Jamaica - Day 1 (Sunday)

Last week I was in Montego Bay, Jamaica with one of MCAs high school mission teams. Every year MCA designates the week before Spring Break as "Missions Week" and students can pick where they'd like to serve. This year the options were local missions, Houston, the Ukraine and Jamaica.

Sunday consisted of arriving at DFW at 6:00 a.m. (I got picked up at 5:00... so I was up at about 4:15 that morning - ouch!) and then flying to Atlanta and then on to Montego Bay. When we arrived in Jamaica we were met by our GAIN (Global Aid Network) team leaders and Pastor Douglas (the local pastor we worked with) and taken to Chattam Cottages where we were staying.

This was the path leading from the area with all the cottages to the "big house" where we stayed:

This is "the big house". It's over 100 years old and has been owned by the same family the entire time. The girls room where I stayed was the two windows on the far right side. There was actually a seperate room where I could have stayed, but since our trip was small and there were only two girls, they felt more comfortable with me in the room with them - which was totally fine by me since I got to have some good high school "girl talk" with them at night :)

My bed was the one in the middle :)After we got settled in, Jim and Cheryl (our leaders) took us to eat at a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant since we had missed lunch (our connection in Atlanta was REALLY close). The girls and I enjoyed some super delicious frenchfries...

... while the boys wanted to dive right into the "local" cuisine...

... this is Ryan about to nibble on a chicken foot (EWWWW!!!) one of many in their chicken foot soup. If it looks like Ryan is about to melt, that's because he was. The humidity in Jamaica is KILLER and it doesn't help that he was eating steaming hot chicken parts, either. After our snack we headed back to the big house to relax on the porch for a while before dinner. A wonderful woman named Gloria cooked for us every night and we'd eat at a table at the other end of this porch...

After dinner on Sunday, we met as a group to talk about what to expect the rest of the week and to pray for the people we'd be interacting with. When the meeting was over I called Dave to let him know we'd arrived safely (and instruct him to send out the email to all the parents that their kids were safe. ha!) and he told me that Luke had been "looking" for me all day... under the covers on our bed, behind the couch, etc. I bawled!