Well Christmas is almost here and we are getting ready to go home but first I need to tell you what we did this month.We decorated our house and Christmas tree the beginning of the month and it was really fun. On the 15th we had our Christmas party which we named "Your Favorite or Ugly Christmas sweater party." We played games, ate awesome food, and played a movie for the children. Many people came from church. We also did some baking and did took some of our cookies to the neighbors. Well we hope all of you that read this have a Merry Christmas and an awesome New Year.

Susan is here!!!

We were all pretty exited to have Susan - the service adventure director - for a few days in our house!
(For people who don't know her: she is really a lot of fun!)
After kidnapping Hallie for a recruiting trip to Virginia she cleared her debt with candy. bagels, pie, donuts...
(see, she is really a lot of fun...^^)
We celebrated her birthday (which may embarrassed her a little bit but that's how we show our love for each other...)

However, we took her to Black Water Falls and to the Purple Fiddle.
She took us for lunch to the Hellbender (I know that sounds like a word you shouldn't use especially when you are around kids but to spill the beans the hellbander is a native north american giant salamander that lives around here... not that I ever met one...)
where we had some really good Burritos.

We played 5 Crowns and had a lot opportunities to fill our  "favorite quotes and meomories"-board...
 And Susan visited us at our work placements!

 

At Black Water Falls

Burrotos at the "Hellbender"

pretty close deer-encounter...

 

Hurricane Sandy Power Outage Fun! Written By Hallie

     Well last time we started the blog with "winter is knocking on our door"...Well not only did it knock but  it blew the door off the hinges!
About a couple of weeks ago if you turned on your television all you would have heard is prepare for hurricane Sandy!! Now being Kansans we understand when you tell us a tornado is coming we feel we have it covered but hurricane was a new one for us! In the beggining we were told to prepare for anywhere from 2-5 FEET OF SNOW and long power outages!

 So being the "mom" of the houshold I felt it was my duty to begin the process of preparing for the "Storm of the Century" as it was being called. Generally, my constant list of demands to fill water pitchers, go to the store for supplies, find the flashlights and telling everyone to take a shower was mostly laughed at by my husband! lol  The night before the big hit it had been pouring rain all day so in my wisdom I decided it best to drive Ines & Josiah to Clarksburg for supplies and last minute items..You know since I have all this wisdom it would go better with me there! (Pick up on the sarcasm) SO in all my wisdom we went to ALDI's for food and after a good hour as we went to load the van I realized with ALL my wisdom I had locked the keys in the van!!! Therfore, Amos had to drag the girls out into the rain to come all the way to Clarksburg with keys, Therfore..we walked to walmart in the terrential down pour to finish our  shopping. In hindsight maybe Mrs. Wisdom should just stay home and let the very self-sufficent young ones handle the shopping...ANYWHO!

The power outages did come the next day with lots & lots of snow but we were prepared!

sleding in 17 inches of snow!!!!

view from the farm...

Happy Halloween!!!

crafts

results of crafts

Day 1 was great fun with sledding & snow fights up at the "Shepards Field Farm", crafts & coloring with the kids in the evening and game time at night!
Day 2 without power we managed to hear the roads were clear so we took the whole family to the Clarksburg mall to a childrens Halloween Party and the guys walked around (you know because they love the mall so much) and of course more games that evening!
Day 3 Starting to get a little tired of no power and Ines begins to coin the phrase "If I don't get out of this house I might eat someone" ..Dont worry she never really did =)
Day 4 We were blessed to recieve a generator so we could save some of our freezer food & later that night we got power back!

Being without power reminds us of the many, many, (did I mention many) blessings that we have here in America.  After spending a week in Haiti two years ago its hard to imagine that people live so differently yet not so far away from eachother.  I am so very thankful for my service adventure family & the quality time we were given during our power outage! Please continue to pray for people on the East coast and think about what you can do to help!

Blessings, Hallie
 

Hi it"s us again!
We are all still doing well and having great weather. The signs of  fall remind us that the year is coming

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

enjoying the last sunrays and dreaming away at the farm...

 to a close and that winter is knocking at our door.  Last weekend Hallie's dad came and we had a great time with him. I (Josiah) had a great time listening to her dad playing the banjo and fiddle. It was great. We had a bonfire up at the farm (the farm is a place where some of our church members live and they share the land and live in a intentional community) on Thursday with very yummy food made by Ines and other church members!!!!

Mr. Music-Genius

bonfire!!!

Hallie & Ines in front of the purple fiddle

 On Sunday, we gave the church service and after church Ines and Hallie went with her dad to the Purple Fiddle which is located in Thomas, WV. There we had some great sandwiches and live music. So if you ever come to West Virginia the purple fiddle is a hometown attraction...

getting started

 A new year of service adventure started!!!
Here comes a quick introduction:
Our unitleaders Amos and Hallie Cable with Bryleigh and Keilah from Kansas.
Nathan Peterson from Iowa is working at Heart and Hand and Kid Reach.
Josiah Dahl from Ohio is working at World Vision
and myself, Ines Binfet from Germany, is working at Feed my sheep christian school and Kid Reach.

(If you find any spellig mistales please keep it to yourself ;) and just enjoy!)

First of all we had a pretty busy orientation week with hiking at Audra State Park, getting to know the people at church (and eating a lot mexican food everywhere we went...) and to get us all out of our comfortzone Hallie made us all do wii dance (and I think everyone enjoyed it! More or less...)
And we started to get to know each other a bit better and we begin to see everyone's "chocolate and non-chocolate-side"...




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To catch you up on the past month we have been canoeing and swimming, visiting the Black Water Falls (I think we were tired of acting like "normal people" and climbed on these rocks testing how far we can go until falling off teh cliff...maybe we just wanted to be a bit more adventureous...)

At worship everyone shared their testimonies and it helped us getting to know each other in a more deeper way.
Every week Nathan, Josiah and me are going to the campus worship of the college nearby and are trying to make some friends outside our unit.

Now we try to find our way into normal everyday life including grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning and of course fun stuff at the weekend like a checking out the resell stores in Elkins and having a huge meal at the coolest restaurant ever!



We will try to blog once a week and hope we will really do it ;) Be patient with us...

A final goodbye

For our final blog post of the year, Renee agreed to share some thoughts since leaving Philippi a week ago. She's been staying at Allison's house and returned home to Florida today.

"We finally finished the 'adventure', and it is strange to not wake up at 7:30 a.m., to get to work by 8:30 and see the wonderful, at times silly, families that I helped at the Heart and Hand Thrift Store. So far my mornings have consisted of sleeping, my afternoons spent reading, and my evening out on the town with Allison's friends and finally staying up past midnight! Yet this vacation feeling will end and in a week or so it'll be back to reality. I miss being needed at work. I miss waking up and sitting quietly at my spot on the living room couch listening to our house (the only time it's silent). I miss getting attacked with hugs and kisses from Ian and Ella--who will NEVER understand how much they've impacted our whole lives. Being in Philippi was definitely an adventure, we got to experience, EXPERience, EXPERIENCE, and enjoy God and friends for an entire ten months. No homework, no bills (a budget, but no personal bills--just taking turns paying house utility bills), and no parents... who could ask for anything better? There have been busy days, hard days at work, grumpy nights with dirty dishes, and a whole lot of time to stare at each other. But, I hope I can speak for everyone when I say, we wouldn't replace this past year for another. We are so blessed to have had this experience. We have learned, grown, and matured just the right amount. And I pray God continues to challenge us to utilize and take everything we've learned back to our homes and MAKE A DIFFERENCE. We didn't come to Philippi to coast... God meant to change our lives so we must not forget and trust Him to work through us even in Kansas, Ohio, Oregon, Germany and Florida."

And I'll add Indiana to that list because our family will be transiting back to Goshen, Indiana two weeks from today. We also pray that we will continue to trust God as we begin our next adventure.

Going, going, gone.

(Scroll all the way to the bottom of this post for a couple videos).

The weekend after we returned from Raleigh started our closure week. Everyone had their last week of work and then we began our closing activities. It was also the Blue and Gray Reunion in Philppi, where they celebrate the first land battle of the Civil War reenactment. To read more about what that whole celebration is about you can read about it here. Highlights of the weekend that we attended included the parade, ball, reenactment, and an amputation reenactment. Several of us in the house also ran a 5K--a first for both Heidi and Mike.

Renee at the ball

Gray shooting at the reenactment

Jim explaining the history

Jim Skidmore did a learning component that week in Civil War era muzzle loaders and we all got a chance to shoot one at targets. We all eventually hit the targets. Micah nailed the Pepsi bottle, Renee hit the center target, and Ben used his TP eye patch to help aim :) We had some cleanup to do at the Skidmore's after our shooting lesson though, because some people in the group had never been TPing before and thought it was time to experience that! (NOTE: this was a late-night prank not endorsed by unit leaders :) as we learned about it the next day)

Ben and his eyepatch

Micah's great shot

Allison's turn

Strawberry pie!

Other closing activities, besides some sessions on transitioning home, and major house cleanup, included a canopy tour with zip lines, revisiting Otter Creek, and messy games! We celebrated Ben's 21st birthday too. All in all it was a great way to end our time together. We hope everyone's experience in Philippi was memorable and rewarding. We'll miss everyone but know the relationships made this year will last a lifetime.

Looks like the shaving cream cans exploded!

Chocolate and oil dancing

Let's go to the beach

A tradition of the East coast Service Adventure units is the annual Memorial Day weekend trip to Raleigh, NC. The highlight of this trip is going to the beach on Saturday. The warm weather has usually arrived and everyone is excited to unwind, relax, swim, play games, and get sun-burned. Yeah, the other tradition is "sunburn Sunday" at Raleigh Mennonite Church. This year there was plenty of sun, but the burns weren't as bad as the parking. You would think this tradition would have a manual on how to find good parking over the first biggest travel weekend of the summer?!? Todd says he'll have a plan next year so we don't have to drop people off and shuttle drivers two miles away. Typically the units are winding down to their last week or so before closure week so it's a nice time to share stories from the year and relax before parting ways. We also celebrated Ian's sixth birthday when we arrived Friday.

Before we made it to Raleigh though, we planned on driving about half the seven hour trip and camp for the night. (See last year's post for our previous Raleigh camping experience). The weather forecast was not looking in our favor, so we decided at the last minute to sleep in our dry beds and leave at 7AM instead. We had reservations at an exhibition coal mine that we still wanted to make Friday morning. The Beckley Exhibition coal mine was a real mine but has been inactive since 1912. Before our tour started we had time to walk around the museum and other "coal town" buildings, including a pretty cool kids museum. It was fantasy storybook themed so you could dress up and sit in Cinderella's carriage, climb Rapinzel's tower and sit at a cobbler's bench from, well I don't know what story that was from. The coal mine tour was interesting. We rode into the underground mine in small coal cars and were led by a retired miner. He stopped us at several spots and demonstrated the evolution of mining technologies throughout the years. For example, he showed us a wooden cage that miners used to carry Canaries in to know if the gases in the mine were too high to sustain life. Nowadays they carry a small electronic meter. He also demonstrated how different lamps worked.

In Cinderella's carriage

Our guide

In the coal car

Happy-ness

Last weekend, Renee led us on a scavenger hunt in and around our house. Every clue had an action, all relating to happiness. In two teams, we yelled all at once what made us happy, taught Ben "if you're happy and you know it," and wrote down our favorite parts of this year, among other things.

It all culminated with us all finding Renee at the nearby park with a picnic lunch ready, and "dessert" suckers with the crazy mouths! It was a fun and creative way to get us thinking! Thanks Nay!

Team 1

Team 2

That night we really wanted to have a fire and smores. So we made a fire pit out back. We should have done this earlier! With the end so near, we seem to be going with a let's just do it mentality!

Allison and her milk jug fire trick

Going back a day to Friday, we were happy to have Ranita from last years' group and her sister Rachel join us for supper and bowling. The bowling alley was supposed to be doing cosmic bowling with black lights and fun music. However, the only other people there didn't want the music on and they arrived first, so we couldn't convince anyone to turn off the lights and turn on the music. So we made our own fun by doing action poses after strikes (if we could get strikes). Allison took home top score (but Mike's two game average was higher!) and a couple of us even won a free game or candy bar.

Allison celebrates Tebow-style

Yay Ranita!

Ben's happy

Abby's happy?

Another strike for Mike! (I really didn't intend on making a rhyme!)

Allison and Abby try a different way to bowl.

Washington D.C.

Last Friday after work we headed up to Washington D.C. for a weekend trip. We actually stayed in Hyattsville, MD at Hyattsville Mennonite Church (really it's their "church house" offices) about 30 minutes outside of D.C. But this gave us the opportunity to meet and make connections with the church, as well as to ride the train into the city!

It was Cinco de Mayo!

They were really excited about these ducks

Saturday morning we walked to the monuments together after waiting for tickets for the Holocaust Museum, had lunch, then split up for the afternoon to see the various museums.

At Ella's favorite - the Air and Space Museum

Saturday night we joined the church for their game night, and then Sunday morning we attended their service before heading home that afternoon.

Outside the Hyattsville Mennonite Church house