Evening

Local time: 22:54

The days here are long and full. I'm really surprised that it's only been 5 days at the YWAM base here, and only 10 hours past a week since I left Minnesota.

Thursday was arrival day, and the following three days were introduction and orientation. There are 12 students and 4 staff in my Discipleship Training School, representing 9 different nationalities. Magdy, the school leader, is from Egypt, and apparently well known and highly regarded throughout YWAM's many locations. He looks like a young Saddam Hussein. He's made multiple allusions to having spent "the past 50 years" doing things, but I think that's counting from birth, not from the start of his time with YWAM.

Viktoria, from Sweden, was going to attend a completely different YWAM school in Finland, but that program was rather suddenly cancelled due to lack of enrollment. I think she signed up to come here on January 1st, 4 days before arrival day. Her coworker just happened to have an extra snowboard she could take for 5 months.

Kevin is from Florida. He enlisted in the Army at 19, and spent two and a half years in South Korea followed by a year training Iraqi police. He bought a GoPro video camera and wants to edit together a bunch of awesome snowboarding footage. He showed me a video he shot of himself kite-surfing, and I'll probably be really excited about kite sports for at least a week.

Tabea is from the German-speaking part of Switzerland. She's 16, making her the youngest person in our class and the second-youngest person enrolled in the classes on our base. Apparently, because most of Europe's educational systems are much more focused on specialization, finishing secondary education at 15 and taking a gap year to learn a language or whatever is pretty common.

Luke is from Canada. Everyone else thinks his speech sounds the same as us Americans (the way the grammar collides in this sentence makes me cringe), but I know he doesn't. His speech is a wealth of tally-markable words. He'll finish (or interject) a sentence with a "Right?" that is not a question more often than the expected "Eh," but will at times change it up with a random and unnecessary "Yo." He used to play guitar and sing in a hardcore band, but left partly to come here and partly because he wanted to do more ambient stuff. Back home, he works for a community program to integrate mentally- and behaviorally-challenged teenagers with the rest of their peers, and currently holds the top spot on my Amusing Anecdotes list:
"I work with kids that have all sorts of behavioral issues, and sometimes we'll be in the swimming pool and a guy will decide 'Hey, I think it would be a good idea to drop my trunks and run to the library right now' and they're like 15, and I have to say 'No, it would not be.' When I applied for the job, I was sort of thinking about when Jesus said 'Whatever you have done for the least of these, you have done for me,' but then I find myself wrestling a naked kid in the library and wondering how this possibly relates."

Leah is from the UK. She calls grenadine "squash" and refers to pickled cucumbers as "gurkens." No one thinks she sounds like the Americans, except when she puts on a phony accent, at which point she is quickly accosted by five apparently torturous British accents. Previous to coming here, she worked five different jobs concurrently "extremely part time," though she later amended her statement to specify that she worked 6 at once for two weeks during that period. She doesn't like tea, even though she's British. Apparently, I was the last one to point that out to her.

Logan is from Forest Lake, MN. He's tall enough that he looks tall from far away when there's no one next to him, but not tall enough that I have to look into the sky to hold a conversation. I'm gonna guess 6'4" and ask him tomorrow. He took a gap year after high school, applied to the U of M for this past fall, and then deferred his application for another year. He might hate school as much as I do.

Nienke is Dutch and sounds like a Dutch person trying to speak with a British accent. She's at least as proficient in English as everyone in the Amsterdam airport. She's been studying architecture in hopes of entering the burgeoning field of unemployment. She takes notes feverishly and engages a lot in class, which I'm guessing comes from a "real school" mindset. She told me that you can't get Gouda cheese in the Netherlands if you pronounce it like that.

William is from the former British Commonwealth. I guess he went to school in Melbourne for an unspecified number of years, but he has said he's from Canada, and Skyping with his parents is easy because they're only one time zone away, in England. When he arrived, a Kiwi staffperson told him he didn't have a normal Aussie accent. He really holds a high regard for waking up in time for "brekkie," even though there are no gurkens involved. He turned 18 in December, and he wants to fly helicopters in the Australian Air Force, I think, but he "got nervous" during one of the interview phases and was told to go out and get life experience and reapply in a year. He's been generous with the chocolate he bought at the Swiss grocery store down the street.

Rachael is the only female Canadian. She lived in a couple of places growing up, so her only distinguishable accent is mumble and she doesn't say any weird things except stuff like "from A to Zed." She's family friends with one of the people on permanent staff here, but it's her first time working with YWAM.

Matt is the third Minnesotan, from Plymouth. He's played hockey all his life and went to the University of Nebraska for three semesters before coming here. He and some of the other guys have spent free time lifting weights. I might join them some day.

Ah Young is from South Korea. If you've been keeping track, that means that all the girls are of different nationalities and all the guys are native English speakers. Ah Young wanted to come to DTS at the Kona, Hawaii base a year ago, but for whatever reason wasn't able to, so she ended up being here now. Her home church back in Korea actually doesn't believe in parachurch organizations, or whatever you wanna call YWAM, and she was discouraged from enrolling. However, she spent the last semester studying in Toulouse, so she was only a train ride away from here and planes away from criticism.

Thomas is Swiss German, born near Zurich. He has torn the ACL in his right knee twice (though technically it wasn't his ACL the second time). And of course I kicked him in that knee the other day because I was pretending to be a kangaroo. I mean, I didn't kick him super hard, but he only had surgery like 2 months ago. He was a good sport about it. He's a very interactive and talkative guy, and it's cool to have him on staff.

Martina is the cousin of Thomas and the daughter of Markus, the base leader. She reminds me of Katrina because she loves Jesus and is good at everything. She is the only female staffperson for our class, and speaks Swiss German, High German, French, and English. Magdy has said that English is her worst language, and yet she's still good enough to discuss deep spiritual matters with people and to be married to a Canadian.

Jon is the other guy on staff for our class. He is from British Columbia and likes the Vancouver Canucks, which is a point of contention between him and Matt. I met him and Martina's husband Jordan on arrival day and thought they were brothers because they were both from "near Vancouver," both mentioned the Canucks playing the Wild, and are both tall and lanky, with similar teeth. Jon is the leader of the Maintenance Team with myself and Matt and stays in the room across the hall from our three-bunkbed hovel.

Since all my experiences for the next 5 months will include these people, you may want to read over this post repeatedly, to get to know them. Form a picture in your minds.