February 26, 2006

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  Still working on my logs that I am going to put here. Looking at so many other sites to try to figure out what I am doing. So going to leave a small portion here and then let you click here to see the rest of the story. Just don't see the point in having a blog site when we have a website up and running. It has been a quiet Sunday here on the ship. I am on call so I could not go anywhere. The girls went with their kids group to have a party with a local orphanage. It is so cool to see them get so exited about activities here. Now we are sitting here and we were reading, now we are watching an episode of Home Improvement for the 100th time. We have 2 seasons of this show and we love to watch them together. Last weekend, Mark and I spent a night at a hotel here in Liberia. Not what you think but it was nice. The generator worked most of the time, so the AC worked most of the time. That was a huge plus. It also had a huge king size bed, We have slept on a futon for over a year now. When the mattresses begin to separate, we laugh and call the gap the crack of doom.  The room also had TV. It was sunny to find there was not much we wanted to watch, but we did so enjoy the Olympics. We became experts on the sport of curling-it was wonderful. We realized it has been over 2 years since we have had a night away from the girls. At least this room has a sliding door into our "master bedroom" aka the living room. Our last room only had a curtain. Privacy is something that is hard to come by at times here on the ship. But we are creative.   So many of you are asking what we will do next and all I can say is that we just do not know today.  WE are praying about so many things. The Lord is opening so many doors and we are just moving forward and praying. We have about 15 weeks until we think we will be leaving the Anastasis. And today, we do not even know yet what the destination will be for our first flight out of here. We are trying to wait to make the decisions. We think that this week will be interesting to see what it holds. That is why I have been so diligently working on the website, I have known forever that I needed to get it in better shape and this must have been the incentive i needed.  Tomorrow we start back to surgery, the first week after the break. It is going to be an interesting spring.  Can't wait to share the details with you. We can't wait to see you all this summer.

February 23, 2006   Well this is the first post of what we are calling our homemade blog.  Yes we are going to work on keeping it updated. The kids are even starting their own pages to hopefully keep in touch with their friends. The kids are on school break and we are having a week of catching up on so much stuff that we are behind with. We have been on the ship for more than 14 months now. I can't believe it has been this long. There is so much that is going to change again soon.  Our outreach here in Liberia is due to be done by the end of May, then the ship is due to sail to Ghana. The intention is to rendezvous with the Africa Mercy to offload goods and crew for her outreach. There are already rumors that the Africa Mercy will not make it on time to Ghana. I do not know what this means for everyone transferring. We are not transferring. Our positions were redundant and there were already people in place when this ship was retired, so there is no job for us there at this time. At first I really struggled with not having a place on the Africa Mercy, but have not come to an exhausted point of being glad that we are not going today.  The crew that are joining the Africa Mercy must go straight into the next outreach without a break, some of them are even having their vacations cancelled to go to work. I know that we could not do that right now. We are half of the way through this outreach, 3 months to go, and I am already so tired. The Lord knew that we needed  break and could not go straight into another outreach. For the more than a year that we have been here I have been on call at least 50% of the time, sometimes 100%. And since Mark has been security officer, he is on call just as much. We laugh at night when we put the two pagers, cell phone and room phone by the bed. Even during these so-called breaks, we do not get the time really off.  When on-call we cannot even leave the ship. All of this to say, we cannot wait to get home and visit this summer. We miss everyone so much and just feel the need to chill in the US.

We have had a wonderful time visiting with our orphanage and doing some work over this week while the kids are out of school. Mark loves to take lemonade and share it with the kids. There are 35 orphans there, it is a very very poor orphanage. Yesterday when we went to visit we decided to stop on the side of the road and buy bread out of a wheel-barrel (yea this is where we get fresh bread-Cailin's favorite). They were so excited and we learned that some of them had never had bread. They eat rice and buckwheat. They get the rice etc. from the World food program, the problem lately is that there is not enough rice and the buckwheat gives the little ones diarrhea. We love these kids. The girls really enjoy their time there. This week Peter (a director) let the girls play with some puppies on the property, they were so excited. They wanted to take them home and when we said no we did not need puppies on the ship, Peter assured us that if the puppies were not good enough, he could get us a monkey instead:)       This is Mama Celina with the new sewing machine we brought from the ship. We bought lots of thread. She is so excited because they desperately need new clothes for the kids. Our next outing is to get fabric and more needles to be sure they have enough. We are also trying to buy more land behind the existing buildings for a girls dorm.  We built a boys dorm already and beds, but the girls are still sleeping in a tiny room on two mattresses for about 15 of them.  I would love to bring them all home, but Mark brings me back to reality.  We want to give you the opportunity to see the orphanage because for many of you, your money and support is going into some projects there and we love them so much and wish you could meet   them all.

This is a long overdue picture for the grandparents of the girls in new Christmas clothes. They are growing so quickly. I know they can't wait to get home.

Please pray for all of us during this transition. And I promise to get better updating this site. Better late than never. Please pray for us as we have sooooo many decisions ahead as to what the Lord would have us do from here. We are just waiting on HIM to show us the way. In the mean time we look forward to seeing so many of you this summer.  Please keep in touch, we love hearing from you. Please check out the kids blogs as they start to try to work on them.