Today started with a sick little girl who handled it like a pro.  Yesterday she had a fever that spiked in the evening, so we equipped her with a thermometer, pen, paper, and meds.  In the wee hours of the morning, she woke up, took her temp, wrote it down, and took meds without disturbing anyone else in the house.  So school looked like this:

She was a trooper. Slow and steady on her school work, even through two negative malaria tests.  And in the other room, the sound of packing tape screeched as Aaron packed up and ready to leave on the Nutoli at 11:00 p.m.

We would never survive here without our SITAG colleagues.  They drove the truck with some of the cargo and the big gas cylinder.  The girls prefered to ride with them!  Aaron and I went down in another vehicle with the rest of the cargo.  Since this is the first time Aaron has traveled on a little wooden copra ship since 2009, he's not sure what to expect.  

Except that he knows it will be stinky.  My kids compare the smell of copra to this "Crime Stinks" video.  My girls really stepped up to the fill the gap left by their older siblings.  They untied and hoisted and carried and were super helpful.

"We can never realize the likeness of Christ by ourselves alone; we will never transform the world as individuals; we will never discover fullness of life in Christ if we stay solo.  We are distinct as people of God because we were made to live in dependence on the head and interdependently with the diverse parts of the body."  ~Julie Gorman