Pool Practical

Our last day of Basic Safety Training Week was about personal survival at sea so we had a pool practical that evening at a local college pool. First we had to don these orange gumby suits in 2 minutes, here's Ray finishing up.

Then we each had to jump in the pool in a certain manner and 'swim' to each other to do a huddle and then to make a train. I was having quite a bit of difficulty staying upright and kept flipping either onto my back or onto my face. Then I started laughing because what else could you do? Then when we made the train I kept laughing the whole way through the exercise so here we are with Ray in front, two friends inbetween and then me, 4th person from the front, laughing of course.

We were finally able to take the gumby suits off for our next exercise. Here I am pulling the anchor of the life raft, and still laughing it appears. Our final exercise of the night was to flip the life raft from upside down to right side up. Everyone in our class was able to do this though it took me two tries to get in the right position to get it to flip.

The next morning we had our final class and then two days later we flew out of the Dallas airport for Cotonou, Benin.

Basic Safety Training Week

This week started out with a bang! We celebrated the 4th of July by riding in the Mercy Ships' van down the road to another Christian Ministry called FatherHeart. They had many activities for the kids to do including bounce house obstacle courses, rock climbing and a 'suds' machine. They also had food to eat, live bands and then wrapped up the night with fireworks. The girls especially enjoyed going into the 'suds' machine!

The next day started early with our Firefighting class. We learned how to put on an SCBA in under a minute with air flowing. I freaked out a little bit until the air started to flow and then realized how much easier it was to breathe!

And the next day started even earlier to get us through our firefighting practical before the hottest part of the day. Our first exercise was to put on all of our bunker gear including the SCBA and then rescue a 165 pound mannequin in a smoke filled room. The only thing was that the smoke machine was not cooperating so they blindfolded us all instead! That was a strange experience! Here we are getting ready to enter the container.

Here we are with our hats on.

Today we learned CPR and First Aid and became Red Cross Certified. Ray had fun splinting and immobilizing my arm. I'm sure he was wishing he could do that with my mouth so I wouldn't talk so much!

Tomorrow will be Personal Safety and Social Responsibility and then we will wrap up the week with Personal Survival Training with a water practical.

It's hard to believe that we will be on our way to Africa in 5 days!

We are in Texas!

We made it to Texas! We were planning on driving our car down here but the day we were leaving we realized that our car could not successfully pull a loaded U-Haul all the way to Texas. In fact, we weren't sure it would have even made it out of NY! The car's bumper was all the way down and we had not even finished loading up the trailer! So thankfully a family from our church offered to let us use their truck to drive all the way to Texas!!! We are so grateful for their generosity. We were able to sell our car quickly to someone in NY and now we are learning to live without a car to drive whenever we want to.

We made it to Texas two weeks ago and have been pretty busy here at the Mercy Ships International Operations Center (IOC). We have class almost every day and sometimes evenings too. We also have a weekly Wal-Mart run where we can sign up to go to Wal-Mart and shop. My niece Jennaea has been a great help to us by watching the girls for us when we are in class. There are also many wonderful people down here who are helping us by taking the girls to the library and berry picking and to the movies. Jennaea and the girls go swimming almost every day which is wonderful when the temperatures are in the mid to high 90s!

And lest you think we have no time for fun, a bunch of us signed up to go to the Mesquite Rodeo last night! This was my first time going to a Rodeo, in fact I think it was the first time for all of us except for the Mercy Ships couple who were driving us there. Ray and I were on the "Kiss Cam" which meant the man with the camera zoomed in on us and we were supposed to kiss! I wasn't sure Ray would cooperate but he did. The bull riding was a bit intense for me but it appeared that no one was hurt enough to go to the hospital so that was good I guess. At least now we can all say we've been to a rodeo!

I have really been enjoying getting to know our classmates (from Germany, the Netherlands, Ecuador, and Washington, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New York States). Our classes really make us think but I could definitely do without the homework, ha ha. We have one more week of classroom instruction and then a week of Basic Safety Training and then off to Benin for our Field Service! We should arrive on the M/V Africa Mercy July 30th and the girls should start school on August 2nd!

We are currently at 85% monthly support and we are so thankful for all of our supporters. We appreciate your prayers more than you can know. Thank you.

We leave in six days!

I feel like I am in a dream most days as the whirlwind of sorting through our belongings and the emptying of our house continues. We are leaving NY on June 7th and I have mixed feelings about that. I have always lived within 100 miles of where I was born (Lockport for those of you who are wondering....) and I think it's starting to hit me that I am moving not only out of the state but out of the country!

So I am both excited and nervous as we get ready to take this next step for our family.

We are currently at 82% monthly support and are praying that we will be at 100% before we leave the country July 12th.

This is our schedule:

June 7th: Leave NY for TX
June 12th: Start training in TX
July 10th: End training in TX
July 12th: Leave for Benin, West Africa for practicum training
July 31st: Arrive on the M/V Africa Mercy in Togo, West Africa

And I'm adding a picture of my girls from their AWANA Awards' Ceremony May 5th where Deborah completed year 3 of Sparks and earned her Sparky plaque and Anna completed year 1 of Sparks and earned her Book 1 and Review Book Awards.

Introducing Izzy and Sold!!!

Izzy is the newest member of our family. My sister gave her to me a couple of months ago and since then we have had fun as a family placing Izzy in various places around our house, she's always up to mischief. We discovered that not only does she have magnets in her hands and feet, she also has a magnet in the top of her head to hold her hat on! This has given us much amusement because she 'sticks' to many objects in our house.

A few weeks ago we were taking turns placing Izzy around the house and I thought that maybe Izzy would like to go to Africa with us and be photographed doing various activities. Izzy is very excited to go on this journey with us and if you haven't figured it out yet, Izzy is the colorful sock monkey sitting between Anna and Deborah!



This picture was taken April 27th and though it's not surprising for us to get snow in April (or even in May) what was surprising was that my lilacs were in full bloom! We were about 3 weeks early this year though I heard on the news last night that it's more like 1.5 weeks early with this latest cold front coming through and slowing down all growing things. The girls were running around trying to catch snowflakes on their tongues.

And the big news tonight is that our house is sold. I'm not going to say we sold it because we didn't, God did it. This whole process has been a lesson in patience and it has been amazing to see God's hand in the whole thing. We are moving out the day we leave for our training in Texas, June 7th.

And yes, that is the other big news........we are less than $100 a month away from 75% of our monthly support so we were given the go ahead to serve with Mercy Ships! We are praying that more monthly support will come in before we leave so that we are much closer to 100% when we leave for Africa mid July.

Please continue to pray for us, I feel overwhelmed most days with packing up the house and trying to figure out what to throw away, what to store and what to take with us.

In other news, the girls have both completed school for this school year and the hitch is on the car so we are making progress little by little.

Until my next post........

Stuff

We have re-figured our budget and with the support that has been coming in we are now only $400 a month from being at 75% support!

Our house has still not sold and we need prayer as we decide whether to just go ahead and rent it out or to try and keep selling it.

The girls are in their last few weeks of school (we started last July) so hopefully that will open up May to packing up the house!

We did end up being in both local newspapers which was a lot of fun. There was no link to the weekly newspaper but there was a link to the daily paper but no pictures. Of course right at this moment I don't know where it is, I'll add it later if I can find it.

We are having a hitch put on our itty bitty Prizm this week. We are allowed to take 8 duffel bags on the flight to Africa and they do not fit in our trunk! I looked into getting a carrier for on top of our car and I still could not figure out how to fit all the duffel bags in our car. We are also picking up one of my nieces in Kansas (on the way to Texas) to nanny our girls for us while we are in training. So we need room for her and her luggage too! Thus we decided we will need to rent a trailer to carry our bags to Texas and therefore the hitch to attach the trailer to the car! Isn't that all exciting?

We had the chance to meet another Mercy Ships' family 1.5 weeks ago, the Rich family. It was so much fun having them over! The kids got along great and are all looking forward to seeing each other in Texas in June. The funny thing is that Josh (the Dad) and I (Nanita) grew up about 5 miles from each other and went to the same K-12 school! Josh knows several of my nieces and nephews from school and working at a local Bible Conference Grounds. We did not know each other because I am, ahem, slightly older......ha ha

One last thing, Deborah and Anna were blessed to be able to participate in our regional Sparkarama at a local college last month. Our church has AWANA but has not competed in the games for several years so we went to the games to watch the cousins participate. I had the girls bring their completed books just in case they needed some extra Sparks to fill out the teams. Sure enough they needed some extra Sparks so both girls got to play but not for the same team my niece was on! They were on 3 different teams! That was hard to cheer for. Deborah was in green, Jem in blue, and Anna in red.

In the Newspaper

We made this week's edition of our local newspaper and we are on the front page! Now if I could only figure out where the on-line version is? or maybe there is no on-line version? In that case you will just have to imagine it!

We were also interviewed by our regional newspaper this week and they sent their own photographer out yesterday to take some family photos. I will let you all know when we make our appearance there.

We are still at 45% support which has been rather disheartening to me. No new support has come in in the past month but not for lack of trying on our part. We have sent out letters with our information in them to various churches and Ray has called many other churches. Most of them do not reply at all, a few respond by saying they are not taking on any new missionaries and are not interested in having us speak at their churches and then there are a couple of churches who are actually considering having us come speak. Please pray that God will raise up faithful supporters for us as we prepare to serve him in West Africa.

We need $900 a month more in order to be able to go. I have made it more convenient for those of you who want to donate on-line, there is a link at the top of this blog that will take you directly to our donation page. Any size gift is much appreciated!

Please continue to pray for the sale of our house to go through smoothly. I tend to be a nervous wreck about these kinds of things and need to just trust God in this particular matter.

We are excited about what is going on in Togo right now on the M/V Africa Mercy. Surgeries started up last week and several screenings have taken place. Our friends the Jacobsens whom we met in Texas last June have written about some of these things on their blog along with posting some great photos. Click here to see their blog.

Some of you may wonder what pre-missionaries do with their time...... pretty much the same things you do. Besides calling different churches and sending out letters Ray is still working as an Electronics Technician, I am still homeschooling Deborah and Anna and we are all still involved with our church AWANA program.

Last weekend we had our first sizeable snowstorm which really wasn't that much compared to other years but it's the best we got this year. Anna enjoyed just making snowballs.

While Deborah worked at building an igloo.

Both girls tried to swing on our swingset.

Ray worked hard at shoveling us out.

And two weekends ago we got a chance to do an overnight at a hotel in Niagara Falls, Canada that was attached to an Indoor Waterpark. We all enjoyed the outside pool! It was actually snowing and some kids were throwing snowballs into the pool. The Waterpark was on top of the Casino's parking garage so we were quite high up!

And the girls especially enjoyed the wave pool. I think Anna spent most of her time here while Deborah went down every single slide in the park. It was a great time for all of us.

Thanks for praying for us as we prepare to serve with Mercy Ships.