Leaving Tomorrow!

We take off for Israel tomorrow morning!  I can't believe its already here, the kids all met today to distribute tools amongst our bags and pray for God to work in the next two weeks.  In case anyone was curious, here's our itinerary for the trip!

March 1   - Leave Sacramento
March 2   - Arrive; Jack picks us up and we go to Rehovot;
March 3   - Church w/ Israeli believers; Rest and instruction from Jack; ride to Tel Aviv and stay in hotel
March 4   - Taxi to Nokia; Competition set up; get picked up by Israeli families
March 5   - Competition stay w/ Israeli families
March 6   - Competition stay w/ Israeli families
March 7   - Competition  Purim begins in evening - Party?; Pick up vans; drive to Rehovot
March 8   - Rehovot: visit school;
March 9   - Galilee
March 10 - Church w/ Israeli believers; Jerusalem in evening
March 11 - Jerusalem
March 12 - Jerusalem; leave at midnight
March 13 - Arrive home

Next time I post it will (hopefully) be from the other side of the Atlantic!

-Mike

Destination: Israel

Working for Sonshine hasn't been the only adventure of mine while in Lodi.  I've gotten the opportunity to mentor the local robotics team out of Jim Elliot Christian High School.  The team, Raptor Force Engineering, competes in the FIRST Robotics Competition, with over 2000 teams competing, annually, world-wide!  One specific cluster of teams have formed in Israel, and the team in Lodi flies out to Israel every year to compete with and minister to the teams over there!

As a student, I was a member of Team Eaglestrike in Los Altos all through high school, mentored the Citrus Circuits, a team from Davis, all four years of college, and even mentored at team in Colorado for the few months I was there.  I love mentoring students in robotics and seeing them come alive as they utilize there unique, creative talents in this intense design competition.

This year, the game involves shooting foam basketballs into hoops on either side of the field.  Additionally, at the end of the game, robots must balance on "bridges" in the middle of the field for bonus points.  Here's a quick video describing the game, Rebound Rumble!

The team I've been working with, Team 1662, decided to attempt to shoot 3 point baskets and balance the bridge at the end of the match.  After an intense 6 weeks of building, 30 hours a week, Monday through Saturday (we got Sunday off), the students came up with this machine, confusingly named "Boing-Bot"

And the best part, it works!  Here is Boing-Bot performing a completely autonomous routine at a scrimmage a few weeks ago!

So that's the robot that's sitting in a shipping crate somewhere in Israel right now.  Myself and the rest of the team (12 students and 2 other adults) are flying out Thursday morning to go meet Boing-Bot there!  We'll be setting up the field in the Nokia Arena in Tel-Aviv this Saturday, and then competing with 45 Israeli teams Sunday through Tuesday.  After the competition, we'll be touring around the country, going to historically significant places such as Galilee and Jerusalem!

I couldn't have imagined a year ago about to fly to Israel to mentor student in robotics and disciple them in their relationships with Christ, but here I am.  Depending on my access to the inter-webs, I'll hopefully be updating this blog regularly from the other side of the Atlantic, so look for updates soon!  Thanks for reading!

-Mike

The Summer is Coming!

Growing up, I've always been a home-body.  On multiple occasions, my mom and sister took vacations to various European countries, always inviting me to join them.  I always declined, instead preferring to hang out with friends, play Halo, or whatever else I did when I was a kid.

I could have never guessed that shortly after spending last summer living on a boat, I would fly to Sierra Leone to live on an even bigger boat!  But that's exactly what happened, and by God's grace the adventure hasn't stopped there!  

For the past two months I've been living in Lodi, working full time for Sonshine Specialized Camping Ministries, a houseboat camp operating out of the Sacramento River Delta and Lake Shasta.  After serving for two previous summers, I will be serving as Director this summer on Lake Shasta!  So in the intermediary period, I am preparing the camp, staff and equipment for the summer season!  It's been a stretching and invaluable experience thus far!

As the summer approaches, all Sonshine Staff are participating in our one annual fundraiser, the Run-Jog-Walk-A-Thon.  The Run-Jog-Walk (RJW) raises funds to help send students to the camp that otherwise wouldn't have the means to attend.  That's right, every cent raised in the RJW we turn around and give right back into the scholarship fund of the churches who attend Sonshine!  Last year, the Sonshine Staff raised nearly $52,000 in student scholarships!  This year, we've increased our RJW goal even further, to $60,000 in scholarships!  

This is only possible with the generous support of resources from the greater community.  The impact that a week on Houseboats can have on a student's life is invaluable.  I invite you to join with me in sending students to camp to give them this uniquely climactic opportunity.  If supporting financially is appropriate for you, please go to http://www.sonshineministries.com/rjw.html, select my name from the drop down list, select submit, and you'll be directed to a secure PayPal site.  From there, donate however much you would like to!

If you have any questions about the RJW, donation process, or just what I'm up to, feel free to give me a call or email me!  I would love to talk.

Again, thank you for all of your support of my past endeavors, and for considering to support me this summer.

God bless,

-Mike

The Reports are Done!

Just a few quick updates. First, I just finished the two reports I've been working on for the past 3 months, the Mercy Ships Hospital Assessment and Namibian Structural Design. The process f0r closing out a report is quite extensive. Every person involved with the report gets a copy of the report, as well as two copies for the home office and three for the ministry. So all in all, I printed, bound and mailed about 20 reports. Here's a little look at the process!

The reports need to be printed and bound. I spent a full afternoon just printing sheet after sheet, about 1500 sheets in all. After compiling all the sheets in order, I punched holes in all the sheets and bound them up.

And here's the result! Pretty cover sheet, huh?

All packed up and ready to ship out to the trip volunteers and Mercy Ships!

And that's that for the report! It's all out of our hands now and Mercy Ships is doing their thing with it.

Looking forward, it appears that eMi will not be going to Guinea this February. Mercy Ships has evaluated the political climate in the country, and due to delayed elections, protests and violence in the capital of Conakry are highly likely. Because of this, eMi will be evaluating three hospitals in the countryside of Sierra Leone. However, this trip will be overlapping with prior commitments in the states, so I won't be able to join the team on that trip. But, I am spending the last three weeks I have here working on that trip, preparing documents and templates to hopefully make this trip and future hospital assessment trips more efficient and accurate.

I am a little bummed I won't be able to return to West Africa in February, but I'm confident the work God has me doing in Colorado will make an impact none-the-less.

Thanks for reading and joining with me in this journey!

-Mike

Preparing for the Future while Being Present in the Present

For the last month, I have quite honestly just been watching as God puts into place the pieces for the coming nine months. So many exciting things I wanted to share!

First, I have been given the opportunity to return to Sonshine this summer, this time serving as Director at our Lake Shasta location. The prospect of leading a 50 person volunteer staff and hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment can be daunting, but when I look back on how faithful the Lord has been to provide every past summer, my fears are relieved.

Leading up to the summer, beginning in January, I will be working as an intern with Sonshine Ministries. Along with receiving training for my position this summer, I'll be helping with all sorts of behind the scene's preparations for this summer, including maintaining equipment, recruiting staff, etc. I will be living at the Sonshine house in Lodi, CA.

While in Lodi, I hope to mentor the local FIRST robotics team, the organization I have been a part of for nearly ten years now. The Lodi FIRST team is based out of Jim Elliot Christian High School. Unique to this team, they travel to Israel to compete with their robot versus the FIRST teams in Israel. While in country, they stay for a few additional days and do missions work with a few of the local ministries. I am on board for traveling with the team and leading the students as they serve God in this totally awesome way.

If that wasn't enough, God has given me a chance to return to West Africa and continue serving the people there! I will be traveling to Guinea (just north of Sierra Leone) in February to perform more assessments of government hospitals. I hope that this second trip is just a fruitful in the work God does through our team.

That's what I have to look forward to!

So what am I still doing in Colorado, you may ask? There's still work to be done here! We're in the final stages of compiling our hospital assessment report for Mercy Ships. Once that is sent out in the next week or so, I will begin preparing for the trip to Guinea. Since this will be the second of as many as twenty West Africa hospital assessments, I hope to develop a standard template for future EMI project teams to use. Having a template to follow when assessing and writing will greatly increase team efficiency, as they won't have to "start from scratch" ever time.

So there is still plenty to do for the remaining month I have here! Time has flown by so quickly, I will definitely miss the relationships and experiences He has given me while out here.

God is good.

-Mike

Back from Sierra Leone

I'm back in America!

I feel incredibly blessed to have been given the opportunity to journey to Sierra Leone. And on the way back, we stopped in Brussels, ate Belgian Waffles (which are very light, flakey and overpriced by the way) and saw some awesome sights.

Aqua Honey Badger enjoys a Belgian Waffles

Less than 12 hours after returning to Colorado Springs, my housemate Seth left for his project trip to Thailand! We had a little send-off for him, excited to hear about what he gets to do there.

I'm excited to jump into three months at the Colorado Springs office. Our goal is to finish the written report for Mercy Ships within a month so they can begin planning their next step. After that report is done, I get to jump on whatever other projects need help. I'll continue to update here about how God is using me and what He is teaching me over here.

To start off that theme, one of the biggest things I learned over the course of the trip is a small aspect of a well known bible passage. In one of our morning devotionals in Sierra Leone, the team went over the story in Luke 10 of the good samaritan. What stood out to me so clearly about the story is how the good samaritan finds the half-dead man "as he traveled". He finds him as he travels, as he walks through life. He doesn't go on a search for half-dead men, he doesn't have a 5 year ministry plan. He's traveling. This convicted me hugely that God desires for me to show mercy in the places he's already led me too, and leading me through. Take my heads out of the clouds so to speak and pay attention to what's happening right in front of me. It's definitely stuck with me too. Good stuff!

Until next time!

-Mike

Sierra Leone, Day 10

For R&R, we sure work hard!

Being our last full day in Sierra Leone, and having given our presentation last night, today was reserved for debriefing and decompressing from the last week and a half of assessing, reporting and presenting. After breakfast, we took off in two cars on a two hour, bumpy-as-no-other car ride to River No. 2, one of the nicest beaches in Sierra Leone.

River No. 2

Ironically, after not raining the whole two hours it took to get there, it started pouring almost the minute we hit the beach. But the minute I stepped into the ocean, the rain didn't matter, because the water was so warm! Being from California, growing up with the Pacific all my life, the ocean has always been a painfully fun experience, too cold to stay in for long but too fun to leave. The atlantic felt like a jacuzzi! And with the rain pouring down as we swam, it felt like a scene out of Shawshank Redemption or something like that.

Proof!

Anyways, after a great time in the water and some fresh barracuda and rice, it was time to head back to the ship. Another 2.5 hours and one overheated engineer later, we got back to The African Mercy just in time to grab dinner.

Hooray for muddy roads!

I may or may not have fallen asleep on the ride back...

By far the best part of the day was after dinner. We did a debrief highs/lows/prayer request/affirmations time, going person by person around the team. A great time to hear how the rest of the team has grown, and share a little bit as well.

Brad and Aqua Honey Badger work late into the night

Now its time to pack up! We leave for the airport at noon tomorrow, via car to a ferry to another car to the airport. Our flight leaves Sierra Leone at 7pm and hits Brussels around 6am. We're planning on taking a train into town once we get there and grabbing Belgian waffles for breakfast, should be fun!

Please pray for safe travels as we go by land, sea and air. Looking forward to updating again soon.

In Christ,

-Mike