We Made It To Africa!!

Our traveling experience with Emirates Airlines has been incredible!!  We thank God that he blessed us with affordable plane tickets through the best international airline company known.  We’ve experienced very little turbulence and extremely smooth landings and take-offs.  AND I’m happy to announce that no one’s ears hurt either!!  We experienced no popping or blocked hearing upon our landing in Africa.  Thank you to those that covered this in prayer. During the flight from Dubai to Johannesburg, Africa (which was non-stop), I (Mindy) finally caught some sleep.  It was an 8-hour flight and I do not know how long I slept, but all I know is I woke up to a voice on the intercom announcing that we’d be landing in 20 minutes.  The kids slept most of the time too.  An 8-hour flight only felt like a couple of hours to us.  We did put the 2 youngest children (Gracie & Josiah) in pull-ups during our flying travels, just to be safe, but we are happy to say that they both stayed dry the entire time!  Christian even got to experience losing his 1^st tooth all on its own too!  He actually had 3 baby teeth pulled shortly before leaving the States because an adult tooth wasn’t coming in properly, but this was the first tooth that fell out all on its own and while flying of all places!!  It’s not every day you lose a tooth on the plane!

One thing to cover in prayer is the kids’ glasses.  We only have 1 pair for Gracie (for those that don’t know she got glasses about 1 week before leaving).  Both she and Josiah are currently farsighted.  We “had” 2 pairs of glasses for Josiah, but the nose piece broke on his newest pair so we have reverted back to him wearing his old pair (which are actually better) and are praying that super glue will do the trick with his other glasses.  Pray that we have no more problems with glasses.  Even better yet, pray that eyes are healed!!

Upon landing in Johannesburg, South Africa we were faced with an escalator and no elevator.  It’s very challenging to get all your little ones on the moving escalator along with their suitcases and backpacks.  Fortunately, we were blessed by 2 people who insisted on helping us.  When we got to the bottom, an airport worker got carts for all our carry-ons and backpacks, another huge blessing because at this point the younger kids were tired and could no longer carry theirs – which meant Josh and I were carrying 2, sometimes 3, backpacks on our shoulders in addition to pulling 1, sometimes 2/3 suitcases on wheels.  Our shoulders were fairly sore at this point.  Wishing our favorite masseuse was here to massage us!!  You know who you are! ;-)  Aside from that, our kids did very well traveling and doing their part with carrying or pulling their own luggage.  What troopers!!

After our carry-ons and backpacks were loaded onto carts by the worker, she continued to lead us to customs and passed the ginormous line of people waiting.  That’s right, she took us to the VERY FRONT of the line (which looked a mile long!)  This probably saved us 1 ½ to 2 hours of waiting in line.  Then she and another lady worker helped to locate our 3 tubs, which don’t come through the regular baggage claim conveyor belts, and got us more carts for our remaining 9 suitcases.  After loading everything onto 5, yes 5 carts, they assisted with pushing them out to the front doors where we waited for our shuttle driver, Ralph, to pick us up with his car and trailer.  He arrived around 5:30pm and took us to Pretoria (about 1 hour away) where a couple named Fred and Rene have opened up their beautiful, did I say beautiful, home to us!

A team of young adults met us at the gates where they unloaded all of our luggage for us.  Our family was given 2 rooms to sleep in and a bathroom.  We were prepared for Pemba, so for those that are familiar with that area, our kids keep asking, “Where’s the red dirt and ocean?!”  There are many young adult missionaries living in the home with us, but in the future things will be changing.  We don’t know how long we will be here, but we are praying for clarity and clear direction on that.  If you receive anything from the Lord related to our family, please feel free to share it with us via e-mail or private message in Facebook.  Even if it doesn’t make sense to you, it very well might make sense to us!  A very delicious dinner was prepared on our behalf, and we enjoyed sitting with everyone in the dining room (which isn’t a custom with everyone’s different schedules but they wanted to honor us and we felt very honored).

We’ve posted various updates on Facebook, but for those that don’t use Facebook, we are experiencing some jet lag in our family but there’s actually a funny story behind that.  So, as you’ve read in our last blog, our kids were wide awake at 4am in Dubai.  For their first morning in South Africa, they woke up at “5:30am” so we looked at this as progress…..!  We decided to spend some time talking with the kids about how they’re feeling so far and then for those that wanted to they prayed over various things.  We then decided to worship together to a few songs – fast, lively songs like, “This is What You Do” and “Deep Cries Out”.  We did try to be somewhat quiet because we didn’t know who’d be awake at 7:30am.  Josh also read Psalm 91 over our family.  Afterwards we decided to head downstairs for some breakfast.  Not long after, one of the young adults came down and said he was headed to preach to some students.  He normally has to be there at 7am.  In our minds we’re thinking, um, you’re a little late this morning.  That’s when the light bulb went off…..!!  After asking him what time it was, it turns out it was only 6:45am instead of 8:45am like we thought.  That means the kids actually woke up at 3am instead of 5am like we thought, oh my!  It turns out our phone clocks were still going off the Dubai time zone and hadn’t recalculated, our bad!  We hope we didn’t wake anyone with our family worship time. J  Although, as our Vineyard Meridian Pastor Reeni pointed out, waking up to a family worshiping the One they adore isn’t so bad!

Today was our first full day in South Africa, and both Josh and I felt like it was to be a day of “chillin’.”No plans, no “we have to get unpacked/organized”, just simply hanging with the kids.  It turns out we all needed it because we ended up taking a family nap around 9/10am and slept until about 1pm. We decided to wake the kids up so they’d actually go to sleep at a decent time tonight.  When I woke up my phone said 3pm, and I was worried that I had missed our Skype session with my parents at 2pm, but then Josh pointed out that the time on my phone still hadn’t updated to the South African time zone and it was really only 1pm.  Phew!!  Unfortunately, the Skype session never happened because Grandma and Grandpa Campbell (my parents) were having connectivity issues.  Pray that gets resolved soon!  We are being diligent with getting the kids adjusted to the time difference from America (8 hours different) so we kept them up for the remainder of the day so they would actually go to sleep at night.  They managed to fall asleep around 9-9:30pm, with the exception of Christian whom stayed up playing Legos and coloring in our bed until 10:30pm.  Please pray that the kids sleep in until at least 7am.

Our plans for tomorrow morning (Tuesday) are to head to the Footprints base in Johannesburg to meet the director, Pastor Yolanda, and the rest of the team.  Excited to love on some children!!  We’ll write another blog on how that visit goes.  It’s now midnight so I’m going to try and get some rest.  Until next time………..