Thank you to everyone for a very warm send off! Your words, prayers, parting gifts, cards, etc. have made us feel very loved and taken care of. We are truly blessed to have so many wonderful friends and family who are supporting us through this venture.
As for Manizales, I think we are going to like this place! After over a year of set backs, delays and challanges, yesterday everything went VERY smoothly! Even the little puddle jumper flight into Manizales was fine! Amazing! I know so many of you were praying and God listened! We are now in our little apartment which is just perfect for us. Manizales is a beautiful place with a unique culture that we are looking forward to exploring. The family that is renting us our apartment is WONDERFUL. I think we will all become friends. They took us to the supermarket and helped us get the right stuff (very important). Of course, later that night we tried to make sandwiches and discovered we bought absolutely no meat of any kind. I suppose we are going vegetarian until we walk back to the supermarket for meat! The family’s daughter is learning English in school and is going to get to practice it with us. The husband speaks very good English. He is in Sports Medicine and teaches at the University here so you know he and Scott hit it off. They will be taking us around the city and even to some places outside of the city after our first integration week with Lanie is over. We have to stay in the city for that week. When they all went to leave last night, the wife went up to hug and kiss Alli. Alli looked at her very strange like, “um… what do I do?” We all had a lot of laughs. I think we all know how to great our fellow Colombians now… with lots of hugs and kisses! They are all very welcoming around here. I sat next to the director of one of the public universities on the flight from Bogota to Manizales. She has lived in the US for a while as well and spoke good English. She was a wealth of information about Colombia. We also met a group of 4 girls from a University in New York who are doing a student exchange here over the summer. The apartment owner told us in the last 10 years of having about 300 adopting families rent from them they have had no safety issues. Manizales is a safer place than many other places in Colombia. We’ll will be smart in all we do throughout this trip and pray that God will continue to go before us and pave the way.
We are adjusting to the altitude a bit, but I’m sure we will get adjusted very soon. It is somewhat rainy here off and on as well as we expected. We were exhausted last night so we’ll start unpacking today and getting settled. I guess I’ll have to finish off my defensive driving online class today. 🙁 Then we’ll go an explore Manizales some. We are within walking distance from a lot of stuff.
Thank you all oodles for your prayers! Now I better finish up that defensive driving class!