Christmas Vacation - The Diary of Two Lost Girls

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!

It's definitely been awhile since I've had time to sit down and write a blog. But here I am on the day after Christmas, mentally reviewing our trip thus far. I guess I should catch you up since the last time I wrote.

So last I left off it was Single Day. If you want to know I had a fantastic Single day. For those of you that don't know, Single Day is a holiday I made up to celebrate the fact that I have officially been single for a year. My fantastic team indulged my whims as I continually danced to the song "Single Ladies" by Beyonce, as well as providing me with cake, and a flower, and earrings. Oh and I stayed up until midnight the night before to toast to Single Day with hot chocolate and KitKat bars. Needless to say it was a great day!

After that the team and I just focused on finishing out the year. We had a great finish, it wasn't as busy as the rest of the year was. We got to do some new things like run a youth group parish mission, which was four nights of evening sessions for a group of teenagers. That was So fun, we really had a good time with those kids. We also got to run another retreat in Limavady, in Derry. It was our first weekend retreat and we had kids aged eight to seventeen! That pretty much closed out our year as far as ministry was concerned.

We topped it all of with the cherry that was december retreat, a mix of Youth2000 and doin' our own NET thing. Youth2000 is another youth retreat organization that focuses on creating a community. NET focuses more on planting seeds. Both very essential to growing a youth catholic community in Ireland. I hope someday that Youth2000 and NET work very closely together. Great things are already happening!!

That brings me to Christmas vacation. Ironically I had four traditional Thanksgiving dinners, and no traditional Christmas.

The Two Lost Girls

Enter Anna Madden. This is beautiful girl that I've gotten to travel around Italy with. As stated in the title, this is the diary of two lost girls. I thought about making it into a miniseries, but that might be a little redundant. Needless to say the Holy Spirit has really been working with us this trip, and we have found absolutely nothing wanting. For the most part. That's not to say we haven't had... shall we say, interesting... experiences. But thats just how it goes. No major crisis' and we always seem to end up with exactly what we need, when we need it.

So, to start at the beginning. Anna and I drove with some of the other NET members at 3:30 in the morning of the 18th to Dublin airport, and caught a plane (that we almost missed!) out to Venice, Italy. First official adventure was reading the departure sign wrong and having to sprint from one end of the airport in Dublin to the other with big packs on so that we could make our flight. But we said a little prayer and got there with about 3 minutes to spare.

Yep... That's me. In Venice.
Dreams are coming true here people! 

We got to Venice, caught a bus out to the island, and water bus (yes they have those they are both bizarre and wonderful, but what else would you expect from a city built on... well, water.) to Campo San Marco. Or something like that. In english its Saint Marks square. Our Hostel/Hotel was about 2 minute walk from there. It was magical. We spent the next two days blissfully lost walking all around the corners of this beautiful Island. We were able to attend Mass in one of the many beautiful Basilica's one night, and got our first experience of Mass in Italian. Being Catholic is awesome. Even though its not your language you can tell by the inflection of the words where you are in the Mass. Truly universal.

The Harpsichord

We had  a great time in Venice. We ate a lot of bread and cheese, that we mostly bought fresh from shops and we had real Italian pizza! the first night we were there, we walked out into our square that our hotel opens up into and there was a free exhibition right next door on Antonio Vivaldi, we got to take cool pictures of his harpsichords and all kinds of cool things like that. But I think the thing we might have enjoyed most was just getting lost. Walking around enjoying the atmosphere, experiencing Italy watching all the people, seeing all the masks and all the new things. It. was. awesome.

This concluded our first 3 blissful days of vacation and being lost. Truly a blessing, and an adventure!!

Well I had better go. Maybe this will turn into a miniseries after all. I hope to recount each city with a little bit of detail. I will try and write on the next couple of cities soon!!

All our love!!
Annie and Anna

What a great winged lion! 

SINGLE DAY!

HAPPY SINGLE DAY!!! 

Glendalough!... and some other things too. :)

Glendalough

There was a hole in the wall :) 

Glendalough (pronounced Glen-da-lock) is the ruins of a monastery founded in medieval times by St. Kevin, it is from about the 6th century and it is still beautiful!  It was one of the most peaceful places I’ve been to. We started on a nature walk and then ended up on the site. It was totally quiet with these really old broken down buildings around. It was extremely beautiful. I was able to take a bunch of pictures of my team here, so enjoy J

Me in front of some of the ruins

Glendalough is near Bray right below Dublin. It’s a really beautiful city, and all the more so because of the people that live there. We lived with an older couple name John and Yvonne, and they had two kids still living with them, Antony and Imelda. This particular couple housed eight of us Netters and then asked another family to take two more down the road. But even so, they fed us every meal that we needed. We had a GREAT time with them, they made sure we got to go to Mass everyday that we stayed with them, and we even got to go to adoration multiple times as well. They were so concerned with our well being, and prayed for us all the time. It was such a blessing to get to stay with them. They truly offered up their home to us and gave us everything they had. One of my other teammates has a picture of all of us with them, and I wish I could post it on here but I don’t have it. But if you remember to, pray for John and Yvonne and family, they truly made us feel at home. 

There was a beautiful grave, a Sacred heart in the middle of a celtic cross

This was the second part of last week.  The first part of this week I moved in with an American family that lived in castleknock (about 15 minutes outside of Dublin). They moved from America about 4 years ago, and this lady (her name was Tracy) can cook! The first night we had spaghetti Bolognese, the second night we had tacos and quesadillas (she was from texas so she understood that Mexican food was like a separate food group for me) and then the third night she made us Chicken Fried steak. OH it was AMAZING. She made us chocolate chip pancakes with Jim bean maple syrup, and they were fantastic. The Lord really blessed me by allowing me to go to her house, she had just come back from America and had brought a whole suitcase of American food with her, and was very willing to share. We had a fantastic time with some real americans. Its was really different not to have to explain things. We even got to have 1/2 a twinky. Mind you, I don't even really like twinkies, but when an american in ireland offers you a twinky, you take it and you love every moment of it. 

Captain Canada (Devan) is on the right, with laura, mike, me, christophe, Gaby, Teallia, and Shelia

We were fortunate enough to get to go iceskating while we were staying in these host homes. We have a guy on our team whose life is Hockey and it was a real joy to see him get out on the ice in one of a VERY few ice skating rinks in ireland. We also had one guy on team who is from Trinidad who has never been iceskating before in his life, but he did pretty good for a first time! Either way, we all had a great time together! 

Gabby and I again, learning to skate backwards

So that about catches us up! I hope you enjoyed the Blog!! Catch y'all next time!! 

PTL! 

Love, 

Annie

"Wow I can't Believe our Whole team fits here!

Dear everyone,

Its blog time again!!

Man! So much to talk about! Okay so, last week was Supervisor visit, and this week we were back on retreat. Its been a crazy week, my Co team leader was out, so it was me and the rest of the time trying to do all the retreats. Everything went fine, but man we really missed him.

I guess I should start from the top. Supervisor visit was so much fun! It was very relaxing for me. I guess something you all should know is that I am one of 2 team leaders for the road team. We make all of the contact with the host homes and with the teachers at the schools, basically any decisions that need to be made about where we are going or what we are doing that is what Christophe and I handle. So when we went on supe visit, he and I were officially off duty. It was so nice just to sit and chill and enjoy the ride and not have to answer any questions.

But as far a Supe visit is concerned its really just a whole bunch of fun. We started off the week with a scavenger hunt which was a ton of fun. It was a photo scavenger hunt with a list of 28 ridiculous things that we had to accomplish and take pictures of. The one that was my favorite was title “wow I can’t believe our whole team fits here!”

…. all I’m going to say is it was a ton of fun. J If you look really closely you can see my head in the bottom front window of the phone booth. Yes, Ireland does still have phone booths. We had another one that was really fun, and it was “have everyone on  team make a funny face” – a small explanation we had a team member that wasn’t feeling well that day, and so we had to do most of the scavenger hunt with out her. (I don’t think we could have fit another person in that phone booth, anyway)  But anyways, we decided to wait to finish that one so that she could be in at least one of the pictures, but when we got to the house she was still asleep!

(picture)

Clearly that was not an obstacle.

The rest of that week was full of meetings and good times spent together. We got to carve pumpkins as a team and good times were had by all J

(picture)

But after the week off we were ready to hit the road again. We had 5 retreats this week. We had 2 all boys 3^rd years, one 5^th & 6^th year girls retreat, and then 2 4^th year (Transition Year) retreats on Thursday and Friday. The school system is very different here. Primary school is until the age of 11 then secondary school starts and is classified by “year”, so it would be “first year” or “5^th year”. 4^th year is also called transition year, and it is optional for all Irish kids. They kids here have to take a Leaving Certification Test in 6^th year (age 18), that if they pass it, it signifies the end of their secondary schooling and then they are free to apply to university. Its pretty different from the states, but once you understand it, everything is grand.

All of the retreats were really good, and very fruitful and spirit filled. It was a real blessing as it always is to get to spend time with the kids.

We have spent the majority of this week with a host family that graciously decided to host 7 out of 9 of us (because Christophe is gone right now). They are a beautiful family, and they treat all of us like we are their own children. It’s really been quite a humbling experience living at the mercy of other people, essentially.

This week during Hood time I had my first experience of Eddie Rockets, which apparently is a big thing in Canada and Ireland, and it might be in the United States, but I haven’t heard of it. Either way, they have delicious milkshakes and really nice chips. J

I have to go for now, but I have cool things to tell you! We visited Glendalough (pronounced Glen-da-lock) but I will have to tell you about it next blog! 

WHAT A CLIFFHANGER!!! 

PTL! :) 

- Annie

We'll call this the catch-up blog :)

Slainte! (Cheers)

Hey welcome to the first official blog of a Jesus hobo in ireland! 

Well let me start off by saying, if you are anywhere but Ireland and reading this, I miss you. Thats not to say I'm not having the time of my life here because I am, but I do miss you all. 

This is the catch up blog so that you guys are kind of up to speed on what I've been up to. This blog will probably be more factual and business-y, but I'm hoping the next blogs are more funny and anecdotal. No promises though :)  I have officially been here in Ireland for 12 weeks or so. We've been on the road for 6 of those weeks. I guess I should start from the beginning. 

I flew out of Dallas on the 11th and arrived in Dublin Airport on the 12th of August. I then took a 3 hour bus ride with 3 other Netters to a town called Derry, in Northern Ireland. When we were being picked up from the bus stop all of us Americans walked around to the wrong side of the car where there is no door, because we were so used to the way things were in America. We could NOT figure out how to get into that van to save our lives. In our defense we did have some serious jet lag and we were all exhausted, but still it was pretty hilarious.

For Training I spent 6 weeks with our Net staff. Shane and Shanelle Bennett from NET Australia were with us for the first 2 weeks, until teams were announced. When teams were announced I was asked to be the Female leader for the Road Team. Training-wise we spent the first week in a very intense retreat setting, we had a great time and grew a lot even in the first week. From that point on we kept moving forward learning different skills and things we would need for our ministry!

Team announcements were a lot of fun! I was put on a team with 10 people, 6 girls and 4 boys. We have 6 from USA, 2 from Canada, 1 from Trinidad and Tobago, and 1 from Ireland. Let me tell you, there is no logical way that this situation should work, but Jesus has really annointed our team and we literally act like brothers and sisters after only 3 months of knowing each other. Each and everyone of my teammates has something really amazing and beautiful about them, and I am so blessed to be with each and everyone of them.

Finally after 6 weeks of craziness and getting to know each other and learning things like how to not embarrass ourselves when speaking to irish kids, (apparently they call pants, trousers, and they call underwear, pants... you can only imagine the slightly awkward situations we have found ourselves)  we were put out onto the road. Literally. We had one retreat about an hour away from our home office in Balleybofey, in a town called Letterkenny, and then we picked up and travelled all the way down to the bottom of ireland to a town called Kenmare, Co. Kerry. It was one of the most beautiful places in Ireland that I have been to so far. The picture below is actually the view from the backyard of the guesthouse we were staying at in Kenmare.

Since then we have been working, doing about 4 or 5 retreats a week, all around Ireland. On average we stay in the same place about 3 days but no longer than a week. I think we have done about 20 or so retreats so far, and let me tell you, God is working in Ireland. These people are HUNGRY for Jesus and are just waiting for someone to tell them about it. I am so so blessed that God chose me to do that!

There is something special about giving total control to God. I would suggest everyone try it. I have never been more materially poor, but I have also never been more spiritually rich than I am right now.

PTL!! (Praise the Lord)