This time next month ...

... I will be finalising the last of my packing for Vanuatu, ready to head off for a great week.  A lot has happened in the last 20 days that has made me feel quite a bit more prepared.  We have been doing the training that UnitingWorld has up online, and putting in some comments on the training forums.  I find that I am quite willing to jump to some potentially rather disastrous conclusions, so the training has been great for me so far.  This morning I did the child protection training, with questions like this:

Choose A or B as a precursor for this statement ... "be responsible around children"
A) I will always
B) I will never

I got 100% correct.  This is a good sign I think...

I know I'll be adding some of the following things with me when I go ...
- combined sunscreen/insect repellant.  My doctor recommended this stuff because it means you don't have to apply sunscreen as well as repellant separately.  I know though, that the time when I get bitten most by mosquitoes is in the evening, so I suspect I'll end up taking different insect repellant as well.  Insect bites definitely = bad.
- A laptop, so I can type blog type things.
- a mini hairbrush.  It is from the stuff we sold at the garage sale, and it has a picture of Winnie the Pooh on it.  I mention it not only because it's very cute, but because I forgot to take a brush last time I went to Vanuatu, and it drove me nuts the whole week.
- My sense of humour - as much as I like to think I can get all "chilled" on "Vanuatu Time", my nature is pretty much on time.  If I am late, it is because I basically intended to be late, and even then, I'm normally only like ... 5 minutes late - so I can't even get the "fashionable" bit right.  So will have to work on patience and fun stuff like that.

We are having a catch up this Sunday so we can run through some of the finer points of our trip.  I keep forgetting who I have spoken to about what, so it will be great to get the whole team in one room!

We should hopefully be posting a bit more over the next month or so ... can't wait to see how things go when we are getting the last set of details ready.

Less than 50 days to go now...

What a massive couple of months.  It is about a month and a half until we fly out now - and still quite a lot to do.  I still need to get to my doctor and get her to fill in a form which says I'm ok to go and do these things in a different country.  We have just received the training information from UnitingWorld - so we need to get into that.  And all of the team seems to be pretty busy doing general day-to-day things.

On the plus side, the person who will meet the shipping container which we put all the computers arrives in Vanuatu this week.  It then needs to be moved from one island to another.  We are really praying that everything arrives safely!  So far so good on this one.

We have also been busy selling some things to fundraise further.  We had great fun at the Wesley Garage Sale a couple of weekends ago.  Raised quite a bit too.  We don't have a purpose for some of those funds yet.  We have had quite a few situations in the last few years where we've wanted to give someone extra stuff to take with them to Vanuatu, and we hadn't taken the excess baggage $$($) into account.  I will be quite happy if we don't spend all of that money straight away.

Anyway - we now have 12 people going on the trip.  Three more intrepid explorers have joined us.  I find myself really looking forward to the adventure.