The Orientation

We are heading to Boone, NC  with all the other Samaritan’s Purse Post-Residents for a week long orientation so they can teach us how to set aside our western ideas of medicine and community development, how to pay our taxes overseas and how not to offend our host culture too much.

I think it should be great.  It is one of the things to cross off our list before we go.
Samaritan’s Purse Orientation
Pack our stuff
Raise Support
Pack our stuff
Rent House
Pack our stuff

I’m sure they will load us up with important and useful information, but I am most excited to meet the other post-residents and families.  These are our people.  People who have been through the same grueling med school and residency struggles.  People who are also dragging their children to another country with out English speaking friends and macaroni n’ cheese.  People who will also have to figure out medical procedures they’ve never been trained to do.  People who will have to make the same decisions about education and (gulp) homeschooling, and people who actually get why we are leaving homes, families and careers to go do what we are doing.

Here’s a secret (that I am now posting on the internet) despite our adventuring and my think outside of the boxedness, I really like knowing that someone has been there before and knows what I’m going through.  It is nice to have people doing the same thing you are, sometimes a little better than you, sometimes a little worse.  It is the way God set it up right? for us to live in community.  Granted we won’t actually be living with any of these people.  SP Post-Residents are all over the world, Niger, Honduras, Kenya, Peru.  No one else will be going to Nepal, but meeting them, reading their blogs and updates, knowing they are out there and we aren’t alone is reassuring all the same.