January Update from the Storey Fam
/Hello from Kigoma to all our friends and family! As always, Rebekah’s comments in italics.
Please pray this month for:
Elijah’s school as we try to find a school rhythm that uses his gifts well and doesn’t make us all crazy!
Our neighborhood as we try to find ways to be the light of Christ to the people around us.
Our church, Azimio Baptist Church, as we followup with many new believers and questioners in Ujiji, Tanzania.
We had a good January here in TZ. We’re in the midst of a rainy season that isn’t quite as rainy as we(or our subsistence farming neighbors) would like! (I thought the rainy season would be a little rainier that this…)
We said goodbye to Mom and Dad on the 4th, and jumped back into life. Rebekah is doing the vast majority of the homeschooling with help from our teammate and friend Laura, who comes a few times a week to help with the boys’ individual work. Their group learning varies, and often includes “spontaneous experiential learning activities”, like learning to take public transportation and use Swahili to go downtown and buy groceries, musical lessons with visiting musicians, and blacksmithing for shop… (or helping me weed the garden spontaneously when I realize it’s being taken over and feel panicky that if I wait until the weekend there will be no crops left)
We had a team strategy and building day in the middle of the month with our organization’s “Member Care”, It was a good experience as we went through personality/teaming profiles, spiritual gifts/inclinations, and spent some time learning more about one another and how we function on a team. It might come as no surprise that my teaming preference is a “Let’s Go” approach(task oriented), while Rebekah takes the “Let’s Stay Together”(team unity/collaboration) approach. (we are thankful the Lord has been gracious to help us learn how to balance each other out in a healthy way with these very different approaches to life for the 17+ years we’ve been walking together).
We completed a couple of home-improvement projects this month. One was the kitchen(finally!)- when we moved in we knocked out a wall and trimmed out the new/bigger doorway. Then Rebekah painted ( the gypsum paste/”plaster of Paris” patch work had to be done before painting. Once that was speckled on, and sanded down I was able to start painting with the for reals washable paint that we brought back with us from Kenya in October - the paint here in Kigoma resembles chalk board paint. It can be wiped-ish, but not very successfully, which leaves our original yellow walls with little red dirt hand prints all over). While Dad was here he helped me hang a shelf and take out an older open cabinet. We’ve always spent a lot of time in the kitchen, but that is magnified here because of the lifestyle (and the cooking from scratch requirement), and this relatively small change opens up the space and makes working in there much more manageable. (and bright, and happy and beautiful and breezy and cozy!)
The other project is some outdoor furniture for our back patio. It was our Christmas gift to one another, but in typical fashion, Rebekah was not willing to have the fundi(carpenter) just slap some varnish on it, (I HATE sanding and stripping furniture to revarnish it, so if it can be avoided, that clearly is the most logical approach) instead opting to source raw linseed oil (from an Australian honey processing plant owner who just randomly had some he didn’t need), boil it(heat to 460ish F)(not safe!), and treat the chairs with it. (I was on the struggle bus for a few days about how dark the chairs turned after being oiled, but they’ve grown on me. I just had to change up my idea about my color scheme for out there - why does a patio have to have a color scheme? That isn’t something I would have thought twice about until we lived here. It’s a bit absurd.) We got the cushion covers sewn last week (after the agonizing process of choosing the color of upholstery fabric I wanted) and we are really enjoying having the space! Our house isn’t huge, so it’s nice to have an outdoor space to spread out a little.(Even today, aside from just little harmless sprinkles of water splattering in here and there,, it kept us dry during the torrential downpour of rain)
It was a busy ministry month as we got back in the swing of things, and had one unexpected event!
Midway through the month we got home from our Wednesday night fellowship and our friend and guard Musa noted that the government was tearing houses down in Ujiji, a town just down the road, and the town where our church is. There had been rumors of this happening for months, because many of the plots of land were built on government reserve land, having been sold and “deeded” in the past by a corrupt seller and local government chairperson. So many of the families who had paid a market price for their land were learning that they did not actually own it, and the government was reclaiming it. There were attempts to prevent it, but these obviously failed, because that week the government had showed up with power equipment and soldiers to carry out their orders.
This kind of thing is not uncommon here in TZ, but it hit especially close to home as it affected a community that we know and love. Musa lost a plot that he bought for 1.5 million shillings(about $700) (roughly 6 months of wages), but thankfully had not started on a house yet. But in the course of the week more than 230 homes were destroyed, in the middle of the rainy/malaria season.
We found this out on a Wednesday and thanks to Rebekah’s sweet empathy immediately started brainstorming what could be done to help this community. We spoke to our team, our relief organization, local pastors, and government leaders. By Wednesday night we had a plan for relief kits and a budget. On Thursday I wrote and submitted an application for a disaster relief grant, and it was approved on Friday night. We had a planning meeting on Friday night at church, and started the project on Saturday morning. The challenge was accessing the grant money- credit cards are not useable here, cash is the only way to conduct transactions. But $10,000 in aid money is 23,000,000 shillings, and we can only take out 400,000-600,000 shillings a time at the ATM. So after a LOT of trips to the ATM by all the members of our team, we had enough to go out and buy supplies for the relief kits. 30-50 volunteers showed up each day to help us with the project, building a small pavilion out front for shade for people who were waiting and for the registration desk, providing security/crowd control, and helping to build the kits. Over the course of the weekend(Sat-Mon) we handed out over 2500 pounds each of flour, rice and beans, 700 pounds of sugar, 650 mosquito nets, 232 liters of cooking oil, and 232 temporary shelters. At the end of the weekend, 300 plus families had received some sort of relief, and more than 400 people heard the Gospel. It was a wonderful opportunity for our church in a town that is 90%+ Muslim to show the love of Christ practically, and preach the love of Christ with words. Thanks to everyone who prayed for us, and Send Relief for the rapid response with grant money! If you want an organization that is on the front lines of disaster relief, we can highly recommend Send Relief!
That’s it for this month-thanks for reading along with us! We covet your prayer support! February is looking to be a big month with ministry, and the in March we’re making another cross country road trip.
Our work here is supported through giving to the Cooperative Program and the Lottie Moon Offering of the IMB/SBC. You can give here: www.imb.org/give. May the Lord bless and keep you all.
josh