99 days to lift off...

Ron and I are freaking out. We've just realized how little time there is left and how much we have left to do. We need tickets and gear, vaccinations and passports, sell this and that, review agreements, transfer accounts, terms and conditions, insurance and storage, refills and battery chargers, bosses and bank accounts, getting in shape, going insane. Ahhhhhh!

And to top all that off the economy is just getting worse and worse and worse. The money we set aside to restart our lives when we return is disappearing before our eyes. But we can't bring ourselves to give up now. We've mentally made the leap and now we have to jump even if we have to shackle each other to the rocket pointed precariously off the cliff. Wile E. Coyote style.

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Salomey

I've been sponsoring a girl in Ghana for about 6 years and I'm going to visit her on the trip! It is really exciting to get to meet her. I don't know where her village is just yet, I'm still awaiting my interview to be approved, and I understand I have to go there chaperoned for only one day. I had some fantasies about staying with her in her village, walking her to school, making buddies with the elders and all that, but I guess that's not to be. I'm sure it will still be an amazing experience.

About two years ago, she had written me that she wanted to be a seamstress so I went to Britex in downtown San Francisco and got her some fabric and buttons, zippers and thread, and needles. I just thought it would be nice for her to get practice sewing but I had been writing her for years and never really thought I made a tangible difference. Many months later I received an email from a Marketing Director from Plan USA that was going through Salome's village and video taped a segment with her (video below).

Well I just about cried watching it, as she talked about me, and read my letters, I was very real to her and now she was just as real to me. Blown away is more the feeling I had, looking at her in the dress made from the materials I sent her. I don't know if she made it herself, but she beamed in it nonetheless.

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