August Update: Sun, sand and Swahili

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August is here! How is it AUGUST of 2021?

PrayerRequestsUpFront:
-Getting to TZ: We are still waiting on housing to get finalized in Kigoma. Please pray for our team-mates as they work to finalize all the logistics, and for the contractors who will be doing the renovations needed to make it livable. Pray for our hearts as we prepare to leave the city/neighborhood that has been home for the past 5-6 months.
-Studying Swahili: Our progress in learning the grammar of Swahili continues, but without immersion in a Swahili-only environment we are not progressing in our ability to hear and understand. Please pray for diligence and a drive to continue to learn despite the plateau we’ve reached in this area of our learning. We also need patience to be content with our slow progress. I greatly dislike being bad at stuff.
-Homeschooling: Over the past couple of weeks we’ve become acutely aware of why our sending organization(the IMB) doesn’t typically allow parents to homeschool during language training! This is HARD! Please pray for Rebekah and I as we teach grades 2, 4, 6 and 8/9. Please also be praying for the boys, especially Elijah as he makes the big adjustment to high-school curriculum.

Thanks for praying for our family! We continue to be blessed by your support. We’ve had an eventful month, and here’s a few updates:

School: I mentioned last month, we started the 21-22 school year in July, because we anticipate we will have to take a number of breaks to move to TZ and settle in. We took a long break during our pack-out and training time last winter/spring, but the boys have been going pretty hard since April, and didn’t get a break between terms. We are using My Father’s World for grades 2, 4, and 6, and Sonlight high-school curriculum for Elijah. This has been an adjustment for him! He’s supplementing the Bible, History, Literature and Writing of Sunlight with 9th Grade Biology and Saxon math. His schedule is FULL! He is learning to self-direct his learning, and being challenged by the weekly tests and quizzes.
The younger grades are doing a year of Countries and Cultures. This is our favorite MFW year of curriculum, as we all get to learn world geography(how many countries could you label on a blank world map?), language, culture and history. Along with this we pray for many different countries and a different unreached people group every day.

Housing: We continue to wait in Nairobi for housing in TZ. Our team has found us a great little house next door to the McDonald Family in Kigoma. One of the benefits of going overseas with a big organization like the IMB is the vast experience they have on the field, and the support network of logistics personnel to help get situated. We’re so thankful that there are a half-dozen people working to help us get into a house! After a house is found you need bids from contractors to determine the cost of bringing the house up to code, then the bid you choose is combined with a housing contract that you agree on with the landlord. Once that contract is approved, work can start on the house. When repairs are complete you can move in! We’re at step one in the process. We’ve found the house, and the landlord has tentatively agreed to a contract, but we need to secure bids to make necessary repairs. Our house doesn’t need much- some tilework completed, paint, cabinets in the kitchen and some work in the bathrooms. We hope this will only take 2-3 weeks once they start.
So for now, we wait. God has definitely been refining our patience throughout this process! We trust His timing to make things happen when they need to happen.

Language: Swahili is going well. We’ve learned nearly all the grammar that the school we’re in has to teach us. As I’ve mentioned before, Swahili grammar is very formulaic, with very few “rule-breaker” words or exceptions. There are a LOT of rules to learn, but once you learn them, you can operate pretty easily. The sentence/word structure can be challenging to hear/understand, because of the many prefixes/infixes/suffixes. If you’ve learned a language, you know that initially you start by translating everything into English in your head. This is VERY difficult to do in Swahili because SO MUCH can be said in just a few syllables. If you miss the first word/thought, you’ll never catch back up! Here in Nairobi where very little Swahili is spoken, we aren’t developing an ear for hearing and understanding. For now we’re content to increase our understanding with the mechanics of the language, trusting that when we’re immersed in Kigoma we’ll long for the days when we could operate entirely in English!

Vacation: In the beginning of August we got a chance to take a family trip to the Kenyan coast. Kenya’s eastern border is the Indian Ocean, and is known for the beautiful beaches. We needed a break from the routine and a rest from language/school, so we drove down on a Monday morning and stayed 6 nights in a rental cottage in Diani Beach, Kenya. It was a blessed trip! Some of the highlights:
1. Road tripping in the US can be fun and even relaxing. In Kenya, road tripping is basically a loooooong game of chicken as the 2 lane highways are filled with vehicles of various speeds. We averaged less that 40mph over 9 hours, and I was driving pretty aggressively!
2. One of the keys to contentment is managing your expectations- the standards for a rental cottage in Kenya are…. different from those in the US. We loved the place where we stayed, but it is a conscious choice to be happy with a place with some challenges.
3. YA’LL(that’s me trying to be more Southern), if you haven’t even had a chef on a family vacation, you don’t even know- it is a GAME CHANGER! This is apparently the thing to do in Africa, and we are SOLD. We actually went with a cheaper cottage to rent because it allowed us to hire Wafula, a Kenyan chef who cooked dinner for us every night. We just asked him to cook coastal Swahili food, and he was amazing! He came around 3 each day, prepared the food, set the table, then stayed around to wash the dishes after. His food was amazing, and it allowed us to go down and swim during the afternoon high tide each day. We could come back up around 5:30pm, rinse off, and sit down to a hot meal. It made our evening such a treat, and the food was excellent.
4. White skin on an African beach during a COVID-suppressed tourist season is like a beacon to every salesman and opportunist in the area. We got used to kindly but firmly refusing, and just accepted that this would be a part of our beach time.
5. We were gifted the chance to take a trip to a waterpark in Mombasa, which was a blast! The place was nearly deserted due to the low season, so we had the run of the place with no lines! It was classically Kenyan- no waivers, no lifeguards, and only a few arbitrary rules…
6. We took a Dhow boat on a dolphin watching and snorkeling tour to Msite Wildlife Refuge and Wasini island. We were so far south that we could see the TZ mountains from the boat- our FIRST TZ sighting EVER!! So excited to get there for real!

Siaya Trip: At the end of July I took a trip with our friend George Okello to his home in Siaya County. George and I took the trip to deliver a load of sewing machines and tables for a job-training center that he is trying to get up and running. We also delivered mosquito nets for pregnant and nursing moms. This was an excellent cultural experience for me, as I got to see a good bit of Kenya, drive 9 hours each way in our manual diesel Land Cruiser, and eat/sleep in the village. I was the recipient of the proverbial African hospitality and wish I could have accepted their invitation to stay another night.

That’s it for this update! I’m disappointed in the low number of Nacho Libre fans in our audience(see prev newsletter), but hakuna shied. We will check back in in September, hopefully with a “move to Tanzania” date!

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Grace and peace,
Josh

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
-Operation World is an oldy but a goody, a global encyclopedia of countries and people groups with prayer prompts.

 Giving
We are 100% supported by the International Mission Board, the missions agency of the Southern Baptist Convention. Thank you to the millions of believers worldwide who give generously to support the Great Commission work of the IMB!

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. 100% of gifts to the Lottie Moon Fund go to missionaries and the people they serve.

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
-give directly to the effort to reach 55 UPGs(Unreached People Group) in SubSaharan Africa in the next 5 years: 55 in 5

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.