This Is Me

My name is Amber Wells.  My dad grew up here as a kid, married my mom in the States, had us 4 kids, and brought us all to Papua New Guinea in 2008. I am the first grade teacher for our Christian school on our mission station. This year I have 44 students! My classroom gets a little crazy at times! 

I’m an avid mud lover. We have so many amazing 4WD roads here, I just love traveling on them! I have a Suzuki lj 81 that, with some help, was able to be fixed up. My brothers and I take it out to our bush churches for church meetings and things like that. 

Food is my passion! I love it! I love cooking it! I love eating it! I love looking at it! (Can you see I’m infatuated with it?) Food is important to keeping a family on the field happy. I wish more mothers and daughters realized this. My grandpa (who was a 23 year Missionary in Papua New Guinea) always said it is good to have anchors back to your own culture. My grandma always tried to make meal time special. She would make impossible dishes out in the bush with just bush food. For example, she made pizza for my dad’s 16th birthday (first birthday on the mission field). The only thing that resembled pizza was the crust. She used her imagination and turned bush foods into something special. 

There are so many things that make missionaries homesick. Like food. To combat that my family has always strived to make food special. Over the last ten years, my mom and I have learned together how to make almost anything we want with the strangest and most limited ingredients.  

 Part of my vision is to show others what they can make with what they have. Hopefully it can help some families be more content and less homesick when it comes to food. 

Thai Stir-fry

สวัสดีทุกคนค่ะ  Hello everyone from hot and dry Thailand!  We are in the midst of hot season right now and we are fryin.'  You may not be able to roast to the same degree that we are, but you can have a taste of the Thai hot season from wherever you are.  This is the recipe for ผัดเปรี้ยวหวาน.  In other words, "Pad bpriao waan" or Sweet and Sour Stir-fry.

First, mix all the ingredients for the sauce together in a saucepan and bring to a boil.  Set aside.

Deep-fry the chicken in batches and then keep it hot in the oven.

Pour about a tablespoon of oil on the bottom of a frying pan.  Layer the onion on the bottom of the pan, and then the peppers.  Fry until the onions are almost clear.  Then, stir the vegetables up to let the peppers get just a little bit of heat.  We want them to stay crunchy.

While the onions and peppers are frying, add a little bit of oil to the bottom of a pan and stir fry the pineapple just until the juice starts to run.  We don't want mush - just softened.

As soon as the fruit and veggies are done, layer them on a large serving tray.  Quickly whip out your chicken, and chop it into strips.  Place the chicken on top of the pineapple and pepper mixture.  Then drizzle your sauce over top of the whole mess.  Serve right away while the chicken is still nice and crunchy.

อร่อยจริงๆ Delicious!

Other vegetables can be used in place of the peppers.  Thais like to add cucumbers, small corn cobs, and extra various and sundry hot peppers.

Scripture From Around the World - Israel

Grjónagraut

Snúður and Coffee

When my husband and I moved to Iceland, we were introduced to some new foods.  Most of them are amazing.  If you visit, you must stop at the bakery to buy a snúður (a giant cinnamon roll) or a kleina (a twisted, deep-fried donut). Icelandic pylsur (hot dogs) and skyr (a thick yogurt) have been gaining international attention because they are so good. 

Kleinur

Other foods, though, I find just gross, to tell the truth.  Hákarl (rank, fermented shark) for one, is simply too disgusting for me to swallow.  For a team challenge at summer camp one year, I tried to swallow the same piece three times.  Yes, that was three times. The stubborn thing just wouldn’t go down.  After my third attempt, I got sympathy points for my team.  Thankfully, most foods taste better than smelly shark.

Icelandic Grjónagraut (rice porridge) is a favorite meal at our house and church. This budget-friendly, simple hot cereal is a great warm breakfast on a cold winter´s morning, a hearty after-school snack, or a sweet treat for supper when the coffers are low at the end of the month. It is neither low-fat nor low-carb, yet somehow no one complains when it is served. One of my sons prefers his cold the next day. Morning or evening, cold or hot, I hope your family enjoys this Icelandic dish.

Icelandic Grjónagraut

Rice Porridge

Ingredients:

2 cups water

pinch salt

1 cup dry rice

4 cups milk (Whole milk tastes the best, but any milk will work.)

1 teaspoon vanilla (Optional, but my kids like it better)

Cinnamon-sugar (a simple mix of a little cinnamon and a little more sugar)

Raisins (Stirred in the last few minutes or on the side dry)

Directions:

Place water and a pinch of salt into the pot.

Bring to a boil.

Add dry rice and cover.

Reduce heat to medium or medium-low.

Leave until most of the water is absorbed, about 15 minutes.

Add milk and vanilla.

Stir.

Reduce heat to low.

Cover and let sit about 20 minutes or until milk is heated through.

Serve with cinnamon-sugar and raisins.

Tips:

Use left over rice to make this the next morning. I just put it in a pot, cover it with milk, add a little vanilla, and heat it on medium-low while the kids get dressed.

Step by Step He Leads Me

A song that I learned many years ago goes like this:

Oh God, you are my God

and I will ever praise You.

I will seek you in the morning

and I will learn to walk in your ways, and

'Step by Step You'll Lead Me'

and I will follow You all of my days.

One of my favorite things about life is looking back and seeing how God led me every step of the way, seeing the puzzle He was making while I could only see the pieces at the time.  

Early Steps: My Foundation and Faith

A Christian home and school set the foundation for my faith in my early years.  Watching my parents serve the Lord in their local church body as a young child to seeing my dad follow the call to be a pastor. The local church body was our extended family.  God drew me to Himself at a the young age of 8; however, it wasn't until I was 15 that I truly understood "surrender."  It was at that time that I surrendered my will to His: to do whatever He wanted me to do wherever He wanted me to go.

Later Steps: Ministry and Missions

God then gave me opportunities to serve Him through missions.  At 16, I went to Samara, Russia with SCORE International.  It was my first mission trip, and my eyes were opened to a world way beyond my own.  I can still vividly recall women sitting on the porches of their homes as we brought Bibles to them.  Some of them had never seen a Bible, and I probably lost count of how many I had owned.  After graduating high school, I traveled on a ministry team around the United States and went with them on a mission trip to Portugal.  It was during this time of ministry that I met my husband and felt the leading of the Lord to return home and become a teacher.

Everyday Steps: Life Goes On...

I returned home to South Carolina, went to Winthrop University, and became a high school Family and Consumer Sciences teacher.  My husband and I were married during this time and continued to serve in our local church.  God had blessed us with two children, Ethan Jeremiah and Emily Jane.  I was living the American dream: now teaching at the university, being a wife and mom to my family, and ministering with my husband in the youth and music ministries at our church.

Even though I knew we were where God wanted us at that time in our lives, I really struggled with "wanting to do more."  I wanted to be in "full-time ministry" and had not understood why God, in all of these years, had not allowed us to serve Him in this capacity--be careful what you ask for!  God used the book Radical by David Platt to show me that my "full-time ministry" was in the place God put me, wherever that may be and whatever it may look like.  God showed me that my "secular job" and the neighborhood where I lived was my full-time ministry and mission field.  He began to open doors to share His love with the children in our neighborhood and with my students at the university.  I had become content with what God had for our family.  I believe He waited to give my husband and I that next big step until I realized those everyday steps of obedience and faithfulness was the thing that mattered the most.

Giant Steps: The Call to Missions

Remember earlier when I said "be careful what you ask for"? Well, God dropped a bombshell: He had laid on my husband's heart to visit a missionary in Mexico that we had known and our church had supported for many years.  In June 2014, we took a family mission trip to spend a week with Thomas and Linda Beard, missionaries to Montemorelos, Mexico for over 40 years now.  In April 2015, God confirmed this was not just a mission trip, but a call to missions for our family.  We began searching how to navigate this new journey.  God led us to ABWE, the Association of Baptist for World Evangelism, and put us on the fast track to the field.  In August 2017, we arrived in Costa Rica to attend the Spanish-Language Institute for the year and hope to arrive in Mexico in October of this year to begin ministering with the Beards.

New Steps:  New Territory

Homeschool.  Language school.  Missions.  Big City Life (San Jose, CR is LOUD).  So much new territory through which God has allowed us to walk.  And, now blogging.  I am looking forward to this new territory for me and sharing what God lays on my heart.  In April and May, I hope to share more of my personal testimony of God's faithfulness: how He fit those pieces of that puzzle together and how He gives a song in the night.

Scripture From Around the World - Singapore

The Weimer Family in Iceland

We arrived in Iceland in September 1999 right before the Y2K scare.  I was a new mom. Clayton was two, and William was eight months. Since we had been married only three years, we were really still green at this marriage thing. That is how we started. Newlyweds, new parents, in a new land with a new language wondering if the end of the modern age was soon to happen.

Fast forward almost 20 years. Clayton and William are adults now. Rosa, who was born later here in Iceland, is soon to graduate high school.  Patrick and I are "that old married couple" now. At least that´s what the teens and young adults tell us.  We know Icelandic now, thankfully, and love living as a family here.  

Patrick and I met at Trinity Baptist College in Jacksonville, FL.  We dated for all of three weeks before we knew we wanted to get married.  This picture of us is from this past summer. We were standing on a dormant volcano.  It was windy.  It is always windy here. 

Clayton was a toddler when we got to Iceland.  He has been a part of our ministry from the very beginning.  He is a mailman here saving money to pay for college Stateside in the fall and spring semesters.  This is a picture of him while helping his dad build something or other in the church building recently.  Construction is a constant for us. 

William was just a babe when we came.  He was our little Christmas miracle baby.  I contracted bacterial spinal meningitis while I was 8 months pregnant with him, but the Lord let us both live.  He, too, works as a mailman to pay for college which he is taking via on-line courses for now. He is double majoring in math education and missions.  

Rosa was born here.  Horses have always been her passion.  Icelandic horses are unique.   To buy her horse Brynjar and keep 

him fed, she works at a restaurant. When she is not learning, serving at the church, working, or caring for her horse, she is teaching children to ride horses. Rosa plans to study some form of equine therapy when she finishes high school.

Why did I mention my kids?  This is a team effort. Our ministry would look a lot different if not for them. I shared some non-ministry things that they do, but they are very involved in our church. Whether your life runs like a well-oiled machine, or your days tend to go sideways (like mine did today), please let me challenge you.  Make the time to invest in your children.  Pray for them every single day.  You won´t regret that.