Hello from Zimba, Zambia!

     After over 20 hours on airplanes, 14 hours of layover, 2 red-eye flights in a row, and a drive from Livingstone to Zimba, we have arrived! The jouney was mostly uneventful, so praise God. Everyone has been telling me to make sure I mention how excited we are: We are excited!! The mission house is very nice and the people here have been very friendly.  We just arrived about an hour ago, so there is not much to update on except to let our families at home know that we have all arrived safely. It is currently 4:00pm on Tuesday local time. I will hopefully have the chance to post a few of our pictures at some point. Thank you for your thoughts and prayer!

Helpful Hint: Our local time is 6 hours ahead of Michigan time. For the rest of the blog posts, I will only refer to the time as it is here in Zambia.

Hello from London!

Note: This post was written Monday evening in London. There was no internet access, so I am just now posting it.

Hello from London! Our travels so far have been relatively smooth.  We had a huge blessing as soon as we got to O’Hare airport when Lori happened to mention in passing to the baggage check-in clerk that we are going on a mission trip, which resulted in the airline refunding the charge for our second bags of medical supplies. This saved us a total of $600! After some delay in Chicago due to weather and mechanical problems, we arrived in London this morning about 10:00am local time (5:00am Michigan time). 

None of us got much sleep, but it really seems that the Lord has been filling us with energy as we have been traveling around London today. We have seen so many amazing buildings and places today! We took a train and the London ‘subway’ and ended up in Westminster. We saw and took pictures in front of Big Ben and the British Parliament. We then headed over to Westminster Abbey, where some of us took an audio tour inside. Unfortunately pictures were prohibited, so I will not be able to upload pictures from inside the church. After seeing the Abbey, we walked through the park (and saw some pretty exotic birds on the way) to Buckingham Palace. We weren’t able to spend quite as much time in front of the Palace as we would have liked because the weather was starting to look bad, so we soon started trying to find our way back to the subway.

Once we found the subway entrance, we had a couple hours to spare. We sat down to eat at an old fashioned pub where more than half of us had some AMAZING fish and chips. They were great! After a nice early dinner, we crammed into the subway (during rush hour) and made our way back to the airport. We are now relaxing after a very tiring day and we are waiting for our gate to open. It has been a great day!

We are praying for all of those at home who have dealt with the storms and tornadoes in the last 24 hours. I will hopefully be able to post again tomorrow evening (tomorrow afternoon for Michigan time) from the mission house in Zambia. Please feel free to ask any questions in the comments! Any one of us can respond to the questions so don’t hold back! I am sure that we all would really appreciate that chance to communicate with our loved ones at home. God bless!

Where We're Going

Hello family and friends! This blog is being designed as a way for the team going to Zambia this June to post updates on our activities while we are out of touch via cell phones. My name is R.J., I am the unofficial team 'blogger', so I will probably be writing most of these posts. Other people may write occasionally and I hope to have a post at least once every couple days (depending on reliability of our internet connection while in Zambia).

To begin, I would like to show where we will be going. Zambia is a land-locked country in southern Africa.

 Our flight plans include a 12-hour layover in London, and then we will be flying into Livingstone (southern boarder of Zambia).

The town our mission house is located in is called Zimba. It is located approximately 40 miles north-east of Livingstone. The main road between Livingstone and Lusaka runs directly through the middle of Zimba.

On our trip, we will also be seeing Victoria Falls. It is only about 10 miles from our airport in Livingstone.