24 Hours

Where to start… it’s a little hard to think these days because I think all of the food we’ve been eating is interfering with proper brain function. Seriously though, what’s the best way to express our love and appreciation to others? Through food, of course. And we love A LOT of people! We’re trying not to focus on the goodbye-for-a-year part – it’s more of a bye-for-now type of thing. That’s been enough to keep me from melting into a puddle at least! The worst part is that there aren’t 40 hours in a day, so we haven’t been able to catch everyone – we’re hoping that Skype is as wonderful as it seems and that it will suffice until we return.

So here are the facts – our flight leaves Monday night at 9:15pm. As of right now, that is less than 24 hours away. Holy cow! Another fact – we get six 50-lb bags, two 15-lb carry-ons, and two personal items. We’re right on the edge on all our bags and are hoping our luggage scale is a little conservative with its weights… Thus far, I probably packed and repacked about 3 times on my own, and then we did one final packing this week – check out our stowaway…

Just to annoy Diane, we might repack again tonight J  We’ll head down to the airport with a caravan of hopefully emotionally stable parents around 4:30, and our flight will head out for Heathrow at 9:15pm. We really got lucky with the flights. We’ll fly overnight (and yes, we sleep well ANYWHERE, so we’ll get some quality rest on the plane), and then arrive in London at 10:45am. Our flight doesn’t leave for Entebbe, Uganda until 9:15pm, so we’re just going to have a mini vacation in London (as in a 6-hour vacation) before we get ready to get on the second leg of the flight and another good night’s sleep.

And then the fun begins! Who am I kidding – we’re going to have way big fun before then! We arrive in Entebbe at 7:15am, and it’ll take about 2 hours to get to our apartment. One of the EMI folks and his wife will be picking us up from the airport – I’ve already decided that they are awesome and that I will like them a whole lot. From there, Maggie, who has been amazingly helpful and has worked very hard to get our apartment ready and just pass along helpful information in general, will be guiding us through some orientation-type activities to introduce us to the community – I’ve also decided that she is awesome and that I will like her a whole lot too.

I’m sure we’ll have lots of prayer requests in the coming year, so here comes the first one. We need to be able to legally work in Uganda! We’ve applied for our work permits in plenty of time for them to process them, but due to some changes they have going on in their immigration process (woah, we’re immigrants – that’s kinda funny to think about!), they’re a little, um, backlogged. As in we’re application #2100-something and they’re on application #834ish. EMI has been awesome about working through this process, and they’ve told us they think it’s still cool for us to head on over – which is good because we didn’t realize that was in question! From what we’ve heard from other folks over there, this isn’t entirely out of the ordinary, so we’ll just be praying that this doesn’t get any more complicated, and we’d sure appreciate your prayer support with this as well!

So I think that about does it for our final pre-departure update! We are SUPER excited – I mean, butterflies-in-your-stomach excited! We are just amazed that God has led us to this point – we figure He knows what He’s doing, because we’re pretty clueless right now, haha! Our biggest hope is just that we will honor Him in what we do over there – whatever form that takes.

Stay tuned for our first we-made-it-to-Africa! update!

9 Days and Counting...

Hello all! Gary here. August 1^st is coming fast! It’s hard to believe how quickly June zipped by and now July is about done.

This past Friday was my last day at work. I was pretty busy, so it didn’t really hit me until the end of the day when I really had to start saying goodbyes. Pieper O’Brien Herr Architects has been a big part of my life since 2000. I’ve been with them since I graduated, and I feel very lucky to have been a part of the firm. It’s amazing how much of our lives are driven by a single decision. We all have many of those times, and I won’t go into it other than to say that I’m very thankful that my early professional employment circumstances went as they did. My firm, POH, has been very supportive of our trip and very excited for us.

Erin was busy last week getting all the packing squared away. We each can take three 50 pound bags on the plane. So Erin has trying to fit our clothes, household items, toiletries for a year, her school supplies, my work supplies, and other miscellaneous supplies in six suit cases. It’s quite a trick, but we’re getting there. Six, 50lb bags seems sort-of like a lot. …and we ‘thought’ we lived pretty minimally. But we are not finding it easy to get all the things we want to take in there. Now that I‘m off work, when we get back in town, I get to join in the fun task in deciding what all we leave behind.

But now we are headed up north to visit Erin’s family in the New Jersey / Pennsylvania area. Our first stop is to see Erin’s Aunt Kate and Knight in Point Pleasant, New Jersey. Next we are off to see Erin’s Aunt Laura and Uncle Rich and cousin Sara in Collingswood, New Jersey. Then, we are off to see her grandparents in Honesdale, PA. We are not far into the trip, but so far it has been fabulous. It’s too bad we needed leaving the country as an excuse to come up here to visit everyone. But we are just glad we have any excuse. It has been very good spending some time with everyone. We are very lucky to have such good families.

With me off from work and us off to give our final farewells to family, it definitely hits that we are in the home stretch leading up to the trip. With this little preamble, in many ways it feels like our adventure has officially begun. We have also received a few pictures of our apartment in Kampala, which also helps make us feel like we are close to being there. We were very excited to get the photos - and the apartment is really quite nice. eMi has done an amazing job of getting it ready for us. We knew we’d be fine, but of course we were a little unsure of what our living arrangements would be. But as you can see, we’ll be quite comfortable. We can’t wait to get over there.

We’ll post more soon, but we just wanted to give a quick update. And of course, no post would be complete without a huge thank you to all of you for your support and encouragement. There have been no snags in the preparation that have not been countered with an outpouring of encouragement from one or many of you. I don’t know how you seem to anticipate when we need it, but I hope you also know how appreciative we are. Support-raising is going very well. We can’t thank our contributors enough for making this thing happen.

We leave Monday night, the 1^st of August. The first leg of the trip will be about 9 hours and we’ll have an 11 hour layover in Heathrow airport in London during the day of the 2^nd of August. We are hoping to take advantage of this and wander around London for a while. So if anyone has any experience around Heathrow and has any suggestions of how to best use some time around the area, please let us know! Then that evening we have another 9 hour flight to Kampala. And on the morning of August 3^rd we will land in Uganda… The Donahue’s are another long term volunteer family who will pick us up from the airport and our African way of life will begin.

And finally, I will add one little P.S.

At the end of Erin’s last post, she put a list of random bullet points of misc going-ons. And midway down, she listed that she was disappointed that we didn’t make it on NASA’s list to be able to buy tickets to watch the Atlantis shuttle launch, the final shuttle launch, at Kennedy Space Center. We figured we’d still go down there and find a parking lot or something in the area to get a glimpse of it. But unbeknownst to us, our friend from our trip to Haiti, Steve, emailed another of his friends, Melba, to see what she recommended. Melba is a regular attender at shuttle launches and has seen quite a few. Steve has the biggest heart, and his friends certainly do as well. We emailed back and forth with Melba a bit and she gave us some pointers of good places to see the launch. And then, I’m not sure what strings she had to pull and how much it cost her, but the Sunday before the launch, we met Melba for the first time, and she surprised us with official tickets to see the launch at Kennedy with a parking pass. We certainly don’t deserve all that, but she said she felt given our certain circumstances, she felt the shuttle launch was something we didn’t need to miss before we left. And so we went, and Erin's mom was able to join us. The launch was perfect, and the experience was amazing. And we are so glad we got to go! We’re very proud of NASA and their 30 years of amazing work, and are so thankful to be there for this monumental event. Atlantis is back on Earth now, and her crew are all safe. And that launch is something we will never forget thanks to the kindness of friends.