January 12, 2006 Update

 

Hello again,

Many of you have asked in recent days how we are doing and what the status is on our car. Well, we’ve certainly had an interesting couple of weeks which has included a nasty bout of food poisoning (Jo), more teething (Luke) and a virus infection (Luke). Amid all of that we’ve been battling daily with our insurance company over the fate of our car. After two weeks of pestering them, we finally had their assessment, which was that it wasn’t worth repairing our vehicle. They then valued our car at such a low figure that it would be impossible to buy anything else with the payoff. We were wondering what we were going to do, when the garage where we’d left the vehicle informed the insurance company that the car was no longer there! It all got a bit surreal at that point. Thankfully the next day the car rematerialized.

To make a long story short, Erik finally persuaded the insurance engineer to ask the garage to reduce the estimate by only doing the repairs that were absolutely necessary. He agreed and, providing the garage doesn’t find any unexpected damage, they will go ahead with the repair. We should be getting a courtesy car tomorrow which will enable us to be a bit more mobile. As far as time frame for the repairs…. we have no idea! We hope it won’t take too long, but we’re not making any firm departure plans until we know more.

During this wait, we have been making most of the extra time to be with family and to work on various projects. Erik is keeping quite busy working on several projects right now, preparing meetings and who knows what else. He is also preparing for the different art fairs he plans to take part in this summer. Erik would be busy even if we lived in the middle of the Sahara desert!

I’ve used the time to get together what we will need for our upcoming time in Kosovo and Albania. It has also been good to have Luke’s grandparents around which allows me to get out once in a while and to do some extra reading. We’ve enjoyed a couple of good books while here: “A New Kind of Christian” by Brian Maclaren and “PostMission” by Richard Tiplady, which deal with faith and missions respectively in the postmodern context – they sound kind of dry, but in fact both books are an easy read and have been very thought provoking.

It has been great to hear from many of you these past weeks by email. Please keep the emails coming! We love hearing from you,

 

Jo, Erik & Luke

P.S. We have had some communication challenges these past weeks. We’re not sure if all our emails went out correctly, so if you are expecting to hear from us and haven’t, please let us know. My parents now have broadband at their home so we are finding it a lot easier and have been able to set up our Vonage telephone. So if you are in the States and want to give us a quick call, our number is still the same: 720 212 0542. Don’t worry about calling at the wrong time: we unplug the phone when Luke naps or goes to bed for the night, but you’ll still be able to leave a message.