October 27th - journal entry, day 1

the mountains were breathtaking! 

This girl broke my heart after asking if I'd come back to play with her.

Jane and I went to Ihop for breakfast at 5:00 this morning and then she came to watch me leave (it was hard to leave, esp. seeing the look on her face. we're like sisters.)

Everything's going pretty smoothly so far, though, I barely have a voice this morning -_-
I am currently sitting 3,000 something feet in the air, with Sierra next to me, on (her 1st flight!) the first leg of our journey! We're headed to Memphis, Tennessee right now.  The look on Sierra's face as we took off was pure excitement!  This is gonna be an awesome week...

We made it to Phoenix, Arizona with only a 20min delay. Mr. Wilkinson got a taxi to go get the van, while the rest of us waited.  We stopped for lunch, then we stopped at Walmart for last minute things and candy for the kids at the Carnival this week.

The drive to Globe was breathtaking!  It was about an hour and a half drive through miles and miles of beautiful mountains and just amazing scenery!
Since we ran so late, the SECOND we got to the church we're staying at, we jumped out of the van and immediately got in the 'Church Bus', for the children's bus ministry.  It was amazing to drive through the Reservation - over 2 million acres of it!  When we got to the neighborhood, the bus driver, Bill, honked the horn while driving around, and the kids seemed to come out of the woodwork!  They were precious.  We did a puppet show, which was the Bible lesson, and then we all split up and played random games with the kids.  A little girl, I forget her name, attached to me - we roller-bladed together basically the whole hour.  She asked if I'll be there next next week and it was so sad to watch her little face go from a bright, excited smile to such a sad look of distress when I told her I will be on my way back to Indiana on Tuesday - It broke my heart!

After Bus, we went back to the church, had a wonderful dinner, cleaned up, and then we were all exhausted and ready for bed, but, Diana, the lady running ARM (Arizona Reservation Ministries), asked if it was okay to go ahead and have orientation, even though it was so late and we were all exhausted, that way, we'd be on track in the morning and could get right to the construction site.  So, at 8pm we all went to the sanctuary for the meeting.  'Orientation' was a...game?! None of us wanted to do it because we could barely think straight, we were so tired! But, we did it anyway...  We were all handed a piece of paper with the 'rules & goal' on it. 5 of us, including myself, read our paper, while the other 2ppl in the group went to a different room, with different rules/goals.  My groups goal was to build a tower (out of legos). We were playing as Native Americans, that only spoke the "eblog" language. The other 2ppl came in, their goal was to evangelize and destroy our tower that we're building for our Chief/god person...after the game/skit, we all sat back down and were then told the point of the game -- how would you like it if foreigners (and/or Christians) came into your land and tried to destroy your 'tower/faith' or told you that you're doing everything 'wrong'?  You wouldn't want to listen or have anything to do with them, would you? We discussed our goal here on the Reservation. You shouldn't preach, clean up trash (you'd be saying they're not responsible - imagine your mother-in-law cleaning your house - that's like how they'd feel. Or, that you're better than them.) you don't treat them differently, you just love, befriend, and PRAY for them.
So after we all talked about the Apache culture and such, we went to bed! (around 11pm - which was 2AM back home!)