i adore her

yep, she's a keeper. these are all from thanksgiving break this past week. pretty much joined at the hip the whole time.

i especially like this last one cause chalice looks so young with her shiny eye and big old pink hat that covers all her hair. for the record, the shiny-ness is not from crying..it's neosporin cause she spilled hot cheese on her face the day before i came home. 2nd degree burns! pretty intense..hm? ouchers.

"Thick" burgers are nasty!

this poster was soooo gross!! Why would you ever want to buy that?? Just stick with the 1$ cheeseburger at Mcdonalds...you really can't beat it. :)

lookin for pennies

the pastrana side of the family (my mom's side) always has a a big second thanksgiving after the real thanksgiving. My mom and all her nine sibling's families get together to eat and play games. We play hard. Danny, my cousin, splits all 50 or so of us into four teams. We compete in mind games, riddles, math problems, word problems, relay races, dodgeball, scavenger hunts and egg races. We had a new activity this year: hunting for pennies! It's so funny because we all actually do it and put our heart into it. Cheating abounds. it really cracks me up cause we all really want to win. There were 40 marked pennies in the lawn we were playing in, so between events we all had our eyes glued to the grass. I found ONE! my team found TWO in all. next time, we need to do nickles.

"When you dig another out of their troubles, you find a place to bury your own."

This is a poster I am planning on putting up around my campus when I get back to school after Thanksgiving break. While I was in Africa this past year I had a roommate from Norway, named Signe. She became a dear friend of mine and since I’ve left we’ve continued to stay quite close. Signe had an office job on the ship, like me, but during her evenings and weekends she was hugely involved in an Orphanage about 1 hour away from the ship. She worked on this place for the entire 7 months we were in Liberia. There are 100 kids, many that resulted from the recent 14 years of civil war, that live at Fatima Cottage Orphanage and before they met Signe, they had been sleeping on concrete floors with no blankets. Signe and two other girls raised the money for bunk beds and mattresses. Then they organized a group from the ship to come down one Saturday and paint the orphanage and they provided the children with some food and raised more money to purchase textbooks for school. They fixed their roof so it didn’t leak during rainy season, when they slept. They started a kitchen and had a well put in with drinking water. They’d spend their Saturdays there just playing with the kids, sometimes spending the night and living their lives with them, showing them love and care…something these kids know very little of.

Signe left the ship, a couple months after me, after 10 months of service. Her heart is still with those kids though and she’s determined to get back to them. She wants to finish their kitchen, bring them blankets, and materials to start a garden and teach them the skills of agriculture so they’ll have an on-going food supply. Signe is planning on returning to Liberia in March for a couple weeks to finish these projects and visit her kids but she needs help to get there. She’s been telling their story, in Norway, ever since she got home and now I’m telling you so you can think about contributing to their lives with your money. Sometimes it’s hard to see how our little bit of help can actually make a difference but Mother Teresa said, “We can do no great things, only small things with great love.”

Anything can help. 1$, 10$, 20$.... anything. Please pray for Signe too and these kids. If you’d like to help Signe get back to Liberia you can send your donation to me.

Sienna Howard #557
Covenant College
14049 Scenic Highway
Lookout Mt, GA 30750

I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love. ~Mother Teresa

a couple days before I left Liberia, Signe asked me to come to her orphange to get some pictures of her and the kids...

You can visit www.fatimaorphanage.com to read more details about Fatima Orphange in Monrovia, Liberia. It's a website Signe and a couple other of girls made.

our countdown is over!

and we're home! Just for a couple days but we're soakin' it up. This was the countdown on our bathroom wall, all this week and last, in our dorm. I'd wake up every morning, go to the bathroom and cross off the previous day... It's so good to be home. Like the talking heads say, which Kyrie has turned on everytime she's walked in the dorm for the past week, "Home is where i want to be." Go listen to it. It's called "This must be the place." It's dang fun!

This was on the 12 hour car ride home when we got real hungry... we were trying to bite into this bread that was a little old and we actually managed to get a couple bites out of it.

Papa's Letters.

that's my little brother, Pax, on the stamp!

"There's no such thing in anyone's life as an unimportant day."
(the return address says.)



"Next after theology, I give music the highest place and the greatest honor." -Martin Luther



we each get a 2$ bill in every envelope...EVERY one! I'm known around this place for paying for stuff with 2$ bills. It's sort of funny.

We got this the other day inside an envelope... :)


arn't these amazing!? These are the kinds of envelopes we frequently get from our daddy...we get the coolest mail at this school. I so look forward to 11:30am everyday, to walk to my mailbox and see what new, creative envelope is waiting for me today from my papa. Thank you Papa, for bringing such warmth to your daughter's days.

i forgot that i knew

i remembered hearing it but i totally forgot until i looked at brae's recent flickr photos: tamera is pregnant! and she's the cutest pregant wifey i ever saw. well, no. ashley wingo and her are tied.

look at tamera and her belly more at brae's flickr photos-->

I think we're twins here. :)

this was about a month ago when we took a road trip down to Louisville, KY for a friend of mine's wedding that I roomed with on the Mercyship. She's from Holland but met a guy from KY on the ship and got married!


our good friend, Matt. He took us to Wal-Mart that day - our favorite place!




Kyrie and I traveled an hour a couple weeks ago to go shopping at this place. All baggage goes here that's unclaimed at airports and they sell it to us!! Isn't that crazy?! We bought a ton but it feels a little weird and sad wearing other people's cool clothes that they've lost. Oh well, we're puttin' it to good use for them... :)




so I got two rolls developed by WOLF camera and got them on CD too so I could share them with you. Film makes me so happy, so happy with everyone and makes the world so dang beautiful. I'm never going back to digital! I'm stickin' with film, I am. It's one of the most beautiful things about life...driving down the mountain, with M. Ward in the CD player, on my way to the camera store to pick up my photos to flip through, touch, put in albums and send off to people so they can have a copy too. I love my camera.


posted by Sienna.

pump it up

car maintenance can be so much fun! woo hoo!

this was sunday after church. after we had a very yummy lunch at Mud Pies with Kiko, Vince and two friends of theirs for Kiko's birthday. I'm in love with Mud Pies. I had a grilled veggie sandwich with avacados in it. pure goodness!

out of everything we did that day, pumping gas was probably the least exciting but the only thing we documented. funny how that works. i love it.