Trip #1 is on the Calendar!

Are you ready for the exciting news?!!? Are you!?!?!?

We're *going* to get to take the trip to a potential allocation *before* we leave for Australia!

Now, before, mentioned in the post "Looking Ahead", we said, "there are no helicopters that will be traveling in one of the areas, which would necessitate commissioning a helicopter, about $5000 round-trip." But it turns out that there was some miscommunication (c'est la vie) and there WILL be a helicopter!!

So we're looking at $4160 for a round-trip, which we've been informed, is the cheapest we will ever find it.

Let me expound on the implications of this.

As we plan to be a village team, we need to decide which language group (and village) we're going to move out to. There  are only two languages on the table at this time. We need to check out both of them before making any decisions and then either pick one or none. ("None" would mean waiting to see what other language projects surface and consider those as they come.) Checking them out means heading to the village where we would want to stay and spending some time there.
So, circling back, the opportunity for the first has come!  

So we head out from February 8th-11th as presently planned. (There has been mention of a desire to extend the trip to give us more time but we haven't heard back about that yet.)

While we're there, our main objective is to do a village checking session. This is a checking stage of translation where we take the draft and, after some polishing, go out to the village and ask people who haven't had any previous exposure what they think. Is it clear? Is it natural? Do they understand everything we want them to understand?

So presently, I've been prepping extensive questions for the 9 chapters that we're going to attempt to cover while we're there, and researching best practices and devising a plan, etc. Jacob will spend most of his time during our trip figuring out the lay of the land, visiting with people, determining who we like and where our house ought to be and who we would want to be adopted by (not that we get to decide any of that, per se, but preferences can be given to the DLA, who speaks to the head translator, who speaks to the village.) 

We also get to plan for a trip out to village! 3 nights is a long and short time. It's too long to expect tech to stay charged but too short to worry about it. It's a weird time for food estimating… You can't just throw 40lbs of rice on the helicopter and say it'll get eaten eventually. But how much do you bring? How many people are you going to end up needing to feed with it? What can you get there? It is definitely a short enough time for disposable diapers though!

So all of this and more gets to be sorted out. We're really excited to see the first of the two language groups and see how God moves to indicate whether or not we should allocate at this location. Helicopter travel is budgeted for but we came into country under-budget, so the question of whether the money is there for this trip is a bit tricky. If you'd like to contribute to our first journey into this language group, or for any of our other ministry expenses, see our giving page!

If you would like to join our support team, that would also be awesome! We're about $1000/month short of being full funded. By committing to give a monthly gift of any size, you lessen that number and the stress that big expenses such as these put on our budget.

Thank you so much. It is through your financial sacrifices, whether monthly or on special occasion, that we're able to do this valuable work of providing the Scriptures in people's heart language. It is through your financial sacrifices that transformed lives can happen in the far reaches of the earth.

Thank you!