Well, we finally have both power and internet on the base, and although I should be using this time to write my sermon for Sunday, I wanted to give a quick update on life here at Hopeland. We're in the final stages of the lecture phase - our last week of actual class is next week, and after that, a week of team building and preparation, and then we're off to Zanzibar. It's been really rocky these past few weeks, both in the DTS as a whole and in my personal walk, but things seem to have smoothed out pretty well by now, and I really feel like we're ready for whatever awaits us on the outreach. Every free moment these days is spent working on skits and Swahili songs to present in churches, and today we started waking up at five in the morning for group prayer. I'm really hoping that five in the morning becomes a little easier to deal with as the time goes on, since we'll apparently be up praying every morning during outreach as well, but today was pretty rough. Even though we turned the lights off at nine last night, getting up this morning was nearly impossible. If it hadn't been for my and Lucy's brand new Masai blankets, which are amazingly warm for such thin pieces of fabric, I don't think we would have survived at all. The freezing African mornings are hard enough when the sun's up, but before sunrise it's even worse. So, after prayer and before lectures, Lucy and I had to absolutely beg Msaki for some coffee so that we could stay awake for class. He gave us some, and it was actually wonderful - I've never been much of a coffee drinker, but African coffee has so much sugar in it that it's absolutely delicious. Of course, we were shaking for the rest of the day, but at least we were wide awake! I'm going to have to buy some when we go into town tomorrow, otherwise there is absolutely no hope of making it through these next few months.

In other news, I'm preaching this Sunday, and I'm both excited and nervous. I'm speaking on relationship with God, based entirely on what He's been teaching me these past few months, and I'm planning on sharing bits of my testimony and the things that brought me to God, which will be the first time I've ever done that in front of a group of people. So, please, keep me in your prayers, and hopefully the Lord will use me in a way that will absolutely blow me away.

I'm still in the process of figuring out exactly how long I'm going to be staying here in Africa. I've been getting more and more serious about the idea of doing a School of Biblical Studies in September, but if I were to do that, I would probably come home for the summer at least, just to spend time with my family before I'm gone for another year. I know, without the slightest doubt, that I'll be spending a large amount of time here in my life, I'm just not exactly sure where that time will fall. I am, as the Ugandans say, slowly by slowly learning the language, and it is my greatest hope to one day understand it so well that I'm able to teach English here to the people who don't have the resources to learn it in a school or with a private tutor, but again, I'm waiting on the Lord to discover exactly when all of this will happen. I still have a commitment to go home for at least a month to fundraise for the lovely orphans in Karpinsk, Russia, so whenever I think about trying to schedule and plan all of this, I get a little bit anxious, but I know that God has given me all of these desires and alerted me to all of these needs, so again, I am fully trusting Him to tell me where to be, and when to be there. I can't wait to see how He works it all out. One travel plan that is certain, however, is my upcoming trip to Egypt. I'm not exactly sure when that will happen, but we're planning on the end of January, a bit after DTS graduation. Lucy gets three weeks vacation time from her Year for God program, and I know I'll need a bit of a break to clear my mind after getting back from outreach, so we've decided to save up our Christmas money and take a week long trip to Egypt, to see the pyramids and just relax. We're going to try to work it out so that we can stay with a YWAM base in Egypt, and since we've (as a total answer to prayer) found round-trip flights to Cairo from Entebbe for $420, tax included, that would make the total trip unbelievable inexpensive. So, from Uganda to Zanzibar to Egypt. And then, who knows. It's so exciting, to see how God is working everything out right now. If you had told me a year ago that I would be traveling all over Africa, I don't even know how I would have responded. Yet, here I am. Just another testament in my life to how wonderful the Lord is.