You asked for it so here it is...Shawns blog post. I speak of myself in third person only here because it just FEELS RIGHT!

So all I really did this week was play games and drive. That could really be the end of my post but it is not because then I'd be selling the whole thing short. Playing games is sort of self explanitory, but what isnt is watching these kids try their darndest to understand what youre telling them. Most of the games we know go by different names here, and the games that have the same names have different rules. Being told how to play a game by a 4 year old is a seriously humbling experience, especially when hes missing most of his teeth and mumbles into my bad ear. By the way, he's also carrying on three or four conversations at the same time with three or four other 4 year olds. What a gas! Speaking of gas, lets now touch on the subject of driving. Driving in Alaska has been more like cross country travel than a vacation. Nothing is close, and what is close is so darned expensive that it makes you want to drive a hundred miles for a cheaper price...which we almost did. But it was more like 50 miles. And sight seeing from a drivers perspective is nothing short of...road. And we surely werent running short on road here. Big roads, small roads, short roads, long roads, high roads, low roads, dirt roads, paved roads, we've seen them all and I have driven all of them. Now I'm not complaining; I love driving. By the end of today I think we will have covered almost 2000 miles. Thats not too bad considering almost half of that was with either a full load of screaming kids (I like to consider this part it Combat Driving), or hauling butt on my way  to pick up a load of screaming kids, thus willingly engaging myself in the act of combat driving. The driving part tho is what really opened my eyes to exactly WHY we do this. Im not picking most of these kids up from great homes, or really exciting video games, or a nice air conditioned house to bring them to some kind of torture( whomever decided to put the words VACATION and SCHOOL in the same sentence should be fired), but to a place where, just for a while, people truly care enough about them to teach them a whole manner of things from the Word of God to how to behave properly in an over crowded room. And you know why they actually learn anything here? It's because they can actually see that people care about them and want them to be greater than they are. This is why I drove all that way and played all those games. Not just for the heck of it, but for the monkeys!