Sunset in Santiago

This was a gorgeous day and now the sky is painted with pinks and grays and purples as the sun goes down. Today marks the 3 year celebration of reaching the required amount of funds so that we could begin our work. We remember this day clearly 3 years ago as we were walking along a Florida beach marveling at God's goodness! It's quite unfortunate that I got this nasty bug now to celebrate with - I have a cough that moves me to tears and makes everyone else cringe. Ugh. But it can't steal the joy of celebrating :).

Today we had one meeting at INDESOR, a research center and deaf school for the Chilean deaf community. Tomorrow we head back there to get another RTT at 11am and then have a 2pm meeting at a deaf association here. Saturday morning we're hoping to make it to the art museum and then have meetings in the afternoon/evening...then Sunday morning we hop on a flight to Panama City where Holly and we will split up to different hotels. We'll be staying at a conference hotel and she is looking for a hostel nearby that is cheaper but not too inconvenient...

Jason and I will be taking a week-long leadership training course for our organization and Holly will be getting Panama survey underway. Pray for her that she'll have good leads and contacts as so far it's been hard to get in touch with people on the ground. We'll see what we can do to to help during the week but will be in meetings all day so don't know how much help we'll get to be - so you can be thinking of her as she tackles survey alone for a few days. Then we'll join up with her on Saturday next week for about 10 days of survey...we're trying to find a good way to celebrate the end of this marathon survey and give ourselves something to look forward to. Any ideas? :)

I know it seems early to be thinking about Panama since we're still in Chile - but the world doesn't stop when we're traveling. And if we don't plan now, we'll end up at the Panama City airport not knowing where to go once we're swarmed by taxi drivers. Some may consider Internet access a nice bonus - but for us it's a necessity to not get behind on other work...when we're not in survey meetings, we're answering emails, downloading, reproducing, and splicing video in order to analyze it later, or taking notes from things that haven't been recorded in other ways, or researching next places to sleep, meet, travel, etc.

But it's a good life...and we have much to be thankful for...but sometimes the variation itself seems monotonous and what would seem out of the ordinary is not to have so many details in our head!