The Friends and Family plan

Day at the beach with Greg, Abby, Jeff, Rachel, Fred, Lauren and the littles

Once again we have been so blessed with family visiting us here, and this time it was our four older children and a couple of their spouses, all at the same time. We had a great time with them and as I write this, Rachel is still with us for another week. We rode some motos, went to some of the waterfalls, went to the beach one day, worshiped together, shared many meals together, played some games, watched some movies, and just had a lot of fun. This is the third time for most of them to come down and visit. Elliot, Rachel's husband was not able to come this year as he had started a new job and did not have any vacation time coming yet. 

Family photo at our home in Jarabacoa

Family Photo taken at the SI Base

          Rachel will be going back on June 27th and Janae will be going back with her. Janae will spend a week in Shipshewana and then meet Karen in Atlanta for a week at WellSpring Camp, a camp for special needs kids. Janae will be a counselor there for the week and Karen will spend a couple of days planning for when WellSpring comes to Jarabacoa and does day-camp for Genesis. Janae will then fly back home when WellSpring comes down on July 15th. WellSpring will then be here for a week of day-camps. It will be good for Janae to have the opportunity to go back for a week but also a but scary to have her flying alone. But I am sure she will be fine.

     We also have a praise that we have spoken to a lady that her husband is coming on staff with SI in August, and she will be tutoring Marcy this coming school year. We have met them before as they have been here on outreaches other times and have actually lived in the Dominican Republic for a couple of years in Santiago in the past. They will be arriving on August 3rd and we are all looking forward to having Dave Adams join our men's sports site and then to have Megan tutor Marcy. It will be a bit of a different schedule but should work out great. 

A laptop charger that was  fried through the wiring.

The corner with all the supplies that got he worst of it.

 Another point of news here at SI is that on Sunday night at about 8:30, I received a call that our Physical Therapy site was on fire. When I got there, the one fire truck in town was on the scene and had the fire "mostly out" enough that we could start to go in and get things out and put them in our Dentistry site, right next door. It had started by a transformer blowing out on a pole outside the clinic. The electrical fire followed the wires inside and sparked the inverter we had inside and then followed all the wires inside the walls in the building. There is not a lot of protection again these kind of surges so it is something that we live with. We could put a disconnect switch and turn it off each night but, that is when the electric is on and it charges the batteries for the day, when the electric is off. It is so foreign as to anything we would experience in the states but, WE ARE NOT IN THE STATES. We spent most of Monday cleaning up the mess then on Tuesday started the "final cleanup" of scrubbing walls, pressure spraying, rebuilding one wooden wall, (everything else was concrete), and getting ready for painting. Hopefully by Monday we can start to paint and be ready for our next outreach there on June 30th.

The place where the fire started

      Pray that we can use this incident to praise God that it was not worse than it was and that no-one was hurt.