Camp at the Farm

After the temple, we made our way down to the fishing village, and were given a tour of a small shop that specialized in...'coral jello'. It seemed like a safe enough thing to try, but after a small taste, I gagged discreetly and calmly decided to let Pinky finish it for me. He put coffee creamer on it and that made it a little better, but I still let him eat the rest of it. Sometimes I wonder if God really intended for us to eat some of the things that I have recently put into my mouth.

That night (our first night of the Yilan camp) our activity was to make a sky lantern. This particular craft apparantly evolved from a practice of writing down prayer to Buddha or other gods, and sending the lantern up like small hot air balloon. However, our team's lantern went up with blessings and requests to God. We lit the torch inside and it rose higher and higher. All of the kids could see the Americans' prayers going up to God, who maybe they had never heard of before then. I wondered if God was made happy with our tiny offering, and he reassured me from Psalm 50:23 that "Whoso offereth praise glorifieth me..." in that case..."I will praise thee, O Lord, among the people: I will sing unto thee among the nations." -Psalm 57:9


One of the last nights at the Yilan camp we went on (of all things) an insect watch. I wasn't exactly thrilled about the whole thing (as most of you can imagine) and tried to conjure up some sort of deathly physical ailment that would have prevented me from going. However, nighttime came and found me in perfect health. Our very enthusiastic guide tried to make us all feel a little better about the hike...apparently, he'd been doing this insect watch for twenty-plus years. He would beam his flashlight on some creeping thing and draw us all in to get a -in my opinion- much too close of a look. At one point, he saw something through the trees and charged forward to investigate. Something about the trees here: a spider as big as your hand hangs from every single one...our little group was content to watch and wait. He was gone for quite a while and I thought for sure that whatever he had gone to look for had eaten him. Fortunately for us, he had a safe passage through the jungle, and took us safely (through foliage full of gleaming beetle eyes) back to our camp for the night.