Participant Blogs

As fitting for someone that has no place to sleep but his car, I offered my services to the 2 Canadians whom had some time left in South Africa after debrief to see some of South Africa. And thus we started what was the road trip. We started in Witrivier, were I got Danica and Sabra late on 1 December, and we had a look at some sort of planning that was done on where they want to go ect. Problem nr 1 was that we did not have a place to sleep on 2de, but since we were planning...

First impressions and getting there My first impressions of Cuba was when we landed at the airport, while waiting to go to immigration an old movie was playing (it looked as if it came from the 50's) with subtitles in Spanish that has been redone since you can see the old subtitles blurred out like in a bad pirated movie. The next funny moment was as I were going through security after immigration, all the security and airport personal woman wore miniskirts and fishnet stockings, I had to try very hard to keep my laughter in. The country itself is...

  Just 2 days?? When I think back I can't believe it was just 2 days that we were in Venezuela, so much happened. The story starts on the bus, the 11 of us got on the bus to Caracas (Capital city of Venezuela) round noon on the 12 May not knowing anyone there or where we are going or having the right papers and the situation as described in the “The next step??” section of the previous blog. http://www.gcex.org/participants/latest-blogs/entry/fred-euvrard/colombia-v2-5-santa-martha.html   Then some of the team starts speaking to some of the other passengers and found out that the there...

  Trinidad and Tobago So finally we are on the plane from Caracas after all the crazy that was Venezuela, and then the dreaded announcement “can everyone please go back to their seats and put on their safety belts, we need to make an emergency landing”, tum tum tum. No not true. Actually our flight was very chill, the only excitement was to have English air hostess again. The first leg of our flight took us to Trinidad that has a big airport. The second leg of our flight went to Georgetown Guyana, but the flight was delayed with 2...

Having a blog covering 4 jam packed weeks turned into a very long writing session and even longer blog so I broke down the blog into a few sections: Bucket list and funny moments May Pen St Ann's Bay Montego Bay Kingston Jamaica culture observation My time there Bucket list and funny moments. (more details below) Playing street cricket in the back streets of Kingston with random people and getting a LBW while bowling Watching Cool Runnings in Jamaica Being the only white person in a church for a 4.5 hour service Going to Dunn's river falls Walking past a...

so much happened over the last 2-3 weeks where to start.... B I G NEWS (highlights not chronological) Our route have been as finalised as it can be at the moment, it will look as follows: Amazon Brazil -> Columbia via boat-> Venezuela -> Guyana -> Barbados -> Jamaica -> Cayman Islands -> Cuba -> Mexico -> Guatemala -> Panama  -> Ecuador -> Peru -> South Africa. I will give an update with the dates once we know a bit more.  We also know that training is finishing 28 Feb and that we will fly out of South Africa on...

Detour So Germany was not in the original planning as a country to visit, but due to visa reasons we had to go there, the irony was that after our flights was booked Hanna, that is in J-bay but was going to visit a friend in Germany, saw that we would be landing a day after her and flying out a day after her. And since her friend that she would be visiting is involved with the Hillsong church in Germany asked if it would be possible to serve them. The friend came back to say that it would be...

Week 3&4 The last 2 weeks in Cuba we were more involved in some of the ministry of the church. We had the opportunity to lead some of the youth church meetings and it was great to see how they interacted and engaged in what we did and how they wanted to learn. We did a lot to take them out of their comfort zone and had some meeting on the roof of the church, did the toothpaste drama (and I took part it was really disgusting and not so disgusting at the same time) and made them do a...

First 4 days Well as stated in the last blog, in stead of going to Venezuela we ended up going to Santa Martha in Columbia. We got on the bus and for a nice relaxing 20h bus ride to Santa Martha. We were met by pastor Julio and Jon a missionary of the church that we were put in contact with. We were blessed with our own 3 bedroom apartment that we could stay in for the first week for free and they had a programme planned out. We started the first few days with some kids ministry in the...

Due to the nature of this blog I have to break it into the below parts so it will make more sense in reading so here we go: 1.The last week in Fuza 2.Our first challenge (a 1 day Amazing race type adventure) 3.Time in Bogota 4.Next stop Venezuela?? 5.My time   Last week in Fuza: So the last week in Fuza was spent finishing off all the building projects we were busy with. The last weekend before we had to finish we had 5 Students from Bogota that came to join us in the work. We had till the...