Seeing Both Sides to a Rainy Day

I have so much to tell you guys so sit back relax grab some cheez-its (thanks Rae) and enjoy the blog. Last Monday I went on an out day with my students. That day work included going to the beach then to a lagoon. The beach was so beautiful, like out of control. It had no stores no touristy things just a beautiful beach. We all went swimming for a couple of hours before going to the lagoon. I feel bad, but most of my focus is going to be on the lagoon, sorry beach you were amazing but you offer no thrill seeking, attention grabbing stories. Ok now that that’s out there. At the lagoon it was the craziest thing I have ever seen. The water was black but you could see through it, a clear black. And you are surrounded by rock (it looks a lot like a huge hole was cut out of a rock) there are trees that go down into the water and through the water you can see their entire root system, it was crazy. So I immediately go with the group of my girls to the 40 foot cliff. On my way up the girls are like “Ms Donohue I cant believe you are doing this!” To which I respond “yeah me either the last time I jumped off a cliff this high I said I never would again.” This made their jaw drop and it was awesome. You see to my non-cliff jumping readers there is a problem with anything higher than about 25 feet, you can feel yourself falling, and I hate that. Your mind literally has time to say “you volunteered for this! You are so stupid!” As you have left the ground and are waiting to hit the water. There is also more risk involved in a jump like this and I was kind of aware that my health insurance does not start until mid October. All of this is going through my mind as I am on the top looking down and am reaching the end of the window of opportunity. This is another thing you should know, about 93% of people can only spend less than 10 minutes at the top of the cliff before they chicken out. If you are up there to long your adrenaline runs out and you realize you are stupid. I am at 8 minutes and the pressure is getting to me, all my students are pressuring me so I just did it, didn’t think just stepped off. Didn’t think was the key statement I learned something in physics my senior year of college that I didn’t remember until I hit the water and it was very clear to me, if you jump into undisturbed water it hurts…a lot. No one was in the water below and lets just say my feet hurt really bad and somehow I hurt my tailbone so bad I almost could not walk to the car. Its been over a week later it still hurts. PS the picture is of the lagoon, now looking at the picture the water looks blue but in real life it looks more black.

I had a good week past that, but I have been really stressed. This week the kids are not in school and instead it is retreat. I wanted to help out wherever I could so I put my name on a sign up sheet that turned out to be a sheet saying I would lead a workshop. So I was put in charge of crafts, totally in charge. I began to panic, not knowing exactly how this goes, what I have to work with, you know those kind of things. So yesterday I finally went to check out this storage room a staff member keeps telling me has a bunch of craft supplies. I go in thinking this will be great, it will be like stepping into Michaels, the possibilities will be endless. I go in to find one slimy soap making kit and some tempera paint. It was so disappointing. I went to talk to another staff member who got my mind running and gave me a bunch of ideas. It was so nice. Today I got to test out one of my ideas and it turned out really well! I made a tote bag from a t-shirt. I think the kids will love it. I got to use a sewing machine today!!!!

So as I said above this week is retreat, a time to give the kids a break from school and think about Jesus. The theme is ‘many roads one way’ and every night two staff members are sharing their testimonies. I am sharing tomorrow. PLEASE pray for me to have the words. It should be a week of craziness and fun! Please pray that God would do crazy things this retreat and that he would rock our socks. Pray that some of the students would come to Christ. Pray also that God would minister to the staff as well. Thank you guys so much! I will let you know what went down.

This week was so much better. I got a lot of encouragement from you guys back home and I needed that. My students were back to normal, praise the Lord! They are really funny and fun to be around when they don’t turn into monsters, but I have my monster days too that’s for sure. I actually have a couple of funny stories for you. On Wednesday night I woke up at 3:32AM and I was standing up wiping down my clothes kind of freaking out, but I woke up doing this so I didn’t really know why I was doing it, so I went to the bathroom and on my way back to my room it hit me, either I had a dream that a bug was walking all over me or it was actually walking all over me. When I say bug I am thinking cockroach, yeah gross I know. So I pulled back my blankets and didn’t see anything so I went back to bed (remember at this point I am half asleep). In the morning I get up and pull my blanket down as I am making my bed and a huge grasshopper (alive) falls onto the ground. I was so disgusted that was in my bed for at least 3 hours walking all over me! That is so gross. Sad as it is my second thought after GROSS was I am so glad that was not a cockroach! My next story comes from my adventure to Santiago and our adventure to find the best hamburger I have ever had. A group of six of us started our mission and were determined to find strong burger (mobile restaurants are hard to find) so we abandoned the staff van at a stop light so that we could walk (other staff members were in the van we didn’t leave it) we get out of the van, play a little Frogger across traffic and walk to the first possible location. It is not there. So all 6 of us pile into an old unidentifiable compact four door car known as a taxi. I had one staff member on my lap as we shared the front seat and three students were in the back with the other staff member. We tell the driver the location of Strong Burger. There was a dead silence when we came to the location and all that was there was an empty parking lot. We then told the driver to take us back to the mall where we met up with the others with. While we did not get the hamburger to satisfy our craving the situation did bring us closer in ways I could have never dreamed of.

I wrote to you a day early because tomorrow I have to work. I am going to the beach with my students. I love that I get to call that work that is so awesome. So you will hear of that adventure fo sho. I really appreciate your prayers, you have no idea. I never knew how hard it was to go somewhere away from your friends and a community you are used to. So please keep me in your prayers.

PS I included a picture of Strong Burger from the last time I had it so you can have an idea in your mind what it looks like.

I had a rough week this week. I have to be fair to you guys and let you know the real stuff rather than just paint a picture perfect experience out here. All of my students got in trouble this week because bottom line they broke big deal rules, and have been without us catching it for a little while. It got ugly, there were hours of sessions just issuing punishments. The kids would go to these and then come to class, angry beyond get out. They had a rough time respecting me and I heard from the male students that my girls had been talking behind my back which makes sense because they were disrespecting me to my face. I got some staff back up that stopped this behavior it its tracks, so that was nice. We also had a huge change in staff positions so that was intense to adjust to. All around this week was rough, I got home from work on the first day of our week an hour and a half later than I normally do and all I could do was lay down with my head hanging off my bed. Through a lot of tears and frustrations I made it through this week. I spent a lot of time on the roof of our apartment building because that is where I get away to be with God. I had some intense conversations of me pouring my heart out to Him and it was really nice. Please don’t take this post as me complaining or packing my bags to come back home. I work with wounded people, and hurt people hurt people. I have rested this weekend and not thought about work much, I needed that. I actually feel ready to start the week. Your prayers are more precious to me than you could ever imagine. When you pray please don’t just pray over my safety and physical needs, but also emotional. It can be so draining to work with these girls, to be so far away from you guys and people who know me. Again don’t get me wrong, I can do it and I still know that God has me here, but I need the encouragement of your prayers. I still love my job and this place and wouldn’t trade this crazy peace I have of knowing I am exactly where God wants me for anything. I promise next week I will be back to my fun upbeat posts but tonight I am just going to call it a night.

A couple of weeks ago I attempted to be creative and make a video. I just want to say right now that it is super amazing, however I can not upload it with the song it is set to due to copy right laws so you will just have to take my word for it. I stumbled upon an awesome blog this week that had what is called a word cloud. Desiring to be awesome I followed the link and created my own word cloud. I made that which was one of the best videos ever created into a word cloud.

Here is the link: <a href=”http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1113387/What_I_Do” title=”Wordle: What I Do”><img src=”http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/1113387/What_I_Do” alt=”Wordle: What I Do” style=”padding:4px;border:1px solid #ddd”></a>

Here is what it is saying not jumbled up and not set to awesome music that cant be put up due to copyright laws.

I work with American teenagers who are in a program because

they struggle

with thing like anorexia, drugs, alcohol, lying, stealing, depression, cutting, and authority.

They come from

picture perfect homes

the worst homes you can imagine

Christian homes.

They are missionary kidsprostitute kids lost lonely struggling broken awesome fun teenagers who are sorry for who they became. What is my role? To walk beside them in school. To help those who thought they would never achieve graduating from high school and help them earn a diploma, because at the end of the day these kids need to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are not only loved by the staff here but most importantly by JESUS.

Santo Domingo was incredible! It was so cool to walk down the oldest road of the new world and to go to the oldest church of the new world! It was weird though I have to admit seeing the outside of the building was cool because seeing something that old is crazy, we have nothing like that back home. However seeing the inside was a bit disappointing. After going to old churches and monasteries in Macedonia it was heart breaking to see the inside of this building. It was clearly fully restored, the paintings were so bright on the walls everything looked new trying to be old. It was weird. Still cool though. After we walked through the church we went shopping. I have put some pictures on Facebook to give you an idea of what I am talking about. It was so weird to go shopping in such old buildings. For the most part it was very touristy shops that were fun to poke around in. Then I saw something that almost made me cry. We turned a corner and to my surprise in the middle of this old town was a Payless Shoe Store!!!!! I couldn’t believe it! I inhaled so deeply when I walked in the door, I love the smell of new shoes. It was like being home for a second! We tried the shoes on and had fun, but then decided it would be more economical to order them and have them shipped to us seems how the standard price for the shoes was $30!

After some fun shopping time we went to a store that was like Wal-Mart with a food court. It was so much fun to shop around and again it really felt like being in the states. I did my grocery shopping, it was so weird to have choice. When you go shopping out here you are very lucky if they have what you are looking for but to get a choice on the brand of product you are buying is just out of the question.

We then went to a mall that was crazy! They had clothing stores that were high fashion stores from France and Italy! They had a store that was imported crystal jewelry from Russia! It was so weird to see such luxury here. We had Pizza Hut there that was so good, and for dessert we had Cinnabun.

This has been a crazy week. With not having a day off because I went with the girls in my class room on the adventure, it was a little rough. I lost patience a few times when they deserved my patience. I needed today to recover and relax and spend some time with God. I do have a cool God story for you guys! Last year the son of the directors of New Horizons got into an accident here and destroyed his knee, he cant walk correctly because of it. The son decided he would like to have surgery to get it fixed so they have been making strides in that direction. Having only Dominican insurance they consulted with the doctors here who told them they have no knee specialists and this was something that they should take back to the states to work on. Not having insurance in the US this would cost $40,000 in the very least. As I talked with the mom of this son this week she was stressing out saying things like “we don’t have that kind of money, I have no idea what to do…” we prayed for her and assured her that God has a plan. My roommate offered some crazy awesome words to her and said God knew about this before you guys even had Richard (he is 21 now), God totally has this situation. Two days ago they went to get a second opinion at a different doctor, unfortunately it was the same news however the doctor told them that a missionary doctor was scheduled to come in from the states who is a knee surgeon! He is going to do the surgery for almost free! isn’t that crazy! God is so out of control! Psalm 139 has this awesome verse in it that says “ in your book were written all the days that were ordained for me when as yet there was not one of them (vs. 16)” it is so true! God know! That just blew me away this week.