July Update
/Good Sabbath! This is our July update, with the prayer requests up front. As per our recent tradition, Rebekah’s peanut gallery in italics…
PRUF:
-Language and culture: are you seeing a theme to the recurrent requests? We continue to progress, but as learning language and culture to an advanced level is one of our primary goals for our first term(3-4 year), this will remain one of our top requests! Please pray for attentive ears, auditory learning, disciplined minds, and clear eyes for opportunities to learn.
-The boys: our five boys continue to adapt well, but in the next few weeks, our neighbors will be moving away, which will be a blow for all of us, not least the boys, who spend hours many days playing with their neighbor friends.
-School: we plan to start up school in the next couple of weeks again, and need prayer for patience and steadfastness! Also, please pray specifically for Elijah as he starts a new online high-school that we hope will help him feel more confident and prepare him better for the future. (if I were currently wearing boots, I’d be shaking in them - homeschooling is a big task in the states, but it’s a monumental task here, where every day life takes so much more time and effort and planning. A praise is that it does look like we will have a helper with school this year. The details haven’t been all worked out, but we are hopeful! This will take a big chunk of the burden off my shoulders, and I’m hopeful it will mean less nights of tossing and turning realizing I’ve forgotten to do a reading lesson with this boy for a week, or check that boy’s math lessons for days, etc. Please be praying with us that we can get all expectations out on the table, and have healthy communication.
July was a good month- we got some helpful cultural experiences, saw God move in the hearts of people, celebrated some birthdays, and continue to settle into life in this strange and beautiful place.
We celebrated the Fourth of July with a gathering of the missionary community here in Kigoma. There are a couple of dozen missionaries in town, with a variety of ministries. It’s a fairly ecumenical group, and we really enjoy the time together, especially for us newbies to learn from families who have been here serving for 30+ years.
After the 4th we had a birthday party for our two July Birthday Boys. Joel turned 11 on the 12th and Elijah turned 15 on the 13th. We had about 50 people there to celebrate and get to know. It was a great time, with a slip and slide, a fire, and great company! Those of you who know us well know how gifted Rebekah is at hosting, and she was certainly in her element!
Last week I did some minor surgery on Nony (that’s always been spelled with two n’s, darling), our 9 month-old German Shepherd. She had been limping off and on for a while, and I saw a sore on her paw, so we pinned her down, numbed it up, and went looking for a sliver. All we found was sand, but there was a lot of it, so I evacuated all I could and irrigated it a bunch. There’s no veterinarian here in town, so we have to figure some of this out ourselves- thankfully I have a very gracious cousin who is a vet and super helpful!
Finally, this month we said goodbye to Meggie, who left the field early this month to get married and take a year of newlywed life in the USA. She and her husband Abel do plan to return to cross-cultural missions, they just don’t know where that will be.
And tomorrow Carly leaves. Carly is a nurse who was here in a “Journeyman” capacity, a 2 year term for young college-age kids. Her term is up and we will miss her terribly, but are excited as she heads back to the states to get married.
(a separate note here about the pics below - I’m awful and forgot to take a picture of Elijah on his birthday. Also, Joel’s hair has been cut since his birthday pictures, so don’t judge.)
This was a month full of cultural experiences and learning!
We’ve spoken before of the ever-present nature of death here in TZ, and this month was no different. It hit especially close to home when one of our guards lost his father suddenly due to illness. We aren’t sure the cause of death, but likely complications of malaria. Tradition for burial here is to be buried in your home village, which was a few hours away from Kigoma. There is also not a mortuary/hearse type system for transporting bodies over those distances. So our pastor asked if we could drive Isaac’s father home for the funeral and burial. We ended up taking two of the IMB cars and a trailer, managing to fit 23 people and a coffin! It was a 3+ hour drive, and we stayed for the funeral and burial, and then headed home to try to beat the darkness(driving in the dark on dusty African roads is NOT ideal).
It was an exhausting day, but we felt it was important both in our relationship with Isaac and as members of his/our church to serve him and his family. It really was a blessing to be able to help and take part in the funeral.
Rebekah got some more experience this month teaching an evangelism course to a women’s bible study at a nearby church. It was an eye-opening experience and she learned a good bit about teaching and leading here.
Finally, I just got back from a national meeting for the Baptist Church of Tanzania in Dodoma, Tanzania. This is really a whole story/post in and of itself (nag him for it - it’ll be worth your time to read!), but suffice to say it was VERY informative! I made some good connections with pastors and the teachers of the Baptist Seminary here in TZ. The experience ended sooner than anticipated, as the two national partners I brought go to baptist churches that are under another organization, so we had to leave early. While the way they were treated was disappointing, it was nonetheless very informative for me to understand some of the culture and polity issues here.
As I mentioned above, the biggest upcoming change is that our friends, neighbors and partners are leaving. Due to family/school issues they are moving to another city. This has been a very difficult time for them, but they are hopeful that they will see a fruitful ministry in their new location and that their kids will have an easier time of it there. Please keep them in your prayers as they’re scrambling to get a house here packed up and moved across the country in time for school to start there. (and for us as well, as we lose our only western culture neighbors and the boy’s best friends - it’s going to be rough! We’ve been in this process for three solid years with that family, since the med-advance conference in 2019 where we all met and started on our trajectory to get here together, so it’s going to be a bit of a task to change our thinking and let go of all the dreams we had of what life and ministry would look like here for our two families together.)
That’s it for this month! As always, we are thankful for you all, especially those who have suffered through my rambling this far.
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