the shipment is out!

Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please. I have an announcement: the shipment is done!

For the past 3 months, we've been working our tails off to find a good shiping company, raise thousands of dollars, get sponsors for 200 Christmas presents, collect blankets, shoes, jackets, clothes, toys, hygiene items, craft supplies, scarves, game stuff, beanies and whatever else we could find to put in our shipment. And now we are finally done!

We ended up with 264 blankets, 678 pairs of socks, over 60 pairs of shoes, about 125 jackets, Christmas presents for about 200 orphan kids, 212 pairs of pants, almost 400 shirts, about 100 beanies - and that's just all the clothes!

Last night we put labels on 126 boxes filled with over 2000 pounds of donations, finished taping everything up, and loaded it all into a huge container to float over to Ukraine by December 27th! It was a ton of stuff [literally], a ton of work, took a ton of help, and so many people to donate and contribute in so many different ways! And now it is gone and on it's way to Ukraine! Here's some of the pictures from yesterday!

This is our huge empty container before we started the loading madness.

126 boxes...

A ton of packing...

Lots of loading...

And this is it folks - over 2000 pounds in a container that costs over $4000 to send!





We were really excited when we finished! 3 months solid, crazy work completed! It's beautiful!




Pravda or bust!!



Thanks so much to all of you who donated, helped pack, brought clothes, bought presents, gave us money and encouraged! There is no way we could've done this without all of you! Spasiba! Ochen! Ochen!

We are so glad to be done with working on this aspect of our trip! We still need your prayers though! Somebody told us that shipping to Ukraine is like shipping to the wild wild west! In other words, it's hard and there's no gaurantees. The company we used seems to be really good, but we've never done this before. Please pray that it all gets there safely and on time! It's scheduled to get to Ukraine on December 27th, the day before we get there. We haven't been able to get a hold of our man Vanya, but the [hopefully] plan is to get him to pick it up and get it through customs and all of that stuff because he has experience with that. So pray that we can talk to him and have good communication and that it all works out!

Thanks guys!