Hello Everyone!!! We finally arrived at 7:30pm on Monday evening after traveling for about 23 hours (with time change). Currently we are 4 hours ahead because here they do not do daylight savings. A huge blessing and answer to prayer was that ALL of our luggage also arrived. Thank you for those who prayed about that because it was definitely a relief.
We have great testimony about God's provision and constant reminder of how He is in control... and this involves how we got picked up from the airport. Our contact who was supposed to pick us up from the airport (and who shall remain nameless) got the arrival time mixed up and thought that we would be on the 9:30pm flight. So here we come trotting out of the airport with ALL of our luggage, and we didn't see "our contact". So we dragged everything to the curb waiting and looking for our ride... it was around 7:35p (we landed around 7:20pm). We thought maybe he just assumed it was a larger plane and that we wouldn't have gone through customs and luggage pick-up as fast as we did. So we were content with waiting... hoping to see him soon.
(Now, backing up our day just a little to when we were in the airport in Puerto Rico...)
Luckily, and we thank the Lord for this, while we were in the Puerto Rico airport, we met a Dominican lady who works with a Christian school in Jarabacoa (the same town where we work and live for those who forgot). We had become good acquaintances while in the Puerto Rico airport that before she left the airport in the DR, she asked us if we had a ride, and if not if we would accept a ride from her and her friend. We told her that our ride should be here shortly and thanked her. She asked us if we felt comfortable waiting and asked if we would like her to stay. We said we were fine and thanked her again, but this time she insisted that she at least call around to see if she could find out where our ride was, just in case he got the times mixed up. We didn't have his number but she said that was ok and that she would call someone who might know him. Sure enough she got ahold of him on the phone, and came to find out that our ride realized the mistake he made (and felt really bad...still does even a day later) and so we got a ride with this lady that we had just met a couple hours earlier in another airport.
This is one of the things that we really love about Dominican culture. We insisted that our ride would be here shortly and that it would be ok if she left. But she said that it would be wrong for her or at least that she would feel real bad not knowing if our ride was coming.
Not to over spiritualize the situation but we really felt that God was telling us through this circumstance that he is in complete control and that he is going to be there providing for us even if it might not be the way that we might have expected.
Today... we went and got our cell phones that we will need for our ministry. We also took a look at the house we will be living in and wrote a list of things that we will need to buy. We also went around to some car dealerships to price some vehicles. Vehicles are really expensive here, we have been looking at Honda CRV and for a 1998 they are a little over $10,000. The reason they are so pricey has to do with the different types of taxes that they have to pay to get them to the island. After car shopping we attended our first staff meeting and it was nice seeing everyone again that we met from last summer.
Another funny story...
So today when we went to the house, Josh opened the gate so that Lowell could pull the van into the driveway, and Josh didn't know that Snickers (the brown dog) would run off if he didn't hold him or tie him up. So Snickers got out and barreled down the street, which was flowing with water like a river because it has been raining so much. So I took off after the dog who just ran even faster. I chased him for about 10 minutes before I gave up. I came walking back up the road to where Josh and Lowell were and told them that I gave up. Just as I said that Lowell said, "that's okay because now he's following you". I turned around and there he was, following me back to the house. And this was a complete miracle because Snickers isn't one to come back... at least not for A LONG time. So after we got him back into the yard we were able to check out the rest of the house. Then we came to find that the dogs had dug two huge holes in the yard (somewhat hidden by the palm trees). The silver lining to these holes, we have just come to find out, is that the house isn't flooding because of these 2 holes. It's been raining really hard for the past 6 days. (We didn't know that the house even flooded, so we learned several new things today!)
Tomorrow... we will be doing some more shopping for our house and if we have time maybe look at some more cars. We probably won't buy all the stuff we need until we have found where the good deals are at and then on Friday we will buy most of what we need.
Sorry for the long posts. Lots of stuff going on and we will probably write more tomorrow night.
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