Just One Week Away! Or Manny Is Home!

By Jason

One week from today the whole team will be in Ghana!  If that seems like a short amount of time let me just say YES IT IS!  I can’t believe how close it is.  The first member of the team, our “advance team” so to speak, should already be there.  Manny left Lexington yesterday morning.  We received a couple of emails from him when he got to Chicago and Washington D.C. and another last night at about 10:00 pm just before he boarded the plane for his 10.5 hour flight to Accra.  Once in Ghana it will take him a little while to get from Accra to Kumasi, but hopefully we’ll hear from him soon.  (By the way I checked the weather just a minute ago and while we have snow on the ground here in Kentucky, it is 86 degrees in Accra and 91 in Kumasi).

Manny at the Lexington airport

I had actually just posted this update to the blog and realized we had just received an email from Manny so I took it down to insert what he wrote:

"Hello,

I made it home safely by the grace of God. My flight arrived at 2:23pm local time.  I am currently staying in a guest house (in accra) with my mom. Going to the US embassy on Wednesday to renew my visa and then heading to Kumasi after that.

I half expected to be blasted by heat waves as soon as I got off the plane. To my surprise, it was pretty cool (for Ghanaian standards), 84 with less than 60% humidity (11mph wind speed). I am so glad for the cooler temperature. I will keep you updated on developments.

Hope all is well with you.
God Bless
Manny"

Manny will be spending this week visiting friends and family, taking care of some paperwork, and hopefully clarifying some of the details of our schedule for when the rest of us arrive.  We are still unsure of our exact itinerary but that isn’t too out of the ordinary.  As we get news from Manny about what is going on in Ghana this week we’ll post it to the blog. 

The rest of us spent time yesterday after church practicing with the vision equipment.  We wanted to do a test run to make sure we knew how to hook up all the equipment and to let Todd and I train on the vision refractor.  We examined our eyes and finished sorting and packing the glasses and putting them into inventory.  If I can find anyone who took pics of this process I’ll get them posted.  Thank you to the volunteers who have come out the last couple of weeks to help us with the glasses, you’ve made the work more much more manageable and enjoyable.

For now we are busy getting the last of our gear together, packing, and all the other last minute things before we fly out on Sunday.  I’ve got to go back to the doctor to get another Hepatitis A & B shot before we leave too.

In the meantime expect to see an uptick in the number of posts this week.  As we gear up for the trip and once we are in Ghana we will be posting a little more often.  At least we hope to post more often.  If you have any questions about what we are doing to prepare, or about the trip in general please feel free to leave a comment here on the blog and we’ll try to answer it in another post.

Thanks for your prayers and support!