5Crawfords

As a team leader, I'm not supposed to choose favorites amongst the team...but I clearly had one on this trip. We actually had two EMI teams arriving on the same flights, and to my knowledge, this is the first time that’s happened. Another team led by Gary and Kevin from our office in Colorado are working at another orphanage starting up in Western Kenya. So, in the arrival hall at Jomo Kenyatta airport in Nairobi, we had 21 EMI’ers in all. Fortunately for our team, the orphanage we’re working with (‘Into Abbas Arms’) is located only about 1-1/2 hours from Nairobi, unlike the other team’s site, which is around 7-8 hours drive from the capital. Nairobi sits up at just over 5000 ft elevation, so it was a steady climb on the drive out to reach our site, which is at an elevation of nearly 8800 ft. The IAA site from above - the building next to the red marker is where the EMI team stayed during the trip. The civil engineers walking the site. You'll notice the rain boo...

EMI'ers from two teams, ready to depart from DIA This trip had a different feel from the outset. Having Alisha join me isn’t just a nice perk, but rather, more of a realization of a long desire to do this work together. It’s not that I can’t do these trips without her – I’ve proved that 19 other times! But I really don’t *want* to do them without her. Of course we don’t always get the things we want, but oftentimes if we’re patient, God does give us a few of those perks eventually. So the normal pre-trip depression and anxiety that has become a very predictable part of our lives (i.e. dad starts getting very irritable leading up to project trips!) didn’t happen. In fact, it was almost the opposite feeling this time, as I seemed more and more calm as the trip approached. Dropping the boys off at their gate at the Denver airport was another ‘new’ feeling. Brodie is 14 now, and though we still see a lot of the ‘little boy’ in him, we know that he (like every other littl...