Final Preparations - Dan Fine

Just 3 more days! It is amazing to think that in just a few days, our group of 14 from Hopkins, MN will set foot in Nairobi. Earlier this weekend, we received an email from Mwende Kieti who traveled ahead of us. My anticipation and sense of purpose grew even more as she wrote of how the drought has taken its toll on the people in Kenya.

The church sent us off this morning with prayers over us. I found it poetic that exactly 5 years ago, on the first Sunday in August, our church met in our building for the first public service. 5 years later, it feels great to have a group going out to Africa. For those not familiar with our church - we are actually under the guidance of the Anglican Church in Rwanda.

After today's service, the group and a few others from our church family met to pack the computers that Mollie Mosman worked with a friend to have donated - 15 in total! She worked with an organization called "E-Quip Africa". They have been refurbished and loaded with educational software that is greatly needed.

We packed the towers, monitors, keyboards and cables in boxes also filled with clothing, toys, books and a set of encyclopedias that were donated and curated from the church sale that we did as a fundraiser early this spring. In total, we are taking 14 boxes with us - using the 2nd piece of checked baggage each traveler is allowed. The trick is that each box can only be a maximum weight of 50 lbs before the airline charges an additional $150 for it! After much strategizing for how to best configure each box to maximize our 50 lbs, we abandoned the logical "one set per box" idea and doubled up towers, threw in half inflated soccer balls for padding, added craft supplies and snuck in a couple letters of the encyclopedia set to equal 14 carefully calculated boxes of much needed items that got us as close to 50 lbs as possible. We found that Rector Christian has a secret spiritual gift for divining weight by sight. More often than not, he hit the target the first try as confirmed by our trusty bathroom scale (this skill deteriorated around box number 9 and his not-fed-by-lunch muscles got tired). Even these few hours felt great - seeing the group work together to pitch in however each individual could.

And so we begin. We meet as a group to embark on our mission at 12:45pm this Wednesday at Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. We covet your prayers and eagerly anticipate what God will do through us and in us.