In Sunny Arizona!

When they said McNeil was a small town, they didn't mean it was a "one horse" town. Its not even a "one dog" town! There is not even a convenience store here. The "big" nearby town is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it" kind of a town! But thankfully these are not important facts...what is important is that the people here at New Tribes are so kind and we've been enjoying our time here immensely! So far Daniel has completed a project doing a Magneto (an airplane component overhaul), which if anyone wants to know what that is, I'll ask him more details later;) and today he's working on a project involving electrical systems. We had our first interview with several of the New Tribes leadership team yesterday afternoon and were able to get some of our major questions answered as well as share our testimony.

We had an adventurous time getting down here on Saturday. We walked from our apt. to the ferry, took the ferry to a shuttle, then shuttled to the airport for our 5 hour flight. That wasn't super eventful except our flight was delayed and the gate was changed at the last minute. A few things came as a suprise to us like needing i.d. for baby (which we had...her new passport!) and not getting to load first since we had a baby. No special priviledges...aw shucks! The adventures occured after the flight (baby M did a fantastic job on the flight!), when we realized that the only luggage we needed was our black duffle. The only bag on the conveyer was...a black duffle, very similar to ours, but...you guessed it...not ours. Of course that bag had all the baby stuff in it, including our stash of baby food, cloth diapers (we used disposables while traveling) and her clothes. And our deoderant. So we were understandably hoping that it was not gone forever! The family that picked us up was gracious enough to take us to Wal-Mart on the way home where we got the essentials to last most of the week and then the "Mission Barrel" here at New Tribes supplied baby with some clean outfits (to keep even!). Our bag did come back to us though(late Sunday night), which was a huge praise. The guy that ended up with our bag was quite suprised and apologetic! Southwest is even going to reimburse us for our Wal-Mart purchases, which was $21, so that is a praise. The trip from Tucson was a lot longer than we anticipated and the van we were in had transmission problems. We prayed a lot on the ride home! Every time we needed to slow down, the van would stay in 2nd so we had to pull over and restart the van. It was an adventure. I figure stuff like this is more common in missionary life overseas so we should start getting used to it!

We are hoping to get some pictures posted tomorrow of the base here and the hangar. For all of you who visit for my frugal tips...here it is: move here, where there is no where to shop! Just kidding, I can already see how having less options for grocery stores and 2nd had shops and garage sales is just as challenging as living where things are more expensive and there are more temptations. More soon!