Happy New Year to you all

We are so grateful to have had a lovely WARM Christmas here in South Africa surrounded by friends. We certainly missed family, friends and fun traditions from home, but this year our homesickness wasn’t near as bad as last year. We made some new traditions of our own (home made ice-cream on Christmas!) and it helps knowing that we will be home in a few short weeks to be with family. Miesha was a fun distraction as well. She loves to be held and everywhere we go people are happy to accommodate. It is still pretty quiet here and we are trying to catch up on some end of the year projects and emails and SLEEP. We have one more restful week ahead of us and then our “normal” routine will pick up the second week in January. We will help to welcome Jasmine, another short term missionary, who will be here for 6 months helping with home schooling some team kids who will be transitioning back into the Canadian school system later this year.

At church today, instead of the usual music and message, they had a fabulous British style brunch for the few of us who are still in town. Of the 40 of us who attended, 18 were visitors! It was a fun international morning as we connected with families from Ghana, Nigeria, Brazil, and also new families from Johannesburg too! Pastor John had us thank God for His goodness to us in 2007 and it was wonderful to hear so many different languages expressing praise to God. I love how international and colorful our church is. We picked up a bit of Portuguese when we were in Mozambique last year and I am going to need to invest some time with my language notes before the Brazilian family comes over!

Praise report – a couple weeks ago we were concerned that Miesha’s paperwork (birth certificate, passport, ID, etc) wouldn’t be finished in time for us to fly home. We were told by a few “experts” that the process should take 8-10 weeks. We took Miesha on an outing to the US Consulate last week and it turns out that everything is going to be ready in 3 weeks time. We are so grateful! Please pray that the process will continue to go smoothly. Above is a cute baby passport picture. (4 days old)