Settling In

We're all unpacked & starting into a routine now. Most of us are still waking up at the crack of dawn (the rooster down the road doesn't help with that) but that makes it easier to get up for early classes.

The weather here has been really very pleasant. It is the dry season & they are going from winter into summer. It is nice & cool in the mornings, then heats up quickly when the sun comes out & then cools off again in the evenings. There is a light breeze blowing most of the time, so it is pretty nice. It will start heating up soon & then the rainy season starts in November. Everything here is dry & brown (although a few things are beginning their spring blooming) since they have not seen a drop of water since March. That means we must be very careful of our water usage & not waste a drop!!

One interesting thing we have here are wall spiders!! They are big flat brown spiders that sit up on the wall every evening. They tell us not to kill them as they are our friends - they eat Mosquitos!! I guess I'll put up with them as long as they stay in their area & not mine!






We had our first official Zambian meal today: Nshima (a corn meal paste), rice, boiled chicken in tomato & cooked cabbage. It was actually pretty good. Our cook, Leonard, does a great job! He is cooking mostly western foods & has made us pizza, fried chicken w/ mashed potatoes, pancakes, biscuits, cookies, & several cakes!! He & a helper cook 3 meals a day for 30 people - no small job! I have a feeling I'm not going to lose any of the weight I was hoping to on this trip!

I am still having difficulty getting pictures on my slide show. I may have to investigate another way to do pictures. Hopefully, I'll fix it soon as I want you to see for yourself what we're doing!

Zambia - Our home away from Home

We arrived safely in Zambia after a LONG journey. We left at 4 a.m. on Friday & arrived at Livingston around 2:00 p.m. on Sunday afternoon. We had an overnight stay in Johannasburg where we discovered that 8 of our bags had not made it there with us! After trying to figure out which bags were missing - which was not easy as the airline person in Little Rock had just slapped tags on the bags - not matching them with the names on the bags - we finally determined which ones were missing. THEN we had a bout with the customs agent who wanted to confiscate our trunks because we had brought medicines & med supplies into their country. After all kinds of cajoling, he finally agreed to let us pass as we were leaving again the next morning. We finally climbed in bed at 1:00 am that night.

Upon our arrival in Livingston, we again had customs difficulties with the trunks of supplies & it took another 2 hours to secure an agent to negotiate for us. They did (thankfully) agree to let us take the trunks on & they would finish with the paperwork & let us pay later!! We arrived at our home away from home, Namwianga Mission, 2 hours later - about dinner time. We enjoyed a delicious dinner of pizza, garlic bread, & cake! Everyone fell in bed that night!

Vann & I & the girls are sharing a 4 bedroom house w/ 8 other female students. Thankfully, there are 2 full & 4 - half baths in this house! It is a really neat place with concrete & tile floors, & a hugely tall ceiling w/ a straw roof. The walls don't go to the ceiling, so it's all open, but shaped in a U-shape, so at least you can't hear a lot going on in the other wing. There's a large living/dining/kitchen area, so it's become the social - hang out place!!

Our first morning up, everyone woke up around 5 am. We enjoyed pancakes w/ home made maple syrup & took off for a tour of the mission. We stopped at the medical clinic, Erics house, Haven house, & the basic school. The medical clinic is an outpatient clinic but they are working to make it into a hospital. It is a really nice facility & several of our students will be doing volunteer work & clinicals there.

Eric's House is run by Roy & Kathi Merrit & their many workers. They have a really nice home & there they care for up to 20 children that have been abandoned. Several of these they have adopted as their own children. Also there right now are about 20 more orphans under the age of 2 that are waiting for their facility, Haven House 2 to be finished. It's pretty wild around there!! The girls had a great time holding & playing with the children & will be spending a lot of their afternoons at Eric's house & Haven house. Haven house is also an orphanage, but for infants. They keep kids up to age 2 there until they are old enought to move to the Haven 2. In Zambia, approx 25% of the children are orphans as the AIDS/HIV disease has taken so many of their parents & many women also die in childbirth & the babies cannot be taken care of by their families. These babies are well taken care of at Haven House, but it is obvious that they cannot possibly receive near the amount of attention & stimulation that they need to thrive. During our visit to the Haven house we were told that they had just received a baby boy the night before & they were going to name it Vann. Check my pictures for a picture of our family with Baby Vann (also nicknamed Mini-Vann around here!)

Tues. is our first day of classes here. In the afternoons all of the students will be rotating through the 4 places - the clinic, Erics house, Haven house, & an after-school tutoring program. I'll have tons more to tell you about those later.

Here are new Pics added of Baby Vann. I'll have pics of the other babies coming soon!

Summer Fun!

Since arriving home from Europe, we've spent most of the summer resting, catching up, spending time with family & friends. Vann started back to work almost immediately & I have been working off & on. Last week we traveled to Myrtle Beach to be with Vann's family. We spent the week relaxing in the condo, playing in the water, & sun-bathing, & eating! The whole family went to see the Grande Cirque which was a really good show. The weather was great the whole week - partly cloudy with a nice breeze & cooled off beautifully in the evenings. We drove 16 hours straight to get back home - we're just wanting to hang out here as much as possible knowing that we're heading out again pretty soon!

The girls started school on the 10th & so, basically, even though it's over 100 degrees these days, summer is over for us. We'll spend the next 2.5 weeks getting ready to go to Zambia for the fall semester where Vann will be directing Harding University's new international program there. We're excited, but at this point so busy trying to get things together, we really haven't had much time to think about the fun part!

Stay tuned for more info about the HIZ program as we travel to Zambia!

Berlin & Spain

Leaving Greece~
After 2 days of tearful goodbyes to all our students who were heading out for free travel all over Europe, it was our turn to go. We we taken to the airport by the Myhans on Friday afternoon for our flight to Berlin. It happened that there was a ground-crew strike at the Berlin airport, so our Easy Jet flight was delayed by an hour. It was an easy flight there & we arrived in Berlin around 9:30 pm. After collecting our luggage, we found the metro station & headed toward our hostels metro stop. It was located in what was East Berlin & in order to reach the ground level, we had to go up & then down flights of steps twice. That wouldn’t be any big deal, except we were each pulling a 50 lb. suitcase along with a carry on bag. Yes - we were seeing that we should have shipped a lot more stuff home!! We just weren’t expecting to have to do this many steps! We finally found our hostel & checked in & guess what?? Our room is on the 3rd floor. Again - no big deal - except there’s NO ELEVATOR! Here we go again!! At least we’re getting our exercise!! We hadn’t had a chance to eat anything since lunch, so we headed out into the neighborhood around 10:30 to find food. We hit the jackpot at a wonderful Italian restaurant where we each ordered a main entrée of pizza or spaghetti, drinking water & we all 4 ate for around $10!! That’s unheard of in Europe!!
Next morning , Saturday, we got up & headed to breakfast provided at our hostel. We jumped on the metro & headed into town. We got a ticket that allowed us to travel unlimited for 2 hours, so we rode to the other side of town to get a feel for where things were & see the city a little. We decided to check out the sights & found the Check Point Charlie stop where the East & the West faced off & the Brandenburg gate. We also visited Museum island where we saw the Gallery Museum & Pergamon Museum. The Pergamon museum had wonderful, huge displays of the Alter to Zeus as well as the gates of Ishtar. They were really something to see. We probably would have appreciated all this even more if we hadn’t just spent 3 months looking at other great ruins!
We found a Dunkin Donuts at one of the metro stops, so had to indulge in a donut for tonights dessert. The girls thought we deserved a treat after spending hours walking through 2 museums! Yes,, we’re about museumed out!
We turned in for an early (anything before midnight these days) night & got ready for our last day in Berlin.
Next morning we set out determined to find “the wall”. We finally found it as we visited the “Topography of Terror” exhibition which was on the location where the 3rd Reicht headquarters had been. We soon realized we were just a few blocks from Checkpoint Charlie where we had been the day before. We just had a half day today as we had to get back to the hostel, collect our luggage, & head to the airport. We all agreed we really liked Berlin & would like to spend more time here.

Hola! Hablo Espanol??
Sunday - We’re off to Southern Spain!! Our flight took us from Berlin to Malaga, Spain where we arrived Sunday around 4:30 pm. We had already reserved a car for the week so all we had to do was load up & find our resort. We had no trouble finding the Club La Costa resort & were soon settled in. We have a 2 bedroom condo that is first floor with a small pool only steps from our doors. Our condo is on a bluff overlooking the ocean, although since we’re on the first floor, you can’t really see the coastline from here. Our first morning, we just hung out around the pool & relaxed. It is a little cool & breezy here but the pool is heated, so it’s at least tolerable. In the afternoon, we headed out to town to eat lunch & buy groceries. We found a wonderful Chinese restaurant. I said we should have started years ago taking pictures of ourselves in front of all the Chinese restaurants we’ve eaten in as we’ve eaten Chinese all over the world!! That afternoon, while the girls watched TV, Vann & I walked around the resort & down the beach a little way. We’ll have to do more exploring later.
Gibralter~
On Tues, we decided to head out to find Gibralter. We didn’t have a map except a very simple one that pointed the direction, so we took off in that direction! After driving about 20 minutes, we realized Savannah didn’t have her passport, so we had to turn around to get it. Back in the car & an hour later, we’re wondering if we’re going the right way as no signs include Gibralter in them. BUT - there’s really only 1 major road going this way, so we continue on. Soon we see a sign for Gibraltar - 7 km. Yea! We walked around the town of Gibralter, which is a British ruled area (everything in English - another YEA!). We opted not to spend the $100 for our family to do a tour of the rock since the girls weren‘t all that interested, ,but just enjoyed it from below. Maybe we’ll return another time to see it without the kids.
The rest of the week has been spent basically chilling out around the pool & getting a little sun! The weather has been beautiful the last half of the week with clear, sunny skies. It is really beautiful here - it reminds me a lot of Greece with the mountains going down to the sea with small towns dotted all along the coastline. We even have an old castle just down the beach from our hotel!!
Sunday, April 29 - We checked out of our resort around noon & had some lunch before our 3:30 flight from Malaga to Madrid. In Madrid, we collected our bags & headed to find a storage area for the bags so we could go into town & look around. After dragging them to the far end of the airport, we found that all the large lockers at that location were taken - so we dragged them all back to the other end to find enough large lockers to hold all our bags. So - finally around 6:30 pm we were heading into town. We found the metro to be really easy to get around on. We stopped in the center of town & just started looking around. There are lots of really neat older buildings - very ornate - & great statues. We didn’t really have any plans, so basically just wondered the streets. We came upon a Hard Rock Café, so had a relaxing American style dinner!! We decided we were really just tired, so headed back to the Airport where we spent the night until time for 4 am. Check in for our 6 am flight out. The flight was very smooth - no problems, thankfully. We arrived back home around 6 pm on Monday night after having gotten about 4 hrs. of sleep in the last 48 hours!! We were exhausted, but glad to be back home sleeping in our own beds!!
I’ll get the pictures from Berlin & Spain on soon!

Saying Goodbye!

I finally got around to putting on the pics from our Greek Island Cruise & Ephesus!! Take a look.

Well, the time has come for us to say goodbye to all the wonderful friends we have made this semester. The time has flown by & we have grown to love so many here. Our students are leaving over the next 2 days & we are hugging each group goodbye & sending them off with prayer. Most of the students are going off in groups to travel on their own in other parts of Europe. It's been a wonderful time of learning, growing, & experiencing new things for all of us!! We've had a wonderful group of students & the Myhans & rest of the staff here have made this a great experience for all of us.

We will be heading out on the 20th flying to Berlin for a couple of days before heading to southern Spain for a week of R & R!! I'll keep you updated!!

Easter in the Islands

Easter in the Islands!!
The final trip of our semester here in Greece was a quick 3-day cruise to the Greek Islands & Turkey. We left at 7:00 am Friday morning from the Pireaus (Athens) port. We sailed on the Ocean Majesty, which is a small cruise ship that holds up to 600 passengers. It was a beautiful, mostly sunny day - in the 60's. After a relaxing cup of coffee, we started sailing toward our first stop, the island of Mykonos. We docked outside of town & took a shuttle bus in & spent the next 3 hours walking through the quaint, narrow streets of town. This is such an unusual place as the streets are about 8-10' wide at the most - (barely enough for a small car to pass). Many streets are pedestrian only & alleyways are a narrow 3-4' lane. Most of the buildings are white & there are many shops which are similar to those on other islands. We enjoyed a gorgeous sunset before heading back to our boat for a buffet dinner.
Just a little bit about Easter in Greece - Easter is a busy time around Greece! It is the most celebrated holiday that they have - even more than Christmas. The Greek orthodox church states that they celebrate the resurrection of Jesus every week, but also celebrate it for 100 days around Easter. On this Friday (good Friday) evening, most of the residents are going to church to worship or pay respects. At 10:00 pm. all the residents meet at the churches & carry a large chest with crosses & flowers through the streets. Others follow with candles lit. They parade through the streets in celebration. On Saturday, the residents will again visit their churches through the day & then have a service leading up to a midnight celebration. At midnight, the priests will come out & announce that he has risen. All the people chant - He is Risen - & fireworks sound all through the cities. Then the people walk home with candles lit & eat a dinner with a special soup! Easter day, most families get together & will grill a whole lamb over the spit or go out to eat. It is a big family day. Easter holiday continues through Monday before business is resumed on Tues.
Back to the trip ~We sailed Friday night & woke up in Ephesus, Turkey. This was really an exciting place as we know that Paul spent a good deal of time in Ephesus & the city is surprisingly well preserved. It was a harbor city in Biblical times, but now the ocean is about 7 miles away! The city was built in a narrow valley between 2 hills & parts of the roads & monuments are still present & the famous library has been largely restored. We also visited a ceramics factory with beautiful, colorful Turkish ceramics & a carpet factory where we watched women making the gorgeous wool, cotton, & silk carpets. These women weave them all by hand & many rugs take well over a year to complete. Both places were a little rich for my pocketbook, but very interesting!
Back to the boat for lunch before setting sail. I grabbed a quick nap before we landed at Patmos, the island John the apostle was exiled to when he received his revelation. There we visited a cave or grotto where he was supposed to have been when his revelation was given as well as a monestary. That evening, we were able to stand on the deck of the boat when the church bells rang at midnight & the fireworks started!! Shortly after midnight, we set sail for the island of Santorini where we landed at 7:00 am. Just a couple of days before we left on this trip, a larger cruise boat with 1600 passengers, had run over a reef off the shore of this island & sank. We couldn't see the ship, (it is in 70 meters of water) but saw where it was marked off & a salvage boat was parked over it. All but 2 passengers from that boat are accounted for.
Santorini's harbor was formed when the volcano blew a huge crater in it, leaving a large caldron with very steep sides which serves as the harbor. To get to the top of the island where the city is,. you have to either walk, take a cable car, or ride a donkey!! We, of course, chose the donkeys!! I have to admit I felt a little sorry for them as it is a very steep path!! Being so early on Easter morning, most shops were still closed, but we walked around looking at the view, stopping in a few shops, & sat in a little cafe for some coffee! Mid morning we headed back to the ship for lunch & to set sail for Crete. Arrival in Crete was at 4:30 & since all the usual tour places were closed for Easter, we had arranged to meet with a new group of Christians who have recently been baptized & started meeting together. Most of them were immigrants from Nigeria & the Phillippines & we had an interesting, encouraging service with them. Sunday night on the ship was formal night, so we all dressed up (OK - on this trip, anything not jeans is dressing up for me!) While the weather was sunny & nice most of the time, it was still a little cool to be able to use the pool or even sit up on deck much while the boat was moving. Despite this, the trip was definitely our most relaxing trip of the semester, which was kind of nice. We arrived back in Athens at 7:00 am Monday & bussed back to the Artemis for a day off before resuming classes tomorrow. We're getting down to the last full week of classes before finals!!
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New Pictures On!

I finally got the Israel pics uploaded, so you can click the link on the left if you want to see them. For some reason, the labels I put on them didn't show up, so you'll probably just have to guess what they are! Hope you enjoy looking at them! We've just got 2 more weeks here & one more trip which is a short 3-day cruise of the Greek Islands & we stop over in Ephesus as well. This trip has gone by really fast! We've all really enjoyed it!