Living in Tomorrowland

Sometimes I feel like I'm living in one of the Tomorrowlands that were featured in the Sunday Supplements and World Fairs of my younger days. As, for example, yesterday: acting on a tip from Sister Chero Chuma, I discovered that Skype will not only let me call other Skype-enabled computers free, but will even let me purchase a local telephone number, so friends here can call a Bellevue number and talk to me in El Salvador without a long-distance charge. Amazing!

I also looked on Google Earth for a small town in El Salvador's Usulutan Province that may be a future mission site, and found myself hovering above it, able to identify the church and plaza and inspect the nearby fields.

I've heard stories from our Sisters who ministered in the Phillipines in the 1960s or Cameroon in the early 1970s about letters taking six weeks to get back to England or the United States, telephones that took days of hard travelling to reach in an emergency. Indeed our globe is now so much more intimately connected and that will make my mission so much easier.

But for someone who remembers her sense of awe when copiers first became available in libraries, it's Tomorrowland for sure!

And in Tomorrowland, it's only 32 more days until I fly away.