Moving..

Rich and I have been very busy moving the last couple days. We were blessed to be able to spend a few days with Chris and Lindy but now we are living in our new house. It has taken some time getting everything that we need for our house. Things in Kenya take longer and are more complicated than in the US. Moving is no exception. We have had to arrange a truck so that we can get some furniture and bigger items. The school has blessed us with the use of the school truck and with some major appliances. Moving has been fun but it takes a lot of time and money when you set up a new house. It is nice to not be living our of bags, but I still don't know where everything is, that will take some time.

Next week I will be working on arranging my classroom. I have a lot of work to do in there. I wanted to get my house set up before the classroom. Rich is going to help me to move furniture because I can not move it myself. I brought some items from home to decorate and make the classroom look nice. I am excited to get everything settled and for the school year to begin. I think that this year is going to be great!

Back in Kenya!

We are back in Kenya! We arrived late last night and woke up at 5 in the morning wide awake. Our bodies and systems are out of whack with the ten hour time difference. We still "hit the ground running" today. We are going to be moving into our new place tomorrow. We also went to our school and made it up to Huruma today. It is really nice being back and being around the children again. Please pray for us and that our adjustment would go smoothly.

London

We had a 24-hr. layover in London so we were able to get into the city and see several places. We were able to catch the Underground to the Picadilly Circus. We then walked over to Buckingham Palace, Westminister Cathedral, and then went over to the Thames River. London was beautiful and we were happy to be there, even if it was just for a day.

Leaving for Kenya...

We are leaving in a few hours for Kenya. We have an almost 24 hour layover in London so we will be able to go into downtown, see a few things, and stay the night. We land in Nairobi Thursday evening. Please keep us in prayer as we go.

2 Day Honeymoon

Because we had to leave the day after our wedding for Pre-Field Orientation in Mississippi, we never had a chance to have a honeymoon.

A friend of ours has a friend who said we were welcome to stay at their condo in Sedona for however long we wanted. Because we are leaving next Tuesday for Kenya, we knew that if we stayed longer than a couple of days, neither one of us would enjoy it because we would be thinking of the hundred things we had to get done before we left.

We drove the two hours from Phoenix to Sedona and had a nice time. Instead of just hanging out in Sedona, we decided to go on up to the Grand Canyon since it is only another hundred miles from Sedona.

We know we will be able to do more in the future in terms of maybe a longer honeymoon, but we wanted to try to take advantage of an opportunity God gave us before we left. Please continue to pray for us as we leave for two years next Tuesday (7/21).

The 4th of July

I realize it's over a week past the 4th of July, but I wanted to include a couple of pictures of Shauna and I with my family over that weekend. We had completed orientation Friday morning, the 3rd, and then drove across the state to Chattanooga the same day.

Having grown up on the lake in Chattanooga, we went straight to the river Friday and then spent all Saturday as well. It was really great to have some relaxing time after almost two weeks of orientation in Mississippi. It was also good to spend time with family.We ended up watching fireworks from our boat. For a number of years my family has been going up to a place called Soddy Lake to watch fireworks from the water. There were around 100 boats anchored in this one location to watch the fireworks. My family has alot of friends on the water and we were tied up to about 10 boats and everyone would walk from one boat to another visiting.

We have yet to have a honeymoon so we are leaving tomorrow morning (Monday the 13th) for Sedona for a couple of days and will probably drive up to the Grand Canyon on Wednesday for the day since it is only another 125 miles. Please keep us in prayer. We will be leaving for Kenya in 9 days.

Pre-Field Orientation (PFO)

The day after our wedding (literally!) we flew out to Mississippi where we had almost two weeks of pre-field orientation. Having already been in Kenya for a while, we had a good foundation of what living cross-culturally looks like, but the orientation gave us alot of valuable information and resources to help us live more successfully in Kenya. There were over 200 missionaries that are going to 15 different countries at the orientation.

There are 13 of us that are headed to Kenya to perform various roles at West Nairobi School. They are a really great group of people and this is a picture of us, with the director and his wife, at lunch one day.

In addition to many lectures, we were broken up into small groups for some of our sessions and this is our small group. The facilitator (Murrell) has been in Korea for a number of years. The couple on the right (Matthew and Stacy) are headed to Seoul, Korea and the other couple (Scott and Laura) are headed to Indonesia. We really enjoyed meeting and being able to hang out with so many others who are going all over the world through this mission organization. We enjoyed our time in Mississippi, but are looking forward to some downtime with just the two of us before leaving for Kenya on July 21.