For those who night not know, I work for Salem Fields Community Church and we have a venue in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. About twice a year we send teams to provide leadership training (because the Nigerian government is incredibly corrupt) as well as to support the day-to-day activities of doing what we can to partner with the local community.

One of our recent projects is called Water for Life. Clean water is typically an expensive luxury in Nigeria. We worked with the local community to help them build a water tower that now provides free water for anyone.

I have felt for some time that I would be going on an upcoming trip to Nigeria as soon as there was a production need. Well, about a week ago I learned that we are going to be sending a video projector to our Nigerian team on this trip... so I am off to the races.

When I pulled out my passport, I learned it expired a few years back (while expired, my old passport photo rocked and shall never look as good!). So step one was starting the process to renew it. It took two trips to the passport agency in Washington D.C., but as of today, I have my new passport. We have FedEx'ed my passport along with my visa request to the Nigerian Embassy. Thanks to Libby (at SFCC), the bulk of the bureaucratic red tape is complete.

I also had to get a handful of immunizations in order to make the trip. If I would have known about the trip a bit more in advance, I would have gone to the Health Department. But it was a bit late in the game to get an appointment with them, so I went to Passport Health to get the shots. After five injections and $448 later, I am now "safe" from contracting Yellow Fever, Hepatitis A, Typhoid, Tetanus and Polio. I will also be taking Malaria pills before, during and after the trip.

We will be flying direct to Lagos, Nigeria from Atlanta where we will stay one night before some of us will go on to Port Harcourt to meet up with James and Charity Onwah, the local leaders at SFCC Nigeria. The rest of our team will fly to Abuja, Nigeria to handle the leadership training.

The Port Harcourt team will be helping with building maintenance for the Onwah's home (where they work from), feeding children from a local school and various other tasks related to reaching out to the local community in an effort to meet their needs- whatever they may be. I will also be training the local team to use the projector as well as basic videography skills so that we can continue to tell their story longer after the US team has left.

In edition, I will be shooting lots of video for future short films to air at SFCC. I will also edit as much as possible in an attempt to post the video clips on SFCC's Facebook page and/or on SalemFields.com. Of course, how much I can actually post will depend on what kind of internet access I can find.

If you ever decide to go on a trip to Nigeria, may I strongly suggest that you NOT read the State Department warnings for traveling in the country. I guarantee that you will lose sleep over the reality that it will NOT be like Kansas anymore, Toto. We will have a team of armed guards that will escort us at all times as we travel on the ground.

So if you are so inclined, I (and the rest of the SFCC Nigeria GO Team) would greatly appreciate your prayers for this trip.

I'll keep you posted...