Update August 2008

I am sorry that I have not been blogging during the first half of this year.
Alan and I have been doing a few things that kept us occupied. One of the things we did was to team up with 2 other people to start a charitable organization so that we can team up and have better resources to raise funds for Africa. This is in progress.

Just to bring you up to date on what Alan and I have been doing, we left Toronto on June 5th and returned on August 4th, 2008.
This is how it all came about.
We had already planned in the summer of 2007, to join an Alaskan cruise in Seattle on June 13th, 2008 with Esther's old classmates who organized this a year ago. Then Alan and I both had been thinking about making a trip across Canada "one of these days" to see this country of ours and so by the beginning of 2008 we decided, since we have to travel to Seattle for the cruise, we would make this trip, so we drove to Seattle to join the cruise and then took the time to camp along the way and to drive back to Toronto across Canada, we gave ourselves 2 months to do this.
This would be a trip of a life time, it was quite an adventure and I hope to write about it some day soon, I hope.

Update on Jessica.
We are in contact with Racheal who has sort of adopted Jessica on her own. Racheal and Apollo are a young couple with 2 daughters of their own. Apollo is an accountant and he also leads worship at their church, Racheal sings and Apollo plays the key-board. Racheal is an interpreter and Apollo is the accountant for the church.
The latest news from Racheal is that Jessica is progressing slowly at school and at home is happy and helpful and is part of their family now. This is expected as she hardly had any schooling before we met her 2 years ago.
You may know of the situation in Kenya since the trouble they had at the last election at the end of 2007. God really took good care of us and we actually were back in Toronto not knowing what had happened until we were home safe and sound. We were very concern about the situation but Racheal told us they are well and life goes on as usual.
However, we have heard of some very troubling stories from the missionaries who are still there working with their ministries. The cost of food there has risen and it looks like they will have a long time to get back to what it was used to be there.
We continue to pray for them and we also need continued support for Jessica and her adopted family. Racheal has told us that the cost of yearly support for Jessica would be about $1000. So looking toward next year, we hope that we can get a few more people on board to help us with Jessica's expenses.

If you are interested to help I would be very glad to hear from you. Please email me at esthercheng777@yahoo.ca