my journey contines

hope everybody’s doing well. many of you i haven’t spoken to in quite a while now. drop me a quick e-mail and give me an update! seriously (i’m not just saying that).

i am going to be travelling up north for 2 days with the gender & marketing specialists. i’ll be observing and interviewing participants in some training sessions related to cotton and diversifying crops. i’ll also be taking lots of pics so be eagerly awaiting that

anyways, thanks for reading!
shannon

check out more new pics on my flickr.

http://flickr.com/photos/sbrisco

by the way, you don’t have to just search through ALL the pics. that wouldn’t be so exciting because I have tons. rather, feel free to click on a group on the right hand side — they’re organized into where I was (Eastern, January in Nicaragua, Christmas in Toronto, etc.) and as here, feel free to leave comments hehe…

thanks for reading
shannon

on Wednesday night I went to another local church, Impacto, actually close to were I work… it is a Spanish speaking church. the pastor is from the states and I was told I’d find his accent a little easier to understand. I did! I understood most of what he said and I could follow the serman (which was cool).

This is during the part of the morning where we were handing out gifts.

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Later in the day, I came home to rest, but had been invited to go with their group to Granada in the evening to celebrate all of the January birthdays. I believe that this was the youth group that went, but they were up to ages above mine, so I’m not positive. I invited my two friends Gaby and Massiel who also joined us. (I met them through my boss)

Me & Massiel

Me, Gaby, Massiel

Me & Gaby

Group Pic - Impacto Youth Group

Street Picture

I decided to share this on my blog as I can’t forward to to everybody that reads my blog — figured this would be the best place to post it! I’m not sure who drew the illustrations, it’s one of those emails that gets forwarded around.

Makes you think.

“Awesome!! We complain about the cross we bear but don’t realize it is preparing us for the dip in the road that God can see and we cannot.

Whatever your cross, whatever your pain, there will always be sunshine after the rain…. Perhaps you may stumble, perhaps even fall, but God’s always ready to answer your call…. He knows every heartache, sees every tear, a word from His lips can calm every fear… Your sorrows may linger throughout the night but suddenly vanish by dawn’s early light… The Savior is waiting, somewhere above, to give you His grace and send you His love.”

i went to Paz Centro again today and met some of the producers who are raising pigs. please see the following video and pictures

This is the view right near my house, I always wanted to snap a picture of the mountains/volcanoes but normally the taxis drive crazy fast…. so here’s a first.

This is a group of the producers of sesame - there was a meeting for some training on the preparation of food for the pigs that these women are raising for additional income.

Re: See Pig. (Andrew? hehe)

Little pigs, piglettes (?), are so cute when they run.

This is the view driving in La Paz Centro. Good thing I have image stabilizer because we were bouncing all around on those crazy roads…

my weekend was pretty full… which is funny because in the beginning i was a little sad about how little i would be doing. i’ve been feeling really lonely lately and i guess that all got to me.

anyways, friday night i took it pretty easy. went to Woody’s with the girls (Wendy, Amira, and Amira’s friend — sorry I’m temporarily drawing a blank on her/your name!)… it was nice, then i just went back home, talked to my parents for a bit, and went to bed early. saturday morning i met with my pastor’s wife of the church i’m attending here in Managua, Claudia and we went to a nearby mall to chat and kinda get to know each other a bit. it was really nice and she’s very encouraging.

then one of my Nicaraguan friends, Gabriela, came over. she’s super nice and we get to practice our English/Spanish. she doesn’t speak much English but she’s starting to study 2 hours 4 days a week in an institute with our other friends Massiel and Evelyn. so we hung out for a while. she told me that she’s going to introduce me to her parents… so i did the same! i called my parents up on Skype, and set up my webcam and made the introductions and did the translating. hehe… so fun. this is a pic of me and Gaby.

in the evening Wendy and her housemate and our friend Megan hosted a boys vs. girls party at their house. a bunch of our friends got together and went for drinks and snacks and games - -and it was so fun! i invited Gabriela and we all had a blast. here’s a video from some of the games hehe…

… are apparently not so easy to get onto paper. journalling should be easy right? just take the journal and start writing. however, i haven’t found it to be that way this time around. i have beautiful pens and a beautiful blank journal. but my mind isn’t blank. maybe i need journalling prompts or something lol.

anyways i’ve been talking to many of my friends from school, randomly here and there. most of them are back home now - and although their homes are all over the place and not really close to mine, i miss them and it feels a little strange to still be in nicaragua while they are home. a few of them are going back to “the field”. Mindy is still in Afghanistan, Melissa has just made a 4 year commitment in Mongolia, and Rebecca is going back to Israel. Nash and Nisreen are still working there and Joe and Mary will be going back to Pakistan. in other new news, Rosa and Eugene are getting married in August and planning the wedding. also, Chantelle and Sam just got engaged about a week ago and will also be planning to get married in August. Janell is back and working in her church, as is Faith (but they are in different states)… so much new news. i on the other hand, do not have any such new news - just that things are continuing here

i’m going to try to attach some of the pictures I’ve taken over the last month or so and in the field — it wasn’t allowing me to post them yesterday.

thanks for reading. i miss you friends and family.
shannon

ok so i’ve heard that gangs hang shoes over wires to identify their territory… this is the barrio right behind my house, the next street over. i’m pretty sure that some of the kids just got carried away and started doing it… or maybe there’s another reason? i didn’t find out but thought it was worth a pic - so snagged this from my friend Noel who took the pic.

This was when I was up near La Paz Centro… I went to visit some of the producers and these were the men that were buying the sesame… Yup those white bags are full of organic sesame.

This is Claudia, the gender-specialist, leading the discussion following up after the focus group discussions.

This is a husband and wife, producer and his wife, that participate in the project and participated in the focus group. I’m currently working to get the interview transcribed and then translated…

Just and artsy pic I took… it was across the street from where we met.

i’ve not been blogging much lately as i’ve been kinda having a bit of up and down emotional rollercoaster… but it’s still important to me to keep in touch with you. and i still so very much appreciate all of your love and prayers and support as you journey with me.

i found Living Truth on YouTube the other day… it’s great because unfortunately I can’t watch it online here and I cannot order them to come here — it would take too long by the time they arrived I’d be gone. for those of you who don’t know what Living Truth is, it’s the televised preaching of Charles Price from the People’s Church Toronto. the most recent sermon i watched was entitled “When the Things over our Heads are Under His Feet”.

some thoughts from that…
“the safest place for an airplane to be is sitting on the runway doing nothing. but that’s also the most useless place for it to be. in a very similar way, life was designed to run with risk. we were intended to live lives that are going to involve us in risk. not wreckless risk of our own chosing, but… risk that comes from obeying and trusting the Lord Jesus Christ. and yet there are lots of us who would rather sit on the ground where the aircraft will never get into trouble, but never do anything either and never get anywhere.”

I don’t want to be one of those people that “sits on the runway” doing nothing… with opportunities and capabilities but not using them to the fullest capacity.

“John in his gospel calls miracles signs. they are not an end in themselves, but rather a pointer to something else… [John 20:30-31] Miracles are to 1) know who He is (Jesus is Christ), 2) know what He gives (life in all its fullness) and 3) that we might know how to respond.”

In this sermon the pastor spoke about the storm where Peter walked on the water. Life have its rough and rigid edges whether you’re a Christian or not — it’s life. We get sick, we die, we have accidents, etc. The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. God doesn’t take us out of these things… “Jesus 1) permits storms, 2)provides storms, 3) protects in storms”.

so what have I been re-thinking? just doing some soul-searching I guess you’d say, to use that over-used term… re-focusing maybe is a better word. it’s very easy in life to get distracted with all the things that are in life. if you’ve been reading my blog for some time you likely read my post about living in the now instead of always waiting for the future. it’s easy to float back to lose focus or to live for a moment other than now. there must be a happy medium. being thankful for today - focused in this moment and on the future, to press on for joy.

my dad gave me this analogy the other day… if you’re driving a car and just looking down at the road right in front or at something on the windshield instead of out ahead, you’ll not drive straight and inevitably you’ll crash! so it’s important to look out ahead. sometimes that means making difficult choices in the now or avoiding the little distractions.

“sometimes it’s in a crisis where everything else that we normally trust and rely on are taken from us, that become our most teachable moments and we learn our best lessons.”

i’m starting to journal again regularly which i believe is very beneficial… sort out my thoughts, process some things, etc. and i’ve started reading a new Brennan Manning book, “A Glimpse of Jesus: The Stranger to Self Hatred”.

and if you’d like to watch the sermon i’ve referred to that has been on my mind in this rethinking, click this link here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJc3DCMNegs&feature=user (it’s on YouTube) and feel free to watch it yourself.

as always, thanks for reading.
Shannon

today i did some random things.

- cut up some yellow and orange pepper. mmm healthy snack.
- organized my itunes. (OC much?) but now they all have the album covers and album names
- deleted a bunch of contacts on facebook with which i really don’t talk to anymore and they don’t talk to me — so it’s ok. just purging and narrowing my list.
- did my laundry. (not yet by hand, the laundry machine got fixed)
- got some photos printed at PriceSmart and hung them up on my walls, which had until now been bare.

and those were the random things of today.

thanks for reading
shannon

the language barrier is still difficult, but it was great to be able to go, see a different part of Nicaragua, and meet some of the producers in the project. i’m currently translating the interviews and writing customer stories.

here is a video of the “drive” from the “field”. hehe a little bumpy.

I was going to add pictures but it won’t let me do that right now, so check out my flickr for up-to-date photos.