Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Wrapping up...

Well we leave tomorrow. It is hard to believe. We will fly into Maputo and spend the night and then leave Maputo Monday afternoon and arrive back in the States Tuesday at 6:14pm into Charlotte North Carolina. Yesterday, of course, Kallen and Traeger came down with colds. So please just pray that this trip goes smoothly and we all survive the 3 days of travel!
Before we go, we just wanted to give you an update of a few things that we have been doing the past month. We finished our parenting seminar, sort of. It was really a disaster over all. We only were able to do 2 out of the 4 weeks planned. The 2 we did do, however went well. We had to deal with a lot of sickness and we had a really difficult time arranging transport for everyone. We will try it again next year, after we get back. Tim finished his class on the doctrin of Salvation with the Anglican Church. We've said many goodbyes. We gave our cat to another family to care for while we are gone and the kids have shed many tears over the cat. Our dogs will stay here with Eden's who will be living here the 9 months we are gone.
Overall, I think we are ready to go. We've got everything packed up (almost) and we are looking forward to seeing everyone again.
Traeger teaching Vader a new trick. He is just a little bit too big for Traeger to control.

One of Karis' favorite friends here, Tessa. They had a goodbye sleepover last week.
Tim's class on Salvation. 16 people attended and everything went very well.
Because of the lack of transportation to get people to our parenting seminar, we hired a friend to drive for us. He is one of our guards and he does driving on the side for another friend of his. Well on our way to the seminar, he lost control of the car and got into an accident. Thankfully no one was really hurt, but the car was pretty damaged. We quickly discovered, that without tow trucks, it is really difficult to get a car back to the city for repairs. We stopped a big truck heading to Lichinga and asked if we could put the car on top. The guy agreed (for a very high price and of course being the only people with money we had to pay). It took us all afternoon to get this car on top of the truck. Complete "man-labor" to get it on top. So we didn't end up getting to do our seminar that week and we had to deal with getting our guard out of jail and lost a lot of money on top of it, so needless to say, we won't be hiring another car!
getting a little bit closer...
Finally...all loaded up...
Traeger's friend Merito. He is one of the sons of Michele's language helper, Beatriz.
Karis and Idris, Beatriz' other son.
Michele did a small teaching in Yao at our church last Sunday. Of course, she only read it, but still it was good pratice.