TheToddz.org

Hello everyone! We have been living in Nicaragua for a little over a year now coordinating kids camps, hosting mission teams and local churches at Campo Alegria. Through this newsletter we want to share with you what God is doing here and how you can be apart of it through prayer or even volunteering!
Click on the link below to view our newsletter online.

http://issuu.com/racheltodd/docs/sept_2008/1?mode=a_p

God Bless,
Rachel, Adam, Ashlyn & Sydnie

Click for More Photos

Hi everybody, sorry we have been so silent here, it has been difficult to contact the outside world. I will post our new mailing address and phone numbers on our Contact Page. Our email will always be the same though so feel free to send us a line anytime. We are moved into a rental house and we have purchased a vehicle that will be used for our family and the camp. Our house is very close to Lake Nicaragua so we enjoy going down to the beach and wading in the water.
It is hot in Nicaragua, Ashlyn got a heat rash when we first arrived and Sawyers tongue has stretched twice as long from always hanging out of his mouth in 90+ degree weather.

We’ve been in Nicaragua for five weeks, but even in that short period of time I can tell you a few things I am already sure about Nicaragua. For one, everything takes about three times if not four times as long to accomplish here than back home. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing, you could be shopping for groceries or discussing something with a local, it’s going to take three times as long - hands down. It all requires patience and flexibility to adjust to a different pace of life, but we are starting to get the hang of it. The biggest thing I’ve learned about Nica is that it’s not what you know in Nicaragua, it’s who you know. This is the case with almost everything. Also you can’t do anything over the phone in Nica you have to do everything in person (also a reason things take so long). As an ExPat friend of mine here would say: “There are no yellow pages in Nicaragua, just people”. Also if someone is going to meet you somewhere at 8:00, they mean 8:15 to 8:30 if your lucky, so you have to add fifteen to twenty minutes on to the time as well. We are learning these lessons one at a time as we try to settle in to our new home.

The Camp has been very busy, we had a church come for a men’s retreat just after we arrived, a team from Virginia came and ran a camp two weeks ago and another team from Tennessee came this week and ran another children’s camp for the children who live in the Managua dump. In a few days another group of children will come from Masaya with a missionary to have a fun retreat and then another church from Rivas will come out again and host a women’s retreat. We have more churches in Nicaragua interested as well, it’s all good news for the camp because right now we are skimming by on finances and the more teams that come, the more we can offer as a camp. Everyone who comes to the camp loves it and always wants to come back. Please keep us in your prayers as well as Campo Alegría.

The Nicaraguan Story

On a trip to Mexico in 1998 the President of Chop Point heard about the devastating situation in Nicaragua and that there were children begging in the streets with little being done to help them. He immediately got on a plane to the Capital of Managua and with no contacts waiting for him; he began looking for opportunities to serve the children of Nicaragua. After meeting a Missionary family in Managua he soon decided to bring a team of students from Chop Point the next year after Hurricane Mitch to paint houses and visit orphanages.
I was one of those students.
I immediately fell in love with the country, and was shocked that people were living in such devastating conditions in a country in Central America. After graduating college, getting married and living in Minnesota for a few years Rachel and I began seeking opportunities to serve overseas long term. At the same time Chop Point had received a few large donations for Nicaragua and had now bought 50 acres of water front property on Lake Nicaragua and had built cabins and a dinning hall in order to run children’s camps, and host mission teams. The Camp, “Campo Alegria”, had grown big and Chop Point was relying on local missionaries to oversee the expenses and expansion. They were now interested in getting someone down in Nicaragua full time.

Before Rachel and I had left for India we had discussed the option of serving with Chop Point at some point, not knowing what our future held. Once we decided to head home from India we gave Chop Point a call and were immediately welcomed into the family, Chop Point gave us free housing and I began working as a bible teacher for the High School as well as studying Spanish daily in preparation for our time in Nicaragua.

Rachel and I had a chance to go to Nicaragua for a couple of weeks in October to check things out, and I just returned from a trip with the school in February where our group ran a children’s camp and completed local service projects.

Rachel and I plan to head down inevitably this coming summer, please keep us in your prayers as we prepare.

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Wow baby! It’s a Baby!

Surprise!

Rachel knew she was pregnant right away, I knew she wasn�t and continued to go along with my denial until the second pregnancy test came back positive and she said �told you so�.

Ultra Sounds have been the highlights of past two months. The first one was not all too impressive, it looked like someone had put a chick pea in Rachel�s stomach; not too exciting. The second ultrasound looked like a bigger chickpea with a heart beat (very interesting). So anyway, �Little Toddster� is almost 15 weeks old now and we went to get it�s third ultrasound done last week - a month can really make a difference. Wow, our chick pea turned into an alien in four weeks, with arms, legs, fingers and all sorts of things including an absolutely massive oversized head to top it all off.

At first when the ultra sound began we could see the baby perfectly, it was facing us directly and wasn�t moving a muscle (in the picture). The doctor said it was probably sleeping, so Rachel decided to poke her tummy and say �Wake Up�. Instantly the baby started swinging its arms and kicking its legs trying to move.
It was very exciting and we got to see it wave at us. So apparently our child is extremely obedient and very social.

So to make a long story short, we will be coming home to Maine this coming July in order to settle down and prepare for the birth in early November. It was a difficult choice to leave India, but we feel it is the right move for us right now and it will give us the opportunity to have our new addition near family and friends. So we will be finishing the school year here at Woodstock and after a short visit from Rachel�s family, we will fly home on June 26 to North Carolina, then on to Georgia, then on to Indiana and finally ending in Maine around mid July.

Your prayers are much needed, we currently do not have a place to live in Maine locked down, nor do we have a job lined up with insurance, etc. So please do keep us in your prayers.

We will be very busy over the next eight weeks so the website is sort of on hold, but feel free to email us anytime if you want to chat.

- Adam, Rachel and Mini Todd.

Click Here for Christmas Vacation Photos

Hey we are back!
Wow, what a vacation we had. Here is a run down of our travels over the past two months:

We left Mussoorie around January 12 and did our first taxi ride since we have been here to Delhi (usually by train). It is sugar cane season and so it was a really smelly ride because the sugar cane factories were all boiling the cane to extract the sugar, we never knew how stinky it was. Our ride was a little over seven hours because it was night time, the fog was thick and we could only see so far ahead of us. This wouldn�t be so bad except most vehicles in India don�t have break lights or are some sort of horse drawn cart. So our Delhi ride was more of a swerving at high speeds for eight hours in the dark.
After arriving alive in Delhi we decided to stay for about four days to enjoy a little bit of civilization and good safe food. After that we headed by train to Goa. Unfortunately we had booked our tickets a little bit too late out of Delhi and we could not get the Second Class A/C tickets that any foreigner in their right mind would get. So instead we were in an open compartment the entire trip being harassed and stared at by locals who either wanted to rob us or laugh at us for two and a half days. Rachel and I kept having to tell ourselves that it could be worse, and that we asked for it when we decided to live in India.
Soon we arrived in Goa and the most relaxing time we have ever had began. Our Hotel was a five minute walk from the beach and costs 95 rupees a night = about $2.00. But we never had to walk because we rented a scooter for about $3.00 a day. This besides a small amount for food was all the expenses we incurred the whole time. It was cheap and it was great. We got to eat lots of food we can�t get in Mussoorie like beef and seafood. The seafood was fresh everyday and the steak was excellent as well. We had to adjust to how smoothly things run in the south. It is very Christian thanks to the Portuguese, and you don�t have to fight your way through traffic and shopping everyday.

The ocean and beaches in Goa were a lot of fun, there were lots of things to do and places to explore. The coastline of Goa is entirely lined with beaches, some populated and some others still left to be explored. See Deserted Beach Photo
We drove all around with our little rented scooter and saw just about everything we could see. Rachel and I both thought we would get bored on the beach for a month and a half, but that never happened.

After Goa we decided to head to Rajasthan (The Pink City) the land of Camels, Tigers and Desert. When you think of India, you most likely think of Rajasthan. We had an awesome time once again; we stayed for about five days in Jaipur the capital and got to see lots of Indian culture that has been preserved by this awesome city. See Photo of Camel in Rajasthan
The entire city has been painted pink, hence �The Pink City�, and it still has a remaining wall around it with entry gates from the old days. Jaipur is famous for cloth and gold, but we didn�t really buy anything we just walked around and looked mostly.
From Jaipur we went back to Delhi for a few days and then back to Mussoorie just in time to arrive for our staff retreat, and then the students came back within a week. Now we are back to work and trying to get back to the rhythm of Woodstock.
My apologies for taking so long to update the blog. When on vacation in India it is difficult to update the webpage because of limited internet access.
That�s about all for now. Our plan is to update our blog more with news and info soon. We thought that since we don�t have much to say personally sometimes than we should juts blog about India in general so our �viewers� could learn more about another culture. So until then �
Click Here for Christmas Vacation Photos

Click Here for Rishakesh / Chandigarh Photos

We have taken two trips over the last month or so.
One was a private motorbike trip with some friends of ours (Dillip and Lindsey) to an ancient city called Rishakesh. It is located on a river that runs into the Ganges and so the area is considered very holy. There are lots of Hindu priests wondering around the river seeking nirvana and selling Hashish (marijuana). The bike trip was about three and a half hours each way, and it was the most fun we have had on our motorbike so far. We drove straight through one of the major protected forests in the area where elephants still wonder out into the streets, we kept our eyes open but never got to see any that day, we plan to go back to this city often and next time we will spend the night, there is so much to see - you just can’t do it in a day.

The second trip we went on was a school sponsored trip to a huge city called Chandigarh, and we were chaperones for the high schoolers. It was a whole day bus ride through some mountains and back into the flats where the temperature rose to the high 80’s (unusual for us since we live at 7000 feet here at Woodstock), and the humidity must of been maxed out. Besides sweating we had fun seeing one of the nicest planned cities in all of India. The British drew out the city plans for Chandigarh when they were still running India and the whole city is divided into perfect blocks, a lot like the US. They even had stop lights and police on the streets, and people actually obeyed the laws of the city. Rachel and I got a chance to eat at some western restaurants for the first time since we left the states. We ate at Subway, McDonalds and Ruby Tuesdays it was really good to have some western food!

I decided just to mix the two trip photos together since there aren’t that many anyway. Each photo should have a description under it explaining which trip the photo was from. I especially recommend the one with Rachel on her first Camel ride, it was really funny to see the camel run at a good sprint and seeing Rachel and her friend giggle and try to control it.

Here are some Photos taken on August 29th.

Click Here for Aug.29 Photos