Greetings from N'gaoundere Cameroon! To catch you up on what has transpired so far...

We left Sioux Falls on Sunday, flew to Chicago, and boarded a plane bound for Brussels. It was during the final boarding process that Karis discovered she had forgotten to pack her health card! This is a required document for entry into Cameroon (of course, lets face it, much can be resolved in the presence of a 100 euro note...still, it was scary to take a chance that that would work!). She had just enough time before the cabin doors closed to phone Tim who scanned and emailed her 8 page document to her sister Cynthia in Cologne. Cynthia faithfully printed the  documents out in the wee hours of the morning and brought them to Brussels where we spent the day with her and her 1yr old son Nicolas! Cynthia's goal was to keep us awake in order to better deal  with jet lag... and she did a good job. We covered in total 9 plus miles of Brussels neighborhoods viewing everything from spectacular cathedrals to (accidentally!!) a portion of the red light district as we attempted to find the train station in order to return to our hotel for the night. On our uncensored tour of Brussels, we also viewed the famous statue of the "Manekin Pis"(boy who put out a potentially catastrophic fire by peeing on it!), government square, botanical garden, and (again inadvertently) the Turkish zone of town. We also dined on delicious Greek pita in the Greek district, visited the Tintin store, and drank some very nice Belgian beer...

Tuesday morning, we boarded our flight for Yaounde. Upon our arrival, the first thing we were asked to present was our health card.... With trepidation, Karis showed her copy and explained that her health card is so tattered and worn that it was necessary to make a copy. She was waved through without any fanfare and we all gave a collective sigh of relief. Our bags miraculously arrived intact and we located our driver Vincent who greeted us and loaded us up for our trip to Ann and Willy's home for the night. As always, traffic was "African style" with people motorcycles, cars, trucks, dogs, etc. dodging eachother willy nilly through town. We  negotiated all manner of deep potholes, as well as some extremely deep ruts - as well as people out partying for the 1st of May festivities, and arrived in one piece at the Langdji residence. Willy welcomed us, showed us to our rooms, and fed us a nice dinner of rice with a lovely pork sauce.

Wednesday morning, we arose to the sound of roosters crowing.We had been told to be at breakfast at 6am, and when we arrived all was dark. We went back a bit later, saw some movement and were welcomed in for coffee, bread, and scrambled eggs. We later discovered that our clock was off by an hour and we had actually arisen at 4am and gone up for breakfast at 5 am instead of 6. No wonder everyone was still asleep!

After breakfast, Vincent came and took us up to the SIL airstrip for our trip up country. Once there, the pilots made us all get on the scale and proceeded to weigh every ounce of luggage. We were told that in order to fly safely to N'gaoundere, we had to get rid of 48 kilos of weight!! That is about 90 pounds. We put the bare essentials into a couple of bags, said a prayer, and sent the rest of our luggage to be shipped to N'gaoundere by train! We hope to see our things today sometime.... stay tuned!

Our flight from Yaounde was beautiful and quite smooth. The Cessna we flew on was quite diminutive... but powered by a strong quiet engine and our pilots were extremely capable. Despite some haze and clouds, we enjoyed a nice view of the rainforest and eventually got to the savannah where we landed gently at the Airport in N'gaoundere. Phil Nelson was there to greet us and we sped off to the mission station.

After settling in to our guest house, we headed up to the EELC meetings which were already in progress. The rest of the day was spent catching up on the issues and concerns of the church. Meetings ended at 8pm and we were all ready to get some rest.

Erika had joyfully greeted Christian earlier in the day and went off to spend the evening with him at "Le Chateau". Nyla and Karis joined Jim Noss and others for dinner at Le Meilleur restaurant downtown N'gaoundere. Much laughter and some delicious food ensued...

In store for us today are more church meetings!