Soooo, there I was wondering what everyone was up to. Then I thought, hey I'll check the blog to read everyone's updates. But I couldn't find them. Anyway, here are a couple of questions to get you started.

Al & Brenda: When are you guys heading out on the mission trip? Brenda, how are your holidays going? Al, have you sold your car yet?

Markus & Teresa: Are you guys on holidays now, too? What are your plans? How did school end?

Scott & Patsy: How was your time with your friends from B.C.? Scott how is work going? How are the kids liking being at grandma & Grandpa's?

Mom & Dad: Actually dad gave me a pretty good rundown of what your up to last week. Mom how did your weddings go? How was Sunday with everyone over? By the way we got our licenses today in the mail, thanks.

So, yeah, I look forward to hearing from you all, soon.

By the way, I have my flight booked for August 20 to go back to Canada to raise support and money for Quest. Carol's is booked as well. Mine is already paid for but Carol's is sitting on our credit card. Any donations??

We look forward to sharing with friends and stranger alike about Quest and what God is doing here. And of course spending some time with family, too.

So here are some recent pics of us.

We got a soccer ball for the girls to play with. It is really soft and gets alot of use by everyone in the house. Jasper is actually pretty good with her feet.

She also likes to just hang out in her own little world many times. She is very creative and uses her imagination a lot. Jessi and her are really starting to play together and get introuble together. An example is, today they covered themselves is oil in their room.

These next few picture were taken at the beach. The fire dept. had their stuff set up so the girls had a few pics taken. This is just one.

They had a play ground there that the girls loved.

Jaden and Shannon were enjoying a moment the other day after he got his hair cut.

Here Jaden is doing his impression of Mr. Bean in his new movie, "Bean goes to Hollywood". "I'm sure they would have told us if he was a serial killer or something."

Have a great day, miss you all!

We are back online!!!
Yup, we now have internet once again. We are sooo behind in many of our communications, but Shannon updated our Blog today and will again in a few days.
So this is just to let you all know we can be connected with again.
Our phone number again is (47)3374-5076.
We look forward to hearing from all of you more.

Hey family,

We're in Indianopolis tonight and we're on our way to Manitoba. Scott's grad on Wednesday was wonderful and it already feels like it was a lifetime away!

Our visit with the Watkins was great...we all had a refreshing time. Now we're on our next leg. Thought I'd let you know where we're at.

See you soon...

Patsy

Hey everyone!!

No we don't have internet yet, but I'm over at the lan house with our computer today 'cause I needed to send some information to Patsy. So anyway, we have a phone now, after only 3 weeks instead of the 4 in Gramado. (Things are picking up) Our number is (47)3374-5076.

We are all settleing in quite well. Jaden has started school and Shannon has started getting more of schedule becasue of that. The girls are playing together more, which is great. They can play outside if someone is watch them. Jasper plays out side by herself sometimes, too. I have started working on Quest stuff again after 3 weeks of being away from the computer and internet. I have joined the evagelical pastors of Jaragua at their monthly meetings (1st Friday every month). This has really helped is kicking off some important relationships for Quest. I will be speaking at one church this Sunday (7:30 pm) about Quest. I will use a power point I made up from translated information Carol did for us. This will help alot because the people can read the information while I speak a little.

Our neighbor, Alzira, has been making a lot of contacts for us since we shared the grander scope of the vision for Quest. She said she didn't realize how big this all really was and got on the blower. I am to have a meeting with the mayor of Schroeder some time soon and we went with a real estate agent to look at a property yesturday. It won't work for us, but he seemed to be a realy good guy and showed us around Schroeder a bit.

Alzira, her son Kleiton, possible Pastor Daniel and us will be going to see another property Sunday. This one sounds pretty good, but we'll see. Many of the ones we've looked at sounded good (that's why we went to see them), but turned out not so great. Keiton found this one for us.

Peter R and Paul L ( from JT Swiss) will be coming to our place next Thurdsy. We will finally get to meet and share God's vision for Quest (Christian camping in Brazil) with them. It will only be a one day meeting so it isn't going to be too long of a visit.

We look forward to hearing from you all. Teresa, I'm glad you can get on now. Thanks for the call last night dad. We really missed being able to communitcate and especially talk for 3 weeks.

This was the veiw out our back window the other night. The front is basically the same. It's hard, you must understand, but we live through it.

Have a great day and get in touch with us.

Love and miss you all,

Dwayne

Hi Family,

Speedos, eh? Where do they come UP with these rules? :)

Well, today we hit 30 degrees! The flowers are starting to bloom and it sure feels like summer. I survived another round of report card writing - let's see now, that's 11 years of it! Yehah! Al is off golfing right now, with Todd, a friend from church. This past weekend we went to Niverville for the Fair. We met dad and Marianne and then headed out for supper together "on the street." Mom joined us after serving cheesecake at the Heritage vendor. I saw high school friends - Laura, Sheila, and Bonnie! It was nice talking to them! Laura was nervous because it was her first time letting her 11 year old go off on his own.

On Saturday we celebrated Al's 44th birthday! Markus, you realize you HAVE lost your "oldest in the family" status. We had Al's family over for a BBQ - Mom Wiebe, Tante Teen, Tante Sus, Tante Annie, and Rob and Brad and the nieces Brittany and Alyssa. It was a great spitziering evening. Alyssa has caused a lot of grief lately, drug use, assaulting a cop, getting a criminal record for that, being "locked up" for that for a few days, and believe it or not, that seems to have helped. She told me she really wants to get out of her bad friends now, because she sees the road they're going down - destruction of their lives. So, I was thrilled to hear that. She really wants to move back to Winkler, so this is being negotiated. It has been hard for Mom W. and Brad. We went to Brittany's dance recital Sunday night at the Concert Hall. She does hip hop. She's really grown into a young lady! We are always praying she makes it alright, in spite of her messed up mom and all she sees there. Right now, Pam is dating a man that is married.

Yesterday we had a bake sale at church to raise money for our Uganda mission trip. There are ten of us going. Later we had a planning meeting the third of about 10. We practiced three skits that we will do this summer. I think we have a nice team of people. We're just beginning to know each other. Because we only have three men going, the nature of the trip is changing from being only construction, to being one week construction and one week children's ministry with orphans. We will get to go the Bethany children's village which is the orphange that Al's "car" money is going to, and any other money raised through our letter.

Marriage ministry class is over now. We hope we made a difference in these 4 couples lives. The one couple was especially close to getting divorced and we may have helped salvage that marriage. Pray for this one couple. I also have one more week of the Daniel - Beth Moore study that mom has also been a part of. It has been incredibly challenging mentally! But it has been great. I hope to have my small group over for a potluck this summer one day.

Graduation is on June 28 at LCS. This is my first batch of kids graduating at Linden so Al and I will attend. It is a milestone for me as a teacher. Kind of sentimental I must say!

We are getting a dog! A "Comfort Retriever." It's a cross between a golden retriever and a cocker spaniel. Looks like a golden retriever, just smaller. He's not born yet, but we will get him in August after we get back from Uganda. He'll be about 8-10 weeks old. We found this dog on the internet, from South Dakota.

Yeah, so those are some of the events happening around here. We are looking forward to going fishing July 13-16 with Al's brother Rob,...who used to be a fishing guide. I'm looking forward to just being out in nature.

Hey Niklaas! My class has been making movies about extreme weather. I thought of you because I know you would like this. I have a suggestion...why don't you film your summer holidays and send us a movie of it? Interview Emily and Matthew and you mom and dad...just a thought. :)

Love you all!

Brenda
Hope you are all well.

Hi all, we'll see if this works. Brenda thanks for getting this username and password to me.

We are all doing fine. It's the end of the school year so you can imagine things are pretty BUSY around here.

Niklaas is losing another four key kids from his class so he's pretty sad about this.

Emily loses one, and I'm not sure about Matthew - I know atleast one.

Jaden our kids know how you must be feeling saying goodbye to friends. It's not easy! We are praying that you will find new friends. Be wise in your choice of friends - dont rush into things. One thing we notice is it's best to sit back and observe for a while first, then start making friends.

I'm glad all you stuff is there - now's the fun part of putting the house together again.

We are changing our house around too. We put the diningroom table into the livingroom, we are moving our bedroom up to the diningroom, and we'll make our bedroom into a guest room. I wish we had thought of this before last summer. We figure if mom and dada want to come for a while they have a place to stay.

Don't worry we understand that they are more needed in Brazil once the camp gets going and we bless them for that.

I brought my special Tim Hortons coffee to work today because we are celebrating Herr Fields birthday and he's my Australian coffee buddy at work.

Our boys are both loving tennis.

Niklaas is thriving in his writers club and it's becoming a social outlet for him as well. He gotr the English and Choir awards for grade 8. They have a closing time planned for tonight with supper and a movie together after writers club is over.

The rest of us are off to a toga party - the high school spring party is up in the vineyards of Tannenkirch.

Saturday Niklaas' class is having a cookout near Frieberg from 2 - 8.

Sunday is the middle school/high school spring concert.

The pool is open with the new rule of speedos only for guys. Matthew has braved it and feels fine, Niklaas refuses at this point. Markus bought himslef a pair but I'm sure they will not get used very often.

I know this is long, but I haven't written for so long.

Mom, Emily loved talking with you the other day - thanks for taking time for that.

Love you all,
Teresa

Dear Al and Brenda,

You are definitely in our prayers. That does sound like quite the roller coaster week. I can imagine your emotions have been varied to say the least. Keep us posted. We love you tonnes.

Patsy