Arriving on the M/V Africa Mercy

The ship seemed larger than life when we first saw it!

This is the entry way of our cabin. The door to the girls' room is on the right, the wall of the bathroom is on the left and then the kitchenette. The living area is straight ahead.

The door to the girls' room.

The girls' bedroom. Deborah on top, Anna on bottom.
Our cabin is the 5th window from the right, top deck. Our other window is hidden by the crane.

Field Service Part Three

Before we left Benin we visited a seamstress where we chose our fabric, we each picked out a style, and then she measured us and made us these beautiful clothes.

And a picture of the motel we stayed at in Abomey, Benin. Each 'hut' was divided into three rooms, each with a bathroom.

Field Service Part Two

Our sleeping arrangements in Abomey, Benin.

Our bathroom.

Pastor Rolland's church.

Pastor Ferdinand's church and our favorite. Each church service we attended was translated twice so that the service could be understood in French, Fon and English.

And the saddest day for us, the day we had to say goodbye to the children at the Children's Home. They had a program for us where they sang a goodbye song and gave us letters they had made for us. We left right after the program and the following day we headed out to Lome, Togo to meet up with the M/V Africa Mercy.

Field Service Part One

On Monday morning, July 12th, our team headed out to the Dallas airport in two Mercy Ships' vehicles, one of which was pulling all of our luggage in a trailer. Izzy came too.

We got to Abomey, Benin on Wednesday of that week and then visited the Children's Home there in Abomey every day for lunch and then some afternoons we would stay until 4p. We stayed the whole day on Tuesdays and Thursdays and would do programs with the kids or just hang out with them. Our team men decided to challenge the boys in the Children's Home to a football game (soccer). The building in the picture is the boys' dorm and the tree to the left of it was Deborah's favorite climbing tree. I think she may have been up the tree when I took this picture.

Ray is on the left in this picture playing goalie. This was taken moments before he sprained his thumb. I didn't get a picture of the thumb but it did turn lovely colors and is now back to normal and fully functional (which is important when you are an electronics technician).

Deborah with some of her friends in the favorite climbing tree.

And there I am with Anna and a bunch of girls that I miss terribly and one little boy in the center of all of those girls. I miss him too.

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!

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