travel

Summer Travels Keep Us Going

/ Gina Sawyer / Leave a comment

This has been a great summer! We have visited 15 states in the 2 months we have been traveling around America! Crazy! But we have really enjoyed our time with different churches, family, and friends. We are so incredibly blessed to have an amazing support team of family and friends, so “work” is more like catching up and sharing life together. We know we are blessed in this unique experience of home assignment. We know many missionaries and families who have to do a lot of fundraising in order for them to continue their mission work, so we are very thankful our time refreshes our souls, even when it’s physically exhausting traveling, sleeping in other homes, and living out of a suitcases.

We can’t express our gratitude for all the love we have received over the MANY years!

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We Can Do Hard Things

/ Gina Sawyer / Leave a comment

Over Christmas break, our family took a trip to Indonesia, and we spent 4 days trekking in the Sumatra jungle. Why, you ask? In hopes to see orangutans in the wild, as well as some other wild animals. We did see orangutans and their babies, several different types of monkeys and lots of leeches (which we were NOT expecting). The trek was HARD! I have never done anything this hard before. I’ve hiked mountains in Colorado, Utah, Dominican Republic and Uganda, I live in Africa, I’ve had a baby, I’ve had lots of adventures… But I have never experienced anything THIS hard. I don’t usually push my body to its limits; that just doesn’t sound enjoyable to me. Some of you thrive on intense challenges, so this post is not for you. 😉

So when Day 1 started with steep climbs up a mountain and then steep climbs down another mountain, and up and down again, it was intense! Then rain poured down on us for several hours as we were trying to climb down the mountain to our campsite. We were carrying all our clothes and things for camping in backpacks of about 25+ pounds, and they were soaked! Everything was soaked! When we got to camp while it was still pouring rain, I tried to hang out all our wet stuff in a cramped space with 6 people in one tent area to air it out some. I thought I had reached my limit. I was exhausted, smelly, soaking wet, and overwhelmed with the day… I wanted to quit. We still had 3 more days of this, and I wasn’t sure I could make it.

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