Goodbye for a Bit

Jane and I are headed back to the US for the summer. Allison is getting married in late June. And Jonathan is going to be in Denver for the fall semester as an "exchange" student.

So the desk in the office at the Phare is cleared off. And Alex and I and Herve have tried to coordinate enough that my absence won't mess things up too much. And my email and files are loaded on my laptop.

I even managed to load up a French version of Office onto the new computer for Herve. Have you seen these little computers? That little box, the size of a book, is the desktop computer. They make them to fit on the back of a large flat-screen TV, I guess. For us, the small profile makes them lovely for bringing over.

Hopefully he and Alex will be able to transfer the files from his ancient and sporadic laptop to this new one!

When I slipped into the Phare this morning, I found a group of college students from the GBU (the French-speaking equivalent of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship). They were here for a retreat.

In fact, I brought the camera along because Gene and Cheryl Toombs were coming over to meet me so I could prepare to introduce Gene tonight. He is the featured speaker for the 50th Anniversary celebration for Dakar Academy. But I didn't remember the camera until they had left again. Sorry.

But perhaps I can make up for that with a few shots of various UWM folks and Phare connections that I've gotten at the DA graduation and other events.

Here are Don and Jan Kuhn with Cheryl Toombs. Don and Jan were the ones who found the Phare property back in the 1970s when it was a vacant villa, the old governor's country estate fallen on hard times. They were looking for a new restaurant they'd heard of. They never did find it that day, but there tour of the Phare property began the process that led the orphanage to its new home.




And here are Adam and Jennifer Dalenburg, former UWM folks, with Alex. Joe Dalenburg was one of the 29 DA graduates this year.
















And I did get a good shot of Gene Toombs over at DA.











And finally, I have to include the photo our speaker from graduation, former Shuttle astronaut Scott Parazynski. He was a student at Dakar Academy in his junior high days, back in the 70s. What fun to get a chance to listen to him and meet him! He was the one who had to go out to repair that self-deploying solar power unit that jammed. And he was the doctor who did the experiments on John Glenn when he went up on the Shuttle at age 77. And he was the one who tested the power pack for space walks. And then just a couple years back, in his late 40s, he climbed Everest.