I'm home!

Hello Everyone! I'm so sorry that I didn't blog earlier that I'm home in the States. In light of all that is happening in India, many of you were wondering if I made it home safely. I sure did, several days before the terror there started. I know my mom is sure thankful I'm home! :)

India was wonderful. I was in a city called Luck now which is southeast of Delhi. We had an amazing time speaking to so many groups of people and teaching English each afternoon. We talked to over 1300 people throughout the 2 weeks. We were exhausted but so happy to be playing such an integral part of the work there. The Indian team will follow up with all we connected with. We felt like a catalyst to take their ministry to the next level. We sure did attract enough attention. Lucknow has almost no foreigners so my light colored hair made me a celebrity. You know I loved that :)

Here's a picture of my own little class. Yep, even the kids were a part of my class, although the little boy tended to wander around sometimes. He was super smart at English, though, and would grin from ear to ear when I told him, "Good job!" Then he would say, "Tammymam, you told me 14 times today "good job." So cute! The women really wear the sari or punjabi outfits all the time. So they are always so colorful. What I have on in the picture is a punjabi suit. It has pants underneat and is like a long tunic. The saris are 5 meters of cloth wrapped around you just right. The food was delicious. I think they toned down the spices for us. Our team worked well together and it was amazing to see how God had each of us designed for specific roles. My role was to do 3 hours of lesson plans for us each night and then teach the rest of the team the lesson plans and how to teach them each morning. I loved it! We each gave our testimony to hundreds of people. We did those speaking engagements in the mornings and in the evenings, teaching English in the afternoons. Like I said, we were kept busy but we didn't mind at all!

Overall, I had three incredible months of travel and work. I am so thankful that God had His hand upon me and took care of me each step of the way. It is good to be home, but I'm already preparing for my next trip ... to Thailand! More on that to come :)

Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia

I'm afraid I haven't had easy access to a computer for a while. In fact, today and tomorrow are my last days to be near a computer until I get back from India. Let me catch you up on all that's happened since last time I wrote:

Hong Kong was wonderful. There was a big ELIC dinner on Saturday with a record attendance. You know I love talking with strangers so I had a great time!

Then I flew to Singapore. Wow, what a great city. I was on the 19th floor of a hotel right downtown. From my window, I could even see as far as Indonesia! The Indian holiday of Deepavali was in full swing when we got here. This is a picture of some Indian girls who were performing at a high class country club where we were eating dinner (thanks to a generous donor who hosted us).

The ELIC President and his wife and 2 VPs were all in Singapore as well and we crammed in a dozen meetings into about 3 days.

On the last evening they were here, I found myself with some unexpected tears. As I was saying goodbye to my ELIC friends, I was also saying goodbye to my long career with ELIC. Here's a pic of our crew on that last evening ... before the tears :)

The next day I was fine and back to meetings. I wasn't actually officially unemployed until November 1st and I worked right up until the end meeting great people in Singapore.

On November 2nd, my first day of unemployment, I did what anyone would do ... if they could. I took a ferry for about an hour to Indonesia. There I stayed at a resort for 2 nights. Amazing! The ocean was so clear and warm. The food was delicious. And God gave me the best room in the resort with an amazing view of the ocean. It was just what I had hoped it would be. What a great way to usher in a time of unemployment (and thankfully, it was relatively cheap too!)

Now I'm in Singapore for 2 days with old friends from Wheaton. Tomorrow I hop on a plane to India. The time has flown by and I can't believe I've been away from America for well over 2 months.