Jim and Mary in Schipol

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And we're off

Jim, Mary, and I are sitting in Amsterdam strategizing how we can discuss certain aspects of contemporary culture with the pastors in Lui.

So far the flights have been relatively uneventful, but we had a little excitement on the last flight when the flight attendants said something like the famous "Is there a doctor in the house?" Jim went to help out and spent a few minutes assessing the situation. The passenger in distress turned out to be fine, thank goodness, and the whole episode brought some interest to the long boring middle part of the flight. That got us into a fun conversation with the man in front of us, which helped us articulate what we're doing on this trip. An unexpected nice launch for the mission!
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Lui's New Website

I'm working on Lui's new website created by Chris in the Diocese of Bradford in England. I hope to sit with Bishop Bullen, Vasco, and Gordon next week and really decide what should go there, and actually work on it with them, with the idea of turning it over to them when they are comfortable with it.

For now I am just trying to put something there to see if I can. The photo-adding feature only allows me to put in a URL for a photo, so I am really writing this post for the purpose of adding the photos I want on that website. I'll post the URL for the website here when I find out if I can actually make something happen.

Great thanks (as Keith Olbermann likes to say) to Chris for building Lui a website!

p.s. Here's the website: www.lui.anglican.org. I was able to add text but the photos didn't upload. I'll figure it out...

The Upcoming Mission -- After May

If you are thinking about applying to go to Lui, you might like advance notice that the next mission will probably be the last week of November (yes, Thanksgiving) and the first week of December, pending approval by Bishop Bullen. One aim of the trip will be to carry out an art project that has long been a dream of Anne Kelsey. More to come on all that, but keep it in mind!

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!

A Little Status Report on the May Trip

Taking a team to Sudan is an amazingly complicated thing, an intricate dance of people's schedules and the days planes fly and the various visas required and the cost of room and board, not to mention vaccinations and antimalarial meds and nets, what's acceptable to wear, what you might need for the conferences you think you're doing while there (and what you might need for the things they won't ask you to do till you get there), and how many kilograms you can take on the carefully weighted 10-seater for the final leg.

Here's the status of the current project: We have plane tickets to and from Kampala and arrangements for the flights into Sudan from there. We have reservations at the MAF guesthouse in Kampala going and coming, and I have almost everything I need to send off for Ugandan and Sudanese visas. One of the things I need is an official invitation to go to Sudan (for the South Sudan visas), and our friends in Lui don't have Internet right now, so that's going to be a little tricky to get. But I'm working on it. And I have ordered water filters. Still to do: buy some time on our Thuraya. I don't know why everyone calls it a Thuraya; I guess it's like saying my BlackBerry or my iPhone and just about that cool if you're in Sudan. Still to do: have the big team meeting in which we kind of figure out everything.

Here's why we're going, a reminder to myself in this bogged-down moment:

Off Again

We are off and running with preparations for the May trip to Lui. The Diocese of Missouri is sending four of us -- a doctor who specializes in infectious diseases, a deacon who is also a parish nurse, a specialist in adult reading with lots of teaching and international experience, and me. We have reservations on our MAF flights into Mundri and at the MAF guesthouse going and coming. I still have lots of arrangements to make, though, and the missioners have immunizations to get, equipment to buy, funds to raise, and conferences to plan. Please keep us all in your prayers!

Vasco confirmed by phone the other day that the Diocese of Lui still wants us to spend time with the pastors discussing contemporary society and teaching English, work with the adult ed teachers on instructional strategies for native-language literacy and English, and talk with groups about HIV/AIDS. He also confirmed that Morris will be teaching us Moru every day while we're there. I'll be traveling to see the UTO-funded grinding mill, which has now actually reached Kediba, and to visit the three new wells that should be drilled by then.

I have also spoken with Stephen, who arrived in Lui Diocese along with the grinding mill this week. He sounded happy to be home.

I hope I will be able to blog from Lui again. Right now they don't have Internet because the company we had been using moved their satellite.