Scott and Jenn Miedema and family Leadership Training with Young Life Latin America/Caribbean What we do : The Miedema family lives in Jarabacoa, Dominican Republic. From there Scott serves as the Training Director for Young Life in Latin America and the Caribbean, while Jenn is support staff for the expat missionaries throughout the division. Young Life currently has ministry in 26 countries in the LAC division. In those countries we are working with over 200 national staff, 80 student staff on scholarships with the YL Developing Global Leaders scholarship program and over 1,600 volunteer leaders connected to about 90,000 adolescents. What is Young Life? Young Life aims to be truly incarnational ministry with adolescents. Leaders GO where teenagers are- in their neighborhoods or schools- and build significant friendships with them in order to ‘ earn the right to be heard’ . They share Jesus through actions, relationship, fun, and adventure with the
The first flat tire isn’t a big deal—it’s the second one you need to be worried about. A good friend once told me this Flat tire #2 while we were traveling over some extremely rough roads in Haiti. We only had one flat tire on that trip ( below average actually for those roads ), so no problem. I hadn’t thought about that for a while until traveling in Colombia a couple weeks ago. Our bus there had a flat tire on our way to a leader’s retreat we were holding outside of Bogota. A 2 ½ hour ride turned into 5 hours, but no real trouble, just more time to laugh, hang out at a gas station, play with some stray dogs and sleep on the bus. The second flat tire though (same bus, different tire) happened on our way back to Bogota, it shouldn’t have been too terrible except it was on a curvy mountain road…. with no shoulder.…at night….and the old tire wouldn’t budge….and I had to catch a redeye flight late that night. It’s the second one you need to be worried about. In between
Our camp group in Haiti
A couple weeks ago I went to Haiti to visit our Young Life leaders there and help them run camp. When I was leaving the US every headline was about the stock market crashing, how much net worth had been lost in a day, and an awful lot of doom and gloom about the economy—quite depressing stuff----- and then I entered Haiti, a place that is well beyond what our doom and gloom can even imagine. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, with an unemployment rate of over 40% and over 50% of its population living on less than $1.50 per day (the definition of abject poverty); it’s also still trying to recover from a devastating earthquake, flooding, and a cholera epidemic that hit the country in 2011. As you can imagine, much of life in Haiti is focused on trying to get enough resources to just survive.
Our senior leaders in Haiti-- Noyo, Bouzy and Chedrick
Haiti can be a place that seems really bereft of hope—and yet when I
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