In good hands

It is 'goodbye' time today as we hand the Healing Home over to Sopheap and Sreymom for the next two months. Our staff are wonderful and the five patients currently at the home, plus (I think!) three family members will know great grace, we are sure.

Two of our patients are little ones. Here they are:

Sreyneth, who needs to get physically built up and get rid of her chesty cough before she can be operated on for the hair lip and cleft pallet. She is such a smiler!

Ping - full of beans and mischief, despite the growth behind his eye. This is his step-mum as his birth mum was, we understand, completely unable to care for him so this neighbour stepped in. She is desperate for work as her husband has run off on her, so little Ping has actually been accepted to go to a Christian orphanage soon.

17 Tick Day

We have just two more sleeps before heading down under once again. It has been over a year since we've been back to NZ and to say that we are looking forward to hugging our kids and connecting with friends would be an understatement. We arrive in Australia on Friday morning and a week later start our 6-week NZ time with four days in Christchurch.

So, today was a 'let's get everything done with a day to spare' day. For me, a '10 tick day' is extraordinarily successful. Today busted all records - I got to tick off stuff that had not even made it onto the 'to-do' list. Now, I've just got some shirts to iron (so that they can get scrunched up in the bag - why do we do this??), a bag to pack and just possibly, a Susie-list to knock over.

Can we help you ... not! Susie was buying supplies at a local chemist shop, but Tarzan was in full flight on the telly ....

Off to market - it is always interesting what you get to meet on the road while running around the city. Here, a motorbike is towing some happy pork to a local market. I pulled up behind these guys at a set of traffic lights.