Namaste! नमस्ते

(Hindi Greeting)

Next Saturday is the big day.  We fly out of London Heathrow to Patna, India and travel from there to a small village to the site where we will be designing an outreach center.  Our team is made up of five professionals and three interns from the US and the UK.

Bihar (in red), where our site is located, is the district of India, sort of like a US state, that is one of the poorest areas of india.  It is located in the Northeast of India, not far from Bangladesh and Nepal. The Ganges River runs through it and life revolves around the rainy flood season and the dry season. With 5 percent of India's total land area, it contains 10 percent of the total population. Only about one-eighth of Bihar's population lives in urban areas, making the state one of the least urbanized in India. Most of the population is engaged in agriculture.   Bihar has one of the lowest literacy rates among Indian states (below 40 percent).  The native language to 4/5 of the people is Hindi. The predominant religion is Hinduism, accounting for 83 percent of the popluation, while Islam accounts for about 17 percent.  Bihar also claims the birthplace of Buddhism and is an important site for the religion of Jainism.  Less than 1 percent of Bihar's population is Christian.

The ministry we are designing this outreach center for has the vision of bringing a church plant to each village in the Bihar district! Which is quite an undertaking knowing that most the population is rural.  However, they are having great success and are now in need of a big space in which to hold training for their leaders and a small bible school and short term housing for missionaries.  That is where eMi comes in! We are going to design an outreach center for them that will give them a home base for the amazing work they are doing throughout all of Bihar.  Our hope is that we can do most of the conceptual design work in the two weeks that we are there in India with the ministry at hand.  Then when we come back to the UK it will be hammering out details and construction drawings.

Bihar has traditionally been known as the graveyard of missions since the arrival of the first Baptist missionaries in 1792. Despite over 200 years of missionary endeavors, Bihar's 90 million people are living in over 40,000 villages without a church. The most recent movement of God through BORN (Bihar Out Reach Network) which is a network of mission agencies and churches to penetrate Bihar with the gospel and to plant churches is slowly turning the graveyard into a vineyard. But much remains to be done.

 http://www.bornbihar.net/

So off I go. 

I am super excited to be designing rather just messing with CAD drawings! also excited for Chai! and to experience a Diwali celebration (the festival of lights and the triumph of good over evil)!

Alvida!   अलविदा।

If you could please pray for health and safety of our project team as well as for the completion of a functional and affordable design for the BORN Ministry while we are away that would be most appreciated! 

Prayer Requests

• For spiritual growth during my time in London
• For safety for the six of us during our project trip to Patna, Bihar, India
• That the projects that I am helping design and produce with eMi would impact the people we are designing the projects for in a positive way for God's Kingdom
• For continued faith that God is preparing something for my life after this term with eMi, even though I don't know what it is yet!
• For the continued growth of the eMi UK office, which just started up this past summer and which doesn't have a permanent office space yet

Thanks for all of your prayers everyone!

Know Thyself

So eMi orientation was largely focused on learning more about yourself, your tendencies, your learned cultural norms and how they differ from other cultures, and how to best work and interact with other people with different personalities and strengths than you.  Thus, I learned that this is me in a nut shell:

For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God prepared in advance for us to do.  -Ephesians 2:10


Personality

according to the DISC Profile: SCi/CSi
S: Stable, Steady
C: Compliant, Correct
i: Influencing, Inspiring

according to the Myers-Briggs: INFP
NF: Idealist
I: Introvert
N: Intuitive
F: Feeling
P: Perceiving


Spiritual Gifts

1 Missionary - Faith
2 Giving
3 Service - Helps
4 Mercy - Hospitality - Administration
5 Voluntary Poverty


Strengths 

1 Achiever
2 Ideation
3 Empathy
4 Input
5 Learner


Mission Statement during my time with eMi

To praise and glorify God through loving and serving the physically and spiritually poor within my sphere of influence by creating healthy, sustainable, and inspiring built spaces.

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explainations

DISC Profile
  I was way up on the scale with both C and S which tied and then I had a tiny bit of I in me with absolutely no D (dominant, driver)
I and S are People oriented while C and D are Task oriented
C and S are passive styles while D and I are active styles

the CS is a Precisionist and the SC is a Peacemaker

I is identified with an Otter: they are people persons. enthusiastic and motivational, talkative, impulsive, emotional, sociable, and value acceptance and fear rejection

C is identified with a Beaver: they are analytical, accurate, conscientious and even tempered, thorough, precise, stable, low-keyed, systematic, logical, values standards of high quality and fear criticism

S is identified with a Retriever: they are reliable, steady, understanding, patient, good listener, passive, reflective, values recognition for loyalty and dependability and fear loss of security

D is identified with a Lion: they are direct, decisive, determined, driving, strong-willed, values power and authority to take risks and make decisions and fears being taken advantage of


Myers-Briggs

I vs E
I was 9 of 10 on the Introverted side rather than Extroverted for those of you who swear i am not an introvert :P I have just adapted really well to a mostly extroverted world around me!

  I: reflective, reserved, being alone is energizing, prefer to know a few people really well
  E: outgoing, people-person, being with people is energizing, have wide range of friends and know lots of people

N vs S
I was largely N (Intuition) over S (Sensing)

 N: remember events by reading "between the lines," solve problems by leaping between different ideas and possibilities, interested in doing things new and different, like to see big picture then find out facts, trust impressions, symbols, and metaphors more than actual experience, sometimes think so much about new possibilities that never look at how to make them a reality
 S: remember events as snapshots of what happened, solve problems by working through facts until understand the problem, pragmatic and look to the "bottom line," start with facts and form the big picture, trust experience first and words and symbols less, sometime pay attention so much to facts that miss new possibilities

T vs F
I was just slightly F(Feeling) over T(Thinking)

 F: concerned with harmony and nervous when it is missing, look for what is important to others and express concern for others, make decisions with heart and compassion, being tactful is more important than telling the "cold" truth, i miss seeing or communicating the "hard truth" or situations, sometimes experienced by others to be too idealistic, mushy or indirect
 T: enjoy technical and scientific fields and logic, notice inconsistencies, look for logical explanations or solutions to everything, make decisions with head and want to be fair, believe telling the truth is more important than being tactful, sometimes dont value the "people" part of a situation, can be seen as too task-oriented, uncaring or indifferent

J vs P
I was slightly P(Perceiving) over J(Judging)

 J: like to have things decided, appear to be task-oriented, like to make lists of things to do, like to get my work done before playing, plan work to avoid rushing just before the deadline
 P: like to stay open to whatever happens, appear to be loose and casual, like to keep plans at a minimum, like to approach work as play or mix work and play, work in bursts of energy, stimulated by an approaching deadline


Spiritual gifts

Faith: the special ability God gives certain members of the Body of Christ to discern with extaordinary confidence the will and purposes of God for His work; a practical gift
Missionary: the special ability God gives certain members of the Body of Christ to minister whatever other spiritual gifts that they have in a culture other than their own; a leadership gift
Giving: the special ability God gives certain members of the Body of Christ to contribute their material resources to the work of the Lord with liberality and cheerfulness; a practical gift
Service: the special ability God gives certain members of the Body of Christ to identify the unmet needs involved in a task related to God's work and to make use of available resources to meet those needs and help accomplish the desired results; a practical gift
Helps: the special ability God gives certain members of the Body of Christ to invest the talents they have in the life and ministry of other members of the body, thus enabling those others to increase the effectiveness of their own spiritual gifts; a practical gifts


Strengths

 Achiever:  have a great deal of stamina and work hard. take great satisfaction from being busy and productive
 Ideation: fascinated by ideas. are able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena
 Empathy: can sense the feelings of others by imagining yourself in others' lives or others' situations
 Input: have a craving to know more. may very well like to collect and archive all kinds of information
 Learner: have a great desire to learn, and want to continuously want to improve. in particular, the process of learning, rather than the outcome, excites you

24-7 hour prayer room!

Look Look! a working 24-7 prayer room at HTB! and Pete Grieg is the prayer coordinator for the church!?! How crazy awesome!

For those of you who are confused at this point- I helped try to get one of these going on our Illinois Institute of Technology campus in Chicago last year. They are rooms dedicated to prayer and dedicated to have someone praying in them at every moment of every day- 24hours, 7 days a week! We ran into a bunch of of problems finding a space we could use for prayer and for all hours but my hope is that others still on campus are working closer to achieving this goal! Pete Grieg was the founder of this movement which started in the UK and has traveled to the US with the name Campus America.   http://campusamerica.org/sections/1-home/entries/62-24-7-prayer

a day in the life

My week starts off on Monday morning at Vestry Mews, Camberwell, waking at 7:00am (!?! still not used to early mornings yet), getting ready, making lunch, and stepping out the door at 8:00am.

There's a five minute walk to a church down the street where I meet Michele. We exchange sleepy nods and then walk another five minutes to the bus stop.

We wait there for the #35 bus and after beeping in, always trek to the top deck for the 45min ride to Shoreditch, on the north side of the city. I currently bury my nose in "Wives and Daughters" by Elizabeth Gaskell

(thanks Liz!) for the duration of the bus ride while also eating my morning pastry, with a brief intermission while we go over London Bridge with a great view of the river and Tower Bridge just outside the window.

We get off the bus and walk another 10mins to the architecture office with a huge freaking door that's unusually hard to open.

The first thing after setting down our bags by our computers is of course to put the hot water on for a cup of black tea with milk and depending on my mood, sugar. Work work till hungry. Take lunch outside to a little church yard around the block. Sit on a bench or in the grass and partake of my sandwich. Back to work work in the tiny corner we call the office. There are four people in the firm but they are all awesome and I don't mind being in a cozy space with them until 6pm.

This is the daily routine from Monday to Thursday. After work on Monday we do some site seeing. Tuesday we go to Holy Trinity Brompton Church (HTB) for the student pastorate: small groups, food, and worship! Wednesday is Alpha Training at HTB for two weeks and then Michele and I are helping lead an Alpha Course at St. George's Church- a church plant of HTB(where consequently Lare and John also go to. Lare(pronounced Laura is Mike and Marietta's daughter)! Thursday probably more sight-seeing.

Fridays: As a part of the eMi internship, you have a weekly mentor session as well as get involved with a weekly community service. So on Fridays we get up at 6-freakin-am and travel an hour to the london Liverpool Street Station and another hour on the train out to Mike and Marietta's place out in the country-side, close to Colchester. Mike is the eMi UK director and Marietta is his lovely wife as well as my mentor.

The office is currently a room in their house but will hopefully be moving soon to a bigger room in a church in Colchester. This is why Michele and I are working in London and not at the "office" in Colchester- it wouldn't hold all of us. So we are working in London in Martin's architecture office- Martin is an architect associated with eMi but who also has his own firm. Anyway- I digress.

We get to Colchester and volunteer at an Open Door facility that serves tea, coffee, and biscuits (cookies) and provides a warm place to chill for homeless people. After 2pm we then meet up with our mentors for an hour or so and lunch. Then we hang out with Mike and Marietta and Sophia (Michele's mentor) for the rest of the day before heading back to London. I look forward all week to sitting with a cup of tea in their brilliant conservatory (sun room) out in their garden!

Sunday we go to church.




welcome to a day in my life as an eMi intern in the UK

Pictures are up!

http://picasaweb.google.com/carissa.emi

Go check out my pics!