5Crawfords

I spy a large eye! The boys stopped to view the London Eye as we walked around the city a couple of weeks ago. Part II - Family Update In the last post I wrote about Brodie’s schooling situation here in the UK. So you may be wondering about Jonah and Graysen and how they are getting on in school. Well, their journey has been pretty different from Brodie's. Thus far, it most reminds me of Proverbs 16:1, “We can make our own plans, but the Lord directs our steps.” Our “plan” for Jonah and Graysen in coming to the UK was that above any particular school, we most of all just wanted to get them placed at the same one, largely for their emotional stability.   So, we noted that prominently in their school application. We always like to stop by in front of the Ugandan Embassy  in London near Trafalgar Square. :) Good memories.  So the first day of school came and went and we had still not heard anything from the admission’s office. We were ...

Brodie, Jonah, and Graysen ready for school  in the UK A view of our street in Colchester. Our house a few houses  down on right. Though it looks like people are driving on the right side of the road, those are actually parked cars. You can park any direction you want here.  When we arrived in England on August 15th, we were still uncertain which schools would have a spot for our boys.   Though we had hoped to have all of this sorted out before reaching this side of “the pond”, that wasn't the case.   L ife for our first few weeks in the UK was filled with shopping, gathering, setting up a home, meeting the neighbors, getting acquainted with EMIUK, and visiting many, many primary and secondary schools.   Each time we arrived at a school, at times visiting the same school several times, we were confronted with a kind, but firm, “No, the school is all full and we do not expect any openings.”   The teacher in me was at ti...

Sunset out over the Atlantic Ocean. The land you see are small islands that are a part of Guinea. With the routine display of tumultuous skies offshore, it's not hard to imagine that the powerful hurricanes in the West Atlantic and Caribbean Seas typically originate off the West African coast. PART V of V Friday-Saturday Sept 21-22 So much has happened in the last few days it’s hard sum it up in words, so I thought I’d use the rapid fire bullet method: Once on site, nothing seemed out of the ordinary at all. That's one thing I've learned through living in and traveling to Africa all these years: 'riots' always seem to sound worse in the news than they are in person. * We were notified early Friday morning that all off-shore activities were suspended until further notice due to an uprising in town. Ironically, the disturbances had nothing to do with the anti-American protests from earlier in the week, but instead were a result of tri...

There are some big trees in Africa! PART IV of V Tuesday-Thursday Sept 18-20 These days were a little quieter for us, as we completed our investigations at the site and spent the bulk of our time in front of computers, working on the report. The team has been very well organized and as of tonight, Thursday, they are pretty much done with the report and presentation. We present on Friday evening at 6:30pm so it will be interesting to see who all from the ship shows up. Before Ruedi arrived, we really didn't even look at the local hospital workers (nor they at us) when we were talking to them since we were communicating with the translators. A few things I’ve been thinking about this week in regards to being in Guinea. This is my first visit to a ‘Francophone’ country in West Africa (i.e. a French-speaking country), and I have to say it is much more of a challenge being here that I was expecting. One thing I’ve always enjoyed about visiting Africa is connecti...

PART III of V Sunday Sept 16 Our last volunteer, Ruedi Tobler, arrived late last night. Ruedi is an electrical engineer who was also on my trip to Sierra Leone back in February. Ruedi had to join late as he had a work conference to attend in Switzerland the past few days. He is one of our most qualified electrical engineer volunteers and travels with EMI every semester, usually to a non-English speaking country so he can practice his other languages (he speaks five). Ruedi will be taking the data that KC and intern Brian have been gathering the past few days and working with them to create the electrical assessment and design report. Volunteer Ruedi, reviewing the electrical data gathered by KC (shown pictured right here) and intern Brian. Since it is Sunday, the ship is largely in weekend mode. Some of our team headed into town to attend a local church service. The rest of us stayed back on the ship, working a little, resting a little, and then attending the ship ...

L to R: John, Abu the hospital plumber, me, the Director-General of the hospital, intern Brian, USA Tony, and UK Tony PART II of V Friday Sept 14 We awoke to a rainy morning, which was a welcome sight after a couple of days of hot sun. The rain turned lighter and lighter as the morning went on, eventually stopping by late morning. We once again headed out to the hospital right after breakfast and our morning devotions. When we got there, the 3 teams (i.e. civil, electrical and structural) all got right to work. I, once again, headed out to…that’s right, more obligatory meetings! My hope was that I could somehow ‘protect’ the team from these meetings so they could do their work. Unfortunately, I was wrong. J Ryan, our South African Mercy Ships’ host, went over to see if the hospital director was in today after his absence during our scheduled meeting the day before. Just our luck, today he was there!  He is a Lebanese man whose parents immigrated here when he was young...