Romantic, candlit....bible study?

I have had much to write about lately. I wanted to post last night, but that was not an option. Why not? We had no electricity.

This week is the national staff conference, held in our city. All the staff from Cru in Venezuela came to Maracaibo to meet and catch up and cast vision and plan. It's really cool to see all the other people and hear first-hand how their ministries are going. The theme for the week is Conexion (connection), and the theme of transportation has been incorporated into many of our talks and activities. To get to know each other we went around and shared what mode of transportation described our personality best. It was really neat to hear everyone's choices and explanations. I knew ahead of time that we were going to do the activity, but assumed everyone would choose the same few responses and not give very good answers. I was wrong, and it was really fun to hear people choose an ambulance, helicopter, taxi, camel, cruise ship, and riding lawn mower, among others. I chose a sailboat, because it's chill, doesn't have to be anywhere at a particular time, has a lot of things to do to keep busy but at the same time is relaxing, is surrounded by a beautiful view, and can bring a few people or go solo. To hear about each other's ministries, we also chose a mode of transportation, such as a roller coaster, space ship, or stilts. I chose a metro for Maracaibo, because we are headed in the right direction, but often get sidetracked at various stops and lose people along the way. Another fun thing was getting into groups and having to make a vehicle out of our bodies, then having everyone else guess what you were. They were really funny - we had a helicopter, and there was also a submarine, spaceship, tank, and segway.

The conference has been really fun since the STINT team is here from Valencia, thus there are other, new Americans my age! I am excited about spending more time with them and getting to know them better. They are coming to Aruba with us, so it will be great to build a friendship here and then have fun on the beach together. Speaking of which, it is going to be difficult to get through this week because I am so focused on Aruba!! In the meeting today I admittedly stopped paying attention and started a rough draft of a packing list. Typical Sydni. I can't wait though!! More on that another time. At first I thought this week would be really chill, with lots of free time, but it is exactly the opposite. Today we had stuff from 9am to 10pm. When everyone left our house from game night just now, I realized I had about 2 hours (if I go to bed at 12), and I was so excited about that amount of free time, I can barely figure out what I should do. That says a lot because I normally have way too much free time on my hands but still want to savor every second of it. The schedule we were given is very vague because in Venezuela you rarely start or end on time, and often cut things out if you are getting too late. It was really funny that on the schedule for Monday it said "12pm-8pm" (for just mandatory stuff), and for Tuesday it said "9am-noche." Andrew joked that if 8pm is not the night (=noche), I am very afraid of how late we'll be up Tuesday night! Fortunately it didn't turn out to be too late.

However, last night I went to bed at 3am!! I was doing stuff with people all day from 12pm until then. We have been doing a book talk for team training, and we really wanted to finish the book that we're on (the Prodigal God) before Christmas. Andrew leaves on Thursday, so we were struggling to find a time to do it due to our crazy schedule this week. (And last week we were going on the mission trip.) Andrew really wanted to do it on Monday, but we were trying to convince him not to because we knew we'd be up really late. We thought dinner would end at 8 and we could start after that, which is our normal time, but Andrew's food didn't even come until after 8. Despite the time, I decided I really wanted to get the meeting out of the way so we could relax later on in the week, so we convinced everyone to meet as soon as we got back to the apartment.

Then the craziness began. I got in, put my leftover pizza in the fridge, and closed the door. We heard a crash. One of the shelves had fallen out. Typical. I went to open the door to fix it, and on the way Kaitlin was yelling "wait!!!" I guess I didn't trust her, so I opened it anyway. The shelf hadn't fallen.....yet. As soon as I opened the door the shelf - and everything on it - came crashing down. Only one thing broke. What was it? A giant, wine-sized glass container of honey. What a mess!! How do you clean up honey?? We laughed for a good while and continued laughing while I scraped up the goo with a spoon. We joked that I should get a job at Cold Stone since the spoon on the floor was making a similar sound. It was pretty fun, but we were supposed to be reading the last chapter so we could be informed for our book talk which was supposed to be happening soon.

While the people who had already read the book cleaned up, Crystal and I tried to read in our living room. We were so distracted because it was SO HOT. I got up to turn the AC on, and apparently turned on the fan. It made a horrible noise. I turned it off, and Andrew and Kim tried to fix it. When they got the AC to finally work, it was making the same noise - but not producing any air.

A little while later, we got a call saying that our electricity was going to be cut off for 30 minutes, so we should turn everything off and prepare. We joked, half-seriously, about Chavez turning communist and controlling everything. We checked facebook and got candles out, and still prepared to finish our meeting that we had struggled so hard to begin. We held the rest of our talk by candlelight, which I laughed hysterically about often, because it was late and I was hyper and slightly delusional, so I kept imagining weird things. It was really fun though, and afterwards we talked for a while, reminiscing about college days.

Of course, since we're in Venezuela, the electricity was not just out for 30 minutes. More like 12 or so hours. It was extremely sad to wake up in the morning and not have water OR electricity (we didn't have water because it requires electricity to pump it in our building). I was slow to get moving, and recall trying to find a shirt in my dark closet, feeling strange things, and realizing I was in Crystal's drawer. Then I leaned over my drawer for probably 5 minutes, sorting through my clothes using the dim light from my cell phone, which cut off every 2 seconds.

So, after our night of living in the 1800's without water or electricity, we learned that downstairs in the breaker room, a fire had started, and that's why the power had to be shut off. The floor associated with the fire? Yep - ours! Maybe we blew a circuit because we are using 2 fridges to store thanksgiving turkeys, maybe because of the weird AC happening. Either way, we decided that someone didn't want us to hold Bible study! Oh, Venezuela.