Our Arrival

1st letter sent Aug. 8


Dearest Family and Friends,

The Bouma's have arrived and partially settled into our new life in China. All in all, it's been great, albeit a few bumps and bruises along the way.

The fights out of Bellingham and Seattle were good. When we got to San Francisco, we rushed to the international flight departure area in order to get checked into our next flight. While waiting, I looked over at Marea and she was about as white as a sheet. "I forgot my purse under the seat in the plane", she exclaimed. As Marea wept, I sprinted back toward where we got off our airplane, thinking that it still should be there. Since 9/11, they do not let people into the departure areas of airports -- when I reached the security line, I was turned down and told to go to the Alaska desk. Being that it was around midnight, only one person was at the desk, but he agreed to run over to the gate and check to see if the purse was still there. 20 minutes later, he came back to say that he unfortunately was unable to find the purse. Since we were the last people off the plane and the cleaning crew hadn't arrived yet, we think that either a flight attendant picked it up, or someone sitting behind us snatched it. It has been a pain cancelling credit cards and checkbooks, however, we feel very fortunate that our passports and onward tickets were in another location (thank you Sally and Ma for all of your phone calls!). God is watching out for us.

The next exciting moment occurred as we approached Honk Kong on our 14 hour flight. We thought we were going to land, when suddenly the airplane made a 180 turn and headed back out toward Taiwan. We were all baffled until the pilot came over the loudspeaker and informed us that Hong Kong was in the middle of a typhoon with 150mi/hr gusts. The plane travelled for another hour and a half until we reached Tapai, Taiwan and landed safely. We thought "how nice, now we can say that we've been to Taiwan!", but after 6 hours of sitting on the runway with no air-conditioning, we felt different about the situation. About halfway into our pit-stop, the plane got ready to take off, only to be turned back to wait the storm out more. We refueled and finally got into the air. The pilot told us that we had enough fuel to circle Hong Kong for two hours and get back to Taiwan if need be. As we approached the airport, the plane started to go into landing mode. For the next 15 minutes, the plane dipped and tilted many times. As we looked out the window, we could see huge wave in the ocean -- not a boat in sight. Marea and I prayed as we landed safely. I started clapping and the rest of the airplane joined in. God is good -- we were one of 2 planes that landed that day.

As if that weren't enough excitement for one day, we loaded all of our belongings on a high speed ferry boat in order to reach Shekou. As we were waiting to load, the wind ripped off part of the roof in the ferry building. We were wondering if we would actually be able to make the crossing. When we finally were called to get on the ferry, I had flashbacks of making a similar ferry crossing in Zanzibar, Tanzania when I filled up the bag in the pocket in front of me. This time, however, we had air-conditioning which probably ended up helping my psyche more than anything. The crossing was rough, but we made it safely and as we crossed through immigration, our school director was there waiting! They had been following our flight on line and were able to meet us when we arrived.

You are all probably wondering how Judah did -- let me just say that Benadryl really works (just kidding). Although we did give him a couple of doses over the whole trip, he was a real trooper -- on the Hong Kong flight, especially. Since we have arrived, he seems really excited about being here. He seems to understand that our new apartment is our new home (away from home). He sometimes picks up our phone (which isn't connected to service, yet) and pretends he is calling Beppa and Paka or Sally and Darryl or Grammie or Emma or Boppa and Grandma, etc) It's been five days now, and we have all finally adjusted to the new time zone.

We will send another email soon -- on Thursday, we will have Internet hooked up in our house. Right now, I'm at a local Starbucks emailing you. We just bought a plug-in adaptor from a local shop and were able to charge up our laptop.

Within a week, we will be able to contact you more frequently over the phone as well. Our Skype account (check it out at www.skype.com) allows us to call Skype users for free, your phone number for 2.6 cents a minute, and possibly set up a phone number in Bellingham for you to call us for free. This Skype stuff is awesome! For those who are interested, you can purchase a web-cam with a built in microphone for about 60 bucks that plugs into your USB port. You can then see us as we talk -- although sometimes you might us in our boxers with messy hair if you call in the middle of the night :)

The next email will describe some of our experiences since we've arrived. We love you and miss you very much. Thank you for supporting us in our endeavors! We feel blessed to be able to have these experiences and pray that God uses us mightily in this area.

Much Love,

The Bouma's

PS -- If you know anyone else that would like to read this, feel free to forward and send us their address to add to our list. Some emails that we were going to add were in Marea's purse (pray that someone honest finds it and turns it in).