When flying back to Suriname January 24’ we had no idea how our agenda would change during the following weeks. We expected to visit the office of the ministry of Justice to apply for our stay papers as soon as possible and take off for Apetina right after that. 
Informing how we could finish our paperwork we learned that brand new rules demanded to make an appointment with the office first. We were only able to make our appointment on Thursday February 13. This made us change our flight with MAF to Friday February 14. Later we learned that this also would be due to change…
Knowing we had to stay in town for a couple of weeks we used our time to make a lot of appointments with people we wanted to meet. Networking is always good when time allows.
Now, looking back, we see that these weeks were instrumental for some important moves in our ministry. God knows what we need. Nothing gets out of His hands when changes occur. Just wait and see how His directions get you to meet new horizons… 
One example is that we tried to meet with the director of the Surinamese Bible Society since May 2013. When we finally could meet (since we had extra time now in town) we happened to run into a process of train the trainers of Operation Christmas Child. We jumped right in and are now able to take 121 shoeboxes to Apetina. This process helps us very much in training the children workers there, enlist new workers into the training and reach out to all of the children of the village. We had been thinking and praying about how we would be able to get such a process started and now here it is.
Another example is that we came to meet with the person in charge of the Central Lab of the Bureau of Public Health helping us to get water samples at Apetina to investigate the amount of mercury in the drinking water. We now have a small box full with the tools we need to take samples and the system in place to have them examined in town afterwards.
At the moment a lot of boxes are ready in the MAF hanger to be transported to Apetina. We know of two extra flights that will follow after we have left since tree people from the Rotary will visit us later in February to investigate the situation of the drinking water in the village since the school applies for this. We know two of them since they are involved in a project funding from a church in the Netherlands. The MAF flight that will bring them back to town will be filled with all the shoe boxes…
These are only some examples of a lot of things like this that filled our weeks in town. A real networking experience that the Lord used to get things on the road to be working with the coming year.
Our appointment with MAF was changed since the pilot had made to many hours due to some emergency flights last weekend. Now we are planning for Tuesday February 17. We really long to meet with the people of Apetina then. Please pray for a safe flight and all the things that are waiting for us there.