November? Are you kidding me?!!!

Yamoussoukro

Yes, my friends, that is indeed a crocodile and Mike was close enough to stick his toes in its mouth!!!!

Caleb at his Tae Kwon Do lesson! I'm afraid.

Tibire's baby. He's growing.

Grandma's Recipe Mmm!

Well, I feel like I should offer some sort of lame excuse for not having written in a million years, but I can't come up with anything. We'll just suffice it to say that we had family here! And what an incredible hit they were!!! I don't know if the nationals thought we just fell out of the sky one day or what, but when they met my parents, without exception, the response was, "These are your REAL parents?" I told them when they got here that I was pretty sure if the president had been informed of their arrival he would have declared a national holiday. I hope they are getting used to just being regular people in the good old US of A again! They are sorely missed by all. Now the first thing anyone I meet says is, "Where are your parents? What! They are gone?!!"

So we tried to show them all of the sights, hit the beach and the market and souvenir shacks and the grocery stores. We made them come with us to all of our ministry spots and churches we go to. They went to Ballet lessons and Tae Kwan Do. They'll probably need a month to recover from all of that not to mention the 24 hour travel here and then back again!

On another note, we got to the point in the story sets with one of our groups where it was time to pop the question again. Our Muslim friend decided that he did indeed believe the stories and wanted to follow Christ. Pray for him as he figures out what all that means.

We are getting deserted around here on a pretty serious level! Our friends Deron and MaryBeth hopped on a plane to stay in the states for 3 months. We'll miss them a lot!! Our supervisors are on their way out along with all of our other regional leaders. There will be a few of us left here, but it will be lonely!

On a happy note, our teammates will be coming to town earlier than we thought. We are expecting to get to meet them for the first time the week before Christmas!

We love you all and miss you. Happy Voting Day to all! I'd like to say that we'll see you at the polls, but something tells me we are in different precincts! ;)

Love,
Heather

Pictures

Down town Abidjan. Funny how nice it looks in a picture!

The gathering spot at the place we spend a lot of our ministry hours.

One of the ladies we story with working at her market table.

Mike's group of men

Most of the time you just get to see pictures of what we do in our free time. Somebody followed us around with a camera a couple of weeks ago and I thought you might like to see what we do with all of the rest of our time.

The Conference is Over!

We are finally done with our conference. It was good, but just made life very busy. We will be getting back to life as usual.

Our storying groups are going really well. We have several people really engaged in the stories of Jesus now and we are enjoying seeing the gospel in the eyes of those that haven't heard.

You can see one of my new friends. I've been building a relationship with this lady. She's listening to my stories and we'll see where that goes. Either way, she's become an important part of my life.

Mike and Caleb went fishing with some of the guys here for the conference and you can see their catch up there. There was enough to feed the whole gang of people here for the conference and give 11 huge fish and the octopus away.

We are looking forward to having my mom and dad here in 2 weeks. We miss you all and will be so glad to have a piece of home here.

I've got lots of catching up to do now, but hopefully we'll keep up better with our blog. Come see us!

Heather