this way. I made us feel a little safer in dealing with a foreign country. We spoke to the owner and set the date. We asked lots of questions and used the forum on Tripadvisor to learn as much as we could.

Now, going back to the plans for the Europe tour, we had felt called to make this trip (that was no longer happening) not just about us but, we wanted to take our faith along and do something good along the way. We had hoped to plan a visit to each of our 4 students and include doing some sort of service work in each country. There were to be about 5 days at each stop and one of the days the student was to find a place for us all to do some volunteer work together. Volunteering to service others in need was something relatively new to all of our students. Each one had joined a service club at our US high school or been a part of our church youth group. Most all of them would agree American's really get involved in helping in charity. This dream of serving while on vacation was still foremost on my mind. We decided to try to plan to serve on Eleuthera.

In asking our rental guy about serving he mentioned the caretaker of the his villa (who is also the guy from whom you rent a car) is a preacher at a local church. His name is Mr. Freddie Ferguson. By this time too I had Googled - Eleuthera and Service and came across Bahamas Methodist Habitat. It seemed there was going to be no one at the camp during the time we would be on the island because they were planning to be in Nassau doing work there. It seemed the volunteer work would be on hold.

We had been praying much about this whole trip - we had been hugely disappointed to not have been given the time to go to Europe, we knew soon Mason would be going off to follow his own path, we knew David had been working sooooo many hours and it was time to evaluate what might be coming up next for us.

Mr Ferguson came to pick us up with our car at arrival. He shared about the island as he drove us to the house. We passed the church where he attends. We would be there for 2 Sundays and thought we should go to worship with the local folks.



We don't always attend church on vacation but, this time seemed we should stop in an make some connections. The island being a small place, it's good to know people who may be able to answer questions and show you the good local places to eat. On Sunday morning we attended. There were a few "obviously not local" people too. A family group of 4 people were there too and those at the church knew some of them. A couple a few years older than us and a girl and guy who looked to be 20-something.

We made the most of our vacation. We actually planned to relax. Each morning David and I would get up early (before the heat and the bugs) and meet on the deck for coffee. We had some great talks those mornings. If the weather was good, we walked to the beach. If it seems stormy, we'd try to tour somewhere just for a few hours. Mason spent time in the hammock reading a book - and I read a book too!

One day we drove South, almost as far south as you can go, to tour a place called - Cape Eleuthera Institute. The crazy thing was, here was this family again who we saw in church. We struck up conversation and learned they were from South Carolina and the basic things you learn about people the first time you meet.

The next day we stopped to have lunch at the Laughing Lizard in  Gregorytown and we met again. This time just the young couple. We learned she was beginning a new ministry on the island and her fiance was going to be leaving for home like her parents had in the morning.

Now a third time we would meet. I had headed to the beach at Rainbow Bay in the late afternoon the next day - and here was this girl again. This time she had with her a small puppy. We had spoken enough now we knew each other by name. Sarah had just taken in this small island "potcake" and had said good-bye to all of her family to begin the adventure to start a Young Life Ministry to teens. It turns out, she had been to Bahamas Methodist Habitat as a summer intern and came back to follow a call to lead a youth ministry on the island. We knew there was something more that God was working on through all of these brief encounters. I told Sarah, I think we need to invite you over for dinner and so we made plans for her to drive over that evening and we would cook.

We talked about ministry and being called. We shared about our encounters on the island and what life would be like on the island. We talked about BMH and how she had been connected there. Sarah offered to take us to the camp the next morning to show us around - even though no one would be at the camp. We took photos and checked out the place.

Little did we know what an impact this adventure would have on our future...