5Crawfords

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...

Back on the Africa Mercy! PART I of V Tuesday Sept 11 At the immigration counters in the Conakry airport upon arrival. I was really surprised how nice the Conakry airport was compared to other African airports. The departures lounge was fully air conditioned, which was a major blessing at the end of the trip! Flying out for this trip was very different this time. Leaving out of the UK, the day after all the volunteers left the USA, was very weird, in a good way! I felt like I got a bonus day, and when I arrived in Brussels to meet up with the team, I wasn’t jet-lagged. I can’t tell you what a huge difference it was, physically and mentally. It was also a lot easier to leave Alisha, bizarre enough as that may sound. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but then it started to come to me that I kind of felt the same way in Uganda. To contrast, in Colorado, it was always very hard to leave because I was torn completely free of my comfort zone, leaving behind Alisha...

(Note: I didn't get a chance to post this prior to departing. But we have landed here in Guinea and are on board the ship, safe and sound. The team is enthusiastic to dig into the project and that will begin tomorrow. It's great to be back on the ship and being a part of the impressive work Mercy Ships is doing in West Africa.) On Tuesday, I’ll be heading out for my next project trip. I’m leading a team of 9 EMI staff, volunteers and interns to Guinea to work with Mercy Ships at the local government hospitals in the capital city of Conakry. This is my third such hospital assessment trip with Mercy Ships in a row. Since Guinea is a French-speaking country however, there will be an additional element of challenge in gaining an understanding of the situation at the hospitals from the maintenance workers. We’ll once again be staying aboard the ‘Africa Mercy’,the largest non-governmental floating hospital ship in the world. It’s a real treat to get to partner with Mercy ...

 This is one of the lions we saw on safari in Kenya back in 2009...has it been tracking us all these years?! I just happened to be browsing on the internet this morning and the top story on MSN news was this: http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/08/27/13498732-cops-hunt-lion-reportedly-on-loose-near-british-village?lite This is 15 miles from our house! They still haven't captured the lion and the nearest zoo, which happens to be in our town of Colchester, does not have any animals missing! Perhaps this beast has been tracking us since our safari in Kenya back in 2009 and had only made it as far as England when, to his utter astonishment, his job became miraculously easier when we suddenly turned up to live in the UK! A quick trip down memory lane - we went on a safari in the Masai Mara in Kenya in 2009 with Alisha's parents, Ken and Karen Berry.    We came across a lion kill - this was the male, so he got to eat first while the 6-7 ...

  At SFO, just prior to checking in with our 19 bags! We have arrived and after a week and a day, are feeling fairly settled here in Colchester. I’ll briefly rundown the past week as it’s been like a blur and with jet lag and all we’ve done. The flight was un-noteworthy, except that at check-in we were charged 2.5 times what we were expecting to pay for our 4 extra bags. We spoke to the manager at the British Airways counter, a Hispanic woman, and things just seemed to get worse with her. I don’t know if she had it in for us because we work for a Christian organization or what it was, but it was clear that she was going to be antagonistic from the start. At one point, she told us that she thought we should be paying more so that the first class passengers wouldn’t have to pay anything since they had paid so much for their flight tickets! Obviously, we were a little shaken by it all but we did stay calm and let her know that we didn’t much care for what she was saying...

UK - here come the Crawfords! It's our last night in the USA - 19 bags/bins (4 more than our free allowance - yikes!), 5 carry-ons and 5 "personal items" (i.e. backpacks) are all packed and in the car waiting for the trip to the airport. It's hard to imagine the amount of energy, planning and work it's taken to get to where we are here on this final night.  We have thoroughly enjoyed our time of seeing family and many friends! It's impossible to sum up all the emotions of the last 3 months of first moving out of our house in Colorado Springs after packing all our things into storage, then driving out to the West coast for visiting and saying goodbye while planning my next trip to Guinea, and then finally packing our necessities into all these bins and bags.  Just listing it out here makes me tired! :) We have definitely been feeling a bit of deja vu from 4 1/2 years ago when we left for Uganda. The mixed emotions of b...