Youth, Baby, Life

Eric is working 40 hours a week at The River Church in Camden, SC. He really enjoys helping the teens in their walk with Christ. He is also in charge of worship on Sundays.
Katy is in school 4 days a week taking Microbiology. She loves learning about all kinds of creepy diseases and such!
Sofie is now almost 9 months old! She is growing so quickly. She is crawling all over the place and will be walking any day I'm sure.

The Life of an almost Graduate

Eric is VERY busy the last week of school. He has papers and exams until Friday. Eric will hopefully be able to rest after this Saturday's graduation. Both of our loving families will visit for the big event of graduation. What a blessing it will be to see them!
Eric's dad, brother, and sister-in-law will be visiting our place for the very first time. Katy's aunt Janet will also be visiting us for the first time. Katy is also very excited about her parent's visiting.

Coming Home

After over 6 weeks of being in South America, experiencing highs, lows and meeting some amazing people... we are coming home! Well, our Chicago home which is home enough. We cannot wait to spend some time with Eric´s dad, brother, sis in law, and rest of the fam, eat some pizza, hot dogs, and gyros, and relax and tell of our summer travels. We will be at Lorimer on Sunday giving a report of our trip. On Wednesday we will begin our journey back to our South Carolina home via our Nashville home. Thank you all for your support and prayers. One last prayer request... and it won´t be a surprise... that our trip to all our homes will be motion sickness free. Looking forward to seeing everyone soon!

Eric y Katy

Land of the Living

Okay, so as Katy said I was a little sick. The side effect from finally removing the motion sickness patch was more than we had expected. But after 2 days of staying in bed, except for getting up to throw up... about 10 times, and a trip to the hospital, I am back among the living. For the last couple days I´ve been starting to feel better and today I´m just about back to normal. Thank you for all your prayers. I´ll spare you the details of the other end of our sickness. You can ask us about it when we get back. Or you may not want to... it involves parasite medicine. I´ll see about posting some pics from our time in Southern Quito.

Eric

Sick in Quito

We had our first trip to the hospital. For those of you who normally read this, you may notice more grammatical errors since this is my first ever post. (Katy) Eric has been very dizzy, vomiting, and just a general horrible sick feeling. This is a reaction to using a medicine designed
to treat motion sickness. We decided to take the patch (medicine) off after his vision became
slightly blurred along with one pupil being VERY dialted and the other pupil being very small.
The reaction to taking off the patch hit him about 7 hours later. After two days of vomiting we decided it was time for the hospital. Praise God He is now out of the hospital. Please continue to pray about this. THANK YOU for your prayers.

Greetings from Cold Southern Quito

Wow, who would have thought that July in South America would require jeans, sweatshirts and jackets! We arrived in South Quito last night and are staying with a Pastor and his wife, Fabian and Mabe. We´ll be here for about a week helping out with VBS doing English and guitar lessons, giving testimonies at the youth group meeting and assisting anywhere else that we can. We survived the bus ride from Peru to Quito, Ecuador. This time it only took 26 hours instead of 36. When we arrived at the seminary in Quito we were pleasantly surprised to be upgraded from a normal room to one of the apartments. We welcomed our own quarters with a normal bedroom, kitchen and bathroom.
Continue to pray that God will use us to bless Fabian and Mabe, the church and the community as our time in Ecuador winds down. Thank you again for all your comments and encouragement.

Chow, Peru!

Hello everyone! We are currently in Trujillo, Peru celebrating the completion of our leading of a short-term team of 180 from Ohio. Katy and I both had our own team of 20ish students that we led with another intern. It was definately a stretching and character-building experience. We spent time working towards the construction of an orphanage, visiting people who work in a couple different garbage dumps, and experiencing a little bit of Peru. Our time at the garbage dump was an experience not to be forgotten. There are people of all ages who go to a huge garbage dump looking for items that could bring in a little income and for food. Throughout the day trucks bring in load after load of garbage and the people dig through it. The teams that we brought there would give them fruit to eat, talk to the people, and play games with the kids. It was an incredibly difficult place to be for many reasons and it was hard to wrap my mind around the idea that this is life the these people. The people that we met in the dump were incredible. The were so friendly and accepting of us visitors. They were not ashamed of the life that they had to live. Some people that we met were Christians and said that they didn't need anything but God. This was not just lip-service for they truly had nothing but God.
Tonight (Tuesday) we will be returning to Quito, Ecuador via another 27 hour bus ride. We will finish the remainder of our time there serving in different ministries throughout the city.
All is well. We are healthy, enjoying the experience of South America and looking forward to returning home in a couple weeks. Thank you for your encouraging comments. Please continue to leave them and pray for us!

Eric