Preparing for Iraq

There's a season for all things they say, and I'm now very much in a season of flux. I arrived back in Britain last week from my training with CPT in Chicago and felt profoundly lost. I find it hard to readjust after having lived shoulder to shoulder with a small community of people through an intensely emotional and exhausting month. I've been flittering between home, Oxford and London since then, living out of a tiny bag (just a change of cloths, a Bible and my wonderful new Fujitsu 4010 Tablet PC) and trying to order my life and relationships so that I'm prepared for a possible extended stay in the Middle East. I've had wonderful support from friends which is sustaining me. My family are still quite opposed and it breaks my heart causing them to worry and not having their approval, but sadly that can't be helped.

I'm flying out to Jordan on the 13th, then going over to see some old friends in Jerusalem and visit others in various parts of Israel/Palestine. Then hopefully I'll get the green light to go over to Iraq to join the CPT team there in early March, although this is not confirmed as they are still figuring out how many people they want to have over there at the moment. So I might be back in Britain in early March trying to figure out what else to do, or I might be out in Iraq until the summer... either way I'd value your prayers for me and more importantly for Iraq as she enters a new stage.

P.S. I saw Nelson Mandela today, speaking to a MakePovertyHistory rally in Trafalgar square. If you look at the photo on the BBC report, I've figured out from the camera angle that I'm one of blurred blogs about 6 rows behind the two red flags you can see, vertically above the right flag in the picture. From where I was NM was just a blob too, albeit a very inspiring blog!