Saturday, December 16, 2006

In the Okanagan -after the second try!

Well, we're now up in the Okanagan after an unsuccessful attempt yesterday afternoon. We had tried coming up yesterday, being concerned that it was going to snow in the lower mainland on Saturday (today,now). We made it as far as Hope and found out the Coquihalla Highway was closed. I presume it must have been pretty bad winds and/or snow up at the top. We had just had another bad winter storm in Vancouver which meant VERY strong winds with many trees down and hundreds of thousands of people without power along with very heavy rains. I can't remember a year this bad for storms -- I think the highest gusts were 159km/hr. Of course this meant severe winter conditions on the mountains so we decided to turn around and give it another try in the morning. Well, God was good and we were rewarded with a very nice clear day with a trace of corn snow that had fallen at night. The roads had a lot of compact snow with a lot of ice too. They were ice blading so that meant a lot of "groovy" driving. We had a close call coming up to the Coquihalla Summit as I was just passing a rig when we came up to a car sitting sideways across the road, leaving just enough room to get by on the left side. The young guy who was driving was angrily brooding over his big dent in the side of the car. It looked like he slid over to his left and hit the median with the middle of the car -- fortunately he didn't flip or roll. We also saw a semi that had jack-knifed and a couple more semis that looked like they had been off the road for a couple of days. My sisters had been two hours late coming up to Kelowna from White Rock on the Greyhound on Thursday due to the blizzard they had come through ( they closed the highway behind their bus). So God protected us and we made it to Kelowna in about 4 hrs ( not bad for how bad the roads were).

Mom and Dad's place is in a bit of chaos as they are just finishing restoring the hardwood floors -- so almost all the furniture from the main floor is in the sitting room. We had grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch in the midst of the furniture and then headed off for Lake-Land Suites (Carr's Landing, Lakeland Country) which is the B&B place that belongs to Werner and Angelica Weiss. Theyare our old time friends that offered mom to put us up til their house is back in order on Monday.

We will be sharing for a few minutes at Vernon Christian Fellowship in the morning. It will be good to see old friends there.

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

December 12 2006

We are about to head for the Okanagen Valley for our Christmas Holidays. On Saturday we will drive up in hopefully good weather conditions to Kelowna. Mom and dad have been doing their hardwood floors for the last month so things could be alittle chaotic. They have spent a lot of time scraping off old lino and asbestos tiles to get down to their fir flooring which has been probably been covered for 20-30 years.

We will be sharing about our missionary work in Vernon Christian Felowship on Sunday where my good and long-time friend Erol Bortucene is a pastor. It will be good to see him and to see many friends we have there in the church.

We are hoping by Friday we will have enough money in our Equip account to purchase our tickets. We will be leaving by January 15th God Willing for Uganda. We will be spending two days in the air and then arrive in Entebbe on Wednesday, Jan 17th. We will be picked up by some staff from Bush Fire and will hopefully settle in to our house on the Hopeland YWAM Jinja base.

Our first few weeks will be spent trying to settle in, letting our bodies adjust to a new time and a new climate. We will need to buy various itmes and set up our house. It will be nice to part of a Christian community as we resettle b ack into Uganda. It has been a year ago since jane and I visited and it has been almost 2 1/2 years since we lived in Uganda as a family.

We ask for your prayers as we are faced with many more adverse situations like the diseases and climate which can really wipe a person out.

We will start to meet with the families in OKM (Orphans Know More) and visit the Bush Fire base (Bush Fire Children's Home) . Jane will be involved with interviewing and meeting the OKM families as we figure out how we can best help them with their farming and home situations. We will also be begin to work out plans with the directors of BF and OKM.