Hey this is Kyler, I’m from Houston Texas, I’m 17 years old and this is my first mission trip out of the country. Today was our first day out and we played two games. It was so different but so similar playing these Dominican kids. They were playing 110% the entire day and while playing some strange things happened. For example in the middle of the game a gang of cows just came onto the field and just stayed there for awhile. I caught most of both games and it was a lot of fun trying to talk to the kids who couldn’t speak any english. But baseball in itself is a language, we knew exactly what everyone meant without even having to say a word. I knew when the kids were talking trash and I know after I got hit by pitch in the arm that the kid was saying sorry, even though I can’t speak any spanish. Today was a success and through the help of translators I made a few new Dominican kids. 

Kyler

Hola this is Joseph from Dallas Texas, and I am 16 years old. This is the first mission trip that I have been on out of the country. Today we went to play a double header at Estadio Alfanzo Soriano. Right when we arrived everyone could tell that the Dominicans could throw super fast. It was cool to intermingle with the players and realize how blessed we are with all the stuff we have. I got to get into one of the dugout and talk to the little kids with the Spanish I know. Today was the first time i played baseball with cows roaming around on the field. Even though we  speak different languages, we can all understand each other because we all talk baseball. 

Joseph

Hey this is Ryan Kirk and I’m from Charlotte, NC and I just turned 19. Me, Caleb, Noah, and Judy pretty much covered the east coast in one day starting at 4 am thursday morning when I had to wake up to go to the airport. We were supposed to fly from Charlotte to Atlanta, and from Atlanta to the Dominican, but that didn't happen because of the bad weather in Atlanta. So due to that, our flight had to stop in Huntsville, Alabama for about an hour, which caused us to miss our flight to the DR. So we ended up getting rerouted to Philadelphia, then New York, and then finally the DR. We ended up encountering a couple delays here and there in between Philadelphia and New York so we had to spend the night in a hotel in Queens and caught the the 8:30 flight friday morning to the DR. We ended up spending about 17 hours either in the airport or in the plane that day so that was fun. However, I thought we all made the most of it by just laughing about how crazy the situation was and just messing around with each other. I also met some new friends in Caleb and Noah and we automatically seemed to be pretty comfortable with each other as soon as we met so that was good to have some people to hang out with through that terrible experience. And thank God that we had Mrs. Judy there to tell us what to do and figure out what we should do. Otherwise, we would probably still be in the airport. So we ended up arriving to the Emmanuel House around 3 o'clock and was shown around and saw all the kids in their classrooms. Then we went back to the hotel and walked to the beach and ended up walking through a pretty poor looking part of the town. It’s amazing how blessed we are and how different life is here than in the US. It’s like a totally different world. I’m really looking forward to playing against the dominicans tomorrow and I think God is definitely going to work in all of our lives in some way this week.

Ryan Kirk