Saturday, July 5, 2008
Today we got to go to
Labadee again! This time we went to
Columbus Beach, which is much more
secluded than other beaches at Labadee, so it was almost like a
private beach for us.
We brought
kayaks, so I went kayaking couple times.
Neil and I rowed out and met up with
Evan and
Nadine far from the shore. Nadine
dared me to take a dip, so I took a
dip in the
deep water for the
first time ever. I have no idea how deep it was. Kind of
scary but
exciting!
We also brought some
snorkeling gears, so I went snorkeling with
Neil and
Nadine. We saw lots of little
fishes,
corals,
sea urchins, etc. I had never snorkeled before, so this was another
first time for me.
We found a big
starfish, so I played with it for a while. I
flipped it upside down and watched it flip itself over. It took like
five minutes, but it was so cool that I watched it
twice. It was a very
exciting day at the beach.
During
dinner at the Holiday House, the
long-term missionaries take turns to join the short-term missionaries and share their
testimonies. Today it was
Gavin's turn for the first time since I got here, so I got to here how he decided to do
medical missions. His testimony had a lot of
similarities with mine in terms of wanting to do medical missions, so what he said really
resonated in my mind. What especially
struck me is when he talked about
setting priorities straight. He told us how he had put so much
importance in
doing medical mission, but one day he realized that he needed to put
God and
relationship with Him
first before missions. I realized that
I had been putting so much
emphasis and
effort into
preparing for medical missions that my relationship with God had come to a
standstill. I
believe that God
has called me to do medical missions,
but I need to let
God prepare me for it and
focus more on
growing closer to Him.
Before serving dessert, the
kitchen ladies called me over to the kitchen and told me that they made a
birthday cake but didn't know who it was for. Apparently someone had asked them to make a cake for
Vicki today (even though her birthday was
Thursday). They weren't quite ready with the
candles, so I just stood in the kitchen facing the dining hall, and everyone else just
stared at me
waiting for me to say something. I didn't know what to say because I didn't want to ruin the "
surprise" so I just stood there smiling until the cake was ready. After a little bit of
awkward moment, we
celebrated Vicki's birthday again.
After dinner we were joined by
Amy, and the seven of us played
dutch blitz. Since we had an
odd number of players,
Laura played by herself. She had won
every time we played, and somehow, even though she was on her own, she
beat us all... How in the world? It must be the way she
shuffles her cards... jk. Sorry for giving you such a hard time, Laura. You've proven to us that you're the
best dutch blitz player in
Haiti. For now anyway.
Afterwards we went over to Amy's house and watched first half of
Chaos Theory. Kind of a
random movie, but I'm
interested to see how it ends.
Bonjou Mezanmi!
