Well it has been a while! So many things have happened. I guess I will have to skip over the holidays and go straight to the D.R. stuff. But I will say that two loves in my life bought me a brand-spankin-new camera, so once I get the swing of things here, I can start documenting some of it on film, or uh, digital-ness. I should post some things soon.

So, I have been in Puerto Plata for about 20 hours now.

I woke up around 3am on Saturday morning for my 6am flight out of Houston. My family (including the wiener) plus Dave drove me to the airport. I got to Miami, where I wandered around aimlessly, ate some Doritos and had a coke around 9am, and tried some questionable airport sushi when I thought it was about lunchtime. After that, my old bible study leader who works here, Cara, found me, and we talked with Ashley (my new roomie) until the flight to Puerto Plata.

We arrived along with Kendall, another new Makarios person, stood in a line to pay 10 dollars for a "tourist card," got the tourist card, then walked promptly through a line that took the newly acquired tourist card back from you. Sharla (the director of Makarios) picked us up, and we went to the house! The house was lovely and crowded. A mission group from the Austin Stone arrived hours before us, so there were many many new faces.

The two things I will have to get used to the most are: brushing your teeth with only bottled water and remembering to put all toilet paper in the trash can... You can't flush!

These two things are more difficult for me to handle than the lack of air conditioning. Pero, this is nothing compared to how many people in the world live. We have it good here at Makarios.

This morning we went to church, which lasted for two hours. The women wear head coverings and everything. For the first hour, random men throughout the congregation will stand and speak a word from God, and someone will suggest a hymn to sing. During the second hour, a preacher preaches. Thankfully, I was able to understand the sermon pretty well. Unfortunately, the people who spoke to me after church were much less understandable. My Spanish is hilariously out of practice, and these accents here are very different.

Anyway, praise God I am here and alive for another day, and safe! I can't wait to see how he moves here.