Tolentreasures

In December, I had the opportunity to travel to West Bengal, India on a mission trip with my church. Six of us made the trip to care for the children of mission workers who would be attending a conference there.   The last full day that we were there we went to a school in a nearby village and met Samuel who runs the school there.  He is a converted Hindu and teaches Hindu children a Christian based curriculum in English.   His school has been very successful because of the high quality of education he is providing.   This allows him to present the gospel to children and their parents often.  The problem?  He has more students than classroom space.  And three swings for over 200 children!  Such well behaved children! Such even lines!  Some of the older children are having outside class! They are starting a classroom on the second floor.  Here is where my part of the story comes in.   Samuel’s school was my moment.  That moment ...

Hang on for the synopsis of a week...another crazy one of course, that is all that we have around here these days. Last Wednesday was spent preparing to leave on the mission trip to Appalachia.  As with all trip preparations in my life, everything seems to go wrong the day before I leave causing me to make such rash statements as "This is it, I am not going on another mission trip, there is too much to do around here, this time I really mean it and yes, I know I say this every time but I mean it THIS IS IT!!!"  And then I go again.  Back to last Wednesday, somewhere along the line I took a post it note and jotted down everything that happened so that I would not forget.  It is in my purse, my purse is in my car, I was too tired to carry it in the house last night.  I think that might be where my blood pressure medicine is also, I just realized this morning that I have not found that since I arrived home.  Add that to the list for today, I think I might need...

A chain of events lead to this happening. My closet that I normally stash the Christmas presents in was completely full of all the generous donations of yarn for the Dominican Republic. In order to stash the Christmas presents, I had to clean out the yarn, so last night we (my knitting friends, Carol and Tina and myself) proceeded to pack the yarn. It was actually fun to touch it all and we packed it in "projects" matching skeins and putting them in large ziploc bags, using our own form of vacuum packing which led Tina to wish that she had worn sweatpants. Please note that there are no pics of the calisthenics required by somewhat middle aged women to kneel, press and contort to get all the air out of ziploc bags. Packed and ready to go. I just have to tag them with what is in them for customs and they can be "stored" at the church until the trip in January! Thank-you to everyone that so generously donated yarn and supplies! I really appreciate your tak...