Homemaking Homesteader

Leanne’s Mission Trip, Part Four

01:33, 2008-Aug-31 .. 2 comments .. Link

Leanne and her team members spent some time (while not doing concrete work ~smile~) with the children of the orphanage. Here are a few pictures…

They made a trip into the town of Assuit, where the orphanage is located, and it was quite an experience. They had to have "tourist police" escort them. Here are some pictures of the town. The water you is the Nile River.

Transportation varied quite a bit! In the pictures below you can see a cart being pulled by a donkey and cars driving along side!

Assuit is an agricultural area and there was lots of green fields Leanne said it was obvious to see where the farm land ended.. everything beyond was brown.

I have more pictures to share from the orphange, other sites they saw in Assuit as well as the pyrimids and Cairo. I hope to be able to get those in the next "mission trip" blog posting..

Leanne has a bit more to share with you about her time at the orphanage …

Egypt
Leanne Miller

Once again we were up at five thirty every morning in Egypt. We had ten minutes to get ready and be outside, where we then waited for the boys (they slept on the other side in the boys’ dorms), who were always late. We worked until eight and then stopped for breakfast. It was a nice break with our thirty minutes of quiet Bible reading time included. Then it was back out to work. We worked for about four hours until lunch break came around. The last part of our workday was never steady in how many more hours we were going to work because you can’t leave an almost finished slab of concrete to dry. That is why sometimes we worked nine hour days. We had another Bible study when we were done working, then bath and laundry time, and sometimes we had another Bible study, though this one the boys and girls separated. Dinner followed shortly, we had a little bit of free time, and then one of the team members, whoever had kitchen duty that day, would lead another Bible study at night. We had library reading time after that and then it was off to bed.

The Orphanage hired a man to do the finishing touches, like smoothing out the top so when it dries it is nice and smooth. His name was Niem. He believed there was a God but that was the extent of his faith. He had a bad opinion of Americans because he’d worked in a lot of touristy places where he’d met a lot of Americans, who didn’t talk, act or dress in any way that would give him any other kind of opinion. The way we dressed (as do most Christian organizations we had a dress code we followed) especially caught his attention, and when he asked one of our Egyptian leaders, who oversaw our work, why we dress like we do he was able to say we dress modestly because of our God. Anyway, his opinion of Americans was completely changed and it was an opportunity for someone to share Christianity with him. It was really neat.

As well as working we also put together presentations for the children. On Sundays we had two presentations we did. One in the morning and one in the evening, and we also had one on Wednesday’s in the evening. A presentation consisted of around eight songs (we even learned how to sing a song in Arabic!), a puppet show, and two testimonies. Once in a while we would even do a skit. One of our leaders would then give a massage. Everything, except the songs we sang, was done through a translator. It only got complicated when our translator (we had more then one) didn’t know what a word meant and then one of our leaders or team members would have to find a way to describe the word. I never spoke through a translator, but I have played games where you have to describe a word and it isn’t always easy to do.

More to come…