South Africa meetings and plane tickets

It's always quite exciting when another piece of this trip falls into place!

I had a good meeting last Tuesday with some of the folks I'll be working with in South Africa. Roland, the South African head of Africa Upper Room Ministries, has been in the States for a few weeks, so I met with him, Renny (hr/finance person for Africa Upper Room) and Dale (the State-side AUR coordinator). We continued a conversation Dale and I began a few weeks ago, filling in a few more of the details of which stories they'd like for me to cover.

Currently, it looks like I may spend about a week in four different South Africa locations on both the east and west South African coasts. I'll also likely end up working with a media guy there on some video projects telling the story of some of the folks AUR gets to work with. I'll be the script writer. There's some possibility that all of my travel in South Africa will not be by plane, allowing me actually to see the country instead of just flying over the top of it from one spot to another.

In addition to filling in more details, the meeting was also a nice chance to meet folks I'll be connecting with on the other side of the Atlantic...instead of having to wait until I climb off the plane into a crowded airport. :-)

I still don't have plane tickets. They're in the works, but my itinerary is quite intensive (probably the travel agent version of those terrible math word problems: if Train A leaves Nairobi at 10 am traveling 80 km/hour, what time will it cross under the airplane carrying Kami and hopefully her luggage, too, to Kampala at a speed of whatever speed airplanes go?), so it's apparently taking some time to work out. And my sister Erin and I are trying to go to Ghana at the same time as everyone else in the world who's heading there for Ghana's big celebrations. So, prayers for all that ticketing to come together for as low a price as possible are appreciated. That might include praying for the poor travel agent on the other end of the itinerary. May he be rewarded with a big bowl of ice cream or his favorite candy bar or something once he gets it all worked out. :-)