Colds and Vitamin C

The end of this past week, most of the children came down with colds...coughs and runny noses. The temperatures have dropped to mid 50s at night, which has felt cold here. "Lord, we need some vitamins for these children!" Fruits are not included in our food budget for the school. I try to buy bananas or sometimes oranges but it is not every day I can get to town to buy these things.

But then Friday morning, a pick up truck pulls up and a farmer hops out. His farm is over 70 kilometers from town but today he has stopped by to visit. He goes to the back of the truck, opens it, and pulls out two gunny sacks full of ....



ORANGES! Vitamin C sent for our children from our Heavenly Father! Thank you Lord! The children are all sucking on oranges now at snack times.

The past week went well. The teacher used stories from the Old and New Testament to illustrate the character and nature of our God! The students enjoyed the practical applications she brought to our lives as well. Next week the speaker will be giving an overview of the Bible and be teaching how to study the Bible inductively.

Our brother who had epileptic fights who had come for prayer last Frday continued to struggle with fits. They were occurring around dawn, 5:00, 5:30, or 6:00. So Victor loaded the car with students and went to his house one morning at 4:30 to pray with him. That morning, the fit happened 10 minutes before they arrived! However the fits were shorter in duration. We have continued to pray and now the last three nights/mornings he has not had a single fit. We are thanking God!

Off to the training center....

Fathers' flight, Kitchen Fights, All night

Fathers’ flight -- The speaker this week taught on finding our identity in Christ vs where we try to find our identity. What a joy that God has called us to be salt and light for Him, that we are a chosen people and a royal priesthood! For the illiterate mother from the village, her identity is first of all in Christ, and she can be about His work! The students were especially challenged one morning when the teacher touched on the deep feelings that reside in our hearts if our parents, especially the fathers, have abandoned or rejected us. The teacher invited those who had been affected in this way to come forward for prayer. Of our 20 students, about 16 of them went forward, most of them with heart breaking stories of one or both parents not present as they grew up. Tears flowed. DTS staff prayed one on one with them. We trust that a deep healing has begun in their lives. Later in the school, we will have a whole week devoted to God as our Father and we hope to see God do a great work in the lives of these students.



The third week of our DTS is over. This picture shows our cooking facilities.


Kitchen fights - As Victor says, the third week is always a challenging week as the “honey moon” phase of arriving, meeting, and starting is over. So we noticed the students coming late to class and complaints arising over this or that. Disagreements, sometimes strong disagreements, dare we call them fights, came from the kitchen as students from different regions of the country hotly discussed ways of preparing food. While we have a lady coming to cook lunch for the school every day, staff and students take turns preparing breakfast and supper. So it is in these situations where the discipleship will need to happen now. In the classroom, we have 20 saints. Out of the classroom, we have 20 students whose “paint is still wet.” Perhaps we will hang a sign in the kitchen “Jesus is Lord of the Kitchen.” For now, we appreciate your prayers for this discipleship process.

All Night -- Last night, our school passed all night in prayer and worship on behalf of a young man who has suffered years of epileptic fits. Medicine from the hospital has helped some but then the hospital ran out of the medication. The last three months he has not had one night of uninterrupted sleep. The fits always happen at night. So he came in the evening with his parents and brother, brought by a missionary who has been discipling him for several years. Most of our staff and students fasted during the day. Then we divided into three groups to take turns staying up all night with him in prayer and worship. We had mattresses on the floor for him and his family to sleep. By God’s mercy, he awoke this morning after a night of uninterrupted sleep – no epileptic fights all night long! His mother is praising God. They went back home today to burn some remaining witchcraft medicine they had there. Then they will return to town for a week to see how he does. Praise God with us, for His showing Himself strong in the life of this young man! Pray for his complete healing!

Praising the Lord

I'm trying to learn this technology. Hopefully, by following this link you will be able to see a clip of our worship time at our school's opening.


At the opening of our Discipleship Training School, we had a time of praising the Lord, together with friends and neighbors. This particular song is talking about how the peoples will gather before the Throne of the Lamb, each tribe with its particular language and dance to praise the Lord. The woman going forward to dance is a Brazilian, representing Brazil in the dance of praise.

Preschool

I am watching the 7 or so children of the DTS staff and students during the class times so that the mothers can take full advantage of the class. I say 7 or so students because the number changes as neighbor children come and go as well. This picture shows the children at the Lichinga airport, waiting for the airplane bringing one of our students. This was quite the field trip for some of the children who come from villages and have never seen an airplane up close (or heard it up close!) Pray for these little hearts to be touched by God's love as well during our times together every day.

Worship Time during our Opening

 

DTS starting

Well, we are now living in a two room suite in a large community! Wow, it has been exciting to see this place fill up with people eager to learn more about the Lord! From the children’s perspective, 3 families came with three 3 yr old little girls, plus 2 neighbor girls around there age, Victoria and Clara have lots of friends to play with! Victoria is thriving on it, complaining when she has to come in for afternoon rest time and bath time/bed time. Clara enjoys it some of the time. Other times, she puts around our rooms, enjoying alone time, finding things to organize in our still disorderly – in the state of unpacking- rooms. (Today she found some little children’s books I had that all fit in a box and she nicely put them all back in.)

Dona Maria (the lady who helps us with our house work)rides her bicycle (which she got early May) all the way out here to help wash clothes and carry water from the well to buckets in our bathroom (since the water tower with the water tank fell down the day before we moved….after Victor had spent hours and hours fixing up the whole plumbing system to have running water).
A few students couldn’t come at the last minute, but it looks like we will have 19 students, a good number (plus 11 children, including ours). It is cold here….since we are situated on a hill, with the wind blowing up off a large pond below us. So we have hung grass mats around the outside gazebo where we eat and have hung transparent plastic over the windows in the classroom.

Yesterday, a man trained by other missionaries, came to show the students how to build a wood stove that conserves heat and greatly reduces the amount of firewood needed. This should help cut down our cooking and heating bathwater expenses.

So today Victor rented a huge truck for $100, got a license to haul firewood, and took over 15 guys out (mostly students) to the bush 30 kilometers from town and cut down loads of dead trees. He said the guys worked hard and with a great attitude! We should have enough firewood to last the whole school, hopefully!

Balbina, the wonderful wife of our YWAM leader Dinis, awoke at 10:30pm one night to make tea for students just arriving. Our wonderful staff ladies from England and Holland are working tirelessly making menus and figuring out budgets for the kitchen. We are feeding 40 people a day. I get up each morning to make a big pot of porridge (ground up corn, peanuts, beans, and soy) for the 11 children, 3 nursing mothers (counting myself) and one pregnant lady! Frank, our Dutch staff, bought some carpentry tools in Malawi and has spent the last two days trying to get 4 tables put together. Victor will leave at 6 am tomorrow to pick up the 20 chairs we had made that will hopefully be ready for our first day of class tomorrow.

It is always a challenge to get the schedule going and everything running smoothly, but so far things have gone pretty well. Most of the students arrived one or 2 days earlier than we had planned, so they have been sitting around a couple days now and are ready to start. What do African women do when they are away from home with very few responsibilities? They braid hair, and unbraid hair, and braid more hair….their hair, their friends hair, etc. I joined the party, having to braid both the girls’ hair. With one other lady helping me, it took half the time.
Well, hopefully this gives you a few word pictures of what is going on here………. More later. Thanks so much for your prayers.

Love,
Lori for all of us

Trip to Tanzania

Sorry for the long silence here. We were out of internet contact for almost a month, due to our last minute trip to Tanzania to visit my father in law, Victor's dad, who is terminally ill with bladder cancer. It was a long trip, about 70 hours in total with us covering 5000 kilometers! The following are a few pictures from our trip:

The girls, in their seats in our car, ready to go. Sunglasses and a piece of gum in their mouths, and they were good to go. The children did exceptionally well traveling. Clara still asks for a piece of gum now every time we get in the car. That was their "long trip treat" that they enjoyed.

We didn't have too much entertainment for our travel, other than look out the window, talking, singing, listening to music on an Ipod Grandpa set up for them, a few books, and sleep!



We had our moments of fussing and fighting but it was not too bad. The girls had to learn how to use latrines or bushes for rest stops. By the end of the trip, they were experts! God blessed our trips in so many ways, one being that our children stayed healthy the whole way, inspite of dirty latrines, food cooked in all sorts of places, and sleeping in 10 different places in 25 days!

Our road went through 50 kilometers of Game Reserve in Tanzania and we were thrilled to see a giraffe, as well as antelope, elephants in the distance and zebras!

On our second night of the trip, we had traveled all day and were quite tired. Someone had arrived a hotel for us to sleep in but the directions to the place were sketchy. We drove around the town for almost an hour trying to find the place. With everyone's nerves on edge from fatigue and frustration, Clara broke into song, singing her favorite song (from Steve Green's Children's Bible Memory Songs) "Give thanks to the Lord for He is good! His love endures forever! Give thanks to the Lord for He is good!" What a timely reminder coming from little lips!

On our way to see Victor's father, we stopped at the YWAM Morogoro base where we had gone for me to do my DTS 4 years ago! It was so good to see friends there again. Victoria was born in Morogoro while we were at this base. In this picture, Victoria is standing in front of the house we lived in when she was a baby. The house was a duplex. The family in the other