Settling In

We made it!  We settling in to our new place here on Isla Bastimentos.  New house, new property, new stuff and new community.  This will be a mini-update before we head to Bocas this morning to visit a church.  Let the photo journal begin.

Madonna, Kathrin, Shirlene, Ethan, and Zulmy at the new dock.  Instant community at the house.  Zulmy and Madonna are now traveling in Columbia, we’re hoping they come back and stay longer.  Kathrin is from Germany and will be with us for about another month.  She is teaching English classes to the indigenous and helping with all sorts of other things like painting, cooking, cleaning and watching the kiddos.

 

Madonna is quite the organizer.  She took on the pantry and made it look beautiful… I shed a tear that day.

 

Liz (& Terry) have committed long term here.  They were also called here miraculously to reach the lost and we are loving being in community with them.

 

Bella settles in anywhere.  I love my Bella.

 

She spotted the camera.

 

Strike another pose.

 

Another.

 

Fake cry… awesome.

 

During the move the dock broke at our house in Tierra Oscura and that sent one of the suitcases full of books into the ocean.  We fished it out within about 30 seconds but some of the books ended up  wet.  We dried them on the porch for days.  Also notice the random chairs and other things along the railing.  This deck is about 15′ off the ground and we don’t want Ethan going over.  This is on the list to be replaced.

 

Bella loves Ethan.  Ethan loves Bella.

 

Ellie is happy with her new bed, room, not living out of a suitcase and her new duties as an English teacher with Kathrin to the indigenous.

 

Ethan looks a little like George W. Bush here – weird.

 

Ethan looking for things to get in to.

 

Where’d it go?  A very common Ethan pose.  By the way, many of these photos are taken by the girls, we never know what we’ll find until we download them.  Here’s one of them.

 

How you doin?

 

Dinner time after a hard, sweaty day’s work.  Bella, Liz, Terry, Kathrin, Ellie, Madonna, Bobby & Ethan (Shirlene is taking the photo).

 

Of course the plants here are amazing.

 

Ellie loves Ethan and takes such good care of him.

 

Why just eat it when you can wear it.

 

What?  Me?

The dishwasher on the dry cycle.

Shirlene and Liz headed to Bocas by water taxi to find curtains for the many rooms.  One side note, we are very close to a place called Red Frog with has frequent water taxis coming and going.  We can zip on over there in the cayuco, canoe, dinhy or boat and take a ride over to Bocas for $5.  This is a big savings since it costs us about $30 in fuel just to take our boat to and from Bocas.

 

Liz shopping in Bocas with Shirlene.

 

The central park in Bocas.

 

These little buildings line the park – they’re pretty cool looking.

 

The street shops.

 

 

 

 

The water taxi back to Red Frog.

 

Local indigenous students heading back home from Bocas to Bastimentos.

 

 

 

The floor, before we mopped it.

 

Repainting and refreshing the Terry and Liz’s new room.  They are moving downstairs to make room for the kids upstairs with us.  Also replacing the screens with chitra screen so those little tiny annoyances can’t bother you in your room.  We are changing out the screens in the whole house.

 

Painting with standard Caribbean colors.  Each room has a different fun color.

 

Kathrin’s birthday cake baked in a very unlevel tray in the oven.

 

You can hardly tell.

 

She was really touched.

 

 

 

 

Breakfast the next morning for Kathrin, on her really birthday.

 

Setting up the kids room.

 

 

 

I went to get a tool in what we call “The Man Cave” and heard something behind the shelves.  I pulled this guy out.  For scale, this bin is one of the large common bins about 18″ wide.  I took him up to the kids, they would stick things in the bin and this guy would act like he wasn’t interested then, without warning, would jump and latch onto whatever it was.  We set him free and later that night Kathrin came to get me, a little scared.  He crawled all the way back to the house and planted himself on the steel door to Kathrin’s living area.  He was really hard to get off.  He hangs around the house and watches us.  He’s harmless but really scary looking.

 

 

Bella, our dog from Tierra Oscura.  The owners needed a new home for her, she fits right in.

 

Coco is happy here at her new home too.

 

She’s a ham.

 

 

 

One end of the girls room.

 

 

Bella’s cute feet.

 

 

A painting in the house on one of the shutters.

 

English classes by Kathrin and Ellie.

 

 

 

 

Bella’s new friend, Lidia.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They are quite the pair.

 

Bella in our Kawasaki Mule.

 

Our dock with a HUGE cayuco coming to deliver building materials from Almirante.  This cayuco is over 40′ long and about 6′ wide.  We are building a retaining wall / swimming pool at the bottom of a water fall in the jungle behind the second house we call the Tree House.  We have to build the retaining wall due to a collapse of the hillside behind the Tree House, and we thought why not do a little more work and make it a swimming pool.

 

 

 

 

What’s even more crazy is this cayuco is cut out of one tree.

 

 

 

 

On our way to Red Frog for dinner.

 

 

 

A sloth on the path to the restaurant.

 

In addition to all of these pictures we have been very blessed with relationships here.  We have really bonded with a local indigenous pastor, Gene.  Gene and about 10 other guys have been staying here Mon-Fri to help get things built, fixed and ready for guests, leadership conferences, a CHE school and finish the mini-hotel (which is part of our tent-maker calling).  We will write more on these things later but I wanted to give you an quick update today.

We are loving where God has us right now.  Things can be stressful and we really feel like we are taking a huge step out in faith but this is exactly where God wants us.  Praise You God for Your faithfulness, provision, protection and love.