5Crawfords

Part I Traveling - Weds. 9/1 thru Fri 9/3 Well, it’s finally our first night at the site. After 4 plane flights totaling 22 hours in the air and an 8 hour drive this morning, we have finally made it. In all, it took 52 hours to the minute to get from my front porch in Colorado Springs to stepping out of the car at the Samfya Bible School campus. Me with interns Rachel (left) and Melissa in the Johannesburg airport in South Africa, posing with Nelson Mandela - he's a lot taller than I was expecting! Just a few highlights – probably the worst part of the flying was from Denver to Washington DC. It was only a 3 hour flight but it was pretty bumpy. Fortunately, the 17+ hour flight from DC to Jonhassburg was relatively smooth for most of it. It’s actually 2 flights – 7 ½ from DC to Dakar, Senegal, where we stopped for an hour and a half but couldn’t get off the plane and then back up in the air for an 8 hour leg to Johannesburg. In Dakar, some people got off the plane and others joined ...

On Wednesday morning around 8:30am, myself and two interns from the Colorado Springs office will board a plane out of Denver Int'l Airport bound for Zambia. We pass through Washington DC where we'll meet up with our full team of 10, and then a 17 1/2 hour flight will land us all in Johannesburg, South Africa before the final 2-hour flight to Lusaka, Zambia. From there, after spending the night we'll drive the final 8-hours to Samfya. We'll return to the US on September 16th, landing back in Denver around 10:30am. Please pray for: our team's travel to be safe (and no motion sickness for me! :) ), the flight out of DC to not be impacted by either Hurricane Danielle or Earl, our design to be a blessing to the ministry, the lives of all 10 of us team members to be changed, for God to use us as He sees fit to accomplish the work He's doing at the Samfya Bible School. Please also pray for Alisha and the boys back home, especially Alisha as she continues to figure out...

One of the things I'm really excited about in being at the eMi headquarters is possibly getting involved with our disaster relief program. For the past couple of years, we have been partnering with other aid organizations such as Samaritan's Purse and Food for the Hungry. How it works is, very soon after a disaster one of these organizations will call eMi and let us know that they may have need for our help. Our DR coordinator, Scott, will then begin recruiting for whatever techincal needs the ministry has. Once eMi receives word that the trip is a go, the team of volunteers is mobilized and travels to whereever the disaster is to either scope out what needs to be done, or to actually meet a techincal need. The week we arrived, I was asked by Scott to join at the last minute on one of these DR trips that was going out to Haiti. They needed one more structural engineer to fill the team that was going down to evaluate 360 houses to let the owners know whether or not they were saf...

Well, we are here and finally moved into a house. It’s been a long process with lots of twists and turns, but we’ve finally landed. I’ll get to it and try to tell you as much about the last 3 crazy weeks as possible. A list will help: The Journey It took us about 19 hours spread over two days. We drove from Klamath Falls to Salt Lake City the first day (about 630 miles) and then Salt Lake to Colorado Springs the next day (via Grand Junction and the Rocky mountains – about 600 miles). The trip was surprisingly easy and we’ve even talked of trying to do it in one day straight next time. Arriving We thought we had a house picked out, but when we got here the house was not at all what we thought and was way too small for our stuff (and the rent price didn’t reflect the size!). So, we called a realtor named Steve Kenney here in town on a recommendation from eMi and Steve was a godsend. He cleared his schedule and took us around town the very next day and by days end we had found a house tha...

The boys with some of the Morrow cousins at cousin Joey's birthday party. If any of you followed the USA team in the World Cup, you were treated (or tortured, depending on whether your glass is half empty or half full) to a scintillating run to win their group and advance to the round of 16. (For those of you who are in the 5% of the world’s population that doesn’t follow the World Cup – most of which reside in the US! – the World Cup Final includes 32 teams who have played in a two-year long qualifying tournament to advance to the final round, which this year was held in South Africa. The 32 teams are divided into 8 groups of 4 teams, who play a round robin called the ‘Group Stage’ with the top two teams advancing out of the group.) My niece Traci (sister Terri's oldest child) got married a week after we returned to the USA. The wedding was on a large yacht in the Newport Beach harbor. What a fun night and a perfect family gathering to attend after returning home. This doesn...

A week of packing and goodbyes has made us a little crazy! Our last week in Uganda is sure to prove to be a crazy and busy one, so we thought we’d share a short journal about everything we’ve doing to close down our lives here in Uganda and prepare for life back in the USA! Saturday May 22, 2010: 5:30am: Woke up early to check the British Airways (BA) website to find that our flight is listed as operating normally! Finally, we can breathe a sign of relief that we will be able to leave June 1st. 10:30am: Picked up the Aylard’s (new eMi family that just arrived from Canada) and took them to the pool for the day. 7:00pm: Went to the guesthouse nearby for our going away party with eMi. It was a touching time where people said a lot of nice things about us and we were able to share what the East Africa office has meant to us. I promise I’m usually not a crier! Sunday May 23, 2010: 9:30am: Picked up the Aylard’s and took them to church in town. 12:00pm: Stopped by the ‘mall’ to do some last...