Countdown

Four months down, five days to go: The current mission team leaves for Lui next Saturday. Well, sort of. Jim, Mary, and I are flying out of Lambert St. Louis Saturday. There is a diocesan send-off at 12:15 in the airport chapel -- come if you can and want to. Susan is leaving from New York Sunday night. We'll all rendezvous in Kampala and then fly into Mundri, the closest airstrip to Lui, on Tuesday, May 19th.

Getting a mission together is quite a project. The logistical stuff is overwhelming -- plane tickets for 4 on a number of commercial flights and then the MAF flight into Sudan. Uganda and Sudan visas for 4. Lodgings in Kampala. Transportation in and out of Entebbe airport. Making sure everyone gets their antimalarial meds and has all their shots. Asking the diocesan office to wire money here and there for this and that.

Then there are the negotiations with our Moru friends. Where will we go, what will we do, how much will it cost? This trip -- as far as we know right now -- we will be putting on three conferences of two days each: one on contemporary society (with an HIV/AIDS component) for pastors, another with similar content for youth, and one on adult education for teachers of adults. In between conferences, we (or at least I) will travel to Kediba to see the new grinding mill funded by a grant from the United Thank Offering (Thank you, UTO!) and the three new wells that Sumadhura is -- I hope -- just finishing up. And we will go to church. I'm excited to realize we'll be there for Pentecost.

I do plan to blog from Lui if in fact the VSAT system we have contracted for is installed this week, and I believe that Mary will be blogging from Lui Notes. If you want shorter bits of news and updates, you can follow me on Twitter; I will try to remember to include the hash tag #lui in my tweets. Please pray for our team and for our hosts!