So the time has finally arrived! The Raghunathans have set off for Ghana! Before I get into the details of life in Accra, I wanted to take a week or two to share our experiences packing up and setting off overseas.
The weekend before we were officially packed up, my mom, brothers, and brother’s girlfriend, Veronica, all came down for a visit. My mom, and brother Jeremy, came down to take our car (and take good care of it until we move back) along with a few other items that we weren’t having stored or shipped. My other brother, Jon, and Veronica were just down to visit before we moved, and they were a huge help babysitting the girls at the beach while the other grown-ups did grown-up things to prepare for the big move.
It was great to have everyone in our home one last time before we had to leave, and sell, the house. While we weren’t all going to be together for a while anyway, it was still hard to say goodbye knowing how far away we would all be. But I’m not worried, our family has always been very close, no matter how many miles may separate us at any given time!
Next step, only a few days after everyone left, was getting the house entirely packed up and either shipped over to Ghana or put into storage. Just like it was when we moved to Charleston from Houston it all happened in a whirlwind! It still took two days for them to pack up our entire lives and move them out of our house, but it went by very quickly. We were given three options: storage, sea shipment, and air shipment. So we had to carefully show them where each item needed to go. Then their task was to pack it all up and haul it away. Unfortunately, they were unable to pack a lot of items we needed, including lots of foods and liquids we had just bought wholesale at SAMs club in preparation for moving. [We weren’t sure what would be available in Ghana food/toiletry-wise].
So, we had to scramble to either give away items or pack the items that were absolutely necessary for us to have, including baby food and formula. We ended up having a lot of suitcases to take with us on our journey. Which wouldn’t have been a big problem, if we weren’t staying in Germany for several days before finally arriving in Ghana.
But take all of our luggage we did, from Charleston to JFK, JFK to Istanbul, and finally Istanbul to Hamburg. We had a fun time in Hamburg, despite some hiccups, but I will save our German adventures for next week’s post!
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