In the Swing of Things

Hello!    Here are a few fun pictures from the last week.  Not much to add, but hope everyone is doing well.

Mindi and Matt on a walk

Looking out the South Point of the island

Manta Ray down at the bottom and Matt swimming towards it

Matt did a dive down to a shipwreck in the lagoon and this is a picture from that dive

Here is a picture of an underwater cave that Matt found on a dive and swam through.  The sides were covered in urchins and the surge was pushing up and down through it.  

Back on Kwaj

 We have arrived back on Kwaj and are into the swing of things with school and everything again.  We finally got our voice message changed to quit saying we are off island!  Our bikes are a bit rustier, but everything is as we remembered.  

It was a pretty quick turn around from the time we got off the plane until school started.  We arrived on a Saturday and reported for work on Tuesday.  We were still a bit tired, but every year the jet lag is less.  It also helps that the flight from Hawaii has been pushed back a few hours to sleep in a bit more in Honolulu.  

When we got back to our rooms, the Huwe's had a made a welcome home sign for us, which was very nice.  The football helmet on the left was my favorite part!

Here is a sunset from the 2nd night back, which I always likes to post.  The weather has been so calm that the lagoon and ocean are like glass in the evenings and mornings.  Compared to the wind that exists all spring, this is very nice.  It is especially quiet with no wind, too.

We took a boat out and you can see just how calm it was out there, even a mile off the atoll.  We found ourselves in a pod of about 100 dolphins and they were jumping and flying all around us!  They were just hanging around the boat so we even stopped and jumped into the deep blue and swam with them!  We heard them talking underwater and they were swimming around us, about 50 feet off!  It was one of the coolest things we had seen.  The next several pictures are of the dolphins that we were with!

This picture shows the set up we had to watch the football game when the huskers played.  Fortunately the kick-off was at noon for us, so we didn't have to get up early or anything!  This was a fun set up.

Other news: we have booked our vacation to New Zealand over Christmas break and are very excited for that! 

We welcomed the new pastor and his family to the island this week as well and we are certainly very excited for his ministry and what he will bring!  A lot of prayers went into their arrival and it was great to meet them.

The Youth Fellowship starts up tonight, so keep that in your prayers as we hope to have a great kickoff!

Not much else to say, just teaching and teaching and doing grad work and everything else.  We miss everyone and hope that things are going well!