Took a while to get the pictures in one piece for this one. Traci will be referring to a snow day and the kids building a snowman. Those pictures are now on her website. You can get to them by following these links.

http://www.possumranch.net/ica/snowman.jpg

http://www.possumranch.net/ica/snowman3.jpg

Have a happy holiday.
charley.

Issue #35
October 30, 1999

Dear Friends and Family,
This has been an exciting week especially toward the end of it. I'm going to tell you about those events firsts.

Everyday the "Daily Bulletin" comes out with all of the announcements in it. Each day this week it has some message about the weather. "Have you noticed the weather changing?" "The temperature is dropping." On Thursday afternoon, we had an all school assembly. Mr. Baxter, the director, told everyone that he had heard of strange weather patterns coming this way. Then we watched a video showing snow. He then announced that on Friday we were having a "Snow Day." There was a lot of hollering, and some of the adults were throwing ice from the back. Many of the kids had now clue what a snow day meant. I leaned over to some kids next to me and said, "Do you know what a snow day is?" They looked back and me with confusion on their faces, "No." About that time Mr. Baxter said, "That means tomorrow, there will be no classes." Then the hollering was really loud. We had a snow day because this trimester was so long without a break. The teachers had the day off, and then that night the teachers took the dorms so the dorm parents could have the night off. It was really nice. Some of the little kids and the second grade teacher made a "snow man." I'm going to attempt to send some pictures of it with this, so you can see it. It is amazing what you can do with feed sacks.

The second excitement of the weekend was that the container finally arrived on Friday morning. Some of the men spent Friday morning emptying and sorting. It was kind of a mess. The container had set so long that rats had gotten into some of the stuff, so they had to find the things that were damaged. There was also some stuff missing. Some of my stuff was damaged or missing, but it wasn't too bad. One was kind of funny. I had order Lifesavers for my class. It was the individually wrapped kind that comes in big bags. When I opened up the sealed box that was supposed to have 12 in it, there were only 6. Apparently it had been re-sealed. They also enjoyed a can of Spaghetti-O's and a jar of Salsa. The rats enjoyed some brownie mixes and some macaroni and cheese. I'll just say with the dining hall food order these were some well-fed rats. Overall though the loss and damage were minimal. The business manager is going to work on getting the money back on some of the stuff. The only big item that was for sure missing was a VCR and possibly a printer. All of the stuff the Free Will Baptist sent out of for the dorm and the Abidjan House made it fine. None of the boxes were even opened. All of the school supplies and books made it with no problems, too. It was mostly the food order that received the loss and damage.

Prayer and Praise

Praise God that the container is here. On Tuesday it didn't look like it would be coming at all. We prayed for a miracle. It was released on Wednesday.

Continue to pray for Dan's headaches. He seems to be doing better.

Pray that I will get over this cold I have had for over 2 weeks. I also haven't had much of a voice for 4 days. This makes teaching kind of difficult. This is another reason I was glad we didn't have school Friday.

Thanks for your prayers especially concerning the container. I hope the snowman pictures make it. If you get a chance I would like to hear from some of you sometime.

In Christ,
Traci