Back in Idaho

As you can see, I am finally posting on this blog about 5 months later. . . . sorry! But we are officially moved back to Idaho : ) We are excited to be close to family and can't wait for the new adventure of a baby. We found out we are having a BOY! We are excited and I know I will learn lots, as only having girls in the family. My older sister Katie is pregnant also and is due 5 weeks before me. So as of today she has 1 week left!!! Crazy! We are so excited to see baby Assmus and that also means that we aren't far off.

I am working on the baby room, trucking along with school and clinical this semester and trying to get settled. Here is a picture of Katie and I that we took this weekend. I am 33 weeks. I will post pictures up of the baby room when it is done and of course pictures of our little guy when he makes his entrance!!!

Hello Again!!! It's been forever : )

Hey all!! We have been crazy busy. In the last 6 months we have had lots of changes. We officially decided to move to Idaho. We moved out of our condo and rented it. We are living at Blake's parents house and will move to Idaho in August. Other great news is that we are expecting our first baby : ) We are due 11/11/11. As you can tell in the photo we are a little excited : ) Right now I am 17 weeks pregnant and this photo was a few weeks ago.If you look hard you can see my tummy. We were trying to decide if we wanted to find out the sex and think

that we will. Our ultrasound is scheduled for June 20th. We can't wait!!!

During the last week or two of July we are excited to head to Kansas to visit our close friends in Med school and then off to Lake Okoboji in Iowa with Blake's family. We will stay at the Lake house for about 10 days and then drive to Idaho the first week of August. We will stop in Pocatello for my sister's graduation from PA school at ISU and then hopefully head to IF to see some family and friends!!! We can't wait.

Sorry it has been so long since I updated. This last school semester was really busy and being in my first trimester I was just pooped working full time, moving and doing school.

Christmas 2010 was a busy and great season

!! We stayed in Colorado for Christmas and both Blake and I worked around the holiday. My family (Dani's) was in France visiting Katie's sister in-law and we were wishing we could go!!!

One great thing we did find out was that my health so far is good and my GI doctor doesn't think that I need to start any meds at this time. I had a colonoscopy on the 10th of December and she was very surprised at how well everything looked. Blake and I were both so relieved. So we will continue what we are doing and pray that it stays that way for a long while!

During the break we went ice skating with our friends Candace & Noah. They are such a blast and we enjoyed meeting their family while they were visiting. This January we have a trip planned to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico with Candace & Noah and we can't wait!!!

One of our favorite gifts this year were snowshoes!! We love to go snowshoeing and now will just have to wait till we can get out into the Colorado mountains.

As many of you know, Zoey is our dog. She will be one year in February. In this picture she is wearing her Christmas sweater that Jonny, my brother-in-law got for her. She did so well at posing for this picture!!

The Brunk's own a condo in Keystone, CO and we were really excited to finally have a few days off to go up and ski. It was a really cold day but we had fun!!

So much to be Thankful for!!!

This Thanksgiving we were able to go to Seattle, WA with my family. Katie is currently doing a rotation for her P.A. program at Harbor View Hospital E.R. in Seattle. So we thought, why not head to Seattle and spend time with my Aunt Linda, Uncle Gary, Cousins Karina and Brian and Jon Marc. We were so excited and had a lot of fun. Karina and Jon Mark have a beautiful house in West Seattle. They had room for all of us to stay there, so we invaded their home : ) and

cooked lots!

I absolutely love my family and we had such an amazing time being together. I know I am extremely blessed to have the family I do and that we get along so well. We hung out at home most days and played games, watched football and ate a lot of food! We did spend one day in downtown Seattle and went out for Sushi! Yum!!

We are now back at home and will be in CO

for Christmas with Blake's family. We are

excited for that and look forward to lots of

friends coming home too!!

This fall has been busy. We had a fun weekend at Crooked Creek for Young Life Camp. We took about 35 kids in all and had a blast. This was my first Young Life Camp and I can admit that I am hooked. The girls were amazing and were so welcoming to me : )

Blake also went on his first hunting trip. He went with his good friend Noah. Noah and Candace are a couple that we have gotten really close. They are great friends!! They didn't come back with anything, but they had lots of fun.

We are back!!!

So it has been over a year 1/2 since I have updated this blog : ( I apologize. I wonder if anyone still looks at it : ) Well alot has happened since our last blog. We still live in Colorado Springs, Co at our condo. We got a dog, Zoey, who is amazing. She is a little ball of joy! I am nursing at Evans Army Community Hospital, Fort Carson, Colorado at the Mother Baby Unit. Blake is still with Dutch Brothers Coffee but moving toward another job very soon!

My health this last 6 months has been up and down. I had a bowel resection and was in the hospital twice. I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease and am having to change my eating habits and such a lot. Blake and I have enjoyed eating healthier and love to cook. We are finding fun and new recipes all the time. We have found amazing friends here and am volunteering for Young Life in Monument, CO. We love working with the kids and look forward to this year!!

Colorado

We are officially moved to Colorado. Blake is working at Dutch Brothers and I am at home studying for my boards for nursing : ( We have our lovely condo andwe are so glad to have our own place. I am loving it here!! The weather is great. It will snow for a day or two then be 60 degrees the next day. We are busy planning for the wedding and can't wait!! It is only a month and a half away!

We are homeowners : )

So our life is beginning to have lots of changes. I (Danielle) am finishing up school, looking for jobs, applying for grad school, wedding planning and getting ready to move. It is hard to focus on one thing at a time when there are such fun and big things coming up! Blake is managing at the Dutch Brothers in Spokane and enjoying time with college friends! One really exciting this is that we are homeowners!! We bought a condo in Colorado Springs, CO and are so excited to have a place to move into once we are married : )

I only have a few more weeks of school and then I will be headed to Seattle for my senior practicum. That is where I work 40 hr weeks as a nurse in labor and delivery (my choice for specialty area). This will be for about a month. Then I head back to Spokane for about a week before we head out for Christmas and then will be moved to CO!!

We are busy and doing lots of things, but trying to live in the here and now and enjoy our friends and last months of college life before we leave!!

Hello again!

7/28 Thanks so much for checking in with us. We realized that we didn't mention where we were at. We are staying in White River, South Africa. It is about 30 minutes from the larger city of Nelspruit. We are stationed with a group of YWAM missionaries and a recent organization called "Ten Thousand Homes". They focus on helping the vulnerable and orphaned children. So far almost all of the families in the community that we have visited have a parent or sibling who is infected with the HIV virus. Since the virus has killed much of the older generation, many children and families are without food or a place to stay, and often times the head of the household is a small child who looks after the other siblings. That is where "Ten Thousand Homes" comes into help. They build care centers in the nearby communities for the children to come throughout the day for care and food. They also provide further education purposes (life skills, construction classes, etc) for the older children when they are done with grade 12. Many have no where to go, and no specific skills to get a job once they are finished with school. We helped start a new outreach yesterday, called "Elizabeth's Inn", in the town of Kabokweni (15 minutes from where we stay). A woman by the name of Elizabeth began providing a home for orphaned children and an after school outreach program. The organization is going to team up with her to build her a care center. We were the first group to go with her to the community and provide food and games for these children. It was such a joy to see them laugh and smile and get to know the volunteers that help Elizabeth. It seems like a huge blessing for the community, Kabokweni!!

Prayer requests: Strength and energy as we begin to build relationships with the community. Since we represent YWAM/Ten Thousand Homes, pray that the impressions that we leave in the community this week will build trust and hope in this new outreach program. Pray for open homes and safe opportunities for these orphaned children! They need to feel God's love! Pray for healing in this entire country. There is so much physical suffering and loss, and still a huge separation between the whites and the blacks.

7/29: Today we went to the Millennium House, which is an orphanage for children under the age 10. Mostly infants and toddlers. Some are sick with HIV or lost parents due to it. The women that work there become exhausted so once a week, a team from the YWAM base goes out to love on the children and play, so that the women are able to rest. These children are absolutely adorable and love to be held! Many of there stories are horrific. One child was found on the railroad tracks, covered in dirt at the age of 1 month. Another at 4 months was taken from the home because the mother was insane and trying to kill her. Most of the time there are not enough workers for the children, so the time they get to be held can be short. They all cried when we left. It was heart breaking!! Please pray for these children in the Millennium House.

We made it!

GREETING FROM SOUTH AFRICA!!!
Well after a long journey, we finally made it! We flew from D.C. to South africa with a quick stop in Dakar. But of course the flight was ONLY seventeen hours! (total of 30 hours of travel time) The first night we arrived we were the only people that were sleeping on the Y.W.A.M. property. They just bought this new property and we were the very first people to sleep in the house. Two other people arrived the next day and are sleeping there with us. Jon a 17 year old from New York City, and Susan, a 26 year old Pharmacist from NYC as well. The first day we traveled to ACTS hospice which is about 10 minustes from where we stay. There we helped the nurses with patient care and tried to make the patients as comfortable as possible. We made friends with one patient named Alfonz, a 54 year old man who used to be a teacher. The hospice was slow that day but the clinic sent over 4 new patients during the time we were there. It was obvious to us to see that the nurses are great at their jobs.... but it was also obvious that the patients really enjoyed our company... Alfonz didn't want us to leave because he knew that no one would talk to him for as long as we did for quite some time. The best part was we saw the nurse the next day and she told us that he was doing much better. We knew in our hearts that the Lord was loving him through us, a taste of the healing power of love.
The next day we went to the clinic (the one that was sending us patients the day before.) When we arrived Myself and Jon began by moving a pile of bricks, and Dani and Susan helped with filing. Shortly after tea time (10:15 A.m) Danielle and Susan were able to head off with Gundula, a nurse from Germany, who heads the homebase Clinic, which allows the patients to live at home, and she visits them for checkups. We headed to the Themba hospital and four homes of patients with HIV and AIDS. The hospital was very intersting. The nursing staff numbers are so low that you barely get care at all, they even ended up removing all the call buttons, which surprised me a lot. There are crammed beds in one large room. Most of the patients had meningitis or AIDS. Then we headed to the homes. Each of these people live with the bare essentials. A room with a bed and a table. Many of them are on TB medicine or ARV's which are drugs for AIDS. They usually have a CD4 count of 20 or below, which is amazing. Many of you may not understand the importance of CD4 count, but it deals with lymphocytes and your immune system. Once they are gone, you have no protection against viruses and diseases. Therefore it is very easy to die. We even met up with one lady who had a CD4 of 0!! I didn't know that was possible. But she seemed to be doing well. It was overwhelming to see the impact that AIDS has on the community. Everyone knows someone affected. In the area that we are at, there are about 37% of people who have HIV/AIDS, which leaves many orphaned children. We met one little infant who was 5 months old, who was orphaned at three weeks. Both his parents died of AIDS. He is now living with a neighbor lady. Tomorrow we head out Mboniswene. This is a town of 200,000 people. many of which are orphaned children. We will be meeting up with a neighborhood of children to feed them and having craft time. In many families, the oldest sibling watches the younger ones, since there are no parents to care for them.
We will check in again soon and let you know how it goes! keep us in your prayers and check back for new updates. We love all of you so much!!
Also forward our blog site on to other people since we didn't have many people's e-mails. Again we want to thank all those who helped us in raising support to make this experience a reality! God is good!
-B & D