Outreach and Beyond

Hello everyone!
I am currently blogging to you from the hot and humid Philippines. I left for outreach about a week ago, the last couple days on base everyone was running around trying to pack away all their things and furiously clean their rooms for the white glove inspection that Faith Bible College had for us. I was the last of my roommates to leave on outreach, which was kind of sad being all alone in my room, though I got to sleep on one of my roommates bed which is the only one in our room with springs and all, not just foam. Score. It absolutely poured for the two days that everyone was leaving, so because of possible flash floods, our leaving time had to be earlier, so we all had to wake up at 5 am. Other than that, traveling was fine, being a leader made it a little more stressful since you constantly have to be counting everyone to make sure the students are all there, and  with 17 people that makes it kind of difficult. We're handling it though, haven't lost anyone yet.

First, we flew to Singapore and spent a few days having orientation classes and explored a bit around the city/island. I wikipedia-ed Singapore and, fun fact, it's the smallest country in the world with an area of 274 square miles and I heard it only takes half an hour to get from one side to another, so basically the whole country is the city we're in, though it still has 5 million people living in it and it's freakin rich. BMWs, Lexuses, and I even saw a Lamborghini just driving down the road. In the marina area they have this cool helix bridge, a massive lotus flower fountain, PLUS a floating soccer field. Just because they can. So ridiculous. It makes every American city look like crap. The food was super good, a lot of noodle dishes and other Asian things. All the girls were trying to cram in our fruit and vegetable intake since we wouldn't get much of that in the Philippines so we would get fruit and vege juices at stands and fruit at markets.

After about four days in Singapore, we flew to the island of Cebu in the Philippines where we would be spending the next 7 weeks of our lives. Like I said, super hot here. We can't really wear tank tops or short shorts in public (which I don't really understand why hot climate countries do that to themselves, just make it socially acceptable to be comfortable) and some of the places we stay at may not have A/C. I've pretty much given up on looking photo-ready for the next 7 weeks. The cities here can be kind of dirty with trash and half-concealed sewer lines, and tons of mangy looking stray dogs and cats, but the people are really friendly and the food is good so it's bearable. Cock fights are also a thing here, so I'm hoping we'll get a chance to observe one, just for the cultural experience.

As you may or may not know already (most likely you don't though), I have decided to stay another year as staff at YWAM New Zealand. I contacted my college about a month ago and they agreed to defer my enrollment and scholarship another year, and my parents were okay with supporting me another year, and the leadership here in New Zealand are excited to have to me stay on, so I figured why not? Yolo. I'm still young and college will always be there. It's beautiful in New Zealand, amazing speakers come though our base, I have some really good friends here, and I get to travel to other countries every 3 months. The only downside to this is that since I'm staying another year, I won't be able to fly home to Champaign for summer since it would cost too much to fly back and only stay a month, so I won't be able to see you guys until December when I come home for Christmas. I'm going to miss you all, but hey there's always Facebook and email. And Pinterest which I recently got, so hit me up. I may try to keep blogging every now and then, but I haven't decided yet. Though it really sucks that I have to wait so long to see you all again, I'm excited for the joyous reunion it'll be at Christmas when we can sweat to the oldies, make music videos, eat tons of food, and cruise around CU together. Love you guys!

P.S. if you ever have the urge to send a piece of mail to New Zealand and are looking for a recipient, I think I can help you out ;)

My address:

Abby Radnitzer

YWAM Bethlehem

PO Box 15134

Tauranga 3030 
New Zealand

Radnitzer Fam NZ Tales

A couple weeks ago the whole Radnitzer clan booked it out here to New Zealand to visit me and travel around for spring break. It was one of our more interesting family vacations that's for sure. All my staff friends here when they found out my family was coming were really stoked and couldn't wait to meet them. They might've been more excited for them to come than I was. Jokes, of course. It was a normal monday morning when I got the text that they had arrived on campus and I went out the parking lot to the strange sight of my whole family climbing out of a compact car here in New Zealand. A pale version of my family too. Let it be known, I was much tanner than Hannah. They immediately wanted to go visit Hobbiton 45 minutes away so we went there. It was pretty cool, we saw all the little houses, the garden, and Bag End. We also got a free drink at the Green Dragon pub at the end of the tour. Mostly it was cool for the pictures, I'll be honest I'm not a massive LotR fan. Read Fellowship of the Ring once, every reading session ended with me asleep on the couch. Anyway, after our Hobbiton adventure we went back to Tauranga and I spent a couple days there showing them around the town, went to the beach, a small hike up the Mount, and thrift shopping, so everyone was happy. 

After that we took a mini road trip around the North Island for 5 days and first went up to a place called Coromandel peninsula, hiked and hung out on the beach. One night we tried to go to a hot water beach nearby, and if you don't know what that is, it's basically a hot spring under the sand that you can get to when the tide is low enough and you can dig your own personal hot spring bath. The time to go we were told was 2 hours on either side of low tide, so we show up exactly 2 hours before low tide with our little shovels we rented. There were about 40 other touristy people on the beach too and we're all running around the beach digging shallow holes, sticking our feet in the to see if it's hot then running off to another spot. We did end up finding a hot spot, but since we had come so early it was really close to the water so waves would keep washing over us as we would try to dig our family hot spring. Let me paint this picture for you: we have my mom and dad attempting to furiously dig a hole in between waves coming in, only to have what they've accomplished be washed out, my brother commenting on the strategies of the wall building of the other people around us and trying to get us all to follow them, me down on my hands and knees in the sand scooping sand to make a seawall, and my sister standing nearby saying how cold she is. After a while we just chalked it up to a good experience and left to get dinner.

After a caving adventure similar to the one I had done before here, though less intense, we dropped Hannah and Isaac off at the airport and I spent two days with my parents in a town called Rotorua. In Rotorua I saw a real live kiwi bird, which look hilarious when they run by the way, and went to a farm tour thing and saw a sheep show which my dad was pretty excited about because he wants to get a couple sheep to raise. Then while my mom was at a museum, my dad and I did a quad adventure thing, I originally wanted to do a dirt bike one but my dad said no, where we basically rode four wheelers through fields and forest, with mud and all, which was super fun. Probably my favorite part of the whole trip. All in all, it was a lot of fun to see my family, but also kind of trippy that they were all here in New Zealand. Though, at the end of the trip, I was really glad to be back at the base and live with all my friends again. 

Phillippines and Phun Times

One perk of being staff, is you get to know vital information a little bit before the students. Not a whole lot before, but every day counts. One bit of vital info we learned a little while ago is the outreach locations. This school, outreach will be to the Middle East, Phillipines, and New Zealand like last time, but some new locations that teams will go to is Thailand, Fiji, and New Zealand/ Tahiti. I didn't really have much of a preference, so I didn't put anything down when the leadership asked us where we wanted to go. Took a bit of a risk there. We learned about a week ago where we were going, and this outreach I am going to the Philippines. It's exciting, but I'm also kind of nervous about it. Mainly because none of the girl staff that I'm living with are on that team. There is a girl staff, Madeline if you recall her, on the team which I'm glad to have someone older who's been to the Philippines a couple times before. There are two other staff on the team as well, two guys about my age who I get along with so there shouldn't be any problems there. It's just unfortunate that none of my good friends here are going to be going with me. I'm optimistic it'll be a good outreach. Our team is pretty big too, there's about 17 of us in total.  

Besides outreach prep and classes, we have quite a bit of free time scattered throughout the day. I've become pretty tight with one of the new girl staff members from Canada, and so one thing we really like to do is play volleyball. Surprising, I know, but it's actually pretty fun. Probably because there's no spandex, ribbons in the hair, or team cheers when we play. This is street volleyball. This is real life. Most afternoons we have free we'll wander all over the campus until we have enough players to play. Mostly guys will join us, so the games can be pretty intense. We also have been trying to work out and stay more in shape, so we go on runs along the country road and will do butt and ab workouts that we find on Pinterest. Another thing we've been filling spare time with, is collecting produce from trees on campus. We discovered that a tree down by the classroom is actually a macadamia nut tree so we spent a good afternoon knocking them down, collecting them, shelling them and peeling this sticky white mess of of it, and now we have to wait 2 weeks until they dry. We also discovered a pear/apple cross fruit tree, and some orange trees. Bananagrams has also been a pretty big part of my free time. My days are basically filled with running, banana grams, and food scavenging.

Something exciting (well at least I think so) is that I've discovered a store in a mall about 5 minutes away that not only has a bunch of cartilage rings, studs, and other accessories (I bought a pretty sweet cartilage ring the other week) but also does nose piercings for either $15 or $30 depending on the stud. Even $30 is a great price. I just might do it. No matter how lesbian Annie Rong thinks nose piercings are. So basically things are going pretty sweet here. It's still summery weather, we live 5 minutes from a beach, and I get to spend all day every day with friends from around the world. Not as cool as you all back home, but hey, they'll do ;) . Miss y'all!

The Hard Staff Life

It's been a little while since I last blogged, but then again, it's been pretty busy since I last blogged. We moved out into our staff girls house last Saturday. It's a 3 bedroom, 1 bathroom cabin-like house on the edge of the property for 10 of us. I'm in a room with 4 other girls, but they're all pretty entertaining, so it should be fun. It's nice being more removed from everyone else, plus we're closer now to the cow paddock and pig pen. One of the new guy staff from Hawaii gave us girls a house warming gift with chocolate and a fancy little air freshener, and two other staff made us breakfast one morning, which was pretty awesome. On Wednesday, all staff left the students to fend for themselves on campus while we had a staff BBQ at one of the older staff member and his wife's house. They have 3 young kids, so they have a trampoline and all kinds of toys and sports equipment including a tennis-tetherball type game. So while most of the older staff were sitting inside talking, us younger people were having a blast playing outside with all their kids' stuff. The students had a nice night of playing sardines, red rover, and other games in our absence.

While on outreach, my outreach leader learned I had all three of the Mighty Ducks movies and she said that I should bring them to New Zealand and we would have a Mighty Ducks marathon. That dream became reality this past week. She recently got married and moved into her house, so she hosted it there and invited our Middle East outreach team and other random staff members that liked hockey or the Mighty Ducks. We started at 4 and didn't leave until 10:30. We had pizza and other small snacks that we had brought and they gave us chocolate fondue for dessert. The movies are pretty cheesy, especially the first one, but it was still a lot of fun, and it was nice to get away from Faith Bible College and all the students for a day.

As far as my duties as a staff member goes, I don't have a whole lot, but I I don't mind it. Other than helping out in small groups and during class, I take care of the morning tea during our morning class break, as is the custom in NZ and something America should adopt, so I go in early and make and set out the tea and coffee and then clean it up after. The cook at the college is a big Maori lady. I don't really know how to describe her personality other than forward, and at first she can seem a little harsh, but she likes me and we get along fine. The food here is good, as I've probably mentioned, but not the healthiest, so me and about four other girl staff members are adopting a workout plan to do every other day for the rest of lecture phase. One of the girls did some personal training prerequisites because she wanted to be a personal trainer at one point, so she lead our first workout. My legs are still sore.

So things are pretty sweet as here, and I think we learn our outreach locations soon! 

Piggies!

Students started arriving about a week ago. They've been trickling in all week, some even arriving a couple days after the official start of the school. Its a lot less overwhelming that way, 65 students is a lot of people after all. The first students to arrive was a Kiwi family, and to be hospitable and all, a staff member made a welcome team schedule so that it would be guaranteed that there would be staff to greet students and show them to their rooms. I was on that first shift along with another girl my age, we have decently similar personalities. They had no idea when the family was supposed to arrive so they told us to just hang out somewhere where we could see the road, so we grabbed a couple guitars and sat on the trampoline and she taught me to play a couple Juno songs, and we just chilled. We were joking about how we were put on the shift least likely to interact with new students. I mean, let's be real I don't make awesome first impressions (8 dead Siamese cats, right Leah?). The first couple days were a lot of meeting people and ice breaker type games. I met one girl who's from Charleston, Illinois of all places, and one guy is from Chicago, so we got some Illinoisians. Represent.

It's been kind of hectic managing all the students, because every one of them has a work duty now, and if they don't get it done then the college complains and the staff looks bad, so we have to constantly remind them and crack the whip a bit. I worked on the kitchen for the first week until the students got the hang of it and it was absolutely ridiculous washing a hundred people's dishes. It took like an hour each night to get everything cleaned. Luckily, now I don't have to help with meals until a new batch of students come in when they switch work duties. One lucky dog gets the work duty of feeding the pigs. The college just got piglets yesterday and they're so cute. They're probably half the size Bacon was when we got her (so about 20 lbs) and there's 4 of them, one black one and three pink/black ones. They wouldn't really come near me when I tried to pet them, but I still like them. I plan on bringing some apple cores next time to lure them in.

Interacting with students has been mostly pretty good. Us staff will go out and play games, talk with them, and get to know them, and then retreat in our rooms and hang out with each other. And then go back out again.  We're still having girls nights/afternoon tea or something, where we can hang out as just staff which is really nice. Beach day today so lataaasss. 

Electric Fences and Other Adventures

Time is really starting to tick down until students start to arrive. We moved a week ago out to our base for this school, which is Faith Bible College, a very small, rural, campground-esqe campus. The day before we left, a couple guys and girls wanted to go to the river nearby the house and swim. I didn't even realize there was a river, but swimming sounded fun so I was down.  We had to trek through several cow paddocks (which I learned is another word for field) and unfortunately they had electric fences around them, so we had to use towels and foam flip flops to pull and push the fence wires out of the way to be able to slip through without getting shocked. The guy who was holding the fence for everyone else just jumped over the fence, but his ankle hit the fence on the way down and he had this red burn looking mark and he said his ankle felt a little numb. We then trudged down through thick grass to the rivers edge and plunged in. It was a refreshing swim, and and I'm glad I went, but it  was probably one of the more intense adventures I've been on.

The day of the move involved a whole house clean, which was expected, before we all piled into vans and drove out to Faith Bible College. There's a lot of flowers and trees out at Faith, so it's a pretty campus, plus there's some cow/sheep fields around the campus. I tried approaching the cows but they just kind of stared at me then all walked away. It went down a lot like in Emperor's New Groove when Kuzco approaches the herd of normal llamas. Hurtful. Word is there's also a pig pen somewhere on the back of the campus, but I haven't gotten a chance to visit it yet because we aren't supposed to wander all around the fields until we have orientation with the grounds keeper because there are sink holes in the fields, and they've lost two cows and almost one of their staff to them. Most of us staff are staying on Faith Bible College campus, though some are staying at the house we stayed at before. The guy staff that are on campus are staying in these small individual dorm rooms, while the girls are starting out staying in mini-condo setups, which sounds a lot fancier than it is. Basically a main room, a small bedroom, and a sink and stovetop. The girls are moving out to a house later, but there's a family living there now. Consequently, I'm not even bothering to unpack or organize my room since we'll just have to pack it all up and move again, so right now everything is just piled up in a corner. Luckily, there's no room checks either.

We have class at least once a day and we go over expectations for the small groups and one-on-ones, and the things we need to do to prepare for the students. One day me and several other staff spent all morning organizing sheets and pillows and making beds. I'm also on dinner prep/clean for this week and me and two other staff help the cook put the food out and clean the dishes. We don't actually do much making food, but we get to use those cool dishwashers that you pull down and it cleans the dishes in like two minutes. The food here is mostly really good though. We even had pork chops one night. From pigs they keep on the farm I hear. Delicious. Other than those obligations, we pretty much have free time. We do a lot of game nights and girls nights, and we went to the beach three days in a row. Just making the best of the short time we have until people will actually refer to us as "staff" instead of the irresponsible and spontaneous children we actually are.

Lazy Dayz

I've been back in New Zealand for a about a week now, and it's been pretty full on, but really good. There's about six new staff members that weren't in my school that came from other bases, a married couple, a Texan dude, two American girls, and a guy from Lyons, France which is kind of exciting. His accent is pretty cool. So along with getting settled in is getting to know all of them. We have classes most morning and afternoons where we'll discuss plans/general structure for the school, do some leadership training, and discuss our roles in the upcoming school. I will be general DTS staff (hopefully on the adventure DTS), and I'll help out in small groups and be a one-on-one person which every new student has, which just means I meet with my students every once and a while and see how they're doing. I'll also be one of the staff that helps out the cook. Since our base is going to be on a bible college campus this time and our previous cook just got married, we will be working with the cook already at the college and assisting her. There's going to be around 70 students coming in from 19 different nations, which is both kind of exciting, but also pretty nerve wracking. Not only will it be a lot of people to cook for, but it will also be a lot of people to have to get to know. One bonus (on the cooking side of things) is that a bunch of farmers are donating some sheep, pigs and cows for meat for the DTS which is awesome because that saves us a bunch of money but also gives us delicious meat. 

Outside of our classes, we have a bunch of free time. Especially since everyone has to buy and prepare their own food for the week before the students arrive so there's no dinner prep or one hour dinners since people can just eat on their own time. I figured since I could only eat food I bought, I would force myself to be healthy by buying only healthy food. It's been going pretty well, I'm even avoiding carbs in the evening (staying strong Marie). Although I did buy a package of these really good spicy Indonesian ramen, and since my salad froze in the fridge the other day, I ate that for lunch and dinner. In any other situation I would take that as a sign that I've hit rock bottom. 

I'm kind of struggling trying to fill all the free time we have. I'll pluck a guitar, go on the internet maybe go for a run, hang out with other staff, but there's really like 6 hours each day where we can do whatever. Yesterday we went to the beach which was a fun time fill, and some of us girls played a game of pick up soccer. Basically things are pretty loose and lazy now, but they're just going to take off as soon as the students come in, which I believe is in like five days. Also, I figured out that I can watch NBC on the NBC app, so my plan of watching Jennifer Lawrence on SNL a couple minutes at a time is going pretty well. So take that haters.