29 Days to Go!

Well, it's 29 days and counting until we leave for Africa. And so much to do! All manageable, I'm sure...

Our schedule is now sorted. We're doing 4 weeks in Mpumalanga, South Africa, working with Youth for Christ, in schools and with orphans and vulnerable children for a local church. Then we're going to Pemba in Mozambique, to spend 3 weeks with Iris Ministries (they do simply amazing work with street kids and lots of other stuff besides), followed by 4 weeks in Entebbe, Uganda, working with a little charity called the Kabanda Trust. And finally, we're spending a week with friends in Cape Town. Just relaxing. Excitingly, I caught up with another old friend on Facebook the other week. He and his family used to live in Stoke on Trent and have now moved to South Africa, to a place called Mosel Bay. He's invited us to go and see them whilst we're in Cape Town. It would be a bit of a drive, but so lovely to meet up. And we'd get to see Mosel Bay...

There's quite a bit of stuff to do in order to leave my business in good order before we go. And it feels a bit of a wrench to leave Nightchurch, our clubbers ministry, just at the moment. We're shut for refurbishments, which I've been working quite hard to keep reasonably on track. I would like to see those finished before we go. And to be there for the week we re-open. Short of divine intervention, that's looking increasingly unlikely.

Doesn't look like anything else is going to happen on the adoption front before we go, either. We STILL haven't heard back about the medical exams we did for Staffordshire back in February. To be honest, I'm happy to leave that be until we come back from Africa. It would have been really nice to know before we went. Or not, I guess, depending what they say!!!

I wrote to Birmingham Social Services last week, to make an official complaint. It was long enough since it all happened for me to feel relatively sane about doing so. If they could avoid putting other people through what we went through, it would be good. At least having written, they have the information.

29 days to go! How exciting! How unnerving!!