Happy Independence Day!

Happy Dominican Independence Day! And what better way to spend the weekend than hiking Pico Duarte, named after the man who helped give the D.R. its freedom! It also happens to be the highest point in Central/North America east of the Mississippi River (a little over 10,000 feet). More on that to come...

Baby & Valentine's

Also this week, we went down to Santiago for another monthly checkup. Not knowing what the insurance situation would be, and not wanting to put it off any longer, we decided to pay for Teresa's blood work out of pocket and hope we can get it reimbursed. The ultrasound this month was great to see... fingers all accounted for, 2 arms, 2 legs, and definite arm movement visible, even though the baby's only 2-3 inches long. The picture's not very clear, but you can start to see definite baby!!

For Valentine's Day, we came home and had fondue of cheese & bread for appetizer, veggies and meat in oil for main course (along with multiple nummy sauces) , and then melted caramel with fruit and angel food cake. We had a good, much needed, relaxing night together.

Tomorrow (Saturday) we will begin the process of looking for a new bike. I (Daniel) will be going with a friend of ours to look around a bit and price shop so that Teresa and I can decide exactly what we want soon. Please pray that we'd have wisdome and seek God's will over our own.

Daniel and a pudding pie.

Teresa and Maria.

Daniel's Cabin Group (The Real Men)

Camp

Last weekend, JCS had a camp/retreat weekend for the 6-10^th graders. I (Daniel) was a counselor and Teresa hung out and helped out where she could. We went to a YoungLife camp in Jarabacoa up on a mountainside with beautiful scenery and a great cabin/lodge for retreat-ish stuff. Stan Long, the director of Camp Eagle in Virginia (where some of our students went for a week this past summer) came down and was our speaker. Friday after school we loaded up in taxis and headed off to camp. As camp always goes, it was full of crazy games and good spiritual time. For those of you who are cold right now, I was sweating like crazy running around in the hot sun ;-). My cabin had 3 JCS boys and a brother of a JCS girl. Overall I think there were 8 boys and 15 girls along with the counselors and other helpers. To make the weekend more fun for the kids, we counselors even got water, pudding, ketchup, and/or mustard dumped or smeared on us for various games (which none of us knew to expect).

A lot of the kids were surprised how crazy I got at camp, since most of them only see professional, teacher Mr. Peterson and don’t get to see the more laidback, louder side many of you have. In some ways, I think being crazy actually gained me more respect from many of my students.

The theme for the weekend was commitment, spending the entire weekend looking at Mark 12:28-34, the Greatest Commandment. Each chapel session, Stan outlined one area of loving the Lord our God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and finished with loving our neighbor as ourselves. After the big group times, we had some time with our cabins, but over such a short weekend, the boys didn’t open up much to each other. Saturday night, one of my cabin boys was strongly convicted and committed to, as he put it, love Jesus in all parts of his life, not just the easy ones. Please pray for him that the Holy Spirit would continue to work and that we at JCS would be able to disciple him well.

Many of our students come from Catholic families, and I think it was good for me to be there and be able to share some of my Catholic background as well as credibility having studied theology at Notre Dame. It was encouraging to me that, despite the many problems with the Catholic doctrine here in the DR, they still confessed that loving Jesus is really what matters. Please also pray for these guys because they are in a tough spot being pulled between cultural Catholicism and a real, living faith in Jesus Christ that transcends denomination.

Teresa came to camp on Saturday morning to spend the day, and she joined us for some games, meals, and worship/chapel times. She was a great defender in “Flicker,” a fast-paced, close-range version of Capture the Flag; did some wall-climbing during our cabin devotional time; helped us with our skits for the talent show; and there was no doubt the kids were glad to have her around. She had planned on leaving camp Saturday night to be able to go to sleep and go to church on Sunday, but the person she was riding back with had a motorcycle breakdown. As a result, she stayed overnight at camp and a few of us had to push the motorcycle back up the mountain to camp (A couple hundred feet elevation climb over about ½ mile). Thankfully I only made it in time for the last quarter of it. While I know she wanted to be at home, it was nice for me to have her around a little longer J.

Needless to say, we were both exhausted Sunday afternoon, and I still don’t think I’ve fully recovered. This weekend will include preliminary motorcycle shopping and catching up around the house, since we are planning on being gone next weekend, too (hiking/climbing Pico Duarte, the tallest mountain in the Caribbean at 10,000 ft).

Email Update

Here is the email we recently sent out as an update:

Dear Family and Friends,
We are writing to not only send our belated newletter, but to ask for your prayers.
Recently we discovered that Teresa is not insured, although we have been paying for her insurance. The insurance company somehow forgot to put her on the plan, and instead put Daniel on twice. When they caught the error, they deleted the extra, but still did not add her. To make matters worse, we found out that the school canceled our insurance over the summer, though we were not aware of this at the time, and did not start it again until September 4. As a result, our pregnancy would not be insured even if Teresa had been added in September, because she got pregnant within the three month beginning period. (We were about 1.5 weeks too soon)

In addition to this, our motorbike was just stolen from our carport tonight. We've contacted the police and will be filing a report in the morning.

Please pray that we would be trusting God in all that is occuring, that, if possible, our bike would be recovered, and that God would continue to supply our needs, as He has so faithfully in the past and present.
Thank you.

God bless,
Daniel and Teresa

P.S. If you want a copy of our newletter and did not receive it, let us know and we will email it to you (it's in PDF, so it's not a big file).