Greetings from Senegal!

I am very pleased to announce that Peter and I were able to successfully fly into and out of Marseille! Unfortunately were not able to stay in the transit area of the airport as we had hoped. In fact, upon our arrival, we were directed to go through customs. As you can imagine, this made us just slightly terrified. We prayed fervently as we waited in line and in God's kindness, the lady who looked at our passports was extreeeeeemely nice. From what I could gather, we should have been escorted from customs to our airline check-in desk, but when Peter explained our situation, the customs lady opted not to call an escort so that we wouldn't run into any trouble. If that wasn't the favor of God, I don't know what is!

By the time we made it through customs (around 8pm Wednesday) the Marseille airport was like a ghost town; there was no one there to check us in. So we claimed a row of seats (the ones with metal arm rests in between, so there's no possible way you can lie down on them) and pulled an all-nighter. With the help of a movie, prayer time, and some good music, the evening passed quickly. As you can imagine, we were pretty happy to see our team members walk through the airport doors bright and early Thursday morning!

All went well with checking in and getting through security, and we made it to our gate with no problems. Upon our arrival in Algiers we had a long, 10 hour layover; we arrived in Dakar around 12:00am today (Friday).

Just outside the Dakar airport Mark rounded up five taxis for our team of 11 and all our luggage. The taxi ride was a "hit the ground running" kind of experience. In other words, SCARY! But God protected us, and we all made it safely to the WEC (Worldwide Evangelisation for Christ) guest house where we spent the night.

Today's adventure will involve taking a 16 hour ferry ride from Dakar to Ziguinchor—our final destination! We'll be staying in a WEC guest house in Ziguinchor for pretty much the entirety of our stay in Senegal. Internet access will be more limited in Ziguinchor, but my goal is to continue blogging when I can. I am keenly aware that I haven't yet explained what we'll be doing in Senegal, so look for more info on that in my next post.

Thanks again to each and every one of you who have been praying for me or sent me emails/facebook messages to let me know you're thinking of me. I am so grateful for you people!