Hi everyone,

I’ve been meaning to send an update for… well, ages. I kept thinking I’d wait til I had photos organised to send along but… yeah, not so good with that. But I’ve picked a few randoms – hope you like them.

So after I got back from Australia, Amanda and Andrew headed home, and before I’d had time to miss them, Carla arrived! She was here for a little over 3 weeks and we had fun. She spent a lot of time enjoying my couch and DVD player and shower, and the fact that she had a bed that didn’t move and could leave here stuff in one place for a couple of weeks at a time.

We went to Xishuangbanna – a part of China WAAAAY in the south, just across the border from Myanmar on one side and Laos on the other. We stayed in the capital city of the county, Jinghong, which has about 100,000 people on a good day (I think). I spent a few days looking at projects for work, and then Carla and I played tourist for a few days. It ws nice! Warm weather, green trees, flowers, tropical fruit and fresh juice… just perfect. After we got back it was time for Valentines’ Day fun with small group, and Chinese New Year, before Carla left on the 19th. Well, the 20th, as it turned out.

Now that I’ve given you a basic rundown, let me fill you in on some of the news in my life!

I have resigned from my position at BICF, and will finish up work here at the end of March (that’s in 4 weeks!) It’s just the right time to move on. Eventually, I want to end up doing full time youth work. I don’t want to be a youth pastor or anything (that is SO not me!) but I do want to be doing something, probably administration, that supports youth work/youth workers and allows me to spend a bunch of my time working with youth.

I don’t have anything set up for when April rolls around. I’ve decided to purchase an F visa individually so that I’m not tied to anything. I’ve had two job offers, but I haven’t given a definite answer. I don’t think I’ll take either. I’m not looking for full time work, I’m looking for enough to get by on. That said, I’m working with some friends on starting up a program for training youth workers to work with kids overseas – some of the writeups and budgets I’ve put together are currently being forwarded around the world and we’re waiting to see if we can get some funding to make it happen. If that happens, I’ll have a salary – so that would be a dream come true.

So that’s the big one!

The next youth camp is happening in 5 weeks and 3 days (not that I’m counting) and then again the following weekend! I’m all excited about that. I’m getting some teams together of people to do camp prep and admin so that I can coordinate rather than doing anything – that was always the plan and it’s great to see it coming together. I think we’re going to have a LOT of kids at these ones so having a good admin system is going to be important. We had over 100 people at youth group this past Friday! When I started helping out in about September/October of 2005, 60 people was a good night.

Chinese New Year

Oh! I remember what I was going to tell you all! Okay, so it’s been warming up here. I don’t remember seeing a 0 degree forecast in the last month. But on Sunday morning I got up to see – 10cm (4″) of SNOW! We’d only had one snowfall all season, a light fall on New Year’s Eve (when I was still in Australia). So that was nuts! Then that night the wind got up and started blasting the city. The temp dropped to about -7 overnight and yesterday was stupidly cold! The sort of icy cold where any exposed skin just hurts! Still quite cold today, but also still quite sunny, which is nice. I think I prefer that to cloudy warmer weather, in general.

Okay! I guess that’s it for now. Have a good one!

love Tanya