Many moons later...

Hey guys! I've finally gotten around to blogging again. I fell into a very peculiar habit of falling asleep every time I sat down at my computer, naturally causing my blogging to suffer. But now I have free time and wi-fi so I will catch you up on the last month or so.

I suppose the biggest news is that I flew home to surprise my family and boyfriend for the summer break! My parents had no idea I was coming-my mother's piercing screams proved that much (we have since decided to never, ever, surprise mother again). It was a lovely opportunity to enjoy Western plumbing and sanitation again, stock up on needed items, and hang out with friends and family. I've also hopefully flushed out most if not all parasites from my system. Cross your fingers!

I'm now heading back to Afghanistan for the second phase of the school. The last two months made up our lecture phase-we had classes on subjects like Compassion, the Holy Spirit, the Word of God, and so on. Now we are about to enter the outreach portion. We will split into teams and go to a different part of the country, with different goals. I am on a team that will go into eastern Afghanistan villages and do either a teacher training seminar to train village teachers, build a library, or conduct health/sanitation seminars. We haven't quite worked out those details yet. It will definitely be a challenging experience as we leave the city and go into the mountains, where life hasn't changed much since the early days of Islam. It is sure to be an adventure!

I also want to let you all know of the upcoming presidential election in Afghanistan on August 20th. There is a lot of unrest throughout the country, as this is only the second democractic election to take place since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Because Afghanistan is still a politically unstable country, there is a lot of concern over how the election will go. If any of you paid attention to the latest elections in Iran that will kind of give you an idea of what could happen. So please join us in praying for a peaceful election!

I write this from the Portland airport, and the smell of Panda Express has become to enticing to ignore, so I will take my leave. In other news, I learned that our base has had its internet connection turned off since we don't have the money on hand to pay the obscene quarterly bill (it's thousands of dollars). So if you think of it, and want to continue having a blog to read, please pray that we get the money to have our internet back! I have a boyfriend (and a mother) who need to hear from me on a fairly regular occassion :)

It's been grand but I must leave America now..see you all in November!