by Erika

If you remember from one of my earlier installments, right before we started our first year of homeschooling, I had spent the summer in Uganda on a missions trip with Teen Missions International. It was an amazing summer and everything had seemed normal in my family before I left. I was promised that things wouldn’t change much even though we’d be homeschooling. Of course, reading back through my story, you know that things DID change. I enjoyed that summer away so much. I had amazing experiences and the travel bug had officially hit. More than the travel bug, though, I enjoyed the satisfaction of helping others and telling people about my relationship with God. Hearing the stories of missionaries that went through the churches of my childhood came alive when I was finally able to have stories of my own to tell from the mission field. As soon as I got home from that trip with TMI, I was ready to sign up for another one. I truly had the heart of missions within me. I was excited to go to another country and help more people the next summer.

When the summer trip catalog arrived in the mail, I poured over it and marked off the different teams that I was interested in until I narrowed it down to the one I really wanted to go on. Nicaragua. It was a new team for TMI. They had never been there with a team before and one of the girls that was on the Uganda team with me was planning to go there. We got along really well while on our trip together and I thought it would be fun that we could be on the same team.