Hi friends,
A quick update from Nick and me….
We’re still on the ship in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. We’ve been maintaining a “quarantine bubble” along with our fellow crew members for 70 days!
If you missed our last newsletter, here’s a link to it: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bDIlVOtp_qBi7_UUY80Uzii0WLGVpd2t/view?usp=sharing
Our days are spent working in other departments (housekeeping for both of us) and finishing documentation from our “normal” jobs. We’re both busy writing road maps for the people who come after us in our work in the Operating Room and MCB (Medical Capacity Building).
The major update is that we have tickets to Brisbane in a week’s time – the plan (unless there are flight changes, which is common right now) is that we’ll leave next Sunday the 31st and arrive in Australia on 2nd June. We’ll need to do a 2-week quarantine in a hotel, and then we’ll get started with what comes next!
The main thing right now is preparing to go because we are “leaving leaving”… around here it means something different when you say it twice. It’s a common conversation on the ship – “oh are you going? Are you coming back or are you LEAVING leaving?” So yes, we are leaving with a capital “L”. haha.
Even before all the COVID changes, we had decided that this would be our last outreach (for now anyway) and we feel God moving us in new directions. It’s time to invest into our lives in one of our passport countries, and we are looking forward to it! I’d like to grow an herb garden, I think.
Blessings over you, friends, wherever you are right now! And do please pray for us in the coming days as we walk through goodbyes and grief, change. We see SO many good gifts from God. He’s opening doors for us, and our next steps are becoming more clear.
We’re gathering up the sweet gifts of time in this community we love…. Here’s a few photos of recent happenings….(this is a great place to be in quarantine, with 200 family members!)
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| The newest muster station name callers for drills and ship emergencies. It's very windy so we had a hard time keeping those yellow hats on. During the field service we wouldn't normally have roles like this because I'm in the OR and Nick is often off-ship. |
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| Nick hosted a penalty shoot-out tournament on Deck 7 (there's a netted area there that kept the ball mostly on deck...it escaped once and was amazingly rescued from blowing into the sea by Rodrigo) |
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| Selfie 1 = day of the last surgery |
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| Selfie 2 = a few weeks later...a receptionist, housekeeper, and cook |
Nick and team have been doing weekly video in-services with the team in Senegal, and they've had people joining in from the ship, Senegal, Madagascar, England, Australia and America! It's gone really well!
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| Operating Room (what was left of us at the time!) serving ice cream |
This song has become and anthem for many during this season, and for us too!
