The Big Yellow Container Arrived!

I got an urgent phonecall about our container and had to high-tail it to Madrid because they were delivering it there. Before we could leave, I had to change the battery in a hail storm on the Speed-The-Light Van we were taking. One of the bolts droppped down into a grate and was washed away by the water, so I had to get a new one of those. When I went into the Spanish hardware store, I didn't count on translating into metric bolt sizes. But I completed the task without getting hit by lightning!

We finally left Thursday night for the 5 hour drive up and over mountains and through the desert from Tarragona to Madrid. The last half of our drive was in the dark. I put cruise control on 120K as speeding tickets via camera are very popular. Didn't seem to matter to other drivers. I was always the slowest, with many cars passing me at twice my speed.

The next morning we raced out to our new storage area that was an old chicken farm. Tried to talk to the little old lady in the farm house that lives just inside the entrance. She kept throwing up her hands and shaking her head. We finally saw the container that was loaded in Kansas City. It was way down at the other end of the old chicken processing plant. The semi-truck hauling it drove under an electric power line that hung too low, but the power line bounced across the top after nearling being pulled out of the transformer.

We had been expecting just to sign a paper in person in Madrid this day that would free-up the container to be delivered sometime in the future. But the big yellow container came anyway! A/G hands unloaded it like it about one hour. In Kansas City I loaded all of their items for the mission field in the very back, so they would unload all of my stuff to get to it. All of our "stuff" is now in a tidy corner on wooden palets in the old chicken processing building. Only one coffee table leg was damaged. Everything else seems to be okay... but we didn't have time to check each box because the delivery driver was charging us by the hour.

Today we took what boxes we needed and drove 5 hours back to Tarragona. It was about 1200 kilometers in the end. I've been home for about an hour. I'm tired, but it feels like quite an accomplishment. This is something I could not have done on my own. Many thanks to all who made it possible!

A month

At first you measure in days...we've been here six days and still have jet lag. Then you measure in weeks..two weeks today, can't believe we finally finished itineration and here we are in Spain.

Now we will begin to measure in months. We have been here a month this week and can't describe how many things in our lives have changed this month. Everything we eat, everywhere we drive, what we do everyday, it's all new. We've driven two different cars already, and will be moving to a different apartment by the time another month has passed.

We are involved in an English outreach in Torredembarra, the next town north of us. So far there have been lots of hand outs but not really anyone except those of us from one of the Spanish churches. It's a first try at reaching the English speakers who are here for the summer.

The majority of our day is spent at language school cramming Spanish into our heads. It's a wonderful priveledge and we are enjoying the Spanish church services more and more.

So much can change in a month. A dear friend, Ruth, at home has been diagnosed with a stage 4 cancerous brain tumor and is in the hospital weak right now. She was at a fourth of July party we were at right before we left. We don't know what a month will hold, but we do know that we do not go alone. God is on the journey with us. I'm so thankful.

D.