ali's african adventures

We´ve arrived safely in Iquitos, Peru after a long night spent curled up in soft chairs at the Lima airport Starbucks. Thank God for the nice people there who let us purchase a few minutes of sleep for nothing more than the price of a frappucino. We stumbled onto the flight this morning, bleary-eyed and not quite ready for the adventure that awaits us.

Ready or not, it has begun.

I´m sitting in an internet cafe somewhere downtown and the sweat is already starting to trickle down my back. This is familiar and comforting, as was the fact that the driver of the mototaxi that brought us here tried his darndest to charge us three times the going rate. I just smiled and let him hose me only slightly, deeming the extra half sole sufficient price for feeling so at home.

We are close to the Amazon River, close enough that everything is green, which provides a beautiful backdrop for the ridiculously bright mototaxis that swarm the streets like rainbow bees. Iquitos is connected to only one other city by road, one much smaller and miles away, and so cars here are almost nonexistant. It´s slightly strange, actually, seeing only mototaxis (same concept as Indian autorickshaws or Thai tuk-tuks, if you have any experience with either) and zemidjahns (although I´m sure they aren´t called that here...) mixed in with the very occasional pickup and minibus.

The sky is blue and the clouds are piled up on the horizon over the palms, reminder that it rains most days for at least a little while. We´re hoping to get back to the base before that happens this afternoon.

The class is diverse enough that I feel almost like being on the ship, since the first couple of questions are from our standard repertoire there. Where are you from? What do you do? Since we´re all here for the same purpose, we can stop there and start to share stories. We´ve got Peruvians and Canadians and Columbians and Americans and Dutchies and even a Kiwi, and I think we´re all going to get along just fine.

Class starts tomorrow with a six AM wake-up call, and I´m itching to get started. I´ve perused the list of readings and books we´ll be studying, and I get this feeling all over again that God´s got something big planned for me during these months.

Photos to follow once I take some. I´ve been so dazed by the unpacking and meeting and getting my bearings that I haven´t yet pulled out my camera.

I plan to remedy that very soon, because this place is beautiful.

(Just as a note: my schedule for the next five months is going to be rather rigorous, and as far as I can tell, the only free time for coming into town will be on the weekends. Expect posting no more than once a week, and I promise I´ll try and make it worth your wait.)

It's the oldest cliche in the books, and I cringe when I hear it, even more so when I actually use it myself. I just don't know where the time went! This year is flying by.

Cringe or not, it's exactly what I thought when I finally managed to open my eyes this morning, far later than the to-do list on my dresser would have liked. It's been more than two months since the HoJ and I landed ourselves back on North American soil, which means that it's high time we left it again.

We leave for Peru tomorrow.

As a farewell to my hometown which has treated us so well since we've been back, we wandered down to the local Chinese restaurant for the lunch special yesterday. I've been eating there since I was young, and I've recently introduced the HoJ to their pork fried rice. He is now, understandably, a die-hard fan.

Once our bellies were filled and we had our little cups of tea in front of us, we cracked open our fortune cookies and burst out laughing when we read our miniature prophesies. Their accuracy and relevance were uncanny.



Tomorrow is the start of our next adventure, and I'm excited to be able to share it with you. I'll be the first to admit that I'm a little apprehensive. As we laid in bed last night, I couldn't shake the feeling. I think it's a mixture of things. The ship is getting closer and closer to Sierra Leone as I type this, and my heart is yearning to be there right now. (Yes, I said yearning. It's the closest I can come to describe the way it's trying to punch a hole through my chest wall and go soaring off through the air towards West Africa. Strange feeling, this.) And I'm headed in the opposite direction.

It's such a strange thing, knowing that I'm in God's will but wanting so badly to do something else at the same time; it's a pill I haven't had to swallow before. Up until now, I've been living out my dream life, getting to practice nursing among the most incredible people in the most incredible setting. And now I'm being told that the next five months of my life will take place more than six thousand kilometers away from them.

I think it's called obedience, and I'm not sure I like the taste of it. But I'm pretty sure, as with everything God plans for my life, that this is going to be so much better than I could have hoped.

So with that, I'm signing off until some unspecified time in the future when I find an internet cafe somewhere in the Amazon jungle. I'm going to go beat the mess in our room into tightly-packed submission, and tomorrow I'm getting on a plane heading south instead of east.

I think it's going to be awesome.

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Want to know more about where we'll be and what we'll be doing? Here are a few links:

YWAM - the organization we'll be working with
YWAM Peru - the website of the base where we're staying
DTS (Discipleship Training School) - a description of the course

Since we're heading to Peru on Saturday (update on all that to follow before then) and I have no idea what sort of internet access we'll have, I figured I'd upload the March wallpapers a little early.







And now I'm off to get the rest of the wallpapers done before we head south so I can keep them coming while we're in Peru.

(Like before, just click on any of them to get to the full-sized version.)

This week's challenge over at I Heart Faces is red. I thought it was a fitting one for Valentine's day, especially when I found this photo. I was going through the hundreds I took on my trip to Ecuador back in 2009, working on putting together some fliers for my sister. She'll be leading the team again this year, in just about a month, when they head back down to Guayaquil to help out at camp for another wild week.



This Valentine's Day, I'm thinking of these kids and the ones waiting in Sierra Leone for the ship to arrive and the ones in Peru who I'll be meeting in less than two weeks. Let's face it; my heart is all over the place.

And I wouldn't have it any other way.

I recently had the chance to do a mini photo shoot with my precious nieces, and when I uploaded the photos to start editing, I noticed that one of them was special.

I'm not sure if it was the awkward way I was hunched into the tiny space between the couch and her blanket on the floor or the way the curtains were hanging, but if you look into her eyes, you can see two little, tiny hearts. In all the rest of the photos, her pupils are perfect circles, but in this one, I think she's just trying to say she loves me.



Ditto, kid.

I've been quite inspired lately, and after a long hiatus after the world trip, I've finally been picking up my camera again. The snow fell thick on Toronto yesterday, and my brother's apartment balcony on the twenty-second floor was the perfect place to watch the sky clear again.



Would you believe that these photos are both of the same view?

If you're anything like me, you can't keep track of the days. In my case, it might have something to do with the fact that I am on what my aunt refers to as permavacation. In a way it feels like that right now, since we're pretty much just soaking up as much time with family as possible before we head south for the next five months.

However, when the only thing separating one day from the next is which church I'm speaking at about Mercy Ships, it's not easy to remember whether it's Monday or Thursday. Add that to the fact that we seem to be sleeping in a different bed every two or three nights, and it's a recipe for disaster. I haven't showed up to church on a Tuesday quite yet, but I figure it's only a matter of time.

To that end, I decided to copy an idea I first saw on this website and create some calendars that go with me wherever I do, since my computer is pretty much my only constant travel companion. Except for the HoJ of course. (Please don't tell him I listed the computer first.)







Click on any of the photos to go to the full-size wallpapers (which are 1280x800; I'm too lazy to make any other sizes, and I figure that's the most common one anyway, right?) which you can throw on your desktop. I know February is actually all about Valentine's Day, but with the amount of snow out there right now, I was mostly inspired by beachy themes instead. Anything to take my mind off the cold. (Although the bokeh one would look incredible with a heart-shaped filter... I'll check and see if my neighbour still has his Christmas lights up and see what I can do when I get home.)

Let me know if you like them, and I might make more! And click on the link to that other website to see lots of other ones, all of which are far more creative than my throw-some-dates-on-a-pretty-picture style.

At the very least, it's a reason to clean up all those icons languishing on your desktop, no? I know I had a little tidying to do before I could even figure out that today is Wednesday the second.