The Copeland Ramblings

I’ve upgraded to the newest version of Wordpress which mostly consists of big changes under the hood. Our current theme isn’t playing nice with the current Wordpress install, over the next little while we’ll be working a new theme and look. Thanks for your patience!

For the time being we’re keeping this post at the top as a reminder

This last Saturday we left sunny California for our other home: Ontario, Canada. We arrived late Saturday night and have had a great time with family. It is our last time with Canadian family and friends before our departure for Guinea on August 4th. In some ways, I feel like we are leaving for Guinea next week! We don’t have a lot planned, we just wan to spend time with our family. We did have to squeeze in a trip to Ottawa yesterday. We left at 5:30am and drove six hours to our nations capital to apply for visas at the Guinean consulate. We were in and out in half an hour with visas! We are so thankful to the Lord for such a smooth process.  The drive was about 24 times longer than our time in the embassy!

So, we have tickets, two shipments underway and visas in hand. We are on the verge of being ready! We will have a few immunizations to take care of but we really hope to spend our coming weeks with family and friends.

This Saturday during the afternoon and evening my parents are having a farewell bonfire and open house for us at their place (Southern Ontario). If you are in the are and would like to come just let us know and we can get you some details!

Today was Norm’s 27th birthday! Luckily for him, while we were out to dinner, our server thought that it was his 21st birthday! He must not have seen the gray hairs on the back of his head!! =)

I am so blessed to have him as my husband and best friend! I could not imagine one day without him. He is always so selfless and is an INCREDIBLE father! I think our boys are so lucky to have him as their daddy.

THANK YOU GOD FOR MY AMAZING HUSBAND!!

Happy Birthday Babe! I hope you had a wonderful day and felt spoiled. =)

Today we held our second garage sale. Almost three months ago friends and family started donating items for us to sell. We had the first garage sale a month and a half a ago and finally had the second this morning. Our street was packed all morning and we made a few hundred dollars. Thanks so much for all your donations! Special thanks to our family who have put countless hours into the garage sales. Deb’s mom in particular has been very busy selling donated items on eBay.

Tomorrow I am speaking at a new (to us) church. I am excited to share with them the journey that God is taking us on.

This week we’ll be getting ready for our departure to Canada. We leave on the 20th and look forward to seeing out friends and family.

The weeks our flying by as we prepare for our departure, check back often for more updates.

Here it is, another newsletter! Most of you should already have received it in the mail. You can download it below by clicking on the image. If you would like to receive it in the mail, you can sign up here.

Enjoy!

Well, it’s been an interesting day. I won’t rehash the details since Debra wrote about it a few hours ago but after all the rain and interesting news we finally arrived at the shipping company with our shipment! It felt great to see it get piled onto a pallet and ready to go. Here’s a few pictures from our trip this morning. They’re from a cell phone but not too bad (other than my disheveled appearance).

ALL WE CAN DO IS PRAISE GOD!

We have been having a whirlwind of a day! A roller coaster for sure! As you know we have been busily packing up our supplies for Africa! The due date was set at June 12th so we had to ship all of our stuff out today so that it would get there in time!  We were so relieved when we finished getting it all ready late last night! It was like a weight off our shoulders knowing that the next morning we were loading it on some pick up trucks and driving it to the trucking company and then we were done! So wonderful!  So this morning, Norm, Kathleen and our friend John loaded all the boxes and tubs onto two pickup trucks! It fit perfectly!  Just as they put on the last box suddenly, pretty much out of no where, it starts POURING! Now, normally this wouldn’t be weird, but this is Southern California where it never rains! And when it does it is pretty little!  Well, Norm and Kathleen start to panic because we have NOTHING to cover it all with!  So they both hop into the trucks and drive as fast as they can across town to Kathleen’s house to try to cover it! Mom met us there with tarps. It was a truly heartbreaking hour as we watched all our earthly belongings sitting out in the pouring rain! After over a week of nearly sleepless nights and it all culminated to this! It was so amazing knowing that GOD IS IN CONTROL OF RAIN! He knew exactly when it would rain!

Well, we called the shipping company and asked if we could possibly delay the shipment until Monday so that we could unload it all and dry it off and air it out. They said that that would be fine and they would make sure it would get onto the shipment to Guinea.  So we then unloaded it all into Kathleen’s garage and did our best at drying it off and airing it out. We then decided that the weather report looked somewhat in our favor… only 50% chance of rain!  So we had lunch and then loaded it all back up onto the trucks and covered them very securely with tarps. Then of course it started raining again… but this time more in California fashion… just spitting rain.

Then, very excitingly Norm, Canaan and Kathleen took off for the hour long drive to the trucking company! Yeah! All of our stuff will be dropped off today and shipped to Missouri!

As soon as they left, I sat down to check the email! And the first thing I saw was an email from our shipping company in Missouri…  I thought I should check it out, pronto! =) And they sent the email to tell us that the boat our stuff is headed to on the East Coast had taken off EARLY! So there will be no shipment!  Our stuff will now be going onto the next shipment next month! WOW! God is in control and I am soooooo glad for that fact! Because if we didn’t have HIM to rely on, we would be so stinking frustrated right now. But I have to tell you… all we feel is PEACE! The precious peace that passes all understanding!

Please pray for us after this last exhausting week! We are now going to go about the task of moving out of our apartment! We packed everything up that is going to Guinea with us… but about half the apartment is still full of stuff that we have been borrowing or will be storing here for future furloughs!

On another note… my Grandpa John is in the hospital again! Please pray for health and speedy recovery!

There it is, shipment number 2! It is packed and ready to go for the morning. Tomorrow at 10am we are going to haul it all down to a warehouse near Los Angeles where it will then be transported to Missouri then in a couple of weeks on to North Carolina. At that point it will be loaded onto a ship and then sent on to Guinea! They are on a long journey, one will embark on in exactly two months from today. We are definitely looking forward to a break after this all leaves. We’ve had EXTREMELY late nights all week and its catching up on us. Thank you so much for your prayers and notes of encouragement as we have progressed on our journey to Guinea!

Some of our boxes

One thing that is VERY important to Debra and I is communication. We believe that with the tools available today there’s no reason we can’t keep in fairly close contact with you all no matter where in the world we are. We’ve been asking questions about what our communication situation will be in Guinea. Internet won’t be readily available, especially at the beginning. We hopefully will eventually be able to get internet set up at home but it will be akin to dial up and very spotty at best. As far as telephones go, we’ll be able to get cell phones once we arrive. Landlines are rare but over the last few years the mobile phone infrastructure has developed quit a bit. This is very common in developing worlds where it is much easier to erect towers than to bury cable. We’ll have a Guinean phone number and will be able to phone home with it.

One of the major cell companies in Guinea is called Areeba. According to the rates on their webpage, calling home won’t be too cheap, about $0.44 per minute depending on the value of the Guinean franc on any given day. With internet being limited I tried to find a way that we can talk to friends and family at home at a better price.

I ended up piecing together Google Voice and Gizmo5 to make something quite useful. If you haven’t heard of Google Voice, it is a free service where you receive a US phone number that will forward to any other US number or numbers allowing you to just have one phone number through the years. Google voice won’t forward to international (and definitely not Guinean) numbers and so the next step is Gizmo5. Gizmo5 is a competitor to Skype though a bit cheaper. Google voice will forward to Gizmo5 for free which will then forward to us in Guinea. To make a long story short, when someone calls us on our Californian phone number (805.504.8753) it is forwarded to Gizmo and then forwarded on to us in Guinea. Being forwarded from Gizmo to Guinea will cost $0.15 per minute but that is much better than $0.40. Text messages from Guinea to North America are about $0.11 so if we want to talk to family or friends we can text message them and have them call us which ends up costing us $0.15 instead of $0.44 per minute! I’ve tested it out and it seems to work. We’ll see how it does in a few months with some REAL testing!

Google Voice also transcribes and emails voice mail so any voicemail you leave will be sent to our inbox! So, feel free to call us! We look forward to keeping in close contact with you all.

As many of you know, we have tickets to Guinea! We ended up with tickets for the 4th of August. A little later than we had planned on but it’s just the way it worked out. No tickets were available the 24th and 31st, there were some on the 28th of July but that is the day after Deb’s birthday. We didn’t want to celebrate it with the busyness of our imminent departure. We are right in the middle of planning our second shipment which is MUCH larger than the first. On top of that, we are moving out of our apartment this week. We will be moving in with Gregg and Kathleen, Deb’s sister.

Our belongings need to leave California on June 6th, after that we will have only the few bags that we will take on the plane with us. We have our apartment to the 9th and then leave for Canada on the 20th. We’re excited to visit family and friends in Canada for the last time before heading to Guinea. While we are in Canada we unfortunately have a little business to do. We’ll be heading up to Ottawa to get visas as well as put a few things in order for our long absence.

We’ll return to California on June 30th and spend the next month visiting with family and supporters as well as keeping our French up.

There’s our next two months in a nutshell!

Thanks very much for your prayers, continue to pray for us as we go through all these preparations. We can’t wait to be done with them. They seem never ending!

We are super busy packing, ordering and getting ready for Guinea! But I wanted to let yoy all know that EMMAUS IS SIX MONTHS OLD!!! Wow! He is such a joy and is really trying to get on the move. He is so close to crawling all over the house. He loves to be on his hands and knees. Anyway, please pray for us as we get or shipment ready to send in the next week, this truly involves a lot of spiritual, physical, emotional and mental strength! Canaan has been sick off and on all week. Please pray he will fight it all off and feel better soon.