Wow…after so many months of planning and preparing for our trip to Ghana, the day has arrived! We pickup Emily after her last class today at Wheaton College, and head right from there to the airport.  We have an 8 1/2 hour flight from Chicago to Frankfurt, Germany; 4 1/2 hour layover; and finally a 7 hour flight to Accra.  Unfortunately, the direct flight from Washington DC we took two years ago with our kids and the OneWay team has been discontinued :-(  We will arrive in Accra (the capital city which is in the south) at 7:40pm on Saturday night (That’s 1:40 PM Chicago time).  Ray has already driven the truck to Northern Ghana to do some training there before we arrive. So, Jeff Korum (OneWay Africa board member) will be picking us up at the airport, and then taking us back after church on Sunday to catch a flight to Tamale (one of the larger cities in the north).  Ray will pick us up in Tamale, and then the adventure begins…

Pete and I fell in love on a mission trip to Bolivia 29 years ago (1984)!  We still love mission trips and each other :-) Pete always manages to make an adventure of every trip we take. I love that!  In Bolivia we built playground equipment for the local children.  As you can imagine, it was great fun!

Pete also encourages a “rule of 3” as a general packing plan. That means you only need 3 of any piece of clothing:  one to wear, one to wash, one for backup. He uses this rule whether the trip is one week or one month. It comes in handy for backpacking trips where you carry all the weight on your back, but Emily finds the lack of variety of clothing somewhat confining. I like its simplicity, but I don’t have much fashion sense.

So, here we come Africa! We look forward to spending time with our dear friend Ray Mensah, as well as working with the Konkomba people to record Bible stories, worship songs, community health information and perhaps even the Gospel of Luke in the Komba language which was recently received from our friends at Lutheran Bible Translators! We are also setting up one of the inexpensive gravity-fed water filters in Ray’s house for testing.  Please pray for our health and safety, our kids while we are gone, and also for Ray as he prepares the schedule for the recordings taking place next week.

A note from Pete:

From the maps and information we have, we may be without Internet for 5 or 6 days.  I’ve once again borrowed Rick and Deb’s SPOT locator beacon.  When it gets satellite coverage, we can send short 41 character messages.  I’ve written a procmail and perl script that will post the SPOT messages directly here to the blog.  HOWEVER… the coverage map for Ghana is very very poor (possibly non-existent):

So, we hope to be blogging even from the remote villages, but with only 41 characters at a time.  Short and sweet. Of course, if the SPOT beacon can’t find a satellite, don’t worry, we will update everyone when we get back online.