February update: Then anew this song we'll sing

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Prayer Requests Up Front:

-We’re still in malaria season here in TZ. Kids and pregnant women are at the highest risk. Pray for those affected, healthcare workers, and for research efforts in combating one of the deadliest infections in history.
-Please pray for our evangelism work, we have seen a number of decisions to follow Christ over the past couple weeks- praise God for his faithfulness in drawing these souls to Himself! We are trying to faithfully disciples recent converts as they start to follow Jesus.
-We are working to develop relationships with national partners- we need the Lord to help us with our language and cultural competency for this important task!
-Our crate of household goods is slowly making its way across the oceans and seas. We’re praying it gets here without customs issues in a timely manner.

This update is full of good news! (Rebekah’s inserts will be left in italic and parenthesis) First, we want to thank all of you who have supported us on this crazy journey! We have received dozens of letters/messages/packages/videos/etc (Rebekah here with a confession: I have a bag of hot tamales hidden in my room to eat all by myself. They were sent in a care package and the boys never saw that they existed. Do I hide them because the boys don’t like them? No. I hide them because I LOVE them and sometimes when I’m really stressed out and can’t get a functional Swahili work out of my mouth to effectively communicate, I sit back here and eat them one by one, while staring straight forward and talking to no one and thinking of nothing) that are more encouraging than you know! God’s grace is poured out on us through all of you, and we are thankful. Thanks also for your prayers- please continue to intercede for us before the throne of grace! (The prayers of the righteous are heard and that has been more apparent in this season of our lives on a person level than in any other!)

February has seen us learning a bit more of a routine. We still feel as though we’re in “Fundi Phase”, where we are trying to get the house fixed up, but have little expertise and less tools, so we have to have workers in our house/yard nearly every day. This gets exhausting, but we feel like we’re getting close to reducing the intrusions. (With this season has come the absolute necessity to wear a long skirt or dress every day, regardless of wether I am planning to walk out my front door or not. Our large windows and layout of our yard around the house makes it very easy to see in all windows, and because we stand out and are apparently interesting to look at, I have to be very careful about my attire. Make no mistake, on the days where there are no Tanzanians, I do happy dances my shorts!)

School continues to plug along as Rebekah has taken back over the significant majority of the teaching duties. I(Josh) am still teaching some of the math and science, but unlike when we were in Nairobi, Bek has to do almost all the other teaching. (In the States when he was working 24 hour shifts 6 times a month, we said homeschooling with the ages we have and Zeke being….Zeke is a 1 1/2 person job. That was with all the modern conveniences of consistently working electricity, plumbing, quick access to ready to eat food, lack of red sand that sprouts legs and walks into the house and mysteriously deposits itself around the house the instant the floors have been cleaned…..You get the point. Here, homeschooling is very much a two person job, and we are doing it still as 1 1/2 people with Josh’s new schedule. We are praying the job description for a “homeschool helper” for us will be filled soon! Please pray for that with us!)

We’ve begun to focus some of our ministry efforts on a nearby town called Ujiji. Ujiji is majority Muslim right now, and needs the light of the gospel! We start by doing lots of prayer walking, having a lot of conversations, and mapping the area. We are also partnering with what may be the only solid church in the town, Azimio Baptist Church, to do evangelism and discipleship training.

A few weeks after we got COVID we got the Moderna booster, so that Rebekah can be considered fully vaccinated and avoid travel restrictions. I had a sore arm for a day. Rebekah basically (there was nothing basic about it) felt like she had COVID all over again. I’m telling you, I don’t know WHY God chose to give me a vastly superior immune system, but I’m glad He did! (blah blahblah blah blah….I felt like I was going to die, and the biggest down side is that he wasn’t on quarantine with me this time, so I went it alone all week while he pulled his normal hours out of the house. But it’s ok, because I get to have another in two weeks!)

Pictures below with descriptions:

Adventures in food

If you know Rebekah, you know that she loves to create beautiful and delicious things. As we’ve begun to settle in more, she’s starting to enjoy baking and cooking a little more, and when she has this creative outlet, we all have full bellies! The past month has been full of delicious treats. My favorite moment was on Valentine’s Day, when she made donuts, but mistakenly quadrupled (HOW? You may ask? Because JOSH distracted me with his chattering in the kitchen when I was mixing up the dough) the shortening, so had to quadruple the recipe, so had a dough explosion, and kept our entire team updated live with pictures and texts! Her mistake was definitely our gain as we shared the bounty with all our friends and neighbors.

Building project

We’ve continued to work on an outbuilding for storage and shop-type things. Our friend and local pastor Onesimus has been helping to coordinate the work, which is a blessing, because we know NOTHING about building in Africa. It’s coming along nicely! Should be completed in the next couple of weeks. The boys have enjoyed watching it come together, and helping the guys working. (And we can’t forget Zeke’s contribution of playing in piles of wet cement.)

Malaria season continues, and we had a cholera outbreak last month in a local village that is dying down.
I started working in the OB ward more this month, and found myself feeling like a fish out of water. This was partly due to the fact that they have plenty of Tanzania docs on that ward, so no one was looking to me to solve all the problems, but also partly because peripartum management (before, during and after labor for those of us who have NO idea what “peripartum” means) here is markedly different from a resource-rich place like the US. There are no fetal monitoring systems, no IV pumps(calculating Pitocin by drops per minute?), no high-risk referrals, no neonatal warmers/incubators, limited neonatal resuscitation supplies, no anesthesia(except ketamine for c-section), etc. As a response, the medical approach is either creative use of limited resources or in some cases, doing nothing.

Maternal mortality in TZ is 578/100,000 births(compared to 20 in the US). This is due to a variety of factors, and has not changed significantly over the past 20 years.
Infant mortality is sobering: 36/1000 live births(compared to 5.6 US). that’s 3.6% of live births. This means that infant death is simply accepted as part of the birth process. The frequency of this occurrence leads the significantly different attitudes about care and expectations, even expectations of staff members/physicians.

All that to say, the culture shock continues whether I’m in my yard talking to a neighbor or at the hospital trying to learn the system. Appreciate your prayers!

On a separate not, sometimes I like to walk into the hospital and imagine if I were to transport some of my more “fastidiously retentive” nurse colleagues over here to take a gander at our facilities. I know a few of you(you know who you are!) who would lose your MINDS to see some of the practices. Two examples below:
I went in to watch a c-section the other day, and the OR staff was insistent that I change my shoes to the “clean” surgery shoes(a collection of mismatched plastic clogs that sit outside the sterile area. I happily change, having been an Infection Control Guy in a former life. But I began to question the utility of our footwear practices when I entered the OR and stepped into standing water on the floor mixed with dirt and discarded supplies. And the air conditioner doesn’t look like the kind of thing you want blowing air over your surgical site…
The second picture is of a bag of blood with tubing already attached thawing in the sink. In malaria season(especially in a sickle-cell heavy population), our blood needs are significant. But this bag of blood will sit in this sink for 20 minutes, then get plugged into the patient’s IV, hopefully after being wiped down with some methylated alcohol.

Practice here will be a constant struggle to try to make important changes without burning bridges or fighting to take insignificant hills.

That’s it for the update this month. It was a long one! (When I wrote one of the first ones, almost a year ago, he asked me if he could do them so he could be straight forward and concise with a few prayer related items…) Here are some other ways to stay in touch and support us:
-Send a letter! They aren’t expensive and don’t have to clear customs! our address is:
Storey Family
Box 1155
Kigoma, Tanzania

-Join our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/groups/1072012219992846/

-Give financially at www.imb.org/give