Agnes Family in Africa: May 2015

Right at the end of April (and mostly in May) Deborah got the amazing opportunity to visit SIM's base in the USA for a training course on working in multi-cultural teams. The major bonuses were that 1) she got to go with good friend Christiane, and 2) several SIM South Sudan alumni are in the area. We were so happy to be met at the airport by Bob & Karen Ihrig, who were part of our Doro team for several years and who now run the SIM USA guesthouse.

Good friends Stacey and Mark Conard (were Pastoral Care for South Sudan team until a year ago - in fact still are but from a distance!) then took us out for supper...

...to Captain Steve's for all things fish (and fried!)

I have missed laughing with these guys!

SIM USA's office is in Charlotte, North Caroline and SIM International's office is in Fort Mill, South Carolina. They are 20 mins drive from each other but it means I have visited my first two states - fun! We started off by staying at SIM USA's guesthouse and it has beautiful grounds to explore.

This is the house used for kids ministry and is in the style traditional to many of the houses in the area

There is a sign for Mark in case he gets lost looking for his office. I very much enjoyed meeting some of the SIM USA staff with him as I regularly email with quite a few of them.

And I am a bit far from home!

Christiane and I had great fun exploring the woods behind the office - fording streams (several times), getting lost and generally enjoying being safe to walk in nature!

Raccoon footprints!

And I was a totally embarassing tourist - taking photos of Walmart...

...and in Walmart - all these things I've heard of and here they are in real life!

I promise I didn't eat these though!

It's fun to see what makes it into this section, including salad cream, Oxo, Sharwoods curry sauce, PG Tips and Ribena :)

Christiane and I did try some traditional Southern cuisine at 'Crackerbarrel', including sweet potato with cinnamon and sugar on the top, apple sauce and fried okra along with my breaded pork and chicken casserole. I was glad we were walking back to the guesthouse after eating all that!

The bedroom of our apartment at the SIM USA guesthouse - very nice!

Christiane took me to a MASSIVE church on Sunday, shaped like a crown, with several auditoriums and lots of facilities onsite. I went fairly sceptical but came away having enjoyed worship with the body of Christ and a good message from the Bible. It probably helped that the minister was Scottish ;) I think the challenge would be to feel involved as a member of the church family and to be good at welcoming newcomers but they do work hard to make this possible.

Christiane also had her sights set on the Vera Bradley shop in this outlet mall and we enjoyed exploring around. We succeeded in walking in and out of the Lindt chocolate shop to get their free taster without purchasing anything - it was a close call though!

The trip would have been a lot less fun without this lady, who is not also an awesome friend but an amazing navigator too. She'd visited the area once before but managed to get us around in SIM's hire car with a freakily good sense of direction. Here she has found a Chipotle restaurant to introduce me to the flavours of Mexico :)

After a weekend exploring we then had a very fun five days of training at SIM International. We were a multi-cultural group and had such fun learning from one another as well as the very useful materials and case studies.