vegas, baby.

well, here we are! it was such a relief to get to vegas after 34 hours of traveling... 2 planes and a bus trip. Of course, on the flights we had our fair share of crying babies and old men snoring!Ted, my leader, begged the team to not sleep during the drive from LA to here so we would be able to sleep that night to begin the fight of our jet lag. Within the first 20 minutes Ted looked back to find all of us asleep! His attempt to wake us all up failed and most only woke for bathroom stops along the way. ...now we are all still fighting jet lag!
saturday we began a full day of work with the YWAM base here in vegas, at their newest location called the Pier. the base here has a heart and vision to reach out to the people in need in vegas, so they recently bought a massive old drug rehabilitaion building located in west las vegas (aka - the ghetto). the building had been vacant for 2 years before they purchased it about 9 months ago, and during the two year vacancy many homeless used the facility as a home : sleeping, eating, and stealing various parts of the building... it's pretty creepy, with all the eerie hallways, a few trap doors and old lockers locked full of stuff belonging to previous patients!

During our days here, we will be working at the pier. Our team began a deep clean yesterday and it should take another 3 or 4 days to finish cleaning and moving everything in. Our evenings will be downtown Vegas doing street evangelism and prayer on "the strip". Please pray for energy and passion for the team! Everyone wants to finish the outreach strong, but the jet lag is kind of hitting us hard right now.

we do have one very serious prayer request about a student. while we were on the island swimming most of the students were fine with the amount of sun we got, but one student (Garrett) got a very bad burn. In fact we took him to the emergency room yesterday because we had never seen anything like it - even the pre-med student on our team said you only see that sort of thing in the medical books! The doctor says he has a 2nd degree burn, an infection in the burn, and sun poisoning. Today we are taking him to a burn clinic to get it taken care of. He is in a lot of pain so we have all been banned from saying "i told you so" anymore...!