The Traveling Pine

Packed in tight for our first C-130 flight! This past weekend we had the privilege to travel down to the country of Niger to conduct and audit and meet with one of Leah's Paying Agents along with many others stationed there. What a trip. Niger is located in the Sahel region of Africa, along the southern part of the Sahara desert. We were supposed to only spend about 24 hours there, but the flight was delayed a day, so we got a bonus day! We flew down on a C-130, our first flight on that type of aircraft. It's loud, so earplugs or headphones were definitely necessary (for the humans of course, I'm a Pineapple, I don't have ears 😋🍍). The first leg of the flight was about 4 hours, a stop for gas, then another 4-5 hour flight. Africa is huge, so traveling down there takes a long time. Especially on a "slower" aircraft like a C-130. We finally landed mid-afternoon. It's hot at that part of the day! Once we got off, we had to wait for all the cargo to be o...

It's been just over a month since we've arrived here in Germany. Overall it has gone by fairly fast. Some days are quick, some are slow. But that's like that anywhere, I suppose. We've settled into a good schedule here. Work Mon - Friday (plus an occasional Saturday or Sunday), running after work, laundry on Tuesday (since no one else does laundry on Tuesdays!), Commissary and BX trips on the weekends to stock up on whatever we need, and the most important, video chats with Ross around his lunch time, and weekend chats with Charlotte and Leah's Mom & Dad. The building where we live Work for Leah is going well. One of the main tasks she does is create documents so people can buy all sorts of things they need down in Africa. It's helping build up bases and keep them running. She also gets roped into random projects like helping someone get scheduled for a class and figuring out which work cell phones belong to who. Random tasks help fill in the downtime,...