Lake Neuron

Here’s the rest of them.

I got home to the apartment about 7 tonight. I haven’t posted before now because I’ve been busy with a million little things and I’ve been trying to upload all my photos to Flickr, and I had been hoping to include a photo with my first post.

I can’t find my thumb drive, which I did not take with me and which I now need to move my video footage from the laptop to my desktop computer.

I’ve been up since yesterday morning. Because our flight left at 6:45 this morning, we had to allow for two hours at the airport, three hours of drive time from La Fortuna back to San Jose, and a little extra time just to be sure (we’d had a flat tire on the way to La Fortuna a couple of days earlier). So we checked out of the hotel at 1 this morning, and with that schedule we didn’t bother going to bed last night.

(As it turns out, we got to the airport with plenty of time to spare — an hour ahead of schedule, and before the airport tax window or the Continental Airlines check-in had even opened.)

It was a great trip. I’ll be working on my newspaper stories tomorrow, and hopefully the video (even if I have to buy a new thumb drive to do it). I will try to post a photo along with a link to all my photos at some point before I go to bed tonight. Hopefully, that will be soon. I’m pooped.

I’m making progress towards being ready for the trip — but I’m not there quite yet.

Today, I was happy to get a stainless steel bowl. Depending on how the soap-making workshop is set up, I’ll need to try melting down, or “re-batching,” some soap. You do that in a double boiler. I needed a bowl large enough to rest on top of one of the two stockpots I’m bringing (one enameled, one stainless steel). I couldn’t find one at Wal-Mart the first time I looked. I bought a bowl at Kroger, but it had a non-skid rubber bottom, and I worried that it might serve as an insulator and keep enough heat from getting to the bowl. Today, I checked again at Wal-Mart, and they had some bowls in stock which weren’t there on Wednesday.

I made a batch of soap last month to give to my relatives out west. It’s now cured, and it turned out very nice; I had already started using the one bar which I held back for myself. The only reason I hadn’t sent the soap to them yet was that they’re packing up for their big move to North Carolina and asked me to wait.

When Carolyn had to pull out of the Costa Rica trip, and I became the leader of the soapmaking workshop, I asked my brother and sister-in-law if I could take the soap to Costa Rica with me instead. (I’ll make them a replacement batch soon enough.) They were quite understanding.

I’m not certain right now how the workshop will be scheduled. I may end up grating and melting soap bought in-country, and using the family soap to hand out as samples. Or I may end up grating and melting the family soap.

Originally, I was scheduled to do two devotions for our internal team meetings. I pulled one out of the file which I had written for Bolivia and never got to give. I figured I would write the other one in country, if not before then. Now, with Carolyn gone, we may have to re-draw the schedule for team meeting devotions.

I’m still trying to finish reading a book which my pastor’s wife has loaned me about the struggles faced by pastoral families, which was a topic our hosts asked us to address.

Our flight will leave at 7:05 a.m. on the 5th. Rather than drive up from Shelbyville (me), Monteagle (Megan) and Sewanee (Frank) that morning, the three of us will go to Nashville on the evening of the Fourth and spend the night at Megan’s parents’ house.

I am taking one large suitcase of my own and one duffel bag which I will borrow from my parents. I didn’t pick that up this week because I thought they might need it for a weekend trip to Louisville. I’ll get it from them tomorrow night or Monday so that I can do some packing during the week. I always use my backpack as a carry-on, and stow it under the seat instead of in the overhead compartment.

The weekend will be here before I know it.

Carolyn Schussler, one of four members of the Costa Rica team, has had a family medical emergency and is going to be unable to make the trip. Please keep Carolyn and her mother in your prayers.

I am going to have to take over teaching the soap-making workshop. I know it, I’ve done it before, but I wasn’t preparing to lead it this time, and so I’m going to have to put together the equipment and supplies I need to take.

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:

I have already embedded a five-minute video of various random moments from training yesterday. I have a seven-minute video with Gail Drake talking about the LEAMIS mission and message and have uploaded it two different times since 2 this afternoon; both times, it seemed to upload successfully but YouTube would still show the “this video is processing” message hours later. The video is well within YouTube’s posted length and file size limits.

I think I’m going to try one more time — but I won’t delete the second attempt just yet.

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.

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.

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: