A Taste of Peru

Prior to our Shoes for Orphan Souls trip to Peru, a friend/co-worker, who is from Peru, invited us to her house for dinner. Cecilia fixed salad, a corn casserole and Chupe (pictured here) and Flan for dessert. It was a wonderful meal and a fun time of visiting with her and her family.

Starting it up again

I decided it's time to "fire up" the 'ole blog here and start some posting.  The big event is a Buckner Shoe Trip to Peru.  We fly out on June 4th and return on the 13th.  In addition to putting shoes on the kids, we will be doing a 1/2 day VBS at each orphanage we go to.  That's a lot of kids.    We got our list of VBS and humanitarian supplies only recently and so we are scrambling to get all the things we need.  If you want to help, go to the list to see what you can get.  But contact us first, to make sure that supply has not already been received.  Our deadline is Sunday, May 30th, so that we can purchase what has not been received and organize the packing.  We, of course, will take cash to make purchases or take with us to Peru and make purchases there.

First Post - getting you caught up

I was hoping to get this set up prior to Christmas and use this as a Christmas newsletter of sorts. I'll do a short summary and then add to it as time goes on. We had a number of "events" this last year to keep us hopping. I'll list some in no particular order other than them coming to my mind.

We went to Italy in June to the 2009 International Church Music Festival .  We spent 1 day in Venice, 1 day in Florence, 6 days in Rome, and 12  hours in the Madrid airport.  Other than the Madrid airport, it was a fabulous time with members of our Memorial Baptist Church choir and others from all over the world. 

We had a job upheaval as an agreement between the University of Missouri and the Cerner Corporation created the "Tiger Institute" as a collaborative effort between the University Healthcare and Cerner.  A part of that is the "migration" of our department to be a part of Cerner.  So, both Naomi & I will be Cerner associates.  Because of my 30 years of employment, I was able to retire from the University, but will still work for Cerner. 

We were able to have Christmas with all of my children.  Erika lives in Columbia, but Jill lives in Portland, OR, and Michael in Hollywood, CA.  Jill had spent most of the summer in India with an internship.  She now works with Mercy Corps International while finishing up her degree at Portland State University.  Michael graduated from Columbia College of Chicago in film editing and now works for a media company in Hollywood.