It is now at the end of our first full day here in Monrovia at Emmanuel and Wintee’s house. After waking up refreshed, somewhat, we got up to a good breakfast and a little time spent with our hosts. I treasure these times in the busyness of a day. After sitting for awhile Wintee and Jenny headed over to the church for an usher’s meeting. The women assume the role of the ushers in their church they went over all of the duties and responsibilities they expect and they encourage them and ask that they remember to pray for the congregation as they serve. One thing Jenny told me the ushers reviewed that I found interesting is that they watch for anyone sleeping and they want to gently and respectfully wake them up. Hmm, I wonder if we should mention this back home. Just knowing this would help keep people alert.

While Jenny was over at the usher’s meeting I sat with a couple of gentlemen, Pastor Paye and Solomon Brown. Pastor Paye is starting a church nearby and he is encouraged by visiting with Pastor Emmanuel. Solomon is a member of LCMI and he definitely knows his Bible. I enjoyed speaking with both of them as the morning wore on. Emmanuel, being his normal busy self, excused himself and went somewhere with the car. As the two men left and Jenny was still in her 3 hour plus meeting, I also had an opportunity to visit with some of the young people around the house. Matthias, one of Emmanuel’s children, was there as well as a young man, Abraham, 23 years old who will be getting married on February 29th. We had a great discussion about Liberia and America and some of the differences in our countries.

When the usher’s meeting ended, Jenny and I then presented many of the things we brought over for Emmanuel and Wintee…seeds and Ovaltine from Mike and Brenda Gustafson, to eyeglasses from Jeremy and Faith to sewing supplies from Bobbijo. It is so nice that many people back home have a part in this visit. We were also able to bring ‘Women of Purpose’ certificates and embossing seals for presentation to WOP graduates. It is a joy to be part of these ministries in a small way.

After a lunch (that I skipped due to a queasy stomach from taking my malaria med too long after breakfast-lesson learned again) we headed out to try and get SIM cards for our phones. The main office for Lonestar, one of their cell companies, was closed for a Saturday so we stopped to have some young men who sell their service on a street office. Basically a table with an umbrella and a bunch of guys carrying wads of Liberian cash. The exchange rate from US $ to Liberian $ has changed from 85 LD to 1 USD in 2012 on my first visit to now the exchange rate being 197 LD to 1 USD. In other words the wads of cash ranging from $5 to $100 don’t amount to a large value. Anyway, this group of young men guessing their age from 20-30 ran alongside our car as they saw us pull up. They then argued on who was there first. After this was established they began the process of popping out our existing SIM cards and getting the new ones registered and installed. This was rather interesting as they had a lot of paperwork required and I had to have my picture taken for each card before they could activate. This took about one hour to process the two phones. Then came the bill…they wanted to charge $15, but our guide, Abraham, said this was too much and he said this was worth $10 plus we’ll buy the scratch cards for minutes on the phone. I was more than willing to accept their first cost, but I initially deferred to Abraham’s judgement. He paid them $10 plus bought 5 one dollar scratch cards. We installed the minutes on the two phones and while we were doing this the group of young men came over to request a couple more dollars for their work. I handed them three more dollars and they proceeded to barter further as they said they have 5 of them so how about $2 more. I thoroughly enjoyed these guys as they did a good job and I wanted to recognize this on my payment. I decided to have a little fun with them like Monty Hall on ‘Let’s Make a Deal’ (for you young people look that up on YouTube). I asked the lead guy if he was willing to trade what he had in his hand for what I had in my front pocket. He was hesitant at first but the others were more than willing to chance it. He held $13 in his hand and I pulled out a $20 bill. They were pleased with their negotiations. In the end I gave him $20 with thanks since they did a good job. The only thing I didn’t realize is that $1 scratch cards do not give you much data. When turning on my data I received a couple of pictures from Jono and Hanna in our group family text. These pictures used up one of the dollars’ data right away. I enquired of Abraham on whether there are other options for data with this carrier. He said at the main office they have an infinity card which offers unlimited data and calling for one month for $27 or somewhere around that cost. We plan on going to the main office on Monday to do this. So, long story longer, we have ‘limited’ data hopefully enough to post this blog. We should be back online full time on Monday. It is surprising how much we rely on data for contact with others.

When we got home from our phone experience Jenny went to rest as we are still feeling the effects of the lack of sleep on the trip over. She ended up staying in bed and we are currently settling in for the night. I, meanwhile, sat with Emmanuel and a few other men in the church for a coffee meeting. They try to meet once a week, review some Scripture, discuss and then have coffee and a time to visit. Reminded me of our Discipleship Hour at CBC. Anyway we had some great discussions and I am getting to know more of the men in the church.

One thing I forgot to mention is a prayer request for Becky Cooper. She is the widow of Delt Cooper who passed away in December. She shared some of the struggles of being alone. She has four children, ages 19, 17, 11 and 6 years old. She has one more year of schooling in nursing to graduate. She would have completed already, but she took the past year off to care for Delt during his illness. Now it is more difficult to attend nursing school due to finances. Please pray for her as she deals with the loss of her husband as well as her plans for future care of her family. We were able to pray with her as she and Jenny shared tears together. I’m so thankful for my caring wife in cases like this. I do want to encourage Jeriann back home who is dealing with a similar loss. Becky was encouraged by her story and her understanding that God is good, all the time.

I don’t mean to bounce around with details from our day, but there is so much new information that it’s easy to overlook a discussion or experience. With that I want to share the struggles that Liberian’s are facing above the normal ones. Gasoline is normally between $4-$5 a gallon. For some reason the gas prices rose to currently $6.35 / gallon with the fear that gas supplies are low. There was one time recently that all the stations ran out of gasoline. While driving to get our phone cards we witnessed lines of cars at all gas stations. Jenny made the comment about them running out of gas while waiting in line. Just after she said this we witnessed this as one car had people pushing the car as the line inched forward. We noticed another man carrying a plate of food he got from someone and he was walking to get back in his car to wait in line. That’s how slow some of the lines are moving. Emmanuel’s cars are diesel which is more expensive at $7.35 / gallon, but more available without the lines. The discussions we have inevitably touch on this new problem they face as a country.

Overall it was a good day and we look forward to worshiping at LCMI tomorrow. Hopefully we can begin to share more pictures after we upgrade our cell service. Good night to all. We hope you enjoy our account of the experiences we have in beautiful Liberia.

Anytime you travel, especially abroad, the travel days merge into a confusion of time.

Jenny and I left Chicago on time yesterday evening with an uneventful flight to Brussels, Belgium where we arrived at 9:00 a.m. or so. Wait, was it 9:00 or was it 2:00 a.m. (central time)? After waiting a few hours in Brussels we boarded our plane for Monrovia via Freetown, Sierra Leone. As I type in this portion of our experience we are sitting on the tarmac in Freetown waiting for clearance to takeoff. The next flight is about one hour and then through Liberian customs and then meet Emmanuel for the ride back to his home, about an hour from the airport. We land at around 8:10 p.m. Monrovia time or 2:10 p.m. central. Again, it takes a couple of looks at the world clock on my phone to keep up with the current time zone we are in.

Airborne now on our way. It’s been a great travel day, but we are looking forward to some sleep, even at the early time back home.

We thank God for His watching over us and for the safe travel and interesting people we’ve already met.

Here now with Emmanuel.

It is very humbling to realize we are such a small part of God’s big world. Today marks a special day for Jenny and me as we begin a journey back to Liberia, West Africa. We feel very blessed to be able to travel back to a country that is very dear to us. The people of Liberia, especially the friends we’ve made over our past visits, are a huge part of our lives.

We appreciate Pastor Emmanuel and his wife, Mother Wintee, as they open their home for our visit.

Jenny and I leave in four hours +/- as we travel through Belgium on our way to Monrovia, Liberia. Upon our scheduled arrival tomorrow evening at 8:10 p.m. local time we begin the three weeks with our friends that we pray God will use us for His glory.

Emmanuel has informed me that on Saturday morning at 10:00 a.m. we will be welcomed officially by LCMI church with a brief welcome service. He also informed me today that he has four young couples that he wants me to aid in pre-marital counseling. He figures that as Jenny and I have so many years together we must have some wisdom to offer. My advice, recognize your own failings and not your spouses. We’ll see how that goes. Emmanuel has a way of hitting the ground running if you’re willing to serve. We appreciate his love for service as well.

We don’t know what adventures we will face, nor what hardships may come, but we leave all in the hands of God who created us to serve Him. We hope to share our experience on this blog. We ask that you pray for us and Mike McMahon, who will be joining us one week after we get started. I look forward to sharing these experiences with Mike. He is a great friend and we thank Kim, his wife, for sharing him in service to the Liberian people.

We already had a good start to today with a visit with our dear daughter, Sarah. We had a good breakfast before she dropped us off at the airport.

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God bless and bring on Liberia.

So many things to write about. So little time available. We had a great time and some day I’ll update the final week.

We just arrived back in the states and we thank God for a great trip and we thank Jessica and Brandon for being such good hosts.

As I sit by a cascade of waterfalls on Friday afternoon I will catch up on our activities from Thursday.

As our day at Thoo Mwee Khee school wasn’t going to start until after lunch Kevin and I decided to walk again to school and the girls would be picked up by Brandon at lunchtime.

Kevin and I wanted to get some more hardware for another tire swing. We thought we saw a shop that sold some u-bolts we could use. As we walked we found a hardware shop of sorts and they did have what we were looking for. We were able to put together another tire swing just off the soccer field.

The kids put this to use right away.

Today we were attending Jessica’s class with the first and second year students. The kids assignment was to interview each one of us (me, Jenny, Kevin and Sherry). They would have 10 minutes to interview each of us and then to continue their assignment they have to write a summary report on each person. Their questions ranged from our names, age, number of children, etc. to the funny ones asking if Teacher Jessica was ever naughty as a child, how many boyfriends did Jessica have in her life to even asking how we would feel if Jessica (or Brandon) married a Karen person. We had lots of fun doing this. We went through 2 different periods of this.

Afterwards we left and came to this same waterfalls I am sitting at now to look around. It is just beautiful here. I decided to walk here today as it’s only a mile or two from our hotel.

Today we had to get up early to go and listen, along with the whole BLA student body, about different teams that went back to villages in Karen state for an internship or student teaching. They send the second year students on this internship. There were 23 different pairs or teams that went back to Burma, into villages to help in any way they could with teaching, sports camps or cleanup in the villages. What a great experience this gave the students. We only got about halfway through the teams when we ran out of time and left for lunch. The others will have to go at a later date. Friday’s are Karen dress day so I took a picture of Jessica and Brandon showing off their Karen clothes.

Today is Brandon’s birthday so we are headed back to the school later this afternoon for supper. The Karen tradition is for the birthday person to feed others on their day so Kevin and Sherry are having the cooking team put together a meal for the 400 or so people on campus and in the dorms. Reminds me of when the Liberian team fed the churches in our Liberian version of the potluck we did. It should be interesting.

Tomorrow we have to leave around 8:00 a.m. as Brandon and Jessica are taking 12 or so students to Chiang Mai for some competitions. Jessica and Brandon are always running. I’m glad they’re young enough to handle it. Kevin, Sherry, Jenny and I will follow in another vehicle and drive the 6-8 hours to Chiang Mai. After dropping the students off we will look around Chiang Mai and spend the night up there. We will travel back on Sunday after church somewhere and stay another night away, possibly in Mae Sott. We’ll see where we end up.

Not sure when I’ll update next. Until then…

How quickly time goes when you’re busy. I have 2 days of activities to write about.

On Wednesday, the 23rd, Kevin, Sherry and I traveled with Pastor Peacefully to Burma to purchase a chainsaw for the Karen people. When Peacefully visited the states he liked Kevin’s lumber cutter attachment for the chainsaw so much because they can not only clear trees, but they can produce lumber for building from the trees with this. Anyway, Kevin and Sherry wanted to help them get this so we rode along to Burma to pick out the chainsaw to go with the lumber attachment. They don’t sell larger chainsaws in Thailand because there has been too much tree harvesting without good forest management. This saw will be used in Karen State which is in Burma. We had no idea on brand of saw available or what it would be like.

We drove to Mae Sott where they have the normal border crossing at the bridge into Burma. We had to pay 500 baht to get a one day visa at the border. This is just under $17 US. When we got to the bridge we weren’t sure (we didn’t ask exactly what we were doing as we were just tagging along) how things would work. After walking and going to the border control we were allowed to walk across the bridge to Burma. Jenny had decided not to go since we had done a lot of walking on previous days. She was happy she didn’t go when she heard how much we had to walk again. We had to leave our passport with border control in Burma on arrival. Once we paid our fee, gave them our passport and met back with Peacefully he says to me, ‘We have a little problem.’ Turns our he forgot to have the Thai border control stamp his passport so he could enter (different process for him since he’s a Burmese and Thai citizen). He informs us that he has to walk back across the bridge, leaving Kevin, Sherry and me in Burma by ourselves and with our passports in the hands of the border control. It sounds worse than it is since we now see how things work, but we initially teased Peacefully that he was planning on dumping us off in Burma and leaving us there.

We wandered down the street past all the money changers and Kevin even converted some Thai money into Burmese money. I think it was 60 baht ($2 US) and he got just over 2800 Burmese dollars in return. I don’t know what they call it. We didn’t have to wait long and Peacefully came back from across the bridge and we went to meet a guy about the chainsaw. Here is the streets of Burma at the border.

When we got to the ‘hardware’ store we found out the chainsaw for sale is a Stihl and one of the biggest they make. We were surprised and happy because we are so familiar with that brand.

They started the saw up and Peacefully made the deal and his friend on the Burma side would take the chainsaw with him.

We then retrieved our passports, walked back across the bridge and headed back to Thoo Mwee Khee school.

Since it was Wednesday we headed to church at the school where the students handle the Wednesday service and they do it in English. It was really neat to see that. A young man preached in English and they had a Karen interpreter repeat in Karen. Next week we will all be responsible for this service. I’m looking forward to that also.

As always here, every day tired us out and we sleep well.

I’ll catch up on yesterday’s adventure later.

This post covers yesterday with getting into part of today.

Yesterday, the 22nd, we were picked up to go to Thoo Mwee Key school in the morning. We had plans to visit Brandon’s speaking class again. We were able to sit in on 3-4 of his classes as they continued with the theme of who do you admire the most in your life.

As we sat and listened to their stories of their mother’s or father’s or grand parents we found ourselves fascinated by their experiences in such a relatively short life. Here were these young boys and girls, around 18-20 years of age, having experiences that sound both painful emotionally and difficult due to poverty in many cases, knowing that in my life I was very blessed to avoid such difficult times. Some stories made us laugh and some definitely tugged at our heart as they shared their story of fleeing from the soldiers or how their Mom and/or Dad sacrificed to send them to school. They were telling us all of this in English, their 2nd or 3rd language. To me that was impressive on what they already achieved.

After sitting in on those classes we visited for awhile and Kevin showed Pastor Peacefully all of the tools he brought over for their use. Peacefully was extremely grateful for these as they are cordless tools that will be put to good use over here.

We, of course, played with the kids and babies around. Jenny even held a (flea infested) puppy for awhile. (She did put him down once she realized the fleas were all over him).

While we were visiting I received a call from Pastor Emmanuel Jonah of Liberia. He wanted to talk with me before he headed home. I was able to video chat with him and show him around Thoo Mwee Key school. What a treat to show our Liberian friend around a school in Thailand that reminds me of Liberia in many ways. He enjoyed seeing how their school is laid out. He is now headed back to Liberia himself and I know he is excited to see his family again.

After visiting we headed out for supper where Jenny and I tried a traditional Thai meal (can’t remember the name) and we both put a little too much chili’s on it. We both experienced the spice of Thai life last night. It was very good though. Kevin and Sherry chose the milder route for supper with fried rice and chicken. After we ate we headed back to our hotel and we all called it an early night. Even though we just sat in the classes the heat seemed to make us a little more tired. I know back home they aren’t having our heat struggles.

Well, I was going to get into today’s adventure, but I’ll post this and try and finish today’s after our day ends.

Today we got a later start from our hotel and we decided to walk the 2.9 miles to Thoo Mwee Khee school. Our path took us through Phop Phra as we wound our way through the side roads and along the main road. There were so many sights and shops to see as we walked. Many stores selling sundries and food items all along the way. Our stop was a familiar name to most Americans: 7-Eleven (they are all over Thailand). We cooled down with a drink and sat and rested awhile. This was just over halfway.

Once we got to the school we were able to find Jessica in the middle of teaching one of her classes.

We then went to one of Brandon’s classes where he was teaching the post 10 students better ways of teaching. They included us in there practical study. We really enjoyed this. After that we went to a speaking class to listen to students give a 2-3 minute speech on ‘Who do you admire the most in your life?’ Many of the students included a mother or teacher as that person. Our presence served as a little more intimidating as they didn’t only have their classmates, but a few more strangers. Brandon was happy we could give them that experience. We will go to school for more of this tomorrow.

After an evening meal that Sherry made at Pastor Peacefully’s home (Kevin and I put together a tire swing which we will put up later this week) we headed over to the community hall for a concert of sorts with a visiting Korean team and some of the Karen students. That was quite an experience as well. Now we are home after a long day with a pickup call for 9:15 tomorrow morning to head back to school.

We are so pleased to hear of CBC’s special offering to raise some money for a new swing set. The younger children only have this right now.

With the help of their generous gift we plan to purchase more functional and much larger playground equipment for the use by the younger primary students who live in the dormitories.

Until tomorrow…

Not much time to write this morning. We had a busy day, touring the rest of the school in the morning, having a greater appreciation for what Brandon and Jessica do here and how they live. What we take for granted is special things for them. A shower that doesn’t consist of a bucket of water with a dipper and a semi warm shower available in our hotel.

We traveled, yes we got back in the vehicle, to Mae Sott to go to a ‘lumber yard’ to find some wood to build a swing set for the school. After stops at 3 lumber yards we gave up on finding lumber. We resorted to pictures of 2×4’s to ask for them. Even Brandon, who speaks Thai some had trouble communicating what lumber we were looking for. We did find one yard that has one bundle of crooked lumber, not suitable for what we were looking for.

We may design a steel frame and find a local shop to build it, but that will be another day to look into things.

We ended our day by going out for pizza in Mae Sott which was very good. The contrast in lifestyles over here is so interesting. We can go out for pizza, but many will sleep, like Jessica and Brandon, on a mat on a floor that you can see through the floor boards to the dirt below.

Today we are heading to church to experience worshiping the same God in a different language.

I’ll write more later. Our chariot awaits.

After a long 2 days of travel we are waking up refreshed from a good night sleep. We are staying at a hotel that is like individual bungalows. We have air, WiFi, tv (all Thai) and more importantly western toilets. It really is beautiful.

Today we will travel to Mae Sott to look into lumber and supplies for a playground set for the younger kids at Thoo Mwee Key school. We’ll see how the day progresses. We are loving the experience already. More later.