Picture Update

Aggie Basketball

Aggie Basketball Again!

At the YSA New Year's Eve Party

The YSA Group

The School made us dinner one night. This girl told Nick that he is crazy and needs to go to an insane asylum!

The Taco Stand!! I crave those tacos!

The Taco Stand again.

The site for the Tijuana Temple

We worked on this bathroom last May. It turned out really well!

We helped sheetrock this room last May!

Jorge's room. We built that closet last May!

Martin Luther King Day Snow Shoeing

Bryce Jensen what a stud!

Tanner and Amber Jones

Getting my snowball ready to roll down the hill!

Tanner and Amber got stuck after they jumped down the hill.

Still stuck.

Tanner fell face first.

These are all of the pictures that I could get from Joey. I still need to find the pictures from our project in Tijuana this year. Once again I will make you wait for some more pictures. Hopefully they will be posted as quick as these ones were.

Catch Up 2: January

In January after we returned from Tijuana we headed up to Bear Lake to work for the week before school started and also to celebrate Christgiving Thanksmas with Joey's family. We had lots of food, played the XBOX Kinect, played Christmas Style "Minute to Win It", exchanged presents, Grandma's general store, and just lots of fun. Joey was really good at the Minute to Win It challenges while I sat on the sidelines watching feeling kind of sick. (That night a couple of the children and a few of the adults got sick :( No Bueno). Then school started up again for Joey he started out being really busy with some hard classes but then after realizing that one of his classes wasn't needed for his Major and only for a minor that he was tacking on because he had the classes and it was keeping him way too busy and stressed he decided to drop the class and ease his burden. He is now enjoying his classes and learning a lot. Emily has been trying to keep herself busy and trying to find a job. The job hunt isn't going as well as we had hoped but Emily has stayed busy. We are involved with two charity organizations, Charity Anywhere (the organization that we go to Tijuana with) and World Joy Foundation. We learned about the World Joy foundation while we were in Ghana and fell in love with their goal and what they do. When we returned from Ghana we joined the Cache Valley World Joy committee.On February 3rd we held a Dinner/Auction Fundraiser for World Joy. Our goal was to raise $35,000 to build a Medical Clinic in Asunafo a small village just next to Abomosu (where we stayed). It was a lot of work. We had a silent auction, a live auction, raffle, and a big dinner. We spent a lot of time looking for donations, advertising, finding entertainment, and inviting people to come. It ended up being a wonderful night and we made a new friend, Foster. Joey and I were dressed in our Ghanaian outfits and a man walked up to us and started asking if we had been to Ghana. Turns out that he is from Ghana so we refreshed a little bit of our Twi with him and just reminisced about our time their. He had only been in Logan for 2 weeks but he had heard about the fundraiser and had to come. He is a new professor at USU. It was great to talk to him but now we really miss Ghana. The funds raised totaled was over $19,000 we were proud of what we were able to accomplish. If you want to see pictures of the event go to http://lauravanderbeek.blogspot.com/2011/02/world-joy-benefit-dinner-and-auction.html

On Martin Luther King Day we went snow shoeing with our friend Tanner and Amber Jones and Bryce Jensen. It ended up being a great day it was nice and warm but there was still lots of snow. We had competitions rolling snow down the hills and had a great time jumping down the hills. It is fun to have friends around to spend time with.

We have been staying busy going to Aggie Basketball games which are always fun.

(Once again pictures to come once I get my hands on Joey's Laptop)

Playing Catch up: Part 1 December

It has been quite some time since we have updated our blog. I have either felt too busy to do it or that nothing of importance has happened to write about. Emily graduated from Utah State University in December so she is now trying to keep busy and look for a job. Joey is finishing up his last semester of school, he is excited to be done but is learning a lot this semester.

Back to December:
 After finals we headed up to Park City to spend some time at a timeshare that Emily's parents have up there. We were able to relax in the hot tubs, play in the indoor/outdoor pool, watch movies, read, and just lounge around. At this point we had decided that we didn't have the money to go on our yearly trip to Tijuana and since we went twice last year we thought that we should stay in Logan/Bear Lake and earn some money. Well we received a phone call from Gordon Carter (the founder of Charity Anywhere Foundation) and he tells us that he needs us in Tijuana. After discussing it we decided that we had to go. We missed all of our friends, the amazing food, and we love serving the wonderful people in Tijuana. We had about a week to get ready to go, which is the reason I don't like to make plans they change very quickly for us. Every year I am amazed at how different our experience is but still how amazing it is. We worked in an area of Tijuana called La Gloria with Miguel and his family. Miguel's house is built right up next to a wall of dirt (the mountain was cut into for his house to be built). The weather down there has been very wet which has led to a lot of runoff, which has caused the dirt to fall in large clumps and they are afraid that it will fall into their house and ruin it. We attempted to help Miguel build a retaining wall to prevent any damage to his house. This ended up being quite the adventure. We were covered in mud most of the week. We began by digging a trench and bailing out water so that we could begin our footings. It was so wet that this took a lot longer than planned. Then on Wednesday it rained all day so Miguel told us that he did not feel comfortable with us behind his house with the weather and the possibility of falling dirt and rocks. Joey and I headed over to the orphanage and began helping them build a preschool with another group. We were really proud of everyone for toughing out the rain and cold and working almost all day long until Gordon told us that we need to go back to the clinic and get out of the rain. We spent the rest of the week laying the footings. Then Saturday after everyone else left we returned to Miguel's house to find a massive chunk of the wall fallen down onto our re-bar and footings. Luckily the footings were down and dry it made it easier to dig it all out. We really enjoyed this year in Mexico again and we truly are addicted to Charity Anywhere and serving in Tijuana.

(Pictures to come when I get a hold of Joey's laptop or just look on Joey's facebook page).