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!