Rainy day at the cabin

After a successful completion of Week 3 of teaching/classes, we are enjoying a weekend at Jason's grandma's cabin in MN. It's a rainy day, which quite honestly I'm enjoying...the breeze makes the lake water ripple beautifully and the trees sing their praises, and it gives us a good excuse to stay inside in our PJs, strum the guitar and sing, and curl up with a book and movie. The cabin also has wi-fi now which allowed us to check the weather this morning and hunker down for a rainy day.

Sounds like our team in El Salvador is doing well - keep praying that they'll have the right openings and groups will follow through with scheduled meetings. Julia especially needs groups of people to meet for chunks of time so she can gather appropriate information for her thesis that she's working on so pray that that happens for her. Pray they continue to have energy for the remaining 2.5 weeks of fieldwork, that relationships and trust continue to grow, and that they'll get the right information while encouraging the local community.

Also pray for the background research for Panama, Chile, and Uruguay surveys that are happening right now in preparation for August-October trips. The Jamaica and Honduras reports are getting closer and closer to being done and submitted for peer-review before being posted online, the Paraguay report is in its final stages of editing before getting sent back to the local community (YAY!) and the Dominican Republic report is being reviewed by local native Spanish speakers working with the local community before we distribute it in the DR. We're very excited that our Peru report was accepted to an academic journal, pending some edits from the reviewer, so that's back on our plate for more work. And we have two student workers who are helping research and write-up some background information on two small islands in the Caribbean where we don't anticipate needing to go for fieldwork because of their size and population: the Cayman Islands and St. Kitts and Nevis. This couple is assigned to the Eurasia area to do sign language survey as soon as their partnership team (and especially funding) is in place, so it's a good taste for them to do a few hours a week of survey work.

So, as you can see, our work is still moving, even when we're in the classroom! We're juggling keeping all of the countries straight but also so thankful that God is allowing us to work effectively as a team to expand and multiply the amount of work we get done and encouraging each other in the process! Yay God! We're excited to see where God takes all of this!