Wow. This week (actually, a little more than a week) was so amazing. But before I get to talking about YWAM, I'm gonna talk about getting there.
The Journey
I left from Dulles last Friday, on a flight with Scandanavian Airlines to Copenhagen (in Denmark, the little thingy right above Germany on a map). Me and my mom left the house at about 2:30pm to go to the airport. We met up with my dad, and had a late lunch at a pub-thing at the terminal. I got on the plane in time, at ~5 for takeoff.
The flight was a long 7 hours. I watched Ocean's 13 (great movie), Spiderman 3 (my friends were right. it was emo), and most of Freedom Writers (profound), and read a little in one of the books I brought, a collection of short stories by Philip K. Dick (he wrote the stories to Paycheck, Minority Report, Total Recall, and Blade Runner. all great films). But the cool thing was, that one of the channels on the tv screen on the seat was the in-flight camera, where I could look in front of or under the plane, which meant that I could still see outside, even though I had a seat in the middle, nowhere near a window.
I got to the Copenhagen terminal easily, and after a quick security check and about 45min of layover, I got to another plane to Zurich (in Switzerland). That is a really big airport. I walked for, like, 15 minutes just to get to the train terminal. There, I met Jenny Skölind, from Finland, one of the students at the DTS, and we took the train to go to Biel, where we were picked up by Micha, one of the leaders. We drove to Wiler, which is a very small town fairly close to Bern, the capital of Switzerland. By then it was saturday, at about 1pm. We had a snack (just some bread), then I crashed from about 2pm until 10 the next morning. it felt great, and because of it, I was spared the worst of the jet lag.
The Base 
After breakfast on Sunday, there were a few more kids who I met, and some who arrived. Jessica Williams was the other American at the DTS. She's from Minnesota, and doesn't speak a word of German (she knows 4-5 words now), so the language barrier was more of a problem for her than it was for me. Fortunately, though, every time the leaders spoke to us together, they used both English and High German (not Swiss German, because even though half of the students were Swiss, it's really really hard to understand). Jenny also doesn't speak much German. Just Swedish, a little Finnish, but pretty good English. When we had the whole group assembled, there were, among the 14 students, 4 guys and 10 girls. Seven of us were from Switzerland, Two from the US, two from Germany, one from Luxemburg, one from Holland, and one from Finland. A fairly varied group. We had a short introduction, then we left to go on our Mule trek.
The Trek
The first thing we did as a group was going on a Mule Trek in the Jura Mountains, the mountain range inbetween Switzerland and France. We drove to the lodge we were staying at (about 30-45min from the base), had dinner there, and crashed. The next day, we started the hiking. We had 5 mules, and we switched between riding the mules, leading the mules, and hiking alongside them. We hiked up around the mountains for about 3 hours, stopped for lunch, then trekked 3 hours back. The second day, we hiked up to this high-ropes course called Forest Jump (like Fun Forest in Stuttgart, but a lot smaller), and I did all of the courses in less than 3 hours (there was a bike-line, a 160m zipline, and a Tarzan-style rope swing). The third day, we took another hike up to the owner of the mules' house, which took 2-3 hours. We were all really tired by the end of the three days, but the views and landscapes we saw through the whole trip were amazingly beautiful. We really got to see God's creation at it's best.
There are a bunch of pictures of the trek here. I'm not sure which ones to post here, so I gave you the whole album. if you have a Facebook, message me, friend me, or comment on the pictures.
In the nights, we were learning about how to hear God's voice. And, when we got back to the base, there was some more of that. We learned (kind of) how to do intercessory prayer (essentially, where you ask God who to pray for, and pray for them, freeing yourself from your ideas and emotions during the prayer, just letting God show his heart to you). I'm not quite at the point where I can simply ask God to speak to me, and I can understand what he's saying, but I'm farther along that path than I've ever been.
This weekend, on Saturday, me and a bunch of other students went to Lyss, another town about 10min away by car, and walked around for a bit. There was actually a MacDonald's there. But, seriously, you need to see this one:
and, the whole view:
So, yeah. This whole week has been great learning about God, my classmates, and Switzerland, in that order. I hope all your lives are good right now, and I'll be praying for you.
God Bless,
Frederick Beuttler
macrovore@gmail.com
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