Christmas morning began with pancakes, followed by a team family time of worship and praying for each other. During the week preceding Christmas we'd written words of encouragement, affirmation etc for each other which we read out during this family time. It was good for us to hear these things.
Monday a group of us took a boat to do ministry at Bocachita Island, about half an hour away. The good news is that I didn't get seasick (!), although I can't really boast too much as we didn't leave the bay so we didn't really go to the sea actually, but still! The bad news is i got heat stroke. Seriously, Cartagena is really hot. It really sucked being so sick. Luckily I was able to go back to the YWAM base on the island where I could lie down for a few hours while the rest of our group had lunch and ministered more. The ministry I was part of was really good, going door to door sharing God's love and praying for people. The island was interesting, loud music plays all the time, lots of street parties with beer, loud music and dancing outside.
Tuesday was a quiet day for me spent mostly in bed recovering from the previous days heat stroke. A massive highlight was getting our cars back that night. All intact with nothing stolen or vandalised, praise God. We only unpacked them on Wednesday though. We were so happy to get the rest of our stuff - we'd all been living out of daypack of stuff for the last 2 weeks so we all really needed a change of clothes, among other things!
So after about 3 weeks of paperwork getting the cars shipped, waiting for them to be shipped, then 3 days of paperwork to get them back, we finally had them and were able to get going on the rest of our trip. It's been quite a challenge not having our own transport or all our stuff. Not to mention how challenging it's been organising our time as we haven't known how long we'll be anywhere, when we'd get to the next place etc. It's been a time of patience and of just being okay with being with where we are. Sometimes it was challenging feeling like we weren't doing enough, ministry etc wise, but I've also learnt that when you drive through and from one continent to another there will by necesity be a lot of admin time required. And for us over the last few weeks it's involved getting our vehicles and ourselves to Colombia, not to mention made more difficult by us doing it all the week before Christmas!!
Colombians are really friendly lovely people, I'm really enjoying the country and the people. Even if I've had only one good (at a push!) cup of coffee! The countryside is beautiful. Colombian Spanish is really hard to understand. Lucky for us we've had a few Colombians join us so that's really helping, they're being amazing with translating and helping organise stuff for us. An interesting thing is as we've driven we've seen many many stuffed dolls (kind of like scarecrows) next to the road. Some of them are really lifelike. They are filled with firecrackers and burnt on New Years Eve to represent all the ugly things from that year to show that the old things have passed away and a new year is now upon you.
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