Since our busyness has ended along with our summer, we now have time to give a little update. The summer staff have all gone home and we have ended our day camps. We have met and served with so many amazing people who desire to follow God.
We are now both back into our preschool routine. Carrie is lead teacher again for the 3s and 4s and I am opening preschool for the first two hours as kids get dropped off. Carrie has some great support from the other preschool staff and it makes her job a little easier. In the afternoon, we both work in the after school program. Every day we pick up kids from the elementary schools and bring them to the mission where we do some fun activities with them as well do a short chapel until their parents come.
For the rest of our time here in Kodiak, I will be co-directing the youth group for the church that we've been a part of. I'm excited about the opportunity and already know many of the kids from the school year before when I served as a volunteer.
We've had two sets of visitors since we last wrote and we loved having them here. My parents visited at the beginning of August and we got to have some fun adventures like deep-sea fishing and an evening trip to Long Island to have dinner and celebrate Carrie's birthday. We enjoyed giving them a glimpse of Kodiak and the Mission.
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| Hobo dinners over the fire on Long Island for Carrie's bday |
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| Carrie's first salmon! |
Caleb came only 10 days after and we did as much as stuff as we possibly
could including hiking a mountain, fishing, looking for bears (we did
end up seeing bears on two nights that he was here!), and a great
camping trip with the Nussbaums. We drove across the island the short
way to Anton Larson Bay, kayaked through some beautiful islands until we
came to a small cove where we camped for the night. About midnight we
got back in our kayaks and kayaked around the cove to see the
phosphorescence in the water. We had never heard of it before moving
here, but apparently it is bacteria in the water that shines when the
water is disturbed. So as we paddled through the water everything we
touched sparkled, making the water glow. It was the most amazing
experience! It felt almost magical. It's hard to describe and we weren't
able to capture it with a picture or video, so you should look it up
online if you want to know more. :)
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| On the top of Pyramid Mountain |
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| Camping out |
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| Just a picture of the incredible beauty God has made |
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| Luke and Caleb with their fish |
This last weekend over Labor Day, Carrie and I got to go on a fishing trip with some of the other mission people to a neighboring island called Afognak. We went on a large charter boat owned by the executive director of the mission and spent two straight days setting nets called gill-nets and pulling Silver Salmon out as they get tangled in the net. By the time we headed home we had pulled a total of 113 silver salmon out of the water! We filleted them right on the boat and both got pretty good at that job! After we got back we divided the fillets that we had vacuum-sealed among the people who went on the trip. Our take would feed us every day for a few months!! (Even though we have grown to like salmon, we will not be eating it that often!) To add to this already very unique experience that usually would have cost thousands of dollars, we saw something that I think is even more unique. Carrie and I were part of a small handful of people who witnessed a salmon shark on the hunt. It only lasted a few seconds but was amazing and exciting (not to mention it helped us out by scaring the salmon into our nets). We were checking the nets out of the skiff and saw it flinging and thrashing it's food, and even breaching bringing its whole body out of the water. If I had to guess how big it was, I would have to say at least 6 ft., probably 8 ft. We are told that the salmon shark is cousin to the Great White.
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| This is a picture we found online - of pretty much exactly what we witnessed! |
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| Luke filleting one of the 113 salmon we caught that weekend. |
We continue to have adventure after adventure, and we also continue to see God at work here and it's amazing.
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| This is a "baby eagle" that has been growing up in its nest in a tree at the mission for months now. It fell out of the tree a few weekends ago and we were able to get real close to it because it couldn't fly yet. It's so incredible to experience wildlife so up-close and personal! |
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Prayer requests:
- That we can hear God's voice as we begin to think about where God is leading us at the end of the year.
- That we can continue to build relationships with these kids, especially with the new kids that have started.
- For Carrie as she takes on the lead teacher job again with much fewer hours to devote to the preschool.
- That our relationships with God would continue to be strengthened day after day.
