Dear family and friends,
Thanks for your prayers for our journey to Africa – boy did we need them! It was over 30 sleepless hours from when we left our accommodation in Brisbane, to when we arrived at the mission house in Nairobi.
Bryan you certainly have a God given gift for building relationships with people in positions of influence, and it was great to see you in action at Brisbane airport. For those of you who don’t know we had a bunch of top notch medical equipment donated last week for IDAT including an oxygen concentrator, portable ultrasound (good for outreaches), fetal doppler, ECG machine, and 4 monitoring devices. Toshiba also gave us a top of the range $60,000 ultrasound machine which is 2 years old for only $5,000 (which Mahu Pressy and a Tauranga church paid for) – this will be awesome for obstetric care in Tonj. However our airline wanted to charge us $51/kg for this medical equipment – $2500!!! Our multiple calls to the airline for an exemption on charitable grounds were totally rejected. But then Bryan got onto the case, and many phone calls and emails later we were talking to the manager at Thai airlines in Brisbane called Steve. Well for some unknown reason Steve decided he loved us (I suspect Bryan built us up to be modern day Mother Teresas, but parents are allowed to do these things), and not only did he personally check in our 13 items of luggage, and ‘approve’ our oversized and overweight hand luggage, and call ahead to Bangkok to ensure that they didnt try to charge any excess fees, but he also allocated us 2 whole rows to ourselves on the first seats behind business class, and gave us free tickets to the business class lounge where we were able to relax and eat heaps of free food while waiting for our plane. We knew this was favor from God due to the prayers of friends, family, and the IDAT support team (thanks for sending out that email to everyone Suzy).
However when we boarded the plane we descended pretty quickly from the ‘mountain of the Lord’ to the ‘valley of despair’! The 9hrs to Bangkok, 4hrs in transit, then 9hrs to Nairobi were definitely the most stressful of the past year. Zoe did pretty well, as long as she was eating and drinking junk, and her cartoon marathon was not interrupted, she was happy (usual rules out the window!). But poor Ellisha just couldnt sleep, couldnt feed, and couldn’t stop crying. We would have felt sorry for the other passengers on the plane, but Ellisha’s cries were echoing so loudly in our ears that we weren’t capable of thinking of anyone else. It was hard to know whether to just keep torturing the people sitting around us, or to take her on laps around the plane (which also settled her slightly) to spread the misery amongst everyone. At times we had to have 5 minute cycles of holding Ellisha so that during the 5 minutes off we could pray and regain our sanity!
However in the scope of life it was only a day, and the plane did finally land in Nairobi, and immigration and customs were both super kind to us. So shortly after we arrived we were picked up by an IDAT staff member (thanks for arranging this Sabet & Suzy), and off to bed in the mission house.
Now that we are all rested again and with the perspective that hindsight brings, we are actually thankful that God allowed us to go through this horrible valley experience, as it has been a great reminder of our limitations and weakness. It is almost hilarious to think that we were travelling on the planes to become missionaries, and yet were the most weak and pathetic people on the plane! But what a great reminder to us that actually this is the truth every day – we are weak, and sinful, and very very human – but Christ’s power is made perfect in our weakness. When we are weak, then we are strong. We are definitely not modern day mother Teresas! But we serve a loving and merciful God, and we are very excited to be going to share this love and mercy that we have received with the people of South Sudan.
Love you all heaps, and thanks for your prayers and support
Jono & Destinee.
