What is our life in the tribe going to be like?

Three days until we leave for Maliyali!  I know I've said it before, but it's a surreal feeling.  I personally am just wanting to get this next week over with...all the cleaning and packing, last time going to the beach, the goodbyes, the flights and the moving all of our stuff in, and the first few days.  I am excited for a week from today--we will have been in Maliyali for like four days and I'm hoping we'll be getting settled!  Just being real :)  I love Wewak but I'm ready for this transition to be OVER!

So...here are our plans!  What our weekend is going to look like...even though we know we need to hold all of our plans loosely.  God has definitely changed our plans many times already!  So this is what we hope will happen :)

On Friday morning, we have two airplane flights scheduled, to get our two families plus all of our cargo into Yifki (if you remember right, Yifki is the airstrip that we use, with the missionary families who we have spent time with).  So we will fly in on this airstrip...

On this airplane...

While that is happening, Mike (our helicopter pilot) will be leaving from Goroka and coming to Yifki as well.  He will be bringing our freezer food that we ordered from Goroka.  So he will meet us in Yifki.  And then...he will begin to shuttle us and our stuff over to Maliyali.  Each helicopter trip from Yifli to Maliyali is about 15 minutes one way.  So he will first take Nathan or David, along with the first load.  The other guy will stay in Yifki to help coordinate everything.  If Nathan is the first one of us to go in to Maliyali, he will need to quickly unload the heli, put the frozen food into our two freezers, and organize things and then be ready for the next chopper load.  And this will go on pretty much ALL day.  At some point, David will most likely switch places with Nathan, but probably we will try to have one of them in Maliyali and one of them in Yifki throughout all the shuttling.  I'm not really sure when me and Em and all of our kids will fly in to Maliyali...some details are not figured out yet!  But all I know is...it is going to be one of the craziest, most overwhelming days of. my. LIFE.  

We will be reliving these moments (from our last time going into Maliyali back in January):

Loading the chopper...

Loading us onto the chopper...

...and entering back in to Maliyali!  This time, for good!  It's a crazy good feeling to know that we will soon be calling this our HOME.

Stay tuned for part two:  What will our next few months look like?