posted by Jesse on Friday, October 24, 2008 at 11:02 pm
OK, this is going to be a real quick one. We’re in the middle of packing up our apartment and tomorrow we’re having an open house where all our friends can come over to say goodbye and pick through all the miscellaneous stuff we’re leaving behind.
Sunday evening I’ll be presenting our ministry (in French, of course) at our church. Then, Monday morning we leave! As you can imagine, we’re very tired of packing, but glad to be almost done.
One thought that continues to run through my mind as we sort through all our stuff, throwing away or giving away way more than half of it, is: How could a missionary be a packrat? Every family has one; the person who holds on to everything just in case he might use it some day. If a missionary were like that it would make life very difficult!
Please keep us in prayer as we go through this very busy weekend and then start our trip on Monday. Hopefully I will be able to write something from our first stop in Maine to let you know how it’s going.
posted by Jesse on Monday, October 13, 2008 at 2:02 pm
We’ve been staying awefully busy in the past week. The biggest things we’ve got on our plate at the moment are:
Getting ready to move back to Oregon
Sorting through what to bring back and what to give away (we’re attempting to only bring back what we can fit in our van!)
Planning the trip back & figuring out where we’re staying along the way. This will be my sixth coast-to-coast drive and believe it or not I’m actually really looking forward to it. I love to travel and see new places, so for me it’s a big adventure! We’ll be taking our time going back since we don’t want to repeat the insanity of the trip to Québec last May (four nights, five days, average of 13 of drive time per day!)
Making arrangements for shipping a container to Togo.
I’ve found a company who works specifically with missionaries and they’ve been doing so for 20 years. They have a great system set up where we just ship all our personal belongings to them in Missouri by truck, then they will: make appliance & furniture purchases for us, pack the container for us, ship it, and take care of all the paperwork. I’m in the process of getting a price quote from them and another company as well.
Finding a vehicle.
I have been emailing back and forth with a guy from MATS International and it looks like we’ll be able to get a ‘99-’04 Land Cruiser shipped from Japan with less than 30k miles for under $20,000. That is a bargain compared to what we can find in Togo!
Please keep all these things in prayer, and we will be keeping you up to date with everything else that’s going on in the next several weeks and months.
posted by Jesse on Tuesday, October 7, 2008 at 10:05 pm
A couple days ago, I briefly started looking around at airline tickets to Togo. Since we’re planning to leave around the end of January, I figured that we should probably order them pretty soon. So, after a bit of looking around I decided that it would be much cheaper to just swim. The cheapest price I was finding from Portland, OR to Lomé, Togo was around $6,500!!! That was the amount we have been expecting all along, but it still is very shocking to imagine spending that much on three plane tickets.
That very same evening, I got an unexpected call from J.J. Alderman who is one of the missionaries we will be working with. He mentioned that it’s sometimes possible to save some money by flying into Accra, Ghana and crossing over the border into Togo.
Anything sounded better than $6,500 so I decided to take a look at tickets to Togo. At first look, all I found were prices similar to those going to Togo. Then I happened to stumbled across a website that serves as a travel agency for missionaries. I did a quick search and couldn’t believe my eyes. Surely it must be an error, I thought to myself. It was listing a price of a little over $800 per ticket! I thought it couldn’t be true, so I went to another travel website, did a search, and sure enough it found a similar price, but with the indication “Special Fare” next to it. That same site also listed non-special fare tickets at over $2,000 per ticket, so I knew that this lower fare was probably just a limited-time deal from one particular airline (United). So, going back to the missionary travel site, I saw that if you contact them directly with your desired itinerary they can sometimes find better prices. So, that’s exactly what I did.
To make this long story just a little bit not-so-long, I’ll summarize from here:
We bought our tickets at $2,289!
We saved over $4,000!
Praise God! Of course, we really don’t believe in coincidences and we know that it was all because of God that we found these tickets at such a good price. We’re leaving on February 3rd, 2009 so it is now officially official! For the past few days, we have been elated to finally have a departure date and we can’t stop talking about it!
Thanks for continuing to pray for us as we get ready for our big journey!
posted by Jesse on Friday, October 3, 2008 at 10:53 pm
A couple months ago, Tiffany started Kindergarten with Joshua and they have both been working very hard. One part of the morning routine is to say the Pledge of Allegiance with the small paper crayon-colored American flag hanging on the schoolroom wall. It was already extremely cute to hear him mispronounce some of the big words which he is incapable of defining, but when he recently lost his first tooth upper tooth (fifth overall) it became even cuter. Here’s a short video of his Pwedge of Allegianthe.
posted by Jesse on Thursday, October 2, 2008 at 9:13 pm
Only 24 days left! We can hardly believe that our time in language school is almost over. We are definitely experiencing a mixture of emotions, both sadness of leaving Québec and all of our friends here, and excitement for what lies ahead.
We’ve been extremely busy over the last several weeks with French, preparations for leaving, and some big ministry projects as well, which explains the complete lack of blog posts lately.
We’d like to ask you to pray for us over the next few weeks. We’ll be taking care of the myriad of things that need to be done before leaving, then we’ll be driving across the country starting on the 27th. Just please pray that God will give us wisdom in making all the important decisions that we have coming up related to getting to Togo at the end of January. We really appreciate all of you who keep up with what’s going on and pray for us!
