Another Beautiful Day in Quebec

I heard a little knock on my door this afternoon - the Wegner Family invited me to come out for a skate. Now here at Parole de Vie that really doesn't just mean that you throw on your skates and hit the rink. It means you shovel the snow off to the side first and then you can go skating! So after clearing a bit of ice we threw on the skates and skated a bit...then the Litsey Family and Emily Schellhase arrived which means 9 more people to have fun with. The entire ice rink actually got cleared and a little game of tag ensued which I somehow managed to avoid being a part of. Five of us were skating while everyone else was tubing. After taking off my skates, I got talked into being a part of a group of tubes going down the hill. The grouping was unsuccessful as half of the group ended up going over the bank into the run next to us. So that led to the highly successful idea of a line. The hill was a killer to climb. I got a huge stitch in my side on my second climb up so I decided two runs was good enough for me and I went and got my camera to take some pictures of the fun. This is what the fun looked like!

The Hike

The Descent

And the Killer Climb Again

And me at the end of a day of fun in the snow with friends.

Carnaval de Quebec

I've heard so much about Carnaval in Quebec City...I thought it would be pretty fun to go and so I jumped at the chance when the Litseys invited me to go along. When we first started driving the roads weren't very good but it really turned out to be an awesome day...a little bit warmer, although very windy. We got to see some amazing ice sculptures. This one had great detail and I loved the little bear playing around in front. This guy was my second favorite...can't resist a polar bear and he was resting on the world.

What could be cuter? My number one favorite was this one...you could see incredible detail which is hard to see in this picture. I thought the movement in it was amazing.This little lumber jack act was definitely entertaining. This was a big castle made out of ice....once inside you could definitely feel the temperature drop!Here I am in front of the Ice Castle with Fatu Litsey.

We ended the day with dinner at La Roy Jucep in Drummondville. They are the inventors of Poutine, a Quebecois specialty. Fries and squeeky cheese covered in gravy. Here in Quebec Poutine is kind of like pizza - you can get a variety of different toppings under that gravy. Poutine tastes much better than it looks...however, I wasn't a big fan of the "original" poutine. The gravy tasted a little bit like ketchup!

Amuse-toi au Québec!

Right around 11 AM this morning, I saw a neighbor going by heading down the hill and it clicked that it was time for the polar bear swim. For the last three weeks there have been weekend camps here at Parole de Vie and each Saturday there's a polar bear swim. Since I had forgotten the last two weeks I decided to pull on my boots and go check out the fun. So here are some pics of the campers and the Bible School students participating in the Polar Bear Swim. Just so you know, in order to make the cold not as jarring, the swimmers spend some time running around in a wood heated shed prior to making the jump.

Martin pumped the crowd up for the red team and then did some fancy diving.

Some jumped with great style

and verve

others were scared to death

or needed rubber duckies

a scrubbie

an innertube or two, plus five girls

to have a whole lot of underwater fun!

So there you have it...one way to have fun in the middle of winter!

Could you live on that?

I'm in the middle of putting together a presentation about Niger and my ministry there in French. I'll be presenting it this Wednesday morning (feel free to pray hard). :)

It is commonly known that Niger is one of the poorest countries in the world but I thought I would just check out who else was on the list and where exactly Niger ranked. I found this article based on the CIA World Factbook 2008.

One quick fact that blew me away was that 63% of the total poplulation of Niger live on less than $1 a day.

The bottom line...

I just have no clue what it's like to live like that.