leaving soon!

Hey everyone!

Wow. We'll be in the air in less than 5 days. Things are really busy during our last week of preparations -- here's some of what's been going on.

Last Friday we opened up the church for a showing of the movie Red Dust. Wow. It's particularly violent (not so great for kids), but also just gripping and powerful. If you want to get a sense of what apartheid did to SA, this is quite a movie.

And during the movie we had some of the kids (with Carolyn's help -- thanks!) stuff over 150 turtles that we're bringing over. Each turtle gets a note to go with it, and the entire congregation helped out on Sunday writing notes to the kids. I think we have most of those covered now. It's been amazing to see how many people have been willing to help out with all the details on this trip -- a huge blessing when your team is only three people and has six weeks to prepare.

Oh, and there's all sorts of other trip prep also. Let's see... where to start... This weekend we printed a cool informational and prayer update for those of you that want to know some more details about our trip. There are some in the mail, but if you're itching for a copy, I put it online too.

All three of us are signed up in one way or another to give a short talk to the kids during one of the nights of the camp(s). And yes, that includes me :). Surprisingly, between taking typhoid pills and trying to learn Xhosa, I've been able to spend at least a few good hours getting things together. But I'm sure I'll be stewing over it at least through the first plane ride.


Ah, and here's a helpful hint (since I got stuck on this a couple weeks ago). The Bridges of hope website doesn't work very well with Mozilla-based browsers and newer versions of Flash player. So if you do a reasonable job of updating your computer and you use Firefox, you're out of luck. Have to use IE for this one. Now you know!


And no, this picture has nothing to do with South Africa. But when we get over there I'll hopefully be posting pictures from Bridges. So I'm just testing it out.


(bonus points if you can tell where this was taken!)