Trip to the Waterfall

On Sunday after church, we did some journaling and played with the children for awhile. Then around 2:30, Jack, Sonia, and I headed down to the secondary school. Jack had arranged the day before for some of the boys to take us to a waterfall outside of the village that Sonia and Amy had been to two years ago on their first Global Volunteers trip to Pommern.

When we got to the secondary school, however, it was a ghost town. No one was to be found. We checked several buildings, including the boys' dorm, but to no avail. We decided to check the grounds next (the soccer fields, netball courts, and volleyball courts), but they too were deserted. We finally decided to walk back to check the school one more time and actually found someone outside. He was having a hard time understanding our English, but then Beti (one of the boys we knew) came out of the dorm, and we talked to him. We're pretty sure they were trying to hide from us, but – ha! – we outsmarted them by doubling back! And they thought they were being so sneaky....

Anyway, Beti went to go wake up his dormmates, telling them they had to get up because the trip had been arranged ahead of time. So Beti, three of his friends, and the boy we'd first found when we returned to the school took the three of us along a bunch of cowpaths and then a gravel trail leading up to the waterfall area. It was a really nice day, and we spent the next hour or so exploring – jumping rocks, climbing everywhere we could, and wading in the water.

The boys took good care of us, knew what was safe to do and what wasn't, told us that the humongous spiders we encountered weren't harmful, and so on. We may or may not have had our shoes off most of the time and may or may not have had to leave our bags up on a rock out of sight part of the time we were exploring. But we won't tell Edward – or my mom – if we did any of those things! It was a really peaceful and fun day and I hope to go again this time around.

Heading to the waterfall, crossing over a log bridge

Massive spiders in their web – we had to walk right under these creepy arachnids. Yuck!!!

Jack and two of our guides; part of the waterfall behind them. The stick in the hand of the boy on the right was used to test the water depth as we were wading.

Sonia, Jack, me, and Beti on some of the rocks we climbed down and back up

Our wonderful tour guides!

When we were done playing, we came back to the village a different way than we went, all along main paths and ended up re-entering the town up by the market area instead of down by the school. I'm not sure exactly how that all worked... Anyway, upon our return to the village we bought mandazi for ourselves and for our gracious tour guides, and we very much appreciated their time. It was a great conclusion to our Sunday in Pommern!