Busy, Busy

This has been quite a busy week for us. A lot has happened.

Last Saturday David taught TEE (Theological Education by Extension - a Bible course) at Remagwe. That is our "young" church. The church is usually filled but only about 6-8 are adults. The rest are youth and children. All of the students in his class are youth and at least one cannot read. He will be out there again today. Please pray that this course will be the foundation for Christ's presence and glory for this generation in this place.

One thing I forgot to mention about our witnessing last week is that we were served a rubber chicken! This is the second time in our years on the field that we were served a chicken so tough you couldn't even take the outside skin off. Chloe, our little carnivore, managed to tear off most of the meat on one leg, but I couldn't even make teeth marks! Chloe and I didn't go witnessing this week. Chloe had big plans for a fancy meal that she wanted to put on for Dad and I needed to study my Swahili lesson for the next day. David said that he and the pastor and his wife had a good time visiting and encouraging some of our Tarime church members.

Thursday, David went out to a village called Shirati. A pastor's house burned down and the little churches up here had gathered some things together to donate. David and our local pastors spent the day down there fellowshipping with them. He said it was humbling how this family took the iron sheets off the burnt house, put up a shelter, and just moved on with their lives. Even though David very much enjoys these times of fellowship, he had an extremely bad headache the whole day. Imagine sitting for 6 to 8 ours in the sun in a dry village with a pounding headache!

While David was gone, Chloe and I walked to Tarime Baptist Church to teach the women's group. It is not a bad walk, except that I wore a pair of Abby's (my older daughter) shoes and immediately had horrible blisters on my toes! On the way there we passed over a stream. A group of men were bathing. Instead of turning away or discreetly ignoring us, they started calling out, "Wazungu!" - which is what we are called everywhere - white people. My teaching was less than inspiring but the ladies trudge along with my language skills and are very gracious.

Then, when we returned to the house there was a huge electrical surge. Lights started blowing out loudly - scaring Chloe to death. The tv started smoking horribly. I turned off the power to the house, but the damage was already done. We lost the tv, dvd player, satellite decoder, and many power supplies and converters. We praise the Lord that the computers (which were mostly not plugged in), the fridge, and the freezer are fine.

And these are just the highlights to a week that involved all the usual life tasks! And it is not over yet. Chloe has the pastor's daughter over today to play and teach English. David teaches TEE again this afternoon. I am supposed to go to the church this afternoon to help clean the little room we use for our services. I say "supposed to" because I am not feeling 100% at the moment. We'll see how the afternoon goes.

Continue to pray for us. Hopefully these little bits of our life will help you to see our prayer needs, where our challenges are, and why the joy of the Lord always floats to the top.

Blessings.

Chloe's Work

Chloe, our 11 year old, is starting her own little ministries. This is a big deal for her and we are so proud. She is an extreme extrovert but quite timid of new things at the same time. Perhaps that is one reason she has not embraced being out with local children - the idea of not being able to communicate scares her.

However, she is now starting two neat ministries. One she begins today - inviting our Tarime pastor's daughter to begin learning English. Knowing English is crucial to success here because secondary school is supposed to be taught in English (though isn't always as the teachers are not all that fluent). Certainly any training after secondary will be in English. Neema (nay-mah) is close to Chloe's age and also a bit shy. Chloe's plan is to have her over every Saturday. They will spend time learning English (and my hope is that Chloe will also learn more Swahili - we do lessons as part of homeschooling) and playing. This will also fill a great for a friend.

Chloe has also started her own blog for MK's (missionary kids)! It is at http://www.mkworld.blogspot.com/. Feel free to visit and please tell any MK's you know about it. We just started so it is not polished and there is not much there, but we plan to do more and the hope is that other MK's will contribute so that it will be more in a magazine format than just Chloe's thoughts.

Please pray that her plans to have Neema over will succeed and that nothing will prevent this from becoming a weekly event. Pray also for her blog - that others will join it and that it will be a joy.

Blessings!

The Office of Redundancy Office

I am still sorting out how all these communication avenues should work. I have a Facebook group (feel free to join - Light for the Kuria), this blog, and try try to remember to send out a regular prayer letter every month. My dilemma is mostly about how much family information should I include - should one be all work and the other include family? Should they both be all work or both include family? And also what to write in each one.

I know that many of you who read this also get the updates from the Facebook group. But some of you don't. And I am never sure how much to repeat. I don't want to be completely boring and repetitive, but want good stories to get out to everybody. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know!

Today I will just say that I sent a great story out on my Facebook page and will tell just another here.

I have been in Nairobi for a meeting and doctor appointments. Sunday I went to church with some dear friends. They introduced me to the pastor and, as is customary, he introduced me to the congregation. He also asked me to come forward and talk about our work. I was blessed to be able to tell the church about my family's time in Africa and to explain who we are working with. The Kuria people, you see, are half in Kenya and half in Tanzania with the border splitting them in two. The Kenyan Kuria are well evangelized. The Tanzanian Kuria have been forgotten.

The pastor used this opportunity to remind his church that we are here for the purpose of sharing the gospel with others. He even offered to bring a volunteer group of Kenyan believers to help us. This idea is very exciting because it could be such an encouragement to our little congregations.

Please pray with us that if it is in God's will that we could have a Kenyan volunteer group come and share their experiences and encouragement with the Tanzanian Kuria.