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:

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.

Bolivia has, after much delay, implemented stiff new visa requirements, as described in this blog and this blog. Included will be a hefty fee as well as some onerous requirements such a background check.

Up until this point, it’s been much harder for a Bolivian to travel to the U.S. than the other way around, and so it’s easy to understand the popular support for stiffening the travel requirements. But, as both of the bloggers above point out, Bolivia could find the new rules counterproductive — they could cut down on tourism and inconvenience Bolivians with dual citizenship.

LEAMIS hasn’t firmed up its 2008 trip schedule, but the last word I had from Debra did not include Bolivia among the possibilities. So I don’t guess I’ll be affected by the new requirements.