Bless the rains: Oct/Sep Update
/Hello from Tanzania, where the rains have arrived, bringing cooler temperatures (sweet, sweet relief!), humidity, and green popping up everywhere!(as per our usual arrangement, Rebekah’s comments are in italics)
Prayer requests up front:
-We continue to seek the Father’s will for our future on the field. As we start the last year of our “first term”, we are looking seriously at how God is calling and using us. We are always dependent on his will and guiding, remembering his sovereignty.
-Homeschooling is always one of our biggest challenges. We would love to bring out a teammate(or teammates) to work with us here and help with the homeschooling load. We’ve put in a request, but those jobs are difficult to fill, so we are praying for the Lord to bring some help to Kigoma as He sees fit.
-The fall/winter season in the US is a hard time for us here, especially for Rebekah as she continues to grieve the loss of her mother this year. Please continue to pray for her and the rest of us as we miss home but create new and different traditions and memories here.
-Our family is hoping to go to a medical missions conference next spring, for some counseling care for our family and for CME credits for Josh. We will need God to provide in a couple of ways for this to happen, so please pray with us that if it is his will, He will make a way. If you’d like to know how you can help, feel free to contact us.
September and October have been busy! We welcomed a new missionary family to our community and started school up again. We lasted out the heat and are welcoming the rains.
The Ayer family arrived with their 8 kids! Dave is a pediatrician who plans to work at the hospital here. They’ve been in a couple of other East African countries before, and are now here with us in Kigoma. 7 of their 8 kids are here, and they have brought a lot of life and energy to our local community! It’s been a joy to help them transition into the area, prepare a house, and learn the culture.
School started again in Sep, with a 10th, 8th, 6th, and 4th grader, and a pre-k student (My frequent midnight insomnia is filled with thoughts about how old our boys are getting. How did it even happen!? How have I not yet gotten used to the passage of time?) The older 2 are taking a Biology class with 3 other high schoolers in town, and enjoying the camaraderie. Rebekah is enjoying working in some field trips and art classes (We’ll soon be starting a candle and soap making home-ec unit with some of the other kids in town participating as well. Finding things here is a major challenge, so we are excited that most our supplies can be sourced at a local honey factory run by an Australian.) Below is a couple pictures from a tour of a local soap “factory” to see the process. Elijah is volunteering at a local primary school teaching reading and English, and loving it!
The seasons here are fun- we only have 2. Wet and dry. The dry season is rainless, usually from May-Oct (known as “Winter” here, but this year it was hot as blazes for all of those months). The rains arrive in October and it will rain consistently every 2-5 days until April/May. We start with the “mango rains”, which are short and lighter (and live up to their name by bringing the delicious nectar of the tropics, mangoes), and then around the New Year we transition to the heavier rains (mask) in the Feb-Apr time (These are the ones that blow in with a fury. They wake us up frequently and give us opportunities to secure flapping window shutters and wipe down wet surfaces when we haven’t gotten to the windows in time. These are the rains that give us ideas about rain catchment water projects, have us walking the whole house with our heads tilted back watching for signs of roof leakage, and bestowing comfort to a tot who’s still quite shaken by the sound of thunder. We bless these rains, down here in Africa. Truly, they bring a lot of joy to us all, and are a blessing for our friends who rely on the rains for their crops!)
Ministry these months continue apace. Rebekah continues to minister in the home, teaching boys, feeding a small army, and mastering living in Africa! Just surviving here takes a TON of time and energy, and she supports us so well! She also is doing a weekly Kid’s Club with neighborhood kids in partnership with our neighbor, Mama Maombi who she is discipling. I’m staying busy in our palliative-care mercy ministry with our teammates, bible studies and church health workshops, and starting a fellowship time for local pastors, whose jobs are thankless, difficult, and usually unpaid.
I also get the opportunity to preach to our local fellowship(Azimio Baptist Church) once every few months, which has been a great honor and joy. I’m actually a pretty terrible preacher (not true), but practice makes perfect!
The most wonderful thing that happened this month was Joel and Luke making the decision to be baptized! They had both previously made professions of faith, and expressed a desire to obey Christ’s command by publicly professing. Onesimus and I baptized them into the body of Christ down at the lake, which was special.
That’s the admittedly short update! We’re so grateful for all of our family and friends who love us so well!
Here are some ways you can support and encourage us:
-We love getting letters! Small/medium envelopes are usually just a few bucks to send to us here and they’re SO fun to receive! Let us know if you need our very short and simple address.
-Follow along with our Facebook group. Search African Storeybook.
-Give to the IMB’s Lottie Moon Christmas Offering- these donation goes 100% to supporting cross-cultural missions.
-If you want to give to our family’s ministry here, you can go to https://www.imb.org/generosity/give-now/. Once on that page you can select “Missionary or Team” under the “Where do you want your gift to go?” option, then type our names and type SSAP for the “Affinity” option or simply, Tanzania. If you give in this way we will contact you to ask how you’d like your gifts to be used.