Back to Tas

For a week now I have been in Tasmania - which is not quite as tropical as Rockhampton (there is a hint of sleet here today...) for Fusion's annual International Conference. For the first few days Fusion teams from all over the world presented reports on what they'd been doing in the last year. Inspiring stuff. Then the last half of the week was more about business.
Lot's of intrepid young adults with great stories. At my breakfast table the other day Ashleigh was telling us what it was like to be a young white girl in Trench Town in Jamaica, Kingston's roughest suburb. And then Bec was telling us about being a young white girl based in Beijing. A whole other set of challenges!
There were Ghanaians, Jamaicans, Sri Lankans, Poms, Albanians, Canadians, Germans... all reporting on how this Aussie style of mission was working in their countries. And the work in Australia as well.
During the last intensives, my diploma class got all excited by an idea to set up a global network in the next three years to bring advent pageants to primary school children in every country that Fusion is involved in. We were ambitious and decided that in 8 years time we wanted 75% of the children in all the Fusion countries to have the opportunity to do an advent pageant, and thus learn the Christmas story.
Yep, that's a lot of kids...
It's a daunting project, but the people at this Conference decided to adopt this as the first global project for Fusion International.
Can your local primary school get on board? Let me know, its part of my class's plan to take over the world by 2015. More on this soon...


Oh, and in other news, the family I was living with in Brisbane have bought a unit which they are keen to rent out to Grego and me. It looks really nice, and is only a Kilometre from the office. Really good, and we'll be able to move in in a week or so after we get back to Brissy!

...my hat....

In further news from Queensland, things are happening apace in all departments except the hunt for a permanent place to live. I've been staying these last few weeks with a nice family with interesting children and a nice house that is halfway up a nice, scenic hill. But a nice, cheap flat within walking distance of Woodridge station would be good too.
The weather too is nice, well, except for the record August rainfalls of last week. Very much of it happened for several days, but the water supplies here are still well below where they should be.
This time last week I was at a beach at Bluff Point which is near Yeppoon, which is near Rockhampton, which is on the edge of the tropics. Off the coast, the tourist resort of Great Keppel Island was visible. I was there wearing cardboard armour and having flour fights with a nice bunch of kids as the tide came in. The Daytrips such as this one at Rocky is a chance for kids contacted at schools to have a safe, fun day of adventure and see Christian values role-modelled. The rain that was with us for most of the 650km or so drive up on Friday finally caught up with us as the bus was taking the tired but happy kids home at the end of the day.
This time next Saturday will be the South East Queensland day trip, we are going cable skiing!
About a week after that I'll be back in Tassie, seeing if the southern spring is much different to the one here. As a pointer, the last daytrip in Tassie was a snow trip!