All that is wrong and all that is right....

One thing we are learning while living in Mozambique is how to cope with losses. For the Mozambicans it is just a way of life. Nothing is certain, with life expectancy at 40 years of age, they don't expect to live long and they experience death of loved ones on a regular basis. Our house helper, Clara, asked me today if she could have tomorrow off because her niece had suddenly died last night. She came to work today and worked all day, I had no idea. Then right before she left, she told me and asked if it was okay if she took the next day off to help out her sister. I know if my niece died, I would be a basket case, but here, they have to learn to cope  with that type of loss or they would not be able to live. We have to tell our workers that they can only have extended time off when immediate family dies, because otherwise, they would be gone weekly for funerals and family sickness.
This past week, we experienced loss. Our dog, Vader, died while we were in Muapula doing the Simply the Story training. We received a message that he had suddenly died. When we left on Tuesday he was fine, but on Friday, apparently he died. When you agree to take on a pet here, you have to be ready for the reality of it. There are no vets. There are no humane ways to put an animal down if it is suffering. There are no vaccinations for your animals, so you take a real risk by bringing them into your home and loving them. A missionary's life is filled with goodbyes. So our kids have had to say goodbye many times. Goodbye to friends and family in the States, goodbye to friends here as they go back home on furlough, or are moving to a new location. Saying goodbye is nothing new to them, but this is the first time the kids have really experienced losing something to death and they are realizing the reality of it. In reality, we really have been blessed and losses for us here, don't normally come in the form of death. We also lost our cell phone and computer cord this week. These are the everyday things, that when they break or simply cease to function, are not easy to replace. We have to deal with how are we going to replace them, how long can we function without them if we have to have them shipped in from the States, will we be able to afford to replace them. Nothing is easy to replace here. They are just material possessions, but with our link to home being via the computer, when you lose a computer, you lose your connection to home. It is possible to exist without it, people did it for years and years before they were available, but for us, we have to learn to cope without them. It is constantly a learning process. So, we are trying to remind ourselves and teach our kids, what is really important in life. Things come and go, and every living thing, including us, will have to die, but what will never leave and what will never change is our God. "We long for the day when all that is wrong, will be made right." And we will never again have to say goodbye.

On another note the storying seminar in Muapula went really well. There were 24 people who participated. Everyone worked hard during the week to grasp the teaching and during the seminar everyone had an opportunity to present stories as we broke into small groups. The missionaries that live and work in Muapula, Frits and Nickey, are committed to storying and have been advocates of storying as well as such an encouragement to us as we try to teach and extend the reach of this storying method.
It is always amazing to see people stand up and tell a story from the Bible in their own language. And then for them to discover the truths that lie within that story - wow!!! We are blessed! The only downside is that eventually time runs out and the seminar ends, but the upside is they get to work on the storying with their family, friends, and neighbors.
We will be doing another seminar there the beginning of June for some Bible students. Tim will also be doing another marriage/parenting seminar in a village called Nimpepe the middle of this month with a local church. Please pray for us as we are extremely busy with admin and then trying to keep up with the teaching and training as well.

 

This is Raimundo. He told one of the stories he learned in the seminar at church on Sunday. It is always so exciting to listen as they quote entire stories directly from the Bible.

Birthdays...

Well it has been awhile since I updated this blog. The past couple of months have been filled with birthday celebrations. We celebrated Jurnee's 1st birthday on the 2nd of February. We celebrated Karis' 7th birthday on the 15th. We attended Kallen's friend Samuel's 3rd birthday party. And our director, Janice Peters, turned 60 and we had a huge party here for her. Our house has been filled with guests the past month. We have fed over 50 people in our home the past month and a half. We have another busy week coming up with more visitors coming into town to stay at the guesthouse, but after that it should be quiet around here for a couple weeks.

As many of you know, Janice has resigned as director or SIM Mozambique, and so Tim is taking over new responsibilities administratively. The actual director, will be our colleague, Alfred Paetzold, but Tim will be the administrator. As we will be the only ones in town, he will assume all responsibilities financially and anything having to do with the government like visas and paperwork for the organization. I have also taken over as the SIM project coordinator to go along with my role with running the guesthouse. It is going to be challenging, but we look forward to what God will teach us through these new roles. Please pray as we balance ministry, the home, and these new roles.

Ministry wise, we have a couple of new prayer requests. Tim will be helping lead a STS training in Muapula mid April. We have friends who are working there and have a school and church, where they want their teachers and leaders trained in storying. We are looking forward to that. Also, Tim, along with a few others, is planning a Yao conference for August. We are looking to gather all the Yao believers in the area for a conference. We are wanting the Yao believers to be able to connect with other Yao believers to see that there are other believers out there that have had to go against their families and culture for the sake of Christ. We will also be doing a week of intensive training on everything from marriage and parenting to how to reach out to their fellow Yao people. We are excited about the possibility and we have a couple of true Yao believers that are helping to head this all up, so it isn't just a "white" run conference.

Here are a few pictures of our birthday celebrations...

 

Janice turns 60!

 

 

 

 

Karis turns 7!.

 



 

Our friends from South Africa brought hamsters and they gave Karis 2 of them. We bought a bird cage in Malawi as that was the only cage we could find in the entire city. She loves them and named them Star and Snow.

 

 

Jurnee turns 1!

 



Jurnee got her face painted as a mouse at Samuel's birthday party.

 

She has the funniest faces ever!

 

Holidays In Mozambique...

I trust everyone received our newsletter in the mail last month. If you did not, please send us an email and let us know and we can make sure you are on our mailing list. Sorry this is a bit late, but I Just thought I would let everyone know how we spent the holidays. We really had a nice Christmas and New Years. It was nice having Tim's parents here and celebrating with family. Even though the weather is hot this time of year, we try to keep as many traditions as possible that we would normally do in the States. Our tree is fake, but we light pine sented candles to make it smell real. We make fake snow and play lots of Christmas music. This year we read an Advent book, called, Jotham's Journey. You start reading it 4 weeks before Christmas and everyday there is a chapter for you to read. The kids loved it and the story is so interesting all of us adults couldn't wait for the next night to hear what happened next. It was a good way for us to keep our family focused on the meaning of Christmas. New Years we spent down at the lake. So we spend Christmas, trying to ignore the hot weather and pretend it is cold, praying for storms to make it feel cooler. Then on New Years we embrace the warm weather and take full advantage of it. This has been our new tradition, going down to the lake and spending a couple days swimming. We love this tradition. This year,  the hippo was back, so we were able to enjoy watching him cross right in front of the beach on his way back to the river and we went crocodile hunting(not shooting, just sighting) at night and Traeger and Karis went tubing for the first time and loved it! Here are some pictures of our holidays.

 

 

 

Baking Christmas cookies and frosting them.

 

Singing Christmas carols with grandma.

 

 



 

Sleeping under the tree on Christmas Eve.

 

Jurnee's first Christmas.

 

 

 

 

The girls all wearing their new jeggings Grandma got them.

 

New Years at the lake. Our friends, the Cranes, have a boat and took the kids tubing. Karis and Kallen getting a boat ride.

 

Traeger and Tim on the big tube.

 

 

 

 

Each of the kids made a Christmas scene with the fake snow we made. This one is Traeger's.



Karis did a nativity scene.

 



 

And Kallen did snow men and colored her snow green for the fun of it.

Ngorogoro Crater, Tanzania...

 

Well I know I've written all about the terrible parts of the trip, but we did have a few highlights as well. I thought I would share this one. On the way back to Mozambique, we spent one day driving around the Ngorogoro Crater in Tanzania. It is an extinct volcano, and inside the crater, wildlife is concentrated, because it is not easy to get out. You will be able to see from the pictures. It is the most beautiful setting and we were able to see animals that we had not seen before in the wild, such as cheetah and black rhino. It really was incredible.

 

 

The back side of a cheetah.

 

 

Hyena

 



 

The front side of the cheetah.

 

A little oasis, full of hippos.

 

I love this picture, because is shows the full scope of things in the crater, the blue sky, the crater wall, open fields, the lake, and then forest with elephants of course. Everything in such a condensed area, it really causes you to marvel at God's creation.

This guy was one of the first animals we saw once we got down to the bottom of the crater. He just walked across the road right in front of us. He was huge and appeared to be quite healthy!

 



 

This is a view of the crater from the rim, before we descended.

 

 

A big heard of wildebeast and zebra grazing in the fields.

 

 I like this picture because the land cruiser looks quite small in comparison to the large male elephants crossing the plains.

 

 

 

 

Sunbathing lions.

 

The very rare and endangered black rhino.

 

A pod of hippos staying cool.

TIA...

 

Sorry it has taken so long to update you on the car situation and how the events all played out to us finally arriving back in Lichinga, but...of course things didn't go as planned. Well, after our car was supposed to be ready wednesday by noon, we were informed it would be ready at 3:00pm instead, so we took a taxi from our beach house to Mombasa city and all got out at the garage and had all our stuff put on the curb and we waited for them to bring out the car. Well, shortly, they came to tell us it would be 5:00pm before the car was done, so at about 6:00 here we are still waiting on the curb with out stuff...

 

Then shortly after 6:00pm, just as it is about to get dark, the wife of the mechanic, comes and tells us to come up to her house. She is an Indian Muslim lady(picture of her and her daughter, who took care of us) and doesn't speak the best English, but was pretty insistant we come up to her house. Well it was getting dark anyway and the curb wasn't too comfortable, so we went up to her house. Her family was so hospitable and they gave us water and snacks and the kids watched cartoons. It was getting later and later. Finally they told us the car wouldn't be done tonight, so we needed to spend the night in their apartment. A little strange, but what choice did we have. We spent the night, with the assurance the car would be ready by 5am, for us to leave very early to head back to Nairobi.

Well we wake up at 4:30am and wake up the kids, get everything packed up and at 5am, they tell us, well it will probably be little longer yet, so just stay for breakfast and it will be ready by 10am. So they make us breakfast and we chat some more and watch more cartoons. At 10am, they say well maybe after lunch, so why don't you just stay for lunch. So we eat chicken curry and rice for lunch. After lunch, they have a friend come over and give my mother in law and I henna tatoos as a gift, so we will remember them (how could we ever forget after all this).

 Then at 2pm, we find out that the car is still having problems and they are going to have to take it all apart again and start over. At this point, I was ready to cry. We were paying for an apartment in Nairobi, that we had already lost 3 days on, and we had things we needed to get done before we headed back to Mozambique. The family offered their car for us to drive around in Mombasa, so we suggested that they let us take their car back to Nairobi and then when our car was done, they could drive it to Nairobi and we would trade back there. Well they agreed. We were so thankful for all they did for us and this was just such a blessing. So, we all climb into their small(and I mean small) truck. We have 6 of us in the back seat with no air conditioning and if you have forgotten, Mombasa is extremely hot and humid. Luckily we started out late enough that the sun went down after a few hours. Kallen also started getting sick on the trip back and threw up a few times. Which is always nice in a crowded hot vehicle. Kallen also wet her pants on the trip, so Grandma had throw up, pee, and plenty of dirt on her when we arrived back at our apartment in Nairobi at 2am! But it was good to be back. Kallen continued to be sick and got so lethargic, we ended up taking her to the hospital friday morning. She underwent tons of tests, blood work, stool and urine sample, and we found she had a bacterial infection and we got her on antibiotics. But all of friday between doctor visits, tests, diagnosis, medications, we were at the hospital. Saturday, they did bring our car to Nairobi, running and looking good. We were glad to have it back. We still had to go buy a fan belt and get that put on, but should be no big deal. We thought we would do that monday, before we left. So, we had to withdraw from participating in the simply the story training, that we were originally scheduled to do, because there was no time left to get the fan belt put on. Monday, we took the car for the fan belt, they said it should take an hour at the most. Well of course, while replacing it, they found the tensioner was bad and so after spending more money on the car and another entire day carless, we are really thinking can anything else go wrong? Thankfully no, we left Kenya wednesday morning and the trip home was pretty smooth. Much better than the drive there. We drove 12-15 hour days and they were long, but we took paved roads and we had much more interesting scenery. We did however get stopped 5 x for speeding and got 3 speeding tickets. The cops in Tanzania are so frusterating. They shoot their radar guns right as you pass the speed marker and then they stop you for going anything over the limit. The speed limit was 50km an hour, kilometers, not miles, and Tim was driving, 53, 55, 60, 62, and 85(the only one truely deserved, but he didn't see the sign). But besides that, it went well. Thanks so much for all the prayers!

Despite all this, Tim was able to visit the oral Bible School near Mombasa. He really enjoyed this and it was incredible to see that some of the people attending the school, walk 12 kilometers each way to come to the school everyday. They do a week on and then a week off and during the year, each of them memorizes 210 Bible stories and learns how to observe, interpret, and apply each of them. They meet in the building below and have very little materials, but these people are committed to learning the Bible. It was exciting to see how something like this could possibly be done here in Mozambique.

Once we arrived back in Nairobi. We visited an elephant orphanage. Tim's parents had adopted a baby elephant as a gift for a friend, so we got to go in the evening and meet the baby elephant and see the other babies in the orphanage. We got to pet them, watch them being fed and play with them. The kids just loved it. It was so fun. They also got to pet rhinos.

All the baby elephants coming in from playing in the fields.

 



 This is the baby elephant they adopted. He is 6 months old, his mother was killed by poachers and then they took him here to raise and then they release them when they are old enough to be on their own. Each elephant has a worker, who cares for it, feeds it, and even sleeps with it. The blanket in the picture above, it a "surrogate mother". They bottle feed the babies through the blanket and then hang it in their rooms. The baby elephants hold on to the blanket with their trunks and even suck on them. They cover them with the blankets at night when they sleep.  

This was the youngest elephant in the orphanage at 4 months old, and his worker.

More drama...

Well I think maybe God is testing me. I need to learn to be more flexible. We left on Saturday for Mombasa. We were estimating a 9 hour drive to our cottage in Diani Beach. Well about half way there, Tim noticed some strange vibrations with the clutch of our car. We just had the pressure bearing replaced on the clutch a few days before we left for Kenya. We had a Mozambiquian guy replace it for us, because they said we couldn't drive to Malawi on it, where we usually get our car repairs done. Well we don't know if he did something wrong or what, but about 30 kilometers out of town, the clutch seized up and Tim couldn't shift at all. Thankfully, Bramuel was already in Mombasa. We called him and after only an hour and a half of being stranded on the side of the highway in back to back traffic (8 white people standing on the side of the road trying to keep cool in the sweltering heat was great entertainment for the people stuck in traffic), Bramuel came and rescued us and towed our car to a garage in Mombasa. Of course it was Saturday afternoon and no one was open and wouldn't be open until Monday. But once again Bramuel came to our rescue and found a guy that would start working on it Sunday. And he even arranged transportation for us out to our cottage, which is about 30 kilometers past Mombasa. So on Monday, instead of visiting the oral Bible school with Bramuel, like planned, Tim spent the day in Mombasa running around finding car parts. He found 3 of them, but the other 2, he discovered he would have to order and they would take 4-6 weeks to arrive. Well we can't stay here for another 4 to 6 weeks waiting for the parts. So our mechanic tells us not to worry about it, he will "engineer" the parts we have and get it working. We aren't so sure what "engineer" the parts means, but we don't have a choice, except to hope and pray the car will get us back to Mozambique. The upside was we get to stay a couple extra days in such a beautiful setting. Thankfully the guy we rented it from, was very flexible and let us stay a couple extra days. We did go to the beach, once, and we won't be back. It was beautiful, but absolutely no breeze and blazing hot and humid. No big deal, just jump in the refreshing water and swim, after 5 minutes, Karis was stung 3 times by jelly fish. Apparently, November and December the jellyfish are in abundance. So, we will stick to our cottage and pool. And yesterday, while Tim was in Mombasa looking for parts, Kallen came down with a stomach bug and began throwing up and having diarreah, she is still not doing so hot. So, we are surviving, thanks to the pool and scenery, but I am struggling.... Today, Tim did get to attend the conference with Bramuel, which was great he could still work that in. The plan(of course I have no idea why we even make plans at this point) is Tim and Bramuel will spend the night here at our cottage. Tomorrow morning bright and early, they head out to visit the oral Bible school, they were supposed to have visited on Monday, and then we go pick up our car, which should be done by noon (not too sure about that) and head back to Nairobi. Doesn't sound too complicated, but I have come to realize, here, anything can be complicated....Please keep praying....Thanks.

 

 

Our cottage

 



 

The kids are loving the pool and in this heat and humidity, swim from about 7am to 6pm.

 

Karis' jellyfish stings. They must really hurt, because she is our toughest kids and rarely cries because of pain, but she was screaming in pain when it happened. We had no idea what was going on, because you couldn't see anything at first. She was just grabbing her shoulder and screaming it hurts! Locals came running and told us that the jellyfish were all over. If only they had mentioned that before we got in to swim!

 

 

 

Other than being covered by bug bites and heat rash, Jurnee is doing great and she loves the water!



 



Diani Beach.

 



 

Traeger enjoying the pool.

 

Kallen and grandma playing go fish. The kids have also loved having grandma and grandpa here. They are getting a great taste of life in Africa and it has been so nice to have extra help around with all the drama!