Hello Everyone! This is the first time that I've made it here to the internet in a week and a half. We're in Vellore India right now. Please continue to pray for us for strength, grace, and joy. We've seen God's hand move in our team. We've also seen Him move in the people of India and seen people come to Jesus!!!! Praise God!

An Indian worker who was more then happy for me to take his photo.

Dear Friends,

Right now I’m sitting here on my bed sweating at 9:45 at night. We don’t have internet where we are staying so I’ll write part of this now, the rest later, and send it in the morning when I take a trip to the internet cafe.

Things have been going well here and it’s hard to believe it’s only been a week. It feels much longer but I’m sure that the weeks will begin to fly by as we get used to life here. It’s been a pretty crazy first week beginning the moment we landed. I won’t go into detail but I’ll give you a quick overview of some of the stuff we did:

Sat we arrived here in India Dhurmapuri, India after traveling for around 50 straight. Needless to say we were beyond tired but our contact here, Pastor Daniel, took us to what we first thought was a birthday party but found out it was a period party :) LOL They were celebrating their daughter/niece beginning puberty. The Pastor wanted us to sing, dance, and give a message. We did all but it was disaster since we were hungry and falling asleep. We laugh at it now.

Sunday, was insane as well but so touching for me. We went to Pastor Daniel’s church at 11 and a couple of us spoke after we sang a song and introduced ourselves. We also prayed for the people. Later that day we went to a leprosy colony and spoke and sang there as well. That was really something to see not only the poverty but the disease that’s slowly taking these people’s lives. Last we went to what they call the beggar’s church were we spoke and sang once again and then helped pass out food.

Monday, we went shopping for India style clothing which ended up being more stressful than I think a lot of us were imagining it was going to be. We had no idea of how to shop for these types of clothes and what to look for; but now we do. After a few hours of that, we went back home and did whatever we felt like napped, pictures, internet.

Tuesday, we spoke and attending part of the weekly pastor’s meeting and prayed with them for the different parts of India.

Wednesday, Pastor Daniel was out of town so we had a day off. (I'm not sure if my days are right or not. Too long ago :).)

Thursday or Friday (I don't remember which one), we also were free until evening when we went over the the girl’s home that the church runs. It was fun spending time with the children and then we got to pray for them at the end. I was blown away by the intense prayer of a little girl.

Saturday, we drove to Pastor Daniel’s children’s boarding school. We ending up eating lunch up there on the mountain which was really nice because it was so cool up there. After we hung out there at a park for awhile we went back down to a village to do street ministry. There was a new and neat experience. We were received really well and a little girl with good english invited me to her house.

It's been a pretty good week and but I'm going through a little bit of a rough time right now. I would love your prayers as it's only the beginning of the 2nd week. We're all looking forward to another part of our team arriving here on Thursday and our team should be complete at the end of this month. Thanks to visa problem our team is broken up into three different groups. But it's fine and God's in control!!!

God bless you all and thanks so much for all the prayers! Our team is switching locations next Sunday so I'm not sure what the living/internet conditions will be there at that time.

Love, Chrissy

Dear Family and Friends!!! I'm loving life here in India and the food is amazing! The heat isn't something I'm so fond of especially when there's no fans because there's no electricity during part of the day but it's okay. It's definitely tolerable. So much has happened already!

I don't have much time left right now so I'll write more later. Thanks for all your prayers! Things are going really well here and we only have one more girl left who isn't feeling well out of several. God bless!!!!

India!!!

I'm here and really enjoying it!!! Love you all!! Please pray for health as some of our team is struggling from sickness. Thank you!

Beginning a New Chapter....

In one way it's hard to believe that it was already 3 months ago that I said goodbye to friends, family, and my home. It's been an amazing time. It's been life changing, challenging, encouraging, one of the most difficult times of my life, fun/ blast, exciting, and stretching. But this has all come to an end and I will be leaving tomorrow morning. I need to be ready at 4:45 so I probably won't sleep much tonight; I'll have many hours to sleep traveling to the other side of the world. This has been an amazing time and a gift from God! I'm so ready to go though. I've been wanting to leave for somewhere around the last 2 weeks and it's finally here!!!

We will be traveling through Japan and Singapore before we get to India. We could arrive to Dharmapuri as late at Sunday morning depending on whether we take the train or bus from Chennai. We will stay with our first contact for 2.5 weeks, go to a new location, go back to the first place, and sometime half of our team will head to N. India to work in the red light district. Please pray that I would be one of the people who get to go. This is something that I said I wanted to do before I even arrived here in Kona.

I'm a little apprehensive but I think that it will be better once we're there. I can feel myself getting really excited that it's finally D-Day! I'm so excited to be heading over to Asia once again!

Please pray for unity in our team. I think that we can have a really powerful outreach if we are unified but if not, it's really going to hurt us. We have a large team of 20 including our leaders so this can make it more difficult. Thank you so much for your many prayers. God has definitely been working on us already.

I'm not sure what the internet service will be like over there at this time. I will try and make time to post updates when I can. As always, thank you for the support, love, and prayers!

Love, Chrissy

Pictures from our last ending celebration for lecture phase:

Dawn, my beloved friend and fellow India teammate

Dork :)

Our Leader/PhotogenX President, Paul, doing a New Zealand traditional dance the "Haka". He's really a wonderful, funny, down to earth guy :); really. LOL

Dawn, presenting her idea/the classes' house warming gift to Paul, Susi, and their two children. We got them a trampoline :)

The India team provided some of the entertainment for the night. We attempted to share our new learned hula for outreach: Parte Parte. It was a blast!

The meal was amazing!!! Complete with Hors d'oeuvres, appetizers, salad, main meal, and dessert! It was so very wonderful after eating YWAM food for most of our meals.

Roomies aka the three musketeers!

Two more of my beautiful friends. Kailyn was my work duty buddy and she is also going to India!!! Hooray!