Well, today I picked up some Spanish-language Bibles, thanks to a gracious in-kind donation by a local Christian printer-publisher. We’ll give them to our host church or others we meet in Costa Rica. I have so many that I may have to split them up with my teammates in order to get all of them packed.

I also checked with my bank today to make sure I can use my ATM card in Costa Rica. I normally don’t have much cause to use an ATM card on trips — we bring cash and change it in for the local currency at someplace recommended by our in-country hosts. But last year, during our odyssey of going to and from the airport in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, for 32 hours, I tried to use my card at the airport and it didn’t work. That’s because many credit card issuers assume that foreign charges are some form of fraud or identity theft — unless you notify them in advance that you will be traveling and using your card abroad.

It won’t be long now. I have a million little things like this to worry about between now and then, and I hope I can get them all taken care of.

Today is one month from my Costa Rica trip.

It is also five days away from my sermon at Annual Conference. I am humbled, and a little surprised, by how many of my friends, family and fellow church members are making the effort to come and hear me that night. The church is planning a carpool. They announced it a week ago and then moved up the time this week after deciding that seating would be at a premium.

I bought a new shirt and tie today to wear that night.

During our team preparation on Saturday, Gail Drake, who co-founded LEAMIS with Debra Snellen, talked a little bit about the organization — not new information for any of us, since we’d all been on trips before — but a good reminder. I had my Flip Video Camera handy and started taping her, in part so that Carolyn Schussler could use some excerpts for a project she’s working on. In the meantime, I though I’d share some of the footage with you:

Team Costa Rica, originally uploaded by jicarney.

From left: Frank Schroer, Carolyn Schussler, me, Megan Siegrist

Well, it was a great day of planning. Some of the things I have told you about the trip turned out to be out-of-date. We will be in one location after all — Heredia.

I’ll have some video to show you, but probably not until tomorrow.

I’m looking forward to the trip even more.

I’m headed to Sewanee for Costa Rica trip preparation. I should have net access, but if for some reason I don’t, I’ll see you fine folk on Sunday.

I’ll be headed for Sewanee this weekend to meet with Frank and Megan (I haven’t heard if Carolyn will be there or not) in preparation for the Costa Rica trip.

I’m preparing for the preparation by reviewing some of the content of LEAMIS’s pastoral leadership seminar. The plan last year in Bolivia was for Debra Snellen and I to co-lead the seminar. Co-lead it we did, but because of some misunderstandings, poor scheduling and a failure to promote the seminar to its intended audience, we really did only a small fraction of it, for a handful of people, none of whom fell into the category of the rural pastors for whom the seminar is designed.

Now, this year, I’m supposed to lead the whole thing, by myself, and I’m a little intimidated by that. It’s not my curriculum. Will I be able to answer questions or deal with unexpected directions to the discussion? I’m going to have to count on a lot of divine inspiration.

Although I’ve never been to that part of the world, LEAMIS International Ministries (the group with which I take my short-term foreign mission trips) has had a number of trips to Myanmar, where a recent cyclone has caused enormous devastation.

Gail and Debra finally heard from the pastor with whom they work in Yangon. His school and orphanage have been damaged, and there’s no place for the children to stay right now. To make matters worse, as you may have seen in the news, the government is stubbornly refusing to allow many types of foreign aid.

Check the LEAMIS web page as time goes on for more information about the situation and how you might be able to help.

Well, the dates of my LEAMIS International Ministries mission trip to Costa Rica are shifting back by a day or two — I will now leave on July 5 or 6 instead of July 4. (I haven’t updated the countdown widget yet — I will when I get the exact date.)

But that’s not all that’s shifted.

The trip is going to have three team members — me, our fearless leader Frank Schroer, and Megan Segrist, who will serve as our interpreter. (Megan was a member of our 2006 Kenya team.) And now, we will be visiting several locations in Costa Rica instead of spending the whole week in one place as we originally planned.

What’s more — I, by myself (except for Megan translating, of course) will be leading a LEAMIS leadership workshop. That’s intimidating.

LEAMIS has developed this curriculum to help rural third-world pastors, some of them with little or no training except for a few Bible classes, deal with leadership issues in the church.

I co-led a workshop with Debra last year in Bolivia, but there were some misunderstandings between us and the church and there were only a handful of people in attendance and we only had a fraction of the time normally allotted. For me to teach the whole thing, by myself, for the first time — well, that’s intimidating. Of course, I’m really just reading from the curriculum that Debra and Gail have developed over the years, but it’s still … intimidating.

Did I mention I’m intimidated? And that I’m supposed to be presenting leadership principles?

God has always gotten me through these trips, and he’s going to have to get me through this one, because I sure can’t do it on my own.

Fund-raising, by the way, is going swimmingly. Since my last post, $350 more has come in, putting me right about the $1,300 mark. This is the most I’ve ever brought in in a single week — I was at zero this time last week. Maybe God is trying to reassure me that he’s in control.

Last Wednesday, I had a pledge or two, but not a penny in actual contributions for my Costa Rica trip.
Well, after sending out a partner newsletter a week or so ago, I got two contributions on Thursday, one in the mail on Saturday, and two at church on Sunday, and I’m now up to $952 in money raised.

The trip is estimated to cost about $1,650, half of which is the estimated air fare (and therefore subject to change).

A big chunk of the money raised is actually left over from last year. My Sunday School class had a luncheon for me during the build-up to the Bolivia trip, and raised more than I needed at the time. I told them they could apply the rest to some other mission project, but they felt that since they’d told the church they were raising money for “John Carney’s mission trip,” that was how the money needed to be spent. There was $502 left over from that event last year, and the class has now given that to me for this year’s Costa Rica trip.

Our class treasurer made out the check to me, so I had to turn around and write a check to LEAMIS. I rounded it up to $505, meaning that I’ve now submitted a total of $955 towards the trip. This is more than the estimated cost of the airline tickets, and so if LEAMIS needs to go ahead and book my ticket, to lock in a good price, they can do it.

Well, I just got off the phone and I finally have dates for my Costa Rica trip: July 4-15.

I should be sending out a partner letter in the next few days to people who have supported me in the past. If you would like to be added to the mailing list, and receive the sporadic newsletter that I send out when preparing for a trip, drop me an e-mail with your mailing address.

Debra Snellen has given me permission to quote from an e-mail she sent some of our LEAMIS team members about the people we’ve worked with in Kenya (and whom we’ve been worried about).

Out of an overabundance of caution, I have removed the actual names and a couple of other details.

I have been in touch with P. regarding the needs there. It seems that food and help to rebuild churches, homes, and the businesses that supported the various pastors are at the top of the list.
P. and G.’s church did not suffer any damage. However, G.’s shop was burnt to the ground. Cost to replace the building, [equipment and inventory] is about $1800. She used her shop to provide employment to a couple of people living in the slums, and the proceeds to help feed the boys at the boys’ home, etc.
Pastor K.’s church was lost and Pastor J. (who works under P.) lost his sewing machine and fabric to theft. Thousands in the slums and throughout the country have lost homes. Of course, one of the most immediate concerns is food because so many have lost jobs or their means of support.
If you are interested in raising/sending any funds please make checks payable to LEAMIS and note Kenya Relief in the memo section. Pastor P. will be distributing the funds and providing us with the accounting records.
Please keep Kenya in your prayers. P. and G. say that things are getting back to normal but it is going to take a long time for healing to take place between the factions.

It now looks like my foreign missions experience this summer will be a trip with LEAMIS to Costa Rica in late June / early July. I’ll pass along more details as they become available, and if you’re on my partnership list from previous trips I’ll probably send out a letter soon asking for support. I’ve not been to Costa Rica before, although my first-ever foreign mission trip was to neighboring Nicaragua. There are certainly areas of need in Costa Rica — or else LEAMIS wouldn’t be going there — but Costa Rica as a whole has a much stronger economy than its neighbor, which is (or was, several years ago) the second-poorest country in Latin America, behind Haiti.

LEAMIS also plans a trip to Nicaragua, but that one’s in October, which doesn’t work as well for me from the newspaper standpoint. Neither does the planned trip to Kenya in late July / early August, to which I had a really strong emotional attraction. After writing my novel (which I’m still tweaking, by the way), I really wanted to go back to Kenya. But it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen this year.

It’s been way too long since I’ve read Gordon Atkinson’s terrific blog Real Live Preacher — since back in the days when I first following a few blogs — and I need to add it to Google Reader and start following it regularly again.

Anyway, Reverend Mommy linked to a post where Real Live Preacher talks about installing water purification in the Dominican Republic. You can see in his Flickr photos that he’s using the McGuire Water Purifier. Reverend Mommy was kind enough to mention me, and the fact that I worked with the same type of system in Bolivia. We were not installing it in-line, however, just teaching the locals how to use it to chlorinate a drum of water at a time. And even that didn’t work out exactly as intended.

LEAMIS continues to work on installing the McGuire system in various countries (usually in the much more capable hands of Frank Schroer or Bob Willems). I’ve posted this video before, but it certainly bears repeating:

Debra Snellen has forwarded me an e-mail from Pastor Paul, our contact in Nairobi. As I mentioned in a column in the T-G this week, LEAMIS could not get in touch with Paul during the height of the election crisis in Kenya.

Paul pastors a church in the Kibera slums, a heart-breaking sardine can of 1 million people (or more, depending on who’s estimating) on the edge of Nairobi. It was the focus of some of last week’s violence:

Out of the Kibera slums alone we have more than 20,000 people rendered homeless and hungry due to the on going skirmishes. As a church we are doing all possible to offer any kind of assistance in terms of food and clothing to the victims of this tragedy.

[snip]

Paul’s wife Grace runs a clothing shop:

As earlier stated, the church facility, the school and the orphanage home are all intact and the boys are safe by the grace of God. However, if you can remember Grace’s small shop where Rebecca works … it was seriously looted and burnt down to the ground along with others on the same street. Right now we are trying to see how to reconstruct another one on the same location if possible. This rebuilding exercise will cost us approximately USD 1,800 due to the current inflated cost of timber and iron sheet material.

Your prayers are solicited.

I’m sorry to admit that I hadn’t really been following the Kenyan election closely — I’d heard there was one going on. There has been unrest related to a delay in counting the votes, and it looks as if the incumbent may lose.

I am interested to see that the LA Times story calls the Kibera slums a stronghold of the opposition candidate. The characters in my novel are working in the slums, just as I did during my 2004 trip.