New Beginnings

For those who haven't heard, I just finished my first week of my new job. I was hired by my local young life to be the associate director for the Illinois side. I will be in charge of the youth groups for Moline High School and Wilson Middle School. I still feel like a Deer caught in the headlights, but I am especially excited about our trip to camp in July. I'm still of course trying to catch up on sleep because as you can see from the picture, last Monday was quite an experiencial travel day. I woke up at 5:00 am eastern standard time to make an 8:20 flight in Santiago, which turned out to be delayed an hour and a half. I was actually fortunate because my bags were overweight, but the lady let me pass free because of the trouble. Once I finally got through customs in Miami, I missed my 1:30 flight and was rescheduled on the 4:15 to Chicago. After a rousing afternoon in Miami airport, we loaded the plane just shy of 5:00pm. However due to weather storms in Chicago we sat on the tarmac of Miami for 2 hours. The only good news was that because of my flight change, I got bumped to business class, which really was no different than first class, so I slept like a baby. At 7:00 they made us deboard the plane because they didn't have enough food to feed everyone on the plane. At 8:00 we reboarded and finally took off. Unfortunately we arrived in Chicago just after 11:00 pm and the night flight for Moline had already departed. I quickly got in line to get my flight changed to 8:05 morning flight. The lady at the counter also informed me that there were no longer hotels available because of all of the missed flights, so emergency cots were set up in the terminal for us to get some shut eye. I was of course freezing and barely slept a wink especially because of the horrendous smell. I finally got extra blankets at about 3 am and fell asleep to be rudely awaken by the security guards at 4 am to kick us out of the cots. I then found a cozy spot on the ground to sleep a couple of more hours to wake up and have my gate changed three times and the flight delayed four times and finally took off at 10:35 am. Upon arrival to the Quad Cities, there was quite the luggage confusion, which meant that I finally got home just shy of 2:00 pm Central time. This made an over all travel time of 34 hours for a trip that can be done easily in under 10. I'm alive which is what is important.

Andrew

End of the Year

Well, I was supposed to be in the Dominican Republic for a couple of weeks, but I ended up staying for over three months. Its hard to believe that it is over, and I am still in shock to be back in the United States. Here is a picture from our last week of school. The third day of Spirit week was Twin Day and of course the winners of the whole school were me and Arberlyn of first grade!!! So here is a shout out to Arberlyn aka Mr. T for looking so hardcore with are tattoos that we won first prize!!!

Andrew

Camping at the Beach

A couple weeks ago, I had the chance to take the 6th graders to the beautiful, secluded beach of Samana. We spent five days on the beach with the primary focus of studying the coral reef. We were partnered with a marine biologist who came and taught the kids all about the coral reef, its importance, and how to protect it. It was an unbelievable trip and we saw incredible things below and above the water. It rained everyday, but we just embraced it and ran around in the rain in our swimming suits. Each kid also got the chance to rock climb and much more. Of course the rock climb wasn't hard for our class monkey, Leynny who climbed the coconut trees every morning to get us each a coconut to drink its milk. Thanks sixth grade for such a memorable trip.

Andrew