October kicks off the fireworks...

It should not have surprised me when I returned from England and found our blog without update...that is, since my last update on September 25th. But for some reason, I keep holding out hope that one of my other roommates here will feel some urgency and pressing need to beat me to the next blog update. However, I am coming to grips with the fact that this may never happen at all. In fact, I think that my dear roomies are quite content with allowing almost all updates to come by way of me. While I will surely face all kinds of denial and harassment over this conclusion, I will happily admit my error if they begin to prove me wrong...But I wouldn't hold your breath...

So, here is another update of the work and lives of the UCF Interns in Ballymena (as told by Dwight Castle):

Well, I returned from my friend's wedding on Monday, the longgg day that began at 5:30am for me, and after becoming very acquainted with the Manchester airport, finished after I arrived at our home around 5pm. The wedding went very well and it was quite refreshing and encouraging to spend time with my friend, Jon, and meet all of his friends there. There were quite a large number of missionaries there that were close friends, and so the Lord undoubtedly meant to encourage me through this, as I heard how the Lord was working through the lives of others around the world.

Though Monday is typically our day off to rest, the others did a school assembly Monday morning, before I got back. It seems that this went well, but we are continually trying to think of ways to improve our schools' programs. Tuesday, we started our first day of after-school tutoring in the homes, and every one of ours went really well! These are cool opportunities for us to not only help the kids with their homework and build our relationships with them, but also to be in the homes, building better relationships with their parents and the rest of their families. We were very encouraged by how well these went for all of us on Monday, and though we don't do any on Wednesdays, we all will go shortly to new homes for our Thursday students, and will do so on Fridays, also. Please continue to pray for these.

Yesterday, John and I joined a local gym, and are quite excited about regularly working out and trying to stay active and in shape. However, our first day proved quite interesting. We have to ride our bikes to this place, which conveniently, is on the other side of town. Not too big of a deal, except that we didn't really know how to get there...and it was raining. So, after about 40 minutes of wrong turns, weaving through cars on the way to work, kids on the way to school, and old men on the way to....well, to nowhere, I guess (but nonethless calling us cheeky for scaring them with our weaving), we made it to the gym, fairly wet, but not yet disheartened. We then had to sit and fill our paperwork and become official members for a while, before we finally began an abbreviated work out. During this time, we heard something that sounded like nothing short of a second great flooding of the earth. After reminding myself that God gave the rainbow (which we see so often) to ensure that this wasn't the case, I thought, maybe the massive air conditioning unit had kicked in...I then looked out the front door. When I saw our bikes float by in the newly formed river, I knew our ride back would not be fun (ok, it wasn't quite that bad, but it may as well have been). By the grace of God, when it was time to go, it had lightened from a deluge to a mild full-body massage, and we set out on the more accurately-guided ride back. We made much better time back for the first half of the trip, but then my back tire blew out and we had to walk the rest of the way back. However, the wonderful girls had decided to make homemade pancakes for us, so we felt much better after that.

Though we were supposed to go to Ballykeel, the incessant rain kept us from doing so. It was good for all of us to spend some time working on (catching up in my case) on our Hebrews Bible study that meets bi-weekly. Today, since the bike tire was still busted and erin wanted to come with us, we caught a much shorter taxi ride and had a great workout. It has been a gorgeous day and we have been able to hang out with a lot of people so far today. As I am typing this, we just watched our neighbors get busted for having MASS QUANTITIES of fireworks in their house, which they have been selling to the neighborhood kids for jacked up prices. (Starting on October 1st, you can hear fireworks going off all day long, as everyone gears up for Halloween, which seems to be a big excuse here for fireworks) You would have thought that it was a major drug bust or something since they brought out 11 police officers and 4 cars. But no, the drug dealers are still around.

Well, I guess that should catch you up on everything up to the past 30 minutes. We've gotta head out to tutoring now, so yep, that's all. Please keep praying for us to have wisdom to know who to spend our time with and doing what. Tonight, we are going out late again to see what the older kids do and where they hang out on Thursday nights, so pray for that too. We love you all!!! keep in touch.

Until later, my friends,
dwight