Sunday, August 10, 2008

8 hours later...

The last two days have been a whir. We've been packing and confirming the financing for our trip. The only moments of non-packing have been attending a wedding, or eating. We've only gotten 7 hours of sleep in two days, and it's looking like it is 7 hours in three as I resign from attempts to sleep on the overnight flight to London. On Friday morning, we were up late enough to see the very impressive opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics (I probably went to bed around 6:30 am).

We've brought about 8 carloads of stuff to my parents' for storage, and each time we do we get a pungent reminder of a spill of rib water into the upholstry of Dora's car. Two weeks ago, we prepared ribs for a bbq, and in transport, what once was delicious rib juice spilled into the car. We sopped up what we could of the oily mess into paper towels, but much of it seeped in to provide a delicious breeding ground for a healthy colony of bacteria. Our thoughts and prayers are now with my parents and brother, who are currently tasked with entering this rancid environment and unloading our last carload.

In our final hours in Vancouver, our most loyal prayer supporters joined us at the chapel at YVR to pray for our safety and the success of the mission (Thanks Donald, Pastor Inho, Auntie Aida, Caleb, Noelle, Jayne, and Bob!) Their companionship with us to the very end was truly comforting, to know that through the next 8 months, we will have their (and your) prayer support.

Prayer items that have been answered:
- Dora's cell phone contract has found a new owner
- our apartment has been rented for just the length of time we want, to a friend
- I was in serious doubt that we'd be able to raise what to me was a lofty target of $10,000 to partially support our trip. In just over a month, we've now exceeded that (our total trip costs of the volunteer/missions part of the trip will be closer to $17,000)

Geek talk
- computer equipment I'm bringing down: two motherboards, about 3 gb worth of memory chips, network cards. I've tried to protect them by sandwiching them between foam and packing that into our checked in luggage
- got a Dell Axim X51v a few months back to replace my viewsonic. It locks up from time to time, and for the last 12 hours, unbeknownst to me, it ran the battery dry. Good thing I brought my trusty Viewsonic V37 on which I'm typing this now.

Our next stop is the apparently unimpressive Heathrow airport, where we will sit around for a good 6 hours, hopefully near a wifi access point where I can send out this update. It may be the last time I get an internet connection until September, when we arrive in Ghana to begin my gig as a teacher, and Dora's as a teacher of teachers.

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