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To our beloved Home Team, Well, we are on our home stretch. Today we packed our luggage, cleaned the house from top to bottom, made follow up calls to Stephanschmarie to clean and redress the infected finger, as well as made visits into Sighi and Chendu for gifts to bring home for our loved ones. Doc Steve made a few house calls and had some private consultation appointments with the missionaries in Sighi. Medications were sorted into boxes for Dr. Opriun, Linda, and Suord based on needs and requests. This morning Norman and Rod went to the train station to buy our return train tickets. When they got back, Rod remembered all the things that have gone wrong in the past. So, he asked Norman to check the tickets one more time. Sure enough, six tickets were for the 8:30 am train to Bucharest, and six were for the afternoon train. So, back to the train station Rod and Norman went to exchange tickets. The ticket lady just wrote the wrong ticket numbers on six of them, so she corrected them and we were all now scheduled for the same train. PTL! Except Abe… he did leave on the Wednesday evening train to make his connections for flying standby. Rod just wanted for once to report to Brad, we no difficulties… Later in the afternoon we all met together headed by Doc Steve to debrief our experiences. Especially for our first timers who have not experienced coming home, we needed to work through all the emotions of our trip. Brad, with the missionaries John Scott, was very helpful as an example of how to debfief and discuss missions experiences. During the meeting everyone shared from Abe to Penny and many tears were shed. We shared about the experience of the team setting, our team responsibilities as well as our responsibilities to the Pattersons. We shared how well the medical team operated and improved the system with the addition of 2 more nurses and extra hands monitoring the line of patients and Linda. We also discussed how well the team from North Caroline integrated with our team. This was their first time together as a medical team, and they received great amounts of encouragement from us. Not only did they like our system, but now they want to come back to join us! PTL! In the middle of our debriefing, we received a phone call from Clauda in Bucharest informing Norman that the trains were going on strike at 8:00 am. We started to laugh, and Rod cried, “Not again!” We finished our meeting and closed in prayer including our current plight of needing to change our train tickets again. Norman and David rushed to the train station. They got Abe out on time to meet his schedule, and then began working on changing our tickets as we were scheduled to leave at 8:35 am. Our two options were: leave at 4:20 am or be driven in! OY-OY-OY! Never a dull moment in Romania! David and Norman returmed to the house where we made the decision to leave at 4:20 am. This meant we had to be up at 2:30 to leave at 3:30 to see if there was room on the International Eurorail train from Hungary. These were not on strike and were guaranteed to run. Of course we were scheduled on a striking Romanian train. We seriously thought about staying another week…Just kidding!
Our Queen Mother, Linda, ordered
everyone to bed by 10:30 pm. Noapte Buna!
In His Love, |