An early morning start, long bumpy drive, two planes and a five-hour layover in the middle: we were absolutely exhausted. We finally made it through, found our luggage intact an headed out into the throngs of Sri Lankans to meet with our final field partner, Reverend Ranjan Fernando.

At first glance, many things struck as the same, many different, compared to other countries we’ve been.

Similarities: in the airport a sea of people waiting outside barricades for loved ones to return home, and taxi drivers lobbying for your fare. A joyful similarity to most other airports was the clean ‘regular’ toilets. Other similarities included driving on the left side of the road, tropical trees, little vegetable stands where women sell their meagre offerings for cheap. There were crowds teeming in the streets, and twice as many vehicles, bikes and people on the width of the road than there should have been.

The biggest similarity to other countries we’ve traveled is that the people are just as foreign in their ways and customs to me as everywhere else we have been. It’s a whole new world to explore and experience. As soon as you get off a plane you’re immersed in it and there’s no way to just dip your toes. You’re in the deep end of a new country before you have the chance to rub the grogginess from your flight away.

Differences: Sri Lankan languages have their own alphabets. Signs often had a mix of Sri Lankan and English writing, making for a unique combination unlike in Kenya and Uganda where most writing found was in English. The people are brown instead of black; the accents are very different and I keep thinking I’ll see the Kwik-e-Mart around the next bend. Women are dressed in saris, some men in sarongs. Tuk tuks pass us by on the congested streets, spewing out a haze of black smoke.

A big difference here compared to other countries we traveled to for Pockets of Change on this final leg of travel is the heat. Colombo is hot, the wall of radiating heat hits you as soon as you step out the doors and into a blazing inferno. It is a wet, humid heat. It is unpleasant, to put it politely.

As we drove by the endless small shops on unmarked roads, I thought how it would be much easier to just be home now. To be surrounded by people more like me, to not be expected to observe and question and report, to not have to sleep in another strange bed in another strange house, to not have to eat unfamiliar food and jump cultural differences to connect with the people here.

But after some rest at our partner’s home where we were to stay while in Sri Lanka, I pondered my feelings. The beautiful thing to me about being a Christian is that while I sometimes don’t feel, I still know in my head the truths in my life. The truth: God is. And as long as I’m following in the path God has shown me, I know that wherever I am is where I’m supposed to be. I also reminded myself of the confirmation I’ve had again and again in different ways that Pockets of Change is a project God has called us to. So despite my feelings of exhaustion, of wariness to face a new country and people, of not having my own bed to sleep in each night and my own food to eat, I know we have been called here as we have to every other stop.

So crank up the heat, smother that rice in curry, bring on the heavy accents. Here’s to the last stop on our Pockets of Change travel.

We are, as our newsletter stated, finished our travel portion of the Pockets of Change project. The Lord was so good to us as we traveled. We didn’t get any serious sicknesses which is a miracle considering the high risk of malaria in many of the places we went, all the food we ate that wasn’t quite up to Canadian food standards, and all the travel we undertook to climates our bodies were not used to.

Not one piece of luggage was ever lost which is astounding considering we went on more than 25 flights over the last nine months. The only items lost during all our travels were one hat in Huanca Huanca, Peru, and one cable lock which we’re pretty sure ended up somewhere in the Ukraine.

One of the big blessings to share is that we have a place to stay for all of January and February! A friend of a friend opened up his apartment for us to house sit. It is fully furnished, centrally located and ideal for allowing us to jump right into putting the project together instead of worrying about moving our furniture, unpacking and setting up house first. This way, we hit the ground running. Praise God!!

We’re both in good spirits and even though the project is huge and I have had some restless nights worrying about it, we know we have a great team at Hungry for Life helping us out and we have confidence that God will see us through this project. We’re trusting that God will equip us to complete the book and that He will continue to pour out His blessing on us to finish what we started.

Thank you for your continued support. We feel so blessed by all God has provided, and that includes the readers of this blog who have been with us every step of the way.

Hello friends and family,

Praise the Lord, our travel portion of the Pockets of Change project is now done. It has been quite the ride and it’s hard to believe our travels are over. After some personal travel time we’re on right now, we will be starting the really hard part of our project: assembling all we’ve gathered into the book.

We started this project not really sure what we would find. We prayed that God would open our eyes to see what He wanted us to see. Working with Hungry for Life communications staff members Ryan and Corrina, we crafted a mission statement to keep our focus. None of us knew if the vision would match the outcome, that was in God’s hands. We prayerfully considered the mission statement and felt that it stated what God was calling us to do.

Reflecting on our travels, I know half the mission statement has been completed. We have found ’specific stories of spiritual and physical transformation of people and communities’.

Now we must work to fulfill the second half of the mission statement, ‘we desire to motivate individuals to be a part of a global movement of compassion and justice, realizing their potential to effect global change’.

All this travel means nothing unless people are called to action through the stories gathered, through the photos captured. Staring this January we will be immersing ourselves in this work, to create a book that will inspire, that will motivate, that will call people to action.

We’ll be working at the Hungry for Life office in Chilliwack. If you’re curious about what we’re up to or how the work is going, feel free to email or call. We’d love to share what we’re learning and how the work is progressing.

Prayer Requests:

Please pray that we’re able to work through all that we have experienced. It is overwhelming just thinking about the amount of places we’ve been, people we’ve interviewed and things we’ve seen. I don’t know how we’re going to assemble it into some sort of cohesive work so your prayers are very much appreciated and needed.

Also please pray that we’re able to find an affordable place to live as we work on the book. Our fundraising efforts only covered our travel portion. While we have some funds left over it’s not enough to cover rent, food, gas and the like while we work on the book for the next three to five months. Given we have no income coming in at this point, we are relying solely on God that He will provide for our ‘daily bread’.

Finally, we just want to praise God for all of you, our faithful prayer and financial partners in this project. We literally could not have done this project without you. While our Pockets of Change project is only halfway done now, I know it won’t seem as interesting when we’re sitting in an office pounding the keys eight hours a day. So while we’re still away, it seems the right time to thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your support. Because of you, we were able to gather what we needed to make this project come together.

Thank you.

In Christ,
Lorene and Justin

p.s. While we are taking some time to travel on our own, we are continuing to update the blog as we find internet and inspiration. Please continue to check out www.pocketsofchange.org for more stories and photos from the road.

It’s hard to believe how quickly the time is flying. A friend just emailed me the other day talking about what her kids want to dress up as for Halloween. It seems so far removed from where I am right now: sitting in a gazebo inside our hotel grounds, watching the birds flutter and chirp to each other in the tall green trees. Flowers blossom beside the rich red dirt road into the compound. It’s a beautiful morning in Siaya.

We’ve been in Kenya for a full week now. After leaving Noah’s Ark, we spent two nights and one fun-filled day with our friend Kimi who is living in Jinja, Uganda. We got a chance to get out and meet some of the kids she works with there. It was great to actually get out into a community and interact with the locals. Plus it was nice for me and Justin to not have the pressure of needing to make sure we ask the right questions, gather the right information and take the best photos. We were simply there to enjoy the day, and it was pleasant indeed. Kimi is an incredible servant of God, and to see what she is doing there because God called her just swelled my heart.

So, she drove us to the Kenyan border and we had no problems meeting up with our Kenyan project partner Edgar. That was a big praise item for me as I was worried we might be at the border all day trying to find each other. It was much less confusing there than I had anticipated!

It has been a full week with Edgar, traveling to Siaya, seeing some of the project sites, meeting with those impacted and getting a good sense of what is happening on the ground here. We also got to spend a couple nights at Edgar’s home in Kisumu, which was very enjoyable. We had a great time getting to know his family and even learning how to make a few authentic Kenyan dishes!

On Sunday, we picked up a team from Kisumu Airport. They come from Coquitlam’s Hillside Community Church, and we are with them until next Tuesday. Not only is it fun to meet a new team, they also brought some much-appreciated treats from home including cookies and instant Starbucks coffee which they graciously have shared with us!

This afternoon we get to spend time with the kids from the Siaya Children’s Home, playing soccer (the team) and doing some interviews (me and Justin). This morning some of the team went to see Obama’s grandmother’s home, which is just a little ways outside of Siaya.

We’ve been feeling healthy for the most part, getting rest and are feeling blessed by our time in Kenya. As our new friend Pastor Richard says, “All is well.” Indeed, all has been well here in Kenya. I hope to start sharing soon on the blog some of the stories we’ve been hearing and of course some of the visual imagery to show you just how beautiful this land and its people are.

We have two long travel days ahead of us which will take us on 3 planes, to 4 airports and one long car ride to our destination of Nikopol, Ukraine. Please pray for safety as we travel and that God will lead us in our work there.

We will post an update as soon as we get settled and find an internet connection. Stay tuned and we encourage you to comment on the blog as we go. Let us know what you think.

Well, faithful readers, we survived.

I know you were worried. I sure was. But through Christ’s strength, not my own, I made it both in and out of the Copper Canyon. Thank you all for your prayers, without them I fear I would be sitting in the canyon still. But let me tell you, we would do it again to see what we saw, experience what we experienced, and hear the few but powerful stories we heard.

I’m looking forward to writing about our time in the canyon. But for now, I want to share with you about the hike because it emphasizes the true length teams go to in order to help out in the neediest of places.

The hike to Guacaivo descends 4,100 feet into the canyon bottom, then back up the other side for 1,500 feet. It is a long, steep switchback path. It took me four knee-bending, body-sweating, slow-going hours to get down the side of the mountain. At the bottom of the canyon there was a wide river to cross, which we did in a suspended cable car over the river. That, I gotta say, wasn’t Justin’s favourite moment of the trip being so high above the water in a weeny metal frame hung from a rusty looking cable.

We got across the river in one of the last carts to cross and the team started up again right away. Time was not on our side as night was set to fall within a couple hours. We were told that going at a good clip, it would probably take an hour and a half to reach the top which meant I was aiming for about two hours. So we hauled it straight up the mountainside, following and crossing the creek again and again as we made our way up.

An hour and a half up from the river and we were at the orphanage. Praise God! We were absolutely thrilled to make it to Guacaivo from the top of the canyon in five and a half hours, though I was exhausted from the intense physical day.

We saw miracles with the weather and with the circumstances and I praise God for all of it. It was certainly through God’s faithfulness, His strength, that we made it in and out of the canyon. It was as though God took away every possibility that I would depend on my own strength to make to the orphanage in Guacaivo and then back out again four days later.

And in spite of the long day to make it to Guacaivo, still in the evening we were all able to sing a rousing round of ‘Oh Canada’ for our country’s 142nd birthday.

As the song ‘On the Road Again’ plays faintly in my head, I sit on our foam bed contemplating where we are now, while Justin sits beside me, immersed in a good book. Outside our barred window is the Bible School in Juarez. It’s a walled compound with beautiful facilities and a kitchen staff that knows how to cook a mean fajita. Up the hallway in the guys’s room, Avril Lavigne wails out an angst-ridden song on the ipod.

We arrived in Juarez, Mexico yesterday evening at about 6:30 p.m. after leaving Chilliwack at 5 a.m. It was a good day of travel – no lost bags, no delayed flights and no sickness. We came here with a missions group from Coquitlam Alliance Church and will be hiking into the Copper Canyon with them soon.

It’s good to be back to gathering the stories of life change and I’m excited about what lies ahead. From all accounts we’ve heard, God is doing incredible things through the people here in Mexico and we are thrilled we get to listen and share the stories of lives being transformed.

We are off to church in a couple hours. I find church in other cultures interesting, though I quickly long for worship in my own tongue. I’m glad this leg of our journey is only two weeks so it won’t be long before I get to sing and praise God and listen to the Word. We did load some worship music onto our laptop so if I need a time of focus and contemplation I can just plug in my headphones and sing to my heart’s content!

It’s hot here, though not nearly as hot as it felt in Haiti, Ecuador and Mississippi. That was a pleasant surprise yesterday to know that I could handle this heat. Others on the team were wilting; I’m thankful I’ve had a chance to experience worse humidity so I know this isn’t so bad.

On that note, it’s been hard to not constantly compare to the other places we have been. One of the things we learned in preparation for our project was that comparing between Canada and elsewhere is unhealthy, gets you nowhere and is just not a good idea. I find myself now comparing not between Canada and Mexico, but between Mexico and the other countries we’ve been. Especially as we drive the streets here, which are lovely paved roads where people obey the traffic signs, pedestrians don’t nearly get hit and dogs don’t roam the streets. I’m looking forward to our other stops in Mexico to see how they compare to the lovely streest of Juarez.

This post is kind of scattered and all personal details, but I want you to know where I’m at right now. Spiritually, Justin and I are doing well and not feeling any sort of attacks from Satan. If you could pray for us to stay strong in our faith even as obstacles come our way that would be appreicated. We also need prayer that we will be able to meet with the right people and have enough time to gather the stories that will have the greatest impact. Things are pretty laid back here and we want to make sure we can go with this slower flow while still being able to connect with people for interviews in the time we have.

Thanks for reading, thanks for your prayer support and thanks for your encouragement. We’re grateful for all the people coming on the journey with us through this blog and we’re looking forward to sharing with you what’s happening in Mexico.

And for those who are wondering, we haven’t finished blogging about Ecuador and Mississippi, our last two stops on the first leg. When we’re back from Mexico in two weeks we’ll be posting more from those two stops.

Hasta luego! (until later / so long)

While we were only gone for five weeks, in some ways it feels like much longer. There was so much we saw, so many incredible stories we heard, that it’s hard to know where to begin to sort through it all.

I feel a deep sense of responsibility over these stories now. I received a gift each time someone opened up their heart to me in an interview, and I don’t take that lightly. I feel at a loss for words to describe what we’ve experienced. It’s a funny spot to be in as a writer, having no words to write.

But we have many stories we want to share with you. We’re back in Chilliwack and have had some time of total rest and relaxation away from the computer, the stories and the project. The focus now is to sort through what we’ve seen, and we would ask for your prayers as we do that .

I want to mention how very much we appreciated those of you that commented or sent us emails along the way. I cannot tell you what a world of good they did for us while we were in unfamiliar places with new faces all the time. While we didn’t have a lot of time to touch base with people back home, hearing your thoughts on what we were hearing and photographing was encouraging.
Our actual travels went well, and we want to thank you all for your prayers as we went from Canada to Haiti to Peru to Ecuador to Mississippi then back home last week. There were lots of opportunities for mishaps and while we did have some travel delays, we always had a place to sleep in safety. We never had one bag go missing and the only thing we lost was my hat. Not bad considering the amount of planes we flew in, vehicles we rode in, beds we slept in and stops we made along the way.

While we are back in Canada for the month of June, I will be posting more stories from the first leg of our journey. Thanks for reading, for praying, and for supporting us as we work on the Pockets of Change project.

Being a day behind schedule, we had to hit the ground running. Within 15 minutes of arriving at the ATEK compound we were re-packed and ready to head to a remote village buried deep in the mountains of Peru. We knew this was going to be the plan, although we had hoped for a few days to acclimatize ourselves to being at nearly 11,000 feet. The village we were traveling to was at roughly the same elevation, but some of the mountain passes surpassed 16,000 feet. We started taking our high altitude pills the night before and were hoping for the best.

The Toyota Land Cruiser was packed full of food and supplies for the five of us taking the trip. Up front was Pastor Freddi our driver and his trusty co-pilot Peter, a Swiss missionary here to teach English and on this particular trek, to be our translator. On our way out of town we picked up Yoni, a young girl we would later find out is in charge of children’s ministries for ATEK.

Eager to get out and see what God is doing here in Peru, we were excited and ready, but nothing could have prepared us for the roads that lie ahead. If you’ve ever driven a logging road to a primo hiking spot in the Canadian Rockies, you’ll have some idea. Just add a 5,000 foot vertical drop, triple the amount of switchbacks, remove the guardrails and let loose dozens of roaming sheep, donkeys and cows.

About a half hour in to the trip I realized that the supermarket chicken goulash was not the best choice for lunch. The combination of traveling for the past 2-1/2 days, the windy, bumpy roads, and what the doctor would later tell me is altitude sickness made for a rather unpleasant drive and resulted in three unscheduled stops to “take in the view”.

190 kms and 7-1/2 hours later we arrived at our final destination, Perrca.  In the end the trip up was definitely worth it. The views were incredible, the people were welcoming and the knowledge that God is working here was encouraging.

It was amazing to see the distances that the members of ATEK go to minister to the forgotten Quechua people. Check back as Lorene will continue to share specific stories of what God is doing here over the next week as we move back in to areas with reliable internet.

The smell in the air was the most powerful: a mix of car exhaust, rotten mangos and something indescribable mixed in. It filled my head with each breath.

The sounds of Haiti if you are driving include a great deal of honking – it seems the biggest vehicle gets the right of way and everyone else scoots around whatever car they can in the opposite lane of traffic. Drivers honk at just about anything in their way. Pedestrians definitely don’t have the right of way here.

Our driver Juliom whipped past motorbikes carrying anywhere from one to four people, close enough you could reach out and high five them. He honked at ambling bikers to get off the road and slowed down as we caught up with Tap Taps full of people piled inside squished shoulder to shoulder. Some sat on top, the wind whipping at them as they hung onto metal railings. Delivery trucks also seem to be passenger vehicles here. We watched as one man leapt onto the back of a truck using a knotted rope as support, flipping his body at least four feet up to the bed of the truck as it bumped along the road. Not exactly Canadian standards of safety apply here.

The other thing you hear a lot of is ‘Blanc, Blanc!’ People shouting ‘white, white’ as Justin and I sat in the second row of the van looking out. We’ve heard this phrase often since arriving. It’s a novelty having a group of white people. When we were in Mirebelais with the team from Chilliwack’s Southside Church, we heard this shout even more. Sometimes the team leader would smile and call back, ‘Yes, black!’ Many giggles from kids would quickly follow.

Along the sides of the road, there were always people. Some areas were teeming with people – women carrying buckets and baskets and bags on their head; children playing naked in the streams and along the roadsides, and men on their way to work, or sitting in the shade because there is not enough work for all. There is more than 80 per cent unemployment rate in this country, so there is a lot of sitting, and waiting, and wandering that seems to happen here.

Haiti has been an interesting country in which to start our Pockets of Change project. We had been warned of the dangers that exist in this country, and I believe there were angels protecting us as we walked and drove and slept in this country. Yet at the same time I saw such hope and such vision from the Christians here. They believe in a God that will save their land, and that’s encouraging to me. Yes, there’s poverty, spiritual darkness and many other problems. But God is bigger than all of that. And the Christians in this country know it. Praise God!