Outreach!

Here is a bit about this last outreach, many of you heard about it while I was home this last July but  I will summarize the highlights for you!

 I met my team and co-leader in Iceland and we had a great time working with the base there in the capitol city of Reykjavik. The YWAMers there run a cafe with a youth center open all day for teenagers who have no place to go other than the streets where they can and often do get into trouble.  We did as much as we could with the youth from Zumba dance class lead by another outreach team, movie nights, playing music on the streets, giving art out in cafes and of course hitting the cold windy streets with free prayer signs! It was quite and adventure doing outreach in a western nation, so one day we went on a photo scavenger hunt looking for a people with purple shoes and such things, it was a great conversation starter and was definitely one of our favorite days. We also spent about a week helping a church put on a conference where we enjoyed Icelandic worship. In many western nations one of the best ways to minister is by relationship which is hard to build in 3 weeks but through the events that we held and participated in the base was able to connect with more youth and churches in the city. Iceland was a great first taste of Europe for many of us and a very friendly place to invest for part of outreach. When our time was up in Iceland we headed back to Perth.

Once back in Perth we had a couple days to wash our clothes and pack ourselves in to a van and a trailer for the next month of outreach to drive all the way up the west coast of Australia to reach the west Kimberly, a large indigenous area filled with lots of different small communities. There were eight different teams that went up so we drove as one big convoy for most of the time, stopping a few different places along the five day journey. We divided our time between two different communities called Looma and Mownjum, each were very different and had their own opportunities. Between the two communities we had two movie nights, Vacation Bible School afternoon sessions, cleaned out a house, helped at a feeding program, lead two church services, prayed for around a hundred people, and made so many friends especially between the ages of three to eighteen. We saw two people give their lives to the Lord and right now there is a team in those same locations following up.This was completely different to Iceland and even China where my team had gone before Iceland.

We quite enjoyed getting to spend a couple long weeks living in tents and taking cold showers without any internet, because there were fewer distractions from focusing on people within the community and with each other. We definitely learned a lot about laying down our comforts at the same time as looking forward to what God had for us after DTS. All of our students are on to other things at home like jobs and school, a few are even being called back to join staff.

Next I'll send an update of life in Perth!