A lot has happened over the past year. I won’t bore you with all the details but there have been some fairly major changes and life events within twelve short months.
- We’ve lost two close family members. Both died way too young.
- The radio station I work for has moved across the city.
- We decided to move house and are still going through the ‘sell one house buy another’ process.
- Our ten year old son James spent five weeks overseas with Pauline’s mum.
There have been plenty of other things happening, most of which can be found in my blog posts from the past year.
On this day last year I was getting ready to leave Perth for an amazing adventure. Below is some of what I wrote early on Saturday morning the 5th of April 2008. At the time I really had no idea what was going to happen.
I’m the only one up in my house at the moment but very soon we’ll all be sharing our last breakfast together for ten days.
I have to be at the airport at around 9:45 to fly out at 10:45. Between now and then I need to put all the clothes my Pauline has so wonderfully prepared for me into my case and then double check that I have everything I need. (I just know I’ll forget something.)
Over the next couple of days I’ll fly from Perth to Sydney then to Los Angeles then Miami and finally on to Haiti. I’ll be in Haiti for around a week before I repeat the entire process in reverse.
I feel totally unprepared but I’m sure that’s what long flights are all about. The flights will give me time to finally stop and soak in the information that I haven’t had time to process so far. I’ll read about Haiti and find out a little bit more of what to expect, I’ll read the instructions to my audio recorder to make sure that I know what I’m doing when I start interviewing people from Compassion and those they serve.
That was the start of my journey with Compassion Australia to see the amazing work they do in developing countries.
Little did I know that I’d only spend a couple of days in Haiti and that we’d have to enlist the services of an armed police escort to get us to the airport to leave the country as fires and violent protests took over the city of Port-au-Prince.
Over the next few days I’ll re-visit some of that trip and look at the highs and the heartbreaks.
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If you’ve read this blog in the past you probably know that I visited Haiti last year and saw the desperate conditions under which so many are living. You may have also read 
I’m a cyclist.