Storey Update 14May21- Settling into a rhythm

As we settle into a rhythm here in Nairobi, we’re trusting God to:

-provide us an open door to Tanzania
-enable us to learn Swahili well
-open our eyes to ministry opportunities
-and give us wisdom in parenting.

PRUF(Prayer Requests Up Front(yes, I know spelling out an acronym defeats the purpose of the acronym, but this is the LAST time!)):

-Most of our TZ team is still waiting on work permits/visas for Tanzania. Please continue to pray with us that our whole team will be approved, and will be able to get to Kigoma ASAP!

-We are done with week 5 of language. The pace has been brisk, and both Rebekah(typically under confident) and I(universally overconfident) are feeling good about the material we’ve learned this far. Pray for continued renewal of our minds in this challenging process!

-We don’t want to squander the time here by becoming completely focused on our lives and language. While our primary task right now IS language learning, please pray that we will continue to find ways to be a part of what God is doing in Nairobi while we wait in limbo!

-The boys are doing well, but parenting right now is a challenge- between the transition, the culture shock, and the significant changes in our routine. We continue to beg your intercession on our behalf. Kids can be the greatest/hardest little things!!

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UPDATE
This weekend will be 6 weeks in Africa! Our being here is still a bit surreal. We’re finding a rhythm in our weekly routine. Here are a few highlights:

We’ve been attending a weekly house church/discipleship training with our team-mates the McDonalds. It’s been a joy to see the Nairobi City team doing ministry and training local churches in discipleship! Thanks to improving COVID19 numbers here in Nairobi, the restrictions eased last week. Because of this, we were able to attend a local church here in Nairobi. What a joy to fellowship in corporate worship with a local congregation for the first time in months! We attended Emmanual Baptist Church, and found their liturgy to be nearly identical to our home church in Omaha(Emmaus Bible Church). Same initials and everything! It was uncanny, and refreshing all at once.

Homeschooling is going well. We’re doing a truncated curriculum, studying the book of James, Botany(what better place?), American History(a few songs from Hamilton have been played), math and language arts. We work with the boys in the mornings, then they have reading time in the afternoon before going outside to play with their friends(usually from about 2-6 every day, rain or shine).

Rebekah and I continue in our language training. We converse 1.5-2 hours daily, and learn formally for 3 hours daily. We’ve so far learned 150 verbs and 500+ vocabulary words. We’ve covered common greetings, numbers, dates, time, question words, personal and object pronouns, tenses(past, present, future, negative, subjunctive, negative subjunctive, imperative, negative imperative, habitual, present perfect and negative present perfect), and some irregular rules/verbs. Swahili seems to be simultaneously simple and difficult. Much of the sentence construction is made up of prefixes, infixes, and suffixes. As a result, many complete thoughts can be communicated with a single word. For example, in English I might say, “how did I not remember you?” This 6 word sentence can be expressed in the following Swahili word: sikukukumbukaje? Try saying that 10 times fast! or once! For the curious/linguophiles, I’ll break it down below.
Another challenging part of Swahili is that the sound patterns are simple. All vowels make only one sound. All consonants make only one sound. There are only a handful of letter cluster sounds. While this makes reading/speaking a breeze, it can get confusing. Sounds like Tu, na, ku, and others have multiple meaning as verb stems, pronouns and prefixes. We’re learning to appreciate the differences rather than grumble about them…most of the time…

The visa situation for Tanzania continues to be in the Lord’s hands. His providence extends everywhere, and that certainly includes the Tanzanian Immigration offices! We have 7 adult teammates waiting for work permits right now. We are hopeful that the recent changes in the government will result in a more favorable view on foreign medical/aid workers in country!

We’re grateful for each of you! Thanks for keeping up with our updates and continuing to support us!

*Ok, sikukukumbukaje. Si is the 1st person subject prefix for negative tense. The first ku tells you it is negative past tense. The second ku tells you that the object of the verb is second person(you). The verb stem is kumbuka, which means remember. The je on the end is a question modifier that asks how a verb is accomplished. That’s how you get sikukukumbukaje! You can imagine when we’re first learning the language how difficult some of these words/phrases are to translate on the fly! Again, please pray for us!! :)

Traffic is a little different here in Kenya, and this motorcycle pig basket is just one example.

The boys routinely find and adopt chameleons. Most East Africans are not fond of them!

Cabbages are a staple of our diet now, and they grow them BIG here! This cabbage cost Bek 40 shilling(about 36 cents) at the market up the road. She would have been changed the mzungu(white person) price if our friend Phoebe hadn’t been there to laugh at their attempted uncharge!

Tall trees make for fun swings, but Zeke prefers to use this one as his personal lounge chair.

on May 4th we set up a little movie theater in the backyard and had a movie night with a couple of other compound families! It’s fun to have small bits of normalcy like pizza and a movie!

-It’s the rainy season, which also makes it the muddy season. Joel and the neighbor girls decided the mud should be up cycled into warpaint.

We celebrated Mother’s Day by finding some sushi for Rebekahd, and the boys and I had falafel! It was good to get out, and GREAT to celebrate the many dazzling attributes of my bride!

This week the compound kids have been building a Star Wars sand base. Every night it rains, and so each day they have to go out and rebuild.

Joel always looks ready to go on an archeology dig with his hat!

Enjoying homemade doughnuts on today’s holiday. Rebekah claims that she made this one giraffe shaped on purpose…

How to support us:

Prayer

We are grateful that so many of you have expressed a desire to support our family in this adventure! The most important way you can support us is through your prayers. James 5 tells us that the prayers of the righteous are powerful and effective- we need you to regularly pray for our family, our team, our people groups, and the accomplishment of the Great Commission!
Some helpful resources we’ve found:
-The Joshua Project gives prayer prompts for the Unreached People Group of the day.
-The IMB Pray app gives you a variety of prompts for regular prayer for missions
-The PrayerMate app is designed to help you keep and schedule customized prayer cards

 Giving
We are 100% supported by the International Mission Board, the missions agency of the Southern Baptist Convention. Thank you to the millions of Baptists worldwide who give generously to support the Great Commission!
If you would like to give to support our work, and the work of the 3000+ IMB cross cultural missionaries around the world, you can do so here: www.imb.org/give
If you would like to directly support our work in Tanzania, you can:
-help us create an endowment to enable a self-sustaining hospital in Kigoma
-designate special giving to our team/family by: going to the link, choose “missionary or team” in the GIFT DESIGNATION drop down, then enter our names(Josh and Rebekah Storey) in the MISSIONARY NAME OR TEAM field, and enter Tanzania in the AFFINITY OR COUNTRY field.

 Partner
If your church doesn’t have a connection to missions and would like to partner with our team(through regular prayer, communication, and more), send us an email at m28StoreyFam@gmail.com discuss further

 Visit
Short term missions trips, when properly planned and executed, can do much to enhance the work of a team on the field. If you are interested in coming to Kigoma to work alongside us, send us an email at m28StoreyFam@gmail.com to discuss further.