# The Weekend Update
### Saturday, July 1
Today started off with us being able to sleep in until breakfast at 8am. Mark, being the coffee addict, went running towards the dining hall right on time for breakfast. When Cheyanne and Harpreet arrived around 8:10, the rest of the team was still in their beds. One of the summer interns ordered Cheyanne to bring the rest of the team to breakfast as they needed us to eat something because of how long our day was going to be; however, they had limited food that our team could eat. Mark, being the college professor, said “college students don’t eat breakfast for 4 years.”
After breakfast, we loaded into a couple open-top buses to go river rafting. Upon reaching the river rafting place, we put on life jackets and helmets and made our way down towards the river. The team had to split up into two groups: Harpreet, Spencer, Alyssa, and Jordynn were on one raft, while Mark, Cheyanne, Sofiya, and another high school student were on another. Before being launched into the water, we had practice on paddling forwards and backwards, leaning in, and getting in. After practicing a few times, we were launched into the water. As we made our way through the “tutorial” part of the river and to the waiting area in the water, we will now give you an acronym form Mark’s encounter on the river:
M- My river guide didn’t give me guidelines
A- Active tourism comes with it’s cost regardless of waivers
R- Rock. As in half way through rafting my head completely rammed into a rock
K- Knowing I might have a mild to moderate concussion, I continued rafting for the next hour and a half
Shortly after Mark hit his head on a rock, Cheyanne (who was in the same raft) was flung out into the river when another raft collided with theirs. Thankfully, Mark and the raft guide quickly reached out and were able to pull her back into the raft before the next set of rapids. Sofiya had a hard time with these crazy events happening on her raft, but was able to make it through the river having fun. Meanwhile, Harpreet, Spencer, Alyssa, and Jordynn were breezing through the river while having a great time enjoying nature and brainstorming annual reunion travel plans.
Everyone made it to the end of the river rafting (relatively) safely and we headed back on the buses to the SI base for lunch and some downtime.
Later that afternoon, our team was broken up into smaller groups to go on a shopping expedition in town. We took the buses into town and spent several hours visiting several gift shops, a supermarket, coffee and smoothie shops. Towards the end of the day, we all regrouped at a churro and ice cream plaza.
After returning to the base, we had dinner and headed up to the base’s outlook point to enjoy the view and chat.
To end the evening, we played a game called “couch”, which is just like musical chairs, except you replace the chairs with a couch and the music with a memory game.
After the game, we headed to bed after a long, exhausting day.
# Sunday July 2
On Sunday we were up and ready for breakfast at 8am, as we were scheduled to leave for church shortly after. However, as is a slight theme with our trip, due to some issues SI delayed our departure for church for an hour and we ended up going to a different one than planned.
Despite this, our church visit was quite nice. The sermon was completely in Spanish and they didn’t have a translator that week, but Alyssa stepped up and was able to fill the role and translate the sermon to English for us and another group visiting from the US.
After church, we returned to the base for lunch and some downtime before heading to the Jarabacoa Country Club (which was about 15 minutes away from the base camp) around 2 pm. Upon arriving to the country club, Mark, Harpreet, Alyssa, Spencer, and Jordynn headed to the bar to get (virgin) piña coladas and food, meanwhile Cheyanne and Sofiya headed into the pool. After ordering food, Harpreet went on an adventure in the woods to check out the river, while the rest of the team ate fries and pizza and enjoyed their drinks.
After a while, Mark headed into the pool, while Alyssa, Sofiya, and Harpreet went and played in the river. After coming back, the team played UNO and Monopoly until around 5 pm, when Spencer, Mark, and Harpreet headed to the pool table to play pool. At 5:30 pm, dinner was served. For dinner, we had rice, chicken, potato salad, and bread with coke and grape soda. We had various conversations while eating, but a couple highlights were titanic sinking and possibly getting Mark to shave his head and beard for $50,000 to fundraise for future trips.
After dinner, we headed back to the base, where we had about 4 hours before lights out at 10 pm. We practiced for worship as we are leading worship tomorrow (Monday) morning. After worship practice, we headed to the porch to do team face masks (this is a Mark Moore team leader tradition). After face masks, we hung out and then headed to bed.
Prayers:
1. Team bonding
2. Leaning into the Lord and hearing from Him during this trip
