Please God, not Africa!

It's been another busy week in Mango.  And I have lots of photos to share, showing you the ins and outs of life here.... Construction update: I mean, really, that's why we're here in the first place so it seems a pretty good place to start.  Remember that the plan is for Nate to help build 2 (or possibly 3) homes for doctors who will be arriving to work at the Hospital of Hope full time.  When we arrived in November, House #1 was simply a foundation.  Here it is today - I just took this photo this afternoon.  Now that looks like a house! The next thing to go on would be roof trusses. The trusses are almost complete (they build them here) and then they'll put them up. After that, roof steel goes on, interior walls get built and so on.  There is a container coming from the USA with most of the construction material required to continue building the house - the good news is that this container is supposed to arrive this week!  Jus...

I have to admit that Christmas here is just plain weird. I mean, we're Canadian, right?  So for us, the Christmas season is evidenced by things like cold, snow, candles, fire in the fireplace, cozy blankets, hot chocolate, lights, trees... Celebrating Christmas with the heavy dust of Harmattan falling from the sky rather than snow, and sweating buckets rather than shivering....well, it didn't seem very Christmas-y. But it was a lovely Christmas and I mean that.  We enjoyed many festive events in the days leading up to Christmas: a Christmas movie night, Christmas cookie delivery and carollers (seriously, a group of young missionaries knocked on our gate and serenaded us with carols), a children's Christmas play written by our own MK teachers, and more. Oh Christmas tree. When I was in Lome in early December, I found a little tree.  It took about 4 minutes to decorate it, but with that and some Christmas music playing, it was beginning to feel a little like Chris...

We’ve been in Togo for exactly one month today.   And you know what’s even crazier than that?   It’s exactly 4 years ago tomorrow that Kylie hurt her foot – and to think of all that happened after December 16, 2012 and now, here we are, by God’s grace, back in Togo and Kylie is healed.   How incredible to look back along the path and see how God worked on our behalf!   We weren’t sure we’d ever be able to come back here and look – here we are. So it’s been a quite a month.   Man, if you could just pop over for a cup of coffee I could tell you story after story, some funny, some not-so-much.   Since you likely aren’t popping over and I don’t drink coffee anyhow, let me tell you a couple… Furniture Shopping in the Middle of the Night Our house here in Togo is great.   It has three bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a living/dining area and a kitchen.   I’ll show you photos some day so you get an idea of what it’s like. The one thing we don’t ha...

We made it! We're here and we're settling and things are good. Here's what's been going on since we left Canada last week... We left London on Monday morning after a very difficult good-bye.  It was hard.  Really hard.  We took at bus to the Toronto airport and from there flew to Paris, then from Paris to Niger, then Niger to Togo.  Amazingly, our trip was completely uneventful. Everything was smooth sailing, even all 18 of our bags and rubbermaid totes made it.  We were very grateful - and still are. We arrived in Lome as very weary travellers but were greeted at the airport by our dear friend and co-worker, Anna.  She and Parico, our Togolese driver, helped us get all our stuff into the van and took us to the Southern Baptist Seminary compound to stay in their guest house.  Sweet Anna had pizza and chips and cold drinks waiting for us when we arrived. The next morning we began our shopping in Lome.  This is the capital of Togo and has ...

Two weeks from today we'll be landing in Lome  - it's so hard to believe that we're that close! Here's where we're at: 1. God has supplied 100% of our monthly support and in fact, we are now over-supported!  Amazing.  Thank you to all of you who have generously and sacrificially supported us - we are so grateful! 2. We've moved out of our house.  We moved out last Thursday and our renter moved in the next morning.  She is a lovely woman who intends to stay for the full 2 years - what an answer to prayer! 3. We received our travel visas!  We're all good to enter the country. 4. We are living with my parents - bless them! It's not like seven people have moved in with the two of them and totally taken over their entire house or anything. We're so grateful to be able to bunk with them for these 2 weeks and finish up some of the details and errands before we go. 5. Flights are booked and our Robert Q shuttle comes to pick us at my parents hous...

It's October the 18th and we leave in less than a month! Our tickets are booked, our house is a mess, and I think I might be losing my mind. This is where we are attempting to do school. Kind of. We move out of our house on October 27th which means we have 9 days to get MUCHO work done.  You can see from the above photo that the packing is in process but I'm not sure the word PROGRESS is an apt description of how we're doing right now. One of those "one step forward, two steps back" things.   We do have tickets booked to fly out on November 14th.  Super exciting and crazy at the same time.  I can't believe we'll be in Togo a month from now. I know these next few weeks are going to fly by. Please pray for us as we try to complete the long list of things that need to be done before we go.  From travel visas (which are in process) to moving in with my parents (Bless them!!), there is still a lot, a lot, a lot to be accomplished. Okay - shor...

Three things to share with you: 1. The packing has started.  Our house is a mess with boxes and totes everywhere. We signed the lease for our house and we move out on October 27th.  That's this month!  Eek! 2. The tickets are actually booked.  We fly out on Monday, November 14th at 6:35 pm from Toronto and land in Lome on November 15th at 6:10 pm (Lome time).  That's about six weeks away! 3. Support is at 91% today.  AMAZING!!  We have about $600 per month left to raise to be fully supported.  Please pray with us that this final amount comes in BEFORE November 14th. We trust that God will provide. This is starting to be really real. I was filling out all the applications for our visas today and it's crazy to think that in a few weeks, we'll actually be back in Mango. It's exciting and scary, happy and sad, good and hard all at the same time. Ugh - these crazy conflicting emotions! You want to know how you can pray for us?  I'm so gl...