Family Reunion

We just finished our first annual meeting with all of the great missionaries of West Africa. We enjoyed our time of sharing, fellowship, and reenergizing. The best way to describe this event is a family reunion of people not related by blood, but by the blood of the lamb all sharing the same call. We laughed together, cried together, and covenanted together to work diligently to share the gospel with West Africans so that they have the opportunity to spend eternity praising our Maker.

It was a little odd to find myself in a room of people that I'd never or barely met and yet somehow be joined together by something a little difficult to put my finger on. Here are some of the things that made us an odd family of sorts.
There was the family resemblance. The Bible says, "How beautiful are the feet that bring good news..." and these feet were all beautiful with a strange tanline from wearing flip flops every day.
There was the commonality of relatives. We shared a love in our hearts for brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews with whom we share no blood relation.
There was a bond of hearts that knows what it's like to cry when they sing praise songs in English, grieve with the broken heart of one that's lost a child (a common greatest fear), feel deeply the loss of those retiring from our family, and who know the sorrow of leaving our most precious posession (family and friends) in a far away land.
Then there were those strange things. We shared a family favorite perfume, Deep Woods Off! We all grabbed for long sleeves and sweaters as the temperature dipped below a chilly 85 degrees. All of our lists and notes are in multiple languages because although we are gaining new words in new languages, we're losing old ones!

So we are glad to have met our new African family! We had a long, tiring week, but we are back to life as usual now!

Love to all!
Heather

Telling the Story...

One of our greatest accomplishments lately has been in telling the story of the Bible. We have progressed enough in our French that we can now tell Bible Stories in French. I takes me (Mike) about three or four days of preparations, but it is well worth the effort. Every Thursday we go to a little neighborhood called Vridi. We have been going there for about three months now telling Bible stories. In the last month I have been telling Bible stories from the OT to a group of 6 guys. Heather has been telling stories to a lady for several months now. They all claim to be Christians, but most of them have never heard these stories. We started with the creation story and have just finished with the Exodus. It is very exciting to be able to tell a story we know well in English in a different language. Please continue to pray for us as we continue to learn French and tell these stories. We go out at noon and come back around 5pm.

Please pray for the group pictured that are playing checkers. This looks like a friendly game, but they are actually betting on the game with what little money they do make. They are currently not open to the gospel, but I (Mike) still stop and talk with them.

The picture with the large red doors is the church in Vridi that we attend from time to time. You can see how poor this neighborhood is by looking at the drum set in the church. Drums are the only instruments this church uses. They start singing a song and the drummer joins in keeping them on time. One person did donate a keyboard, but no one knows how to play it, so it stays at the pastor's house.

Please pray for us as we continue to learn french and tell these people the stories of the Bible. May God get all the glory.

Mike

More Pictures

This is where we stayed the last night. It was quite beautiful. Come see us, we'll take you!!

Love,
Heather

Vacation Pictures

Slave Castle in Cape Coast, Ghana.
Granddaddy, maybe we should have a lesson in gun safety, huh?
Now you may be thinking that Caleb is the only wise person, in that he is getting out of dodge, but the way I see it, the camera lady was the wisest of all because she chose the higher ground!
Check out the pierced ears! In African culture, she is officially a girl.
Gotta love the beach!

Home Again

We made it home from our vacation. We had a lovely time tasting a bit of American culture. Caleb and Karis have decided they would like to combine Accra, the beaches of Senegal, the people of Abidjan and all of their friends and family from home to make the perfect mission field. They greatly enjoyed the shopping and food of Accra. Of course any 6 and 9 year old that got to eat hamburgers, pizza, ice cream and doughnuts for a week would enjoy themselves, not to mention playing tennis, swimming and a monstrous swing set.

Our border crossing home was very uneventful too. All in all, everybody is ready to go back to Ghana, minus the long car ride.

Our little dog and cat have been thrilled we are home, it's great to have animals!

pictures

This is a picture of Caleb and Karis's lego creation. They've gotten into legos recently and are even content to play with these big ones we have.













These are some pictures of the people we spend time with in Vridi, telling stories and discipling.

Vacation

This week of vacation is a breath of fresh air after all the days of this summer that have passed almost as a blur. I think that I am finally getting through my thick skull that life is always going to be busy here. Hopefully I'll get a better handle on how to be able to keep in touch with family and friends in spite of the busyness.

I can't believe that in just a couple of weeks, I had planned to start back with homeschooling. I still haven't even had time to put away last year's stuff. Whew!!

We are in Ghana this week and I had looked forward to having all of this free time and what I thought was going to be constant internet. Unfortunately our first stop had no internet for some reason and then when we go to our second, the internet was out! We love West Africa!!!

We've had quite an interesting week. We said goodbye to our little dog and cat last Friday and headed off for our first border crossing in a car! We were armed with our luggage, our little GPS unit, several pages of scribbled notes on what to do where and a sandwich for lunch. The border crossing turned out to be quite uneventful! We found ourselves in English speaking Ghana by lunch time.

We continued on to Elmina beach where we planned to spend our first three nights. The hotel there had a pool and a tennis court, which provided some good entertainment. We also visited a slave castle there. The tour was very well put together and was very educational. I still find it difficult to process how that all happened.

I was a little under the weather on Sunday, but up and around by evening. We had an amusing conversation with Karis one evening at dinner. She and Caleb were chatting about something I didn't quite understand and finally they asked me a question that included me in the conversation. They were discussing turtle twins and asked me if somebody we knew were turtle twins. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what they were talking about. Finally after several minutes of confusion, Karis said "You know, mom, turtle twins! Where one is a girl and the other a boy!" Of course this was all the more amusing because my sis-in-law is expecting "turtle twins".

We intended to get an early start Monday, when we were headed on to Accra so that we could swing by a great national park that has some suspended bridges that everyone talks about. After we'd gotten all loaded, though, Karis closed her finger in the truck door. It looked horrible right to start with and I was really scared as we were in uncharted territory as far as the medical field went. We looked right away for a clinic, her finger looked mangled, but we didn't find anything that I would have considered allowing to treat her. So with some advice from our supervisors, we found some ice (a miracle in itself) and headed off for Accra, three hours away. By the time we arrived in Accra, it was obvious that the finger was already getting a little better. It was still badly swollen and bruised, but it appeared all bones were in proper alignment, something I'd been quite certain was not the case earlier. There "just so happened" to be a nurse on site at the guest house when we arrived. She advised taping the finger and waiting a day or so for an Xray if it didn't seem better. Later that evening, we "ran into" a doctor spending that one night on his way out of town. He checked the finger several times that night and had cleared her by that evening of possible bone damage!

Apparently trying to break her finger one day wasn't enough, so Karis decided to get her ears pierced on Tuesday. She's been wanting to for some time. All girl babies ears are pierced at only a few weeks/days old. So Karis often is questioned as to why hers aren't. We found a very Western style mall here and when I saw they did it and it looked OK, we let here. I'll have to admit I couldn't actually be there for the event. My stomach hurt and knees were shaking just standing outside waiting!!

We've found all sorts of neat gadgets that we can't get back home like muffin tins and cookie sheets! If we didn't already have a carload to take back we'd be loading up. We came to pick up a few things that a missionary on the way out sold to us. We are a little concerned as to how big a problem they will be to get out of the country!! Also, oddly enough, we can read the books in the bookstores here, so those have been a real draw!!!

We've eaten lots of hamburgers, french fries, pizza and ice cream! I am super excited at the possibility of going to a Chinese restaurant tonight!!! They have more Chinese restaurants in this city than we have McDonald's in a big American city. You quite literally don't pass one before you can see one or two more in front of you!! I just hope the food is good at the one we pick.

We will be back on the road tomorrow, Friday. We are going to try to make the whole trip in one day and expect it to take all day. We have loved it here, but miss home. Karis misses the animals.

We had some disappointing news before we left. We'd been looking forward to a visit from a missionary that does urban strategy in another region, but his family will be unable to make the trip at this time. Hopefully he will visit us the first of next year to help give us some ideas.

I managed to leave our cord for our camera at home, so you'll have to wait until we get home to see our pictures.

We love you and miss you.

Love,
Heather