Thursday, October 16 - Switzerland

We reluctantly said goodbye to Hedi today after another yummy breakfast and lunch, catching the train from Tann to Reinach where another childhood 'Aunty' lives. Lotte also worked with the Shan people along with my parents. The Shan team had a bit of a reputation out of all the OMF missionaries in North Thailand for having fun on the job – namely by having many picnics - often next to beautiful rivers and streams in the rolling North Thailand hills. Lotte was often the ringleader, full of fun and adventure finding new places to go, being the first to go swimming...wonderful storyteller with a great sense of humor. Nothing has changed. In fact she is being very gracious, letting us stay with her as she literally returned from a four week trip to the US and Canada with her sister. Ironically she just stayed with my parents in Seattle arriving back in her village yesterday.

Reinach is officially a village with a population of 7000. (There are only two classifications in Switzerland – village or city – and you have to meet certain requirements to be called a city, which evidently Reinach does not). Surrounding villages in the valley bring the immediate area population to about 20,000. These villages are located in the valleys and lower slopes of the hills of valleys that run North-South in this area, formed by ice age glaciers running down from the Alps. You can see where the glaciers stopped and pushed up the Jura (“U-row”) mountain range which run East-West as do the Alps. Around 5pm we drove to a farm owned by a family that goes to Lotte's church – just in time for feeding and milking! 27 milking cows, calves, pigs and chickens – someone was in 7th heaven. We both got to sample some warm fresh milk from the cow! (Special thanks to Theo, Elspeth and Christian!) Like in the US, many small farms are having to sell to large farms as they just cannot make ends meet. This seems to be especially true here in Europe where even though Switzerland is not part of the EU, they have to adopt certain EU agricultural standards.

Saw the first bit of news in English today that we have seen for a while (Oil is down by $30-40/barrel since we left, the Dow is down to 8000 from 10,000plus.)

Duncan