Finding Momentum

The pho­tos that almost weren’t

So do you see those pho­tos I just uploaded? Let’s just say that get­ting them online came at a price. So the story is that because I was so busy edit­ing pho­tos on the com­puter, I lost track of time (strangely enough, that’s the story of my life). We had a frenzied-yet-hilarious adven­ture check­ing out of the hotel, mis­er­ably drag­ging our lug­gage to Padding­ton sta­tion in the rain, and nearly miss­ing the Heathrow Con­nect train to Heathrow because I was hun­gry (hey, I really was!) and needed to grab some breakfast.

Then in Dubai as I’m upload­ing them to the blog, we nearly miss our board­ing call. As we’re sprint­ing to the ter­mi­nal, bags flail­ing about us, I see my life pass before my eyes, capped by a slow-mo mon­tage of Sarah destroy­ing me with her fists or her glare (equally hor­ri­ble fates). Luck­ily, we just shared a good chuckle. If we missed our flight(s), how­ever, I’m sure the out­comes would be much different.

So, please do enjoy the pho­tos. If you’d like to see more, keep track of my Flickr stream through the trip, pro­vided I sur­vive that long.

Head­ing to Maun, Botswana

We’re cur­rently stay­ing in Johan­nes­burg for the night at a really cool guest house the mis­sion referred us to. The weather’s nice and balmy here (they say it’s really weird weather for this place… nor­mally the place would be an oven). The neigh­bor­hood here is rel­a­tively upscale, more rem­i­nis­cent of a strip mall straight out of Cal­i­for­nia. There’s also a bit of a jar­ring tran­si­tion as we notice the power dynam­ics between the whites and African nation­als here in this neigh­bor­hood. That, and we’re pretty much the only Asian peo­ple around, so we do attract our fair share of looks.

I’m def­i­nitely a bit ner­vous now as I think about arriv­ing tomor­row. What are the nation­als like, or the staff at LBOM? What’s the weather like? Will I be able to make friends? How do I feel about being Taiwanese-American in this con­text? A soft­ware engi­neer? Will I feel use­less (my friend Alvin says yes, absolutely)? I think there’s just a lot of ques­tions that are float­ing in my head and I need peace about.

Although it’s a bit nerve-wracking, I’m def­i­nitely at peace. Some tough things have come up this week, and as Sarah and I press onward I’m more con­vinced that we can trust Jesus to keep being good.

Oh yeah, my lug­gage broke and hilar­ity ensued

So I for­got to men­tion how my carry han­dle on my suit­case snapped en route from SFO to Lon­don. Which caused us prob­lems today when we were scram­bling to Padding­ton Sta­tion, because I was try­ing to jury-rig a con­trap­tion to drag the suit­case while main­tain­ing a high rate of speed. Sarah has dia­grammed this for us:

“this is a pic­ture of what andrew looked like while we were going to padding­ton sta­tion. it was hilar­i­ous how mis­er­able and awk­ward he looked!”