Travel, Debrief and Graduation...and add a Tsunami and Earthquake!

Well, this week has been our last week of our DTS experience. What a growing, stretching, challenging, fun and exciting 6 months it has been!

We left South Africa last Saturday and traveled a LONG time to get back to Kona, Hawaii for debrief and graduation. Thankfully, I had the window seat for 3 out of 4 flights! I was SOOO thankful for that! I was especially desperate for the window seat for the 17.5 hour flight from Johanessberg to Atlanta! God gave me so much grace for that flight and I did so well! I could have been on there longer by the end =)

Except for a some napping on the plane, we were awake for 52 hours in total between getting out of bed and going to bed! We had a wonderful welcome from some of our Call2All family when we landed in Kona on Sunday night and stayed up late catching up with our friends, the Hales.

Debrief week was actually really full and there wasn't much time for jet lag. Monday was a rest day but we filled it with enjoying campus, saying hello to many people, supper with our friends (the Coles from IHOP who are doing a DTS here), enjoying the prayer room (and seeing some IHOP faces in there!) and ending a great day with a message and ministry night in the prayer room by Allan Hood! What a treat! Allan was out here to speak at the Call2All Church Pioneering School this week! What an awesome time!

Our class debriefed Tuesday and Wednesday and we shared our presentations with one another of the different locations we went to (South Africa, Brazil and the Philippines). We got this awesome booklet to process our DTS experience and take home with us. I enjoyed filling it out! I also spontaneously led the class worship on Wednesday which was fun!

Sadly, we missed out on the Spirit being poured out in the prayer room on Tuesday night because jet lag hit me that day =( I was so tired and though I set my alarm for 5:35pm to make it to supper and to hear Allan Hood speak, when I woke at 7:45pm, my alarm was still set but hadn't gone off! Bummer!

We've been enjoying the prayer room, the campus and catching up with friends who were on other teams around the globe! It's been a fun and full week!

We had graduation on Thursday and Mark Anderson (president of Call2All) was our guest speaker. That was really nice that he could come and see our class. What was extra special was that he sat at the same table as Shane and I and I could pick his brain with probing questions for an hour and a half =)

To end graduation day, as we were hanging out with friends in our building, the tsunami sirens we hear on the first Monday of the month at noon went off. It was surreal at 10pm! It was a mad scramble for the first few minutes and we quickly checked CNN to find out about the earthquake in Japan. We grabbed the children from bed and headed over to campus as directly by our school leader. Generally, the students stay on campus, which is a safe spot and out of the evacuation area. Because campus is full and we are in just for debrief for a few days, they put us in housing off campus. Our place, with the other couples and families, is in a safe zone, but we don't have food and such. The singles are in a hotel that is in the evacuation area. So, to make sure everyone is accounted for, everyone had to evacuate to campus.

We all spent the night there and I slept amazingly well for the circumstances. We slept on the floor of the Ohana Court on the cement pad as a class. It was an interesting way to spend our last night together on graduation day =) They had CNN and all the updates playing on a big screen throughout the night. We also found out that we had an earthquake! What a night of natural disaster issues! It was like a scene out of a movie =)

We made it back to our place around 8am, even though the warning was still in effect. The students in the hotel had to stay on campus. The road that we always walk on, do our weekly evangelism down and where the hotel is was full of water and some of the businesses were trashed! Good thing they evacuated! I don't know how high the water got but it's amazing to me that it passed the sea wall and the road! We checked out some of the aftermath this afternoon and can see how high the water got! God is so good and He is our Protector.

Thanks for your prayers, care and concern! We are safe and sound and had an exciting night =)

Tomorrow we leave for Winnipeg and start the next season of our journey! Wow! Crazy!