Safely home

As those of you of a Facebook persuasion may already know, we have arrived safe and sound in Trinidad and we have all our luggage – wahey! The Lord is, indeed, to be praised.

We arrived in Santa Cruz on Saturday morning, where we had to catch our flight to Trinidad, albeit from a different airport. We picked up our luggage (aided and abetted by the usual trolleymen here – whom Craig stupidly mistook for taxi drivers and paid an astronomical tip!), jumped in a taxi and headed for the other, smaller airport, a good 40 minutes’ drive away. Already, as we sat in the car, the enormity of the task we were facing became clear. Santa Cruz is essentially a mega-sized version of Trinidad. Everywhere we looked was pure anarchy as evidenced by the insane driving. It wasn’t too cool either!

Fortunately for us, Dr. Diego Santana (whom you’ll get to hear a lot more about over the coming months – he’s in charge here at FT) was on his way back from Nicaragua and had a reservation on the same flight. And what a flight! A 14-seater aircraft, with a single row of 7 seats on each side of the aisle! The rivers and jungles of Bolivia spread out below us – but all we could do was sleep!

We met the rest of the Santanas (Jo and their delightful three daughters, Elena (8), Hilary (6) and Noemi (4)) and KC, who, with her husband Maicol, is staying – as are we – in the home vacated by Kenny and Claudia Holt, while they are on furlough in the UK. And once we’d dumped everything, we more or less slept, waking up around 8pm to grab a quick bite (sleep was a bit of a running theme yesterday).

This morning we had a chance to visit the church attended by the workers at FT and the locals, ‘El Jireh’. We listened to our first Spanish sermon from the pastor, Elias, before taking communion together. In this way, we felt truly at home. It’s also a good place for us to revise our Spanish, given that you hear essentially the same vocabulary every week!

More soon, but we’re heading out for a bite to eat now…

(PS -- We'd been hoping to post at least another couple of pictures, but simply to upload this single image took about 15 minutes! This is the new reality in which we now live, therefore please be patient if you're waiting to hear from us any time soon!)