Welcome

I'd like to take this time to officially welcome you to Vancouver and your journey with me at WYAM Nexia- DTS. We have pretty much now completed the "orientation" phase and first week of school. I can tell you straight up that it has been full on and overwhelming, but good too.

We have two schools doing the classroom phase for the first three months. So there is my school Nexia and then there is the Hockey school. All the hockey students are from Canada, there are about 11 of them and then 6 of us from various countries (3 from America, 1 Swiss, 1 Brazil and this little Aussie, with maybe one more to come (the guy to come is from South Africa, he is having some visa troubles). The living arrangements seem kind of crazy. We have 2 apartments next door to each other, guys in one girls in the other. So 7 girls in one place with a staff member and they boys in the other with their staff members. Us girls have it pretty good with space and stuff.  We eat meals together at night and just find a spot in either house where we can fit I am sharing a room with Linda, she is from Arizona and is also 26. So the nannas are in a room together which is good. And this little nanna got the top bunk YAY. Linda is happy to swap part way through so ill see how I go. I'm right once I'm up there, its just the getting up and down.

So yeah.. introductory stuff this week. Just finding about what we will be doing and how living in community will work. We have to sign up for 'job roles' so my job everyday is lunch clean up at school. Its pretty good. It was either that or cook tea every night for everyone haha.

So classes.. We have classes everymorning and then in the afternoons we break up into our schools and do our thing. The hockey students play hockey and we do what we need to do. The past two days we have been sharing our God stories and how we came to be at our DTS. Its been really good getting to know each other a bit better and where we have come from.

The sharing bit isn't always comfortable even just sitting at lunch and just chatting is tricky and at times I need to give myself a little internal pep talk to work myself up to it. I'm more than happy to let conversations go on and I will just sit back and watch or absorb what people are saying. I'll put in my 2 cents worth at times but sometimes not. lol. I have kind of challenged myself to push myself a little bit extra everyday. Like the other night I went to the boys house for tea when I would have preferred to stay at my house and quietly disappear afetr tea. Or today.. wait for it... I prayed out loud.. yep..EPIC And Anthea it didn't take me half an hour of laughing before I did it. Although the group I was with did laugh at me as I had to 'shake it out' after we were done cos I had to pump myslef up first haha. So that is good. As I was going to bed last night a line of a Supertones song came into my head. The line was - Don't take even a moment for granted, from the song Dedication. So thats the plan- not to take a moment for granted. It does make me tired putting myself out there but I think that in the long run that tiredness will be cancelled out with the what I gain form this experience.

So that about it fro now except for maybe the the answer to one of the biggest questions of all... Where is outreach??? I have told a few people and Facebook has probably done the rest but.... we are going to Malaysia and Thailand. Not sure in what order and the details of what we will be doing, but from the 4th ish of Dec till the the 22nd ish of Feb I will be somewhere in South East Asia.

So now that is really all I have. Totes time for bed now. Goodnight.