Pally Festive Posting

Happy new year when it comes. This is a fairly pally post for the festive season, so it doesn't contain much news about work!

We had a lovely Christmas with my (Adam's) family, who are with us until the 5th January. Jo and mum did an amazing job of dinner, with 2 roast chickens cooked in a combination microwave oven! This was accompanied by perfect roast potatoes, greens, carrots, and gravy!! This was followed by apple crumble, which was delicious. NO COMPROMISE! It was extremely nice to have family with us, and there is already the prospect of some of Jo's family coming out next year!! The day was also spent with a medical student from London, who really fitted in well. He was extremely generous, and bought me a webcam as a present!! Unfortunately he subtley tried to find out if I already had a webcam first, and I thought "that's a greeeaaat idea", and promptly went out and bought myself one on Christmas-Eve!!! OOPS

The webcam means that we can now show people live footage via SKYPE, which is a web based telephone/videolink service, which is free to download, and costs the price of your internet service provider's calls to use. This means that it is effectively FREE if you have broadband. Visit http://www.skype.com by clicking on this link to download the software (make sure you download the latest version (2.0) which supports webcams). It is very user friendly, so don't be scared! and takes only a few minutes to set-up. In order to find us on SKYPE, our username is 'adamclanblack', and our region is 'India'. Once you have sent us an invite to skype you, we will each be able to see when the other person is on-line, and we can call with the click of a button! Alternatively you can call our landline to ask us to go online (0091 22 25399949) It is such a great tool for those abroad!

Andi and Sheba Eicher have gone to Mussoorie for a week to visit his parents, and attend a wedding. This means that I am holding the fort at JSK until the 4th of Jan., and my family leave on the 5th. God has been very gracious by providing a particularly quiet spell at work. We have no in patients at the moment, which means that I have the possibility of a lot more free time. Please pray that this will continue, so that I can spend as much time with my family as possible.

Amazingly Jo and I have not actually been to visit Mumbai proper since we arrived 3 months ago! this means that we are planning to enjoy exploring the Bazaars with my family. They left today to stay In Mumbai for 2 nights, and we plan to join them tomorrow for new year's eve in a hotel.

Cameron has also offered to babysit for Jo and I one night, so it will mean that we will be able to go on a date, which will be the first since arriving here (and probably the last for a while, given that the new baby will be arriving very soon!). We have been fairly careful to protect as much 'family time' as possible here, but it will be nice to have some 'A&J time' as well.

Please pray for us to make the right choice as to where we choose to settle for 'Church'. (I put this in inverted commas because we are all 'Church' all the time, aren't we! What I mean is that we could settle in the right body of believers on a Sunday, in order to share fellowship, worship, serve, grow, and be held accountable!!). At present we are really torn between a Baptist Church which is a Rickshaw drive away, but is more what we're used to, or the Brethren Church which meets in the Hospital. This is a great group of people who we love and respect, but the brethren ethos is a little different to what we are used to. I think that we could maybe be used more at the brethren Church, and it would be great to go to somewhere local.

On the baby front, Jo now only has 24 days to go before her due date! Added to this is the fact that Alistair came 8 days early, so it is fairly likely that we will have another addition to the family in only a couple of weeks!! Are we prepared? Probably as well as we can be, but your prayers would also be appreciated on that front as well. Pray especially for a quick, pain-free delivery, as they do not offer any pain-relief in labour here!!

Anyway, I generally try to keep these letters brief, so that people don't tire of reading them, so I think I'd better sign off now!

God bless, Love Adam, Jo, Alistair and Bump