Mandeville Highlights

The St. Vincent/ Mayreau Outreach team is planning serious strategy for the Egg Drop competition. Rules? Creatively wrap your egg no more than an inch thick to make it damage proof so we can hurl it from the roof without breaking it...hmmm....

I dont think the team is very convinced about the potential for success in this mission...(Far right: Josh's face is a dead giveaway...)

Still, they gamely present their best efforts

And they finally figure out it isn't really about whether the egg survives the drop or not. It's about how well they can work together as a team under pressure and when the odds don't seem to be in their favour.

One of my students, Matt Cassell, turned out to be a good ol' Lancaster boy from the town we left behind in Manheim. Isn't it a small world? He's doing great fitting in down here and bonding with his classmates..

Renita Lapp and I are the two female leaders of the St. Vincent team which gladly, our husbands are helping us organize. Renita is so much fun to be around! The other night I heard strange cawing sounds outside my house and she was under my tree cawing and flapping her wings...

Danya Josh and Renita

These are some of the larger team of students heading to St. Croix for outreach. Kaela is the one on the left making this candid moment great. The others are too intensely aware of the drama about to unfold as the Battle of the Eggs begins. Did I mention we had to sing a song substituting one word with "Egg" and sing it triumphantly as our well wrapped eggs plummeted to the ground? Yeah..St. Croix start off with "I believe my egg can fly..."

We participated in daily worship with the school kids who attend the Bethel Christian School which the Stone's Hope base ran on their property. The kids were funny and said the craziest things. One young kid named Ronaldo, when asked why on earth he wouldn't eat his lunch so he could go outside and play, responded with wide hyper eyes, "Miss I dont like no food at all. I dont eat no food! I only drink Milk!"

John and I stayed in the little "Treehouse" all week, the tiny suite to the left by the staff house. This base is definitely more rustic, pastoral and still than our base here in Montego Bay.

The dorm rooms- the females stayed on the top floor with the men bundled down below. It was funny and interesting to watch ten girls share one dorm room for a week. It was cluttery, noisy, jumbled and yet great fun for them all.

Bethel Christian School. A small school in a small community, but its awesome how the children here are learning Godly values, good discipline, have stable meals and caring staff who get to know their whole families as well. The Mandeville base is discipling a community through transforming the children. They were really outgoing and very well behaved.