For a long time, I've longed to take our family on a humanitarian trip. I talked to friends and looked into many options over the years, but never found one that seemed like a good fit for our family. Then sometime last year I heard about an organization called, "Family Humanitarian."
Family Humanitarian was everything we were looking for. They are not interested in just bandaid fixes that cover problems and don't do any real long-term good. They strictly forbid their participants from bringing handouts and they earnestly seek to work with local organizations and people to do projects that are sustainable and focus on education. I loved the idea that we would be busy and engaged in doing and supporting a good cause, but in a way that did not harm the local economy or make the people we were serving more reliant on others. The goal is education, health, and self-reliance. Add to that that they are family friendly and include some cool sightseeing trips on the side, and it was the perfect balance of work and play we were looking for and we decided to go for it.
Family Humanitarian offers a variety of options for locations and timing of service expeditions. With kids in college or working, one that hopes to leave on a mission at the end of the school year, and Glen with an intense job, we really felt like Christmas was the only option for timing for us. Location wise we were drawn to Peru and Uganda with Uganda being our strong preference, but since only Peru had a scheduled expedition at Christmas, that's where we put our efforts. We researched, discussed our budget and other considerations, made the decision, and signed up. But we were too late. We had no idea that the trips filled so fast.
I had felt such strong impressions that our family needed to do this trip, it was discouraging to only be on the waiting list, but still we held out hope that something would work out. In the meantime, we decided to keep our Christmas calendar completely open. I didn't even buy the kids their tickets home from college, because I wanted to be sure about dates before committing to anything.
Sure enough, somewhere along the way we were contacted and informed that, because there were so many people on the waiting list, that they were considering opening up another expedition or two at Christmastime. We were totally thrilled when Uganda was mentioned as one of those potential add-on trips. A trip to Guatemala was the first to get added. We considered it, but reluctantly decided to wait to see if Uganda would open up too. Eventually it did... but only if they could get the minimum number of participants to commit.
At this point, the spiritual impression that this was something that our family needed to do had only grown stronger. We jumped at the chance and hoped and prayed that other families would feel the same pull, so that the trip could happen.
We didn't hear officially that the trip was a go until mid-October, a fact which was frustrating to me as the planner and organizer of our family, but we were truly so excited that it was hard to focus on the frustrating aspect of it.
At that point, it was full speed ahead with buying plane tickets, getting the right vaccinations, visas, preventative medications, etc...all with us living in different states. Stay tuned for the next blogpost, which will be about some of those preparations...
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