Officially counting down

We officially booked our airline tickets this week:  Tuesday, August 13 at 11:55 pm out of JFK, Turkish Airlines.  We connect in Istanbul (not Constantinople, for all you TMBG fans!) and arrive in our new home airport of Dar es Salaam at the unholy hour of 2:35 a.m. on August 15.  It's around 17 hours of travel time, plus a 3 hour connection, plus a 7 hour time difference.  I'm tired just thinking about that!  Also really hoping the "issues" in Turkey settle down soon and don't affect the airport :(

So that means it is REAL.  We are GOING.  In a mere 59 days, counting today and the day we leave.  Yikes!  It's an excited yikes, but also a terrified yikes.

Booking the tickets was a bit of an adventure.  Unfortunately, we were not able to book round trip tickets, so while we still plan on coming home for an extended visit next summer, we'll need to navigate those tickets from Africa.  The good news is that because the tickets are one-way and because we ended up using CRWM's travel agent, they are a lot less money than we had hoped.  The kids' tickets were also a bit cheaper than ours (still ridiculously expensive, but less so).  Another happy surprise is because airfare is in our "budget," CRWM picked up the tab for this and future support will go against paying back that debt.  This was fantastic, as I was planning on putting them all on my credit card myself.  The bad news, for the left-brainer in me, is that two one-way tickets are more expensive than one round trip.  But, as Tim would say, we'll put that on the list of things to worry about next spring.

I'm also not 100% thrilled about using JFK or the fact that we'll be getting into Dar in the middle of the night.  However, the next-best option (out of Newark) only gave us 45 minutes to connect in Zurich.  Knowing Newark like I do, the odds of us leaving on time are extremely low (especially since that flight left at around 6:30 pm).  I know that I'd be spending the entire Newark-Zurich flight checking my watch and stressing out about running through international customs with 3 tired and cranky kids.  So we chose the less optimal time and airport for the trade-off of our sanity.  Thankfully, our dear friends agreed to drive us and our myriad of suitcases there, even though I feel JFK feels like it's at the end of the earth.  Love you, Wilsons!

The other stressful aspect of this is that we got an email from HOPAC this week which strongly encouraged us to raise 90% of our support budget before booking tickets.  They said that they'd rather us come late than leave early due to lack of funds.  Obviously, we haven't raised 90%, or even 10%, but we're stepping out in faith.  Honestly, we really don't have the option of staying here.  Tim's job is ending and it's not financially feasible to stay here without an income stream.  In addition, we want to go.  We want Tim and the kids to start off the school year at the appropriate time.

So we're trusting God that the support will work out (and no, for those who have been asking, the online donation link with our names is still not active).  I will shout it out to the world when it is live!  In the meantime, for those of you writing checks and using snail mail, you can send any donations to CRWM, 2850 Kalamazoo Ave SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49560-0200.  Put our name and the funding code WMEA 803894 in the memo of the check.

Thank you for all your prayers and your financial support!