I'm back from the Dominican

So I'm back from the Dominican Republic now. It was a greatly blessed trip, God definitely did a lot of amazing things during our time there and I'm now glad to be back home in my apartment. What can I share with you first, hmmm. We spent two weeks at the University of Santo Domingo, commonly known as the UASD. The University of Santo Domingo is way bigger than the university of Panama, about four times bigger from my judgment. There was also more of a diversity of student culture at the UASD. For example, when you walk into the arts faculty, you find that students dress differently than do the students of most other faculties. You'll also find that business students dress formally, I guess to get them used to the business world, but you can almost always guess which faculty a student is from by the way they dress or look. I the bigger student population may have something to do with the diverse student culture.

Our time there was mostly spent on the campus evangelizing and discipling students, which was great because that is why went there. This gave us a great opportunity to share alongside the Dominican students, who really really needed experience in sharing their faith. Always being on campus also made it easier to do important follow up with students there. Follow up is really hard to do if you don't have a very open schedule for all types of different students who have their own personalized schedules and lives that don't necessarily fit ours possibly tight schedules, so that was awesome. We were also able to plan some small scales meeting and events with them, like training meetings and our awesome picture scavenger hunt. It was really cool to see so many students show up to that scavenger hunt and it was especially cool to be a part of the winning team that day! We got points for creativity, which I am proud to say, pretty much won it for us.

Now let me just share with you a little story of what happened. Every day, we would eat under a certain tree on campus that was close to the business and arts faculties. As we were eating there, we ran into a group of students and just started talking to them. In our conversations, one of the girls in the group told us that she was married, but by sexual and a lot of other things that I can't remember, but I think she said all these things to see our reaction to them. Maybe she was all the things that she said, but that didn't matter, we shared the gospel with her and the rest of her friends, and I think that they could really see that we cared about them. I made four friends in the midst of all those conversations. Yael, Martha, Elizabeth and Pedro. They were all very loving people, but their confidence and toughness can be intimidating for others. Yael in particular, seemed to be the tough girl in the group. Yael also didn't accept Christ into her life, but she came to all the meeting we had and seemed really interested in what we were doing. By the end of the trip, Yael and all her friends were so happy with our friendship, that they left us gifts to take back home to Panama. The gifts were really nice too and it indicated to me that they really appreciated the time that we spent with them every lunch time. I think that even though Yael never accepted Christ those two weeks we were there, God was definitely working in her heart and making her think more about her own life.

Now that I'm back home, I've been dealing with some stomach issues right now and I just ask that you keep that in prayer for me. While I was down there, I was sick with a cold and stomach problems, and even though my cold has gone away, my stomach is still bothering me a lot. I'll be heading over to the doctor soon.

I hope that you have been blessed these past couple of weeks. Here are some photos for you to enjoy, to give you a little picture of Dominican Republic. Blessings :)