Mountains of Nepal

The Philippines was great, Lots of salvations and healings! In one OR there were 19 healings! praise God! We then moved on to Nepal.

Well we are down from the mountains in Nepal and now in Sherkit Nepal. I'm not sure on the spelling. The mountain experience this year was better then last year. There were more salvations and we could see God moving! God has a lot planed for Jumla! There was a lot of hiking again this year. on our last day we hiked 9 hours! not including the breaks! i am sore...


We hiked about 4-5 hours to the first village that we spent the night. It was raining but it wasn't bad. The whole time i had this joy that could only come from God! The next day we hiked more and then we hiked a little more after that ;) we did and outreach in the rain on a roof top and six people got saved! So many good things and hard things happened but It was worth going. I think it was nine days since my last shower...ha-ha don't worry that was first on my list when we got back ;)


The team is doing well and are for the most part healthy. There is a bad ankle and a few colds. I am doing well. There is something different about this outreach this year. God has been working on me and i am really enjoying this OR. It makes so much of a difference when your thinking is straight! ha-ha I have been so happy and i can see a huge difference!


Things to be praying for...The health of the team, also unity. Please pray for a girl on our team who is having a hard time with different things on outreach. Salvations-we have seen a lot already but alway good to pray for more! Thanks! write me back if you can. it is always good to hear from you as well ;)

FEET Staff 2010

For the last month I have been getting ready for Feet to start. The program started on July 14th! All the participants are here and are all excited to begin! There are seven participants and five staff. There are six different nations represented! Tomasi from Fiji, Marcus and Daniel from Sweden, Sephora from Switzerland, Faylisha from England, Richelle from Holland, Natasha, Jessica, Phyllis, Arianna, Julie, and I are all from the states. Our welcome party was the night before, full of getting-to-know-you games and snacks! I am very excited about this team, they seem to be meshing well!

      Our first day went really well! Our schedule was full of orientations, registration, and teachings. That was only the first day! Our fun day out was a lot of fun too! This was to show them the city and how to use the transportation. We ate Dim Sum, the traditional Chinese breakfast, and lots of other fun things! Next week we will see what each person is good at, dance or drama. After that we all will start learning our part in each dance or drama.

          We have one month to the day here in Hong Kong. A very busy four weeks then we will start out on Aug. 14th for our outreach! The first country we go to is the Philippines! This will be for about two weeks. Then we fly back to hk (Hong Kong) to fly to Nepal! We will be there for about three an a half weeks. After that we head to India for three and a half weeks as well! Our last country to visit on feet will be to Vietnam for ten days! I have not yet been to Vietnam so I am very excited to see what their culture is like. The end of Oct we will be getting back to HK to finish up Feet around Nov. 1st.

Although there won’t be much time to rest because I will be leaving to Europe for a Communications team on Nov. 5th! Most of the Feet staff will be going plus a few more that are on staff here at the base. The countries we will visit in Europe are England, Belgium, and Germany in that order. Two weeks in England then one week each for the others, arriving back to HK on Dec. 4th. Some of you were asking how much this trip will be. The cost is going to be around $1500. This is a really good price for traveling around Europe from a month! I am not sure if this is including the airfare or not. I will let you know more details as I get them.
       As for Feet outreach, one of the places we are going, is back up in to the mountains in Jumla Nepal! This year I know more of what to expect then last time! I am very excited to go back and see what God has done in the villages we visited.
       This team seems to be very excited about outreach and are open to what God has planned for them! I am enjoying the people on this team and I believe that God is going to do amazing and wonderful things through them! WhooHoo!

Things to pray for: Unity in our team, Airline tickets to be available for all of us, and that I would continue to go deeper with God. Also pray that I would be thinking positively. Thanks everyone!

Nepal 08

This is a picture from my Feet in 08 in Nepal. The red stuff is chili peppers hung out to dry!

Break through

I'm calling this one break through because I have seen a lot of it in the past month. God has shown me a lot of things that I knew about but didn't realize. One of the things that I have started to change is my negative thinking. I saw how this turns in to a negative outlook on things and then affects a lot of areas in my life. The verse in Romans 12:2 ("Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of you mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is-his good, pleasing, and perfect will.") has become real to me. There are a lot of lies that I believed. Which would repeat in my head creating a negative mind set. At least this is how I see it. So now that I see whats going on, I can watch the things that are going through my head. If they are not pleasing to God I can replace them with Truth! This is no easy thing. But then the verse in Romans 8:1-2 ("Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death.") comes to mind. Thank you God for your grace!

Pictures in June

The few feet between our house and the next.

                  

Sun rise view from the roof

Mari and I.

Phyllis and I.

Three months!

Lei ho! (hello in Cantonese)


It is weird to think that it has been three months since I was back home in Nebraska! A lot has happened since then. I got back in mid March and was put straight to work on taking a tree stump out! We celebrated the 50th anniversary of YWAM in April, then DTS left on their outreach and will be back in June. Right now I have a room to myself! My room mate is helping lead one of the teams. I have come to really like having my own room! Although I do miss Mari a lot.

FEET will be starting soon, so part of my day is organizing and planning things out for that. This year we have five staff on FEET! Not just two like last year :) so that will make things even more enjoyable! Two of them have never done feet before but are super excited! We are going to go to the Philippines, Nepal, India, and Vietnam! Also the staff, and maybe a few participants, will be going on a communications team to Europe! This trip is to encourage the youth to do missions and challenge them to come to Asia! We will be going around to churches, youth groups, prayer meetings...etc to share with them what God is doing in Asia. This will be a challenging and growing experience for me because we will be speaking a lot. Maybe when I'm done I'll be a professional speaker! Ha ha! The trip to Europe will be expensive, even though we will be staying with contacts. The contacts are setting up and arranging places for us to speak at now. So far we are going to England and maybe one or two other places as well. The communications team will be going early November, right after FEET.

Just yesterday I learned two dances, and boy am I sore today! This will be the first dance I've been in since tap dance in 4th grade! These dances are a little jazzy.

I am getting my Hong Kong ID card finally in two weeks! I had to go to Macau and then enter back into Hong Kong to activate my workers visa. The ID card will make things a little faster going through immigration. (view outside my bedroom window)

Things to pray for:
That I use my time wisely
For more understanding from God
That God will provide all I need
Safe and healthy
That's all I can think of for now!

Thank you for your prayers.

Brittany~

and so it begins...

Well it's that time of year again! Doesn't seem like it was all that long ago Phyllis and I were having our first meeting for Feet a year ago. We met together yesterday to talk about what ideas we had and new things for this year . Nothing is set in stone right now so I can't give out any details yet, but I can say that it looks like an exciting time! I'll let you know as soon as we get things figured out.
This morning I woke up with a huge bottom lip! I had been bit in the night and also woke up with a cold so i couldn't breath or talk! The swelling went down by afternoon thankfully.

Right now we are doing cleaning projects on the base. Deep cleaning! Next week the different schools should be starting to prepare for their programs. We have a new school starting called TESOL. This school is on teaching English as a second language. There is also the Preforming Arts DTS and SOFM. That means four schools this summer / fall!

Please be praying for: More students to apply for Feet and for the others schools.
That the preparation time would go smoothly and that we can get everything done.
I don't have as much financial support as I've had in the past, and will need to be raising more for the new things coming up. Pray that God will porvide.

Back in HK

Well I got back to Hong Kong on March 17th. Being home was great! I was home for almost six weeks. I got to see a bunch of friends and family! I also got to talk at two churches, two youth groups, and a prayer meeting. I drank Mountain Dew almost everyday and got all the western food I could think of! I was sad to leave again but I knew it was time to come back.

Since then I have been working at the base here doing different jobs. While I was in the states I got my drivers license renewed  and so now I can drive here again! I know it doesn't seem right being from a place that drives on the right side normally. I enjoy driving and if i didn't drive here then I wouldn't drive for a year at a time! This last week I went two times and both those times the person I was picking up didn't show! lol well the first one missed the flight and the other was coming in the next day! ha

As soon as I got back I was put to work with five other guys to help get a large tree stump out of the ground! Yes I was considered "one of the guys" after this project! We recently cleared out an over grown part at the base and put cement over half of it. We put the wash line there. In order to get it to this point we had  to get a stump up and out! not easy when the roots are mixed with cement blocks. For that reason we couldn't just use the saw. It took a week to get it out! After taking an axe to it, we had four of us pulling a rope that was wrapped around it and two guys pushing it from the other side!

This year is the 50th anniversary of YWAM. So our founders, Loren and Darlene Cunningham, are coming to our base to celebrate! It is over a three day period starting in a few days. The base is busy getting ready for that right now.
One of out schools (DTS) is going on outreach very soon! they will be gone for two months. It will be really quiet around here for a while...

My last year in review

When I started my staffing in February 09 It was what I would say "out of my comfort zone" If the year before that wasn't "out there" enough then this way! I knew it would be hard but that is where I learn how to rely on God and him alone. This is an on going process you see and no easy thing, at least for me that is. For the first few months I learned to do some of the jobs around the base. These would be house keeping, food run, Driving on the opposite side of the road to pick people up from the airport, and picking up the mail and other random things in town. Now let me tell you Hong Kong is nothing like anything in Nebraska! Especially coming from a small town! I had the previous year to get to know parts of the city so that helped. This all lasted till June. At the beginning of June there was a Big conference called Call To All that our base attended. At this conference they had listed all the unreached groups in the world. (unreached with the gospel). That way you could target an area that you want to go to. There were so many groups of people on the list. That week gave me more of a drive to reach the lost.

As soon as the conference was over we started FEET prep. Now feet is a dance and drama program that goes to several different nations and preaches the gospel! This would be my first year staffing the program. I wasn't on my own though, Phyllis, who is also on staff here, was with me. One of our directors lead the team while in Hong Kong, over seeing how things went. We did a lot of planing with two of our contacts and ex feet leaders Tryfina and Sophia. Who just recently started a ministry in Kolkata India. On this feet we went to the nations of India, Nepal, and Thailand. All amazing countries in different ways! Our team was made up of 13 participants and us two staff making 15. Then including our contacts, which would vary from place to place, around 20 people traveling around!

Outreach
FEET always starts in July. Normally we have about six to seven weeks of prep phase but not this year. We only had four weeks to do what we do in seven! This includes learning dance and dramas, learning how to give your testimony, learning how to preach the gospel, and many other things. We stuffed our things we had to have into our hiking backpacks and headed out to India in Aug. Our first stop and the longest place we stayed in was Kolkata for two weeks. We arrived in the middle of the night and the students were smacked in the face with the harsh reality of life in that city. The streets were filled with the homeless sleeping on the hard ground or carts that they owned, you could even find them on top of cars. A lot of the taxi drivers will sleep in the taxi that they drive people around in all day. We helped out with Tryfina and Sophia's ministry where they work in a slum. After our time in that city we made our way north. Going up to Darjeeling and places around it. North India is one of my favorite places that I've gone so far! The foot hills of the Himalayan mountains are so beautiful!

The next place we went was Nepal. This year we targeted an unreached people group called the Tharo people. The majority of them live in a place called Bardia. When we got there only 90 people were Christians out of the 900 villages that were in that area! When you think of Nepal you think of Mountains and cold, but this was the flat lands and HOT! lol Our next place was a bit more extreme! We got in a airplane that was big enough for our team and three contacts plus the stewardess! We then flew up north to Jumla. After arriving we then hiked for five hours with our two backpacks. I thought the foot hills were beautiful but the Himalayan mountains themselves were amazingly more beautiful! This hike wasn't easy, sometimes the road would be nonexistent. There would be a gap maybe 30 feet long or more because that part had crumbled down the mountain! There was a bus that went to different parts of the mountains but it took around 20 days to get where we were going, so we hiked. During our time in the mountains we would hike from village to village putting on programs, preaching the gospel to people who had never heard of Jesus nor seen white people before! At the end of our time there we hiked back to Jumla in the rain. It had been raining for the last maybe two days, so the path was muddy and slippery. Our next spot was Kathmandu, the capital. One of my favorite places. We went around to churches and schools mainly.

After that city we made our way to Thailand! Arriving in Bangkok to stay for a few nights before going up to Chiang Rai. We worked with The Home of Blessing. This is a place that houses kids who live up in the hill tribes and can't get education, with the school being right next door it works well. The food is amazing in Thailand! It's also the right temperature all the time! well at least in Oct it is! We finally got back to Hong Kong after our three month outreach on Nov 9Th. A week of report back and re-entry teaching and FEET was over.

The next thing at the base was a seminar that brought the founders of YWAM to our base. It was a good time and I learned a lot, especially on giving. Right after that was COR (Christmas outreach) a two week program for people of all ages to go do ministry in Hong Kong itself! There was a great Christmas brunch and dinner. That ended and the new year came, now it is the time of year that we have DTS start! Today was the first day. I am not involved with this program which gives me the chance to go home for a month! I go back home on Feb 7th!

In the beginning...

Hello everyone! I am starting this blog so it will be easier for you to follow what I do. So far I am coming to the end of my second year here in Hong Kong. I have as of right now one more left. I am working with YWAM, a non-profit missions organization. I came here in Dec. 07 for a year to do a dts and feet along with cor. Where we went to the countries of India, Nepal, Philippines, and C***a. That year changed my life! I saw God move in ways I never knew possible! At the very end of that year in Nov 08 God told me to come back as staff. At first I didn't want to, because I wanted to go home and "be normal"... But how could I after this last year?! I knew that if I went home I would be unhappy with where I was. So God continued to confirm that he wanted me here in Hong Kong. I went home for two months visit over Thanksgiving and Christmas. Started my two year staff commitment in Feb 09.

I joined to staff the program called FEET, which starts every July. So up till then I help around the base doing different jobs. Right now I am on hospitality. There are a lot of people that come through the base and so I make sure they have all they need...big job, a lot to remember... I am liking it so far. I haven't been home in a year so on Feb 7Th I make the long trip back! A full 17 hours or longer! I am very excited to be going home to see everyone!