Peope in Need

The path to the river

Here are three quotes from just this week:

A young father who has been coming regularly to study with Tom:
“I’m sorry Tom isn’t here and he won’t be back for awhile.”
“Okay, I’ll come back tomorrow…..but….do you guys not have some food?…..I’m very hungry.”

A neighbor, a grandmother (though still young) comes at night:
“We’ve used up the last of our oil and now the last of the rice is gone. I don’t have anything left and not a single coin. I haven’t eaten anything all day.”

The youngest team members

A neighbor, mother of seven kids who works for one of our teammates:
“I don’t have a man anymore. When I was three months pregnant, he left me, so now it is up to me to find the money for the baby. I used my last pay for the electric bill...Can you tell them that I need an advance to buy the baby’s medicine.”

The islands are a poor place. Sometimes it is hard to see the extent of people’s poverty. They often look healthy, they may be wearing well-kept clothes, someone in their family may have a job, or they may have family overseas who send money back to the island. But island employers can often go months without paying their employees. The money from overseas may never show up. What then?

We want to help. We want to be generous. To one of these friends we gave a bunch of bread and then invited back again for a meal. To another we sent her home with all our warm leftovers (enough for 2-3 people) and then hired her to make us some local samosas. To another we gave a little money, made the appropriate phone calls and then prayed for her baby.

Peter & Grace with valentines

Ultimately the most powerful thing we can do is pray. We simply can’t meet every need. We are not the solution to the islands’ many problems, but we pray.

PRAYERS ANSWERED
We have a visitor from South Africa staying at our home this week. He is a young man hoping to return to work on the islands one day. We are encouraged by his heart for the islands-- pray that he would find direction for the how, where and when he might return.  As always we are praying for more workers to come to the islands.  The special local language time with the team went well.

PRAYERS REQUESTED
Our team is sick! A virus has hit half the time so far. Megan was one of the first sick and is starting to feel better. Pray that this illness would pass quickly and that no one else would get sick. We recently heard about some breaches of trust among island brothers- pray for reconciliation and a healthy way forward. We pursuing the option of Megan traveling to the neighboring island sometime next month to get an MRI, pray that things would easily fall into place and that she wouldn’t have to be away from the family very long.

Small Encounter

Tom hiking up a local river

It all started with a phone call. Tom was in the middle of a meeting when the phone rang. A islander brother, “Mwandzani”, from Volcano Island, “coming to Clove Island today”, “okay, it will be good to see you.” Islanders often inform friends of their travel plans, so Tom didn’t think much of it. Mwandzani called again later that same day, “The boat hasn’t left yet, but I’ll call when it does.” Tom got off the phone…”I think Mwandzani might be coming over for dinner.” Why else would he want to make sure we knew exactly what time he was coming in. “Is it possible that he wants to stay with us?”, I asked. “No, I don’t think so. He only let us know he was even coming last minute.”

Neighborhood avocado tree falls

Tom was gone to class when Mwandzani showed up at our door that afternoon. He had his bag with him and I knew right away that he was wanting to stay at our house. I made my excuses and cleaned up the guest room and put new sheets on the bed.

It was a little inconvenient but we were genuinely happy to see him. He was hoping to be able to make it to the next island over for medical treatment but had to wait on Clove Island to see if things would work out. He had no idea how long it would take. He may learn that it wouldn’t work and he would just go home to Volcano Island having wasted a few days and boat fare.

The second evening, a new brother (“Azfar”) came to visit and study with Tom. He is a Clove Island native who had been living on the smallest island and having met and grown with some of our friends there was given our number. Mwandzani came back from the cyber cafe just as Tom and Azfar were finishing.

Tom was then called away, leaving the two islanders alone. As I came back around, cleaning and getting things ready for dinner, I overheard Mwandzani talking to Azfar about truth and the difficulties of seeking truth on the islands. He was encouraging him in his walk.

Our kids watching the tree deconstruction

Now this is a small incident, but it was really meaningful for us. Islanders are often isolated. Outside family and even within families, they do not trust one another. They rarely share deeply with each other. They don’t naturally look for support and encouragement from each other.  Here were two strangers having a heartfelt conversation about truth. They had found a bond outside of what island or family they are from. Just being a witness to this small encounter felt like a breakthrough.

Tom joined them and they all prayed together before Azfar left for home. Mwandzani’s medical trip didn’t work out so he got a boat the next morning to return to Volcano Island, but we don’t think it was a wasted two days.

PRAYERS ANSWERED

Tom victorious over his rat foe

We had a nice visit from Mwandzani. The first week of “Language Concentration” is done. This has meant a lot of work in lesson planning, watching kids and 9 hours of class time teaching our teammates. We repeat it again this coming week! We have found out that there is an MRI option on a neighboring island! (Now we’re waiting to hear from doctors whether Megan needs to make a special trip to get one.) We forgot to mention it last week, but a teammate watched our kids so we could take a little hike (just the two of us)-- it was a fun time, reminding us of the beauty of the islands and our Vermont hiking days (before kids). We finally caught the rat that had been visiting our home! The power is a little improved but it is still off more than it is on.

PRAYERS REQUESTED
Pray that more islanders would reach out, trust, engage and encourage one another as Mwandzani and Azfar did. This is a great need in the community here. Pray for our team as they continue to tackle a difficult part of island grammar (noun classes!). Pray for good comprehension and retention. Pray for wisdom as we pursue what to do with Megan’s back and continue to pray for her healing.

No Power

The whole team on our first retreat

Growing up in the United States, we very rarely had to deal with power outages. I have a fun memory of eating a tub of ice cream by candlelight (it would have just melted otherwise), but it was a pretty rare experience. We would drag our candles from some dusty unused corner of the cupboard and we’d usually count the minutes until power was restored. It wasn’t a regular concern and the few times there were power outages, it was for big reasons-- blizzards, high winds, earthquakes! Big reasons that no one could control.

On our island we have been having serious power outages (bad for here). For the past week, we are probably averaging less than 6 hours of electricity a day, sometimes 24 hr stretches without power. Food is going bad in the fridge. We’re running out of candles and having trouble keeping things charged. But the worst part has been the heat. It has been one of the hottest week-- a hot, humid, stagnant heat. No wind, no breezes, no relief. So no power, means no fans at night. It means waking up covered in sweat and miserable. it mean the kids wake up in the middle of the night, scared in the pitch darkness, hot and covered in heat rash. It hasn’t been fun.

The 3 littlest teammates

So what is the big reason? Did we have a cyclone? Did a landslide take out the power plant? We heard there was a gas crisis, is there no gas left on the islands? No. Everyone assures us there is gas. All cars are running and the gas company has plenty of it. They just aren’t selling to the government owned electricity company, because the electric company hasn’t been paying their bills. Now we all pay high electric bills every month-- how can they not have any money?

I have asked this question to a number of different islanders and they all throw up their hands and say, “You know, it’s the government. Money disappears,” that’s to say the “big” reason is common everyday corruption.

What can we do? We can pray. We cannot change men’s hearts, but we know someone who can. We cannot stop the heat but we know someone who controls everything.

The power is still bad and we may have to wait to see corruption in the government stop, but one thing has changed. God sent rain and lots of it. And with the rain has come sweet relief from the heat. :)

PRAYERS ANSWERED
It rained! It is much cooler now. We had a short retreat with our team to close out the first unit.  Tom has gotten to share and study the book with a man, as well as help this man with his sick daughter. Our schedule has changed which will allow Tom to restart a weekly study with another man.

PRAYERS REQUESTED
Next week we head into two weeks of intensive language to start the next unit of our team’s curriculum. This means that we will have our teammates in a classroom setting and be “teaching” them some island grammar. Pray for us as we prepare those lessons and that it would all go well. Pray that this would be a good boost to our team’s language learning. Continue to pray for Megan’s back! We’re looking into options for getting an MRI (there are no MRI machines on the islands).

Language Revisited

Megan helps at neighborhood event

This week, as part of the end of our first team unit (a.k.a. “the orientation unit”), our teammates underwent a language evaluation officiated by Megan.  We are pleased to say that all of them are progressing well.  But that doesn’t mean they don’t have a long way to go.  They see that now themselves.  Some are tiring of language learning.  The road is hard and steep and there is a long way to go.  Our goals are grand: to be able to speak clearly and deeply in this language, so that we can share stories and explain the deeper truths of life with our friends and neighbors.  We want to be able to pick up on the nuances--the things said in passing that actually carry deep meaning.  We want to be able to understand their stories so that we can laugh with them and cry with them.  A wonderful goal, but not easily achieved.  And after 3 months, they begin to realize just how high the mountain is they wish to climb.

Now comes the hard part: perseverance.  Slogging on when it seems like you aren’t learning, or even forgetting things you learned before.  It’s all part of the process, but it is humbling.  Not to mention, it grows more difficult to practice at deeper levels where vocabulary is in less frequent use.  Where you have opportunities to say “Hello” and other greetings a hundred times a day, how often will you get to practice a word like, “cooking pot” or “forgiveness”?

Grace & Peter with some neighbors

Our teammates are not the only ones learning language.  We have not reached that lofty goal either.  We are just further down the road.  It has been a little disheartening how little time there has been to improve our own language skills during these recent days as we juggle our team responsibilities and English classes. But there is always hope.  Megan has been teaching our teammates parts of island grammar on our team days, and you know what they say, “If you want to learn something well, teach it.”  And things are settling down enough that we are once again finding time to push ourselves further in this language.  For us this is exciting...we long for more language time, we thirst for it.  Our teammates are drowning in language and study time is like overflowing an already full barrel, but for us an hour of study is like a drink of cold water to a parched and weary traveler. 

This might not seem like a very exciting blog, but language is our ever constant prayer request.  It unlocks more doors than almost anything else we can do.  So remember us and our teammates as we work and persevere to learn this language which cannot be learned in a classroom and for which nearly no written materials exist.  It is no easy task, but it is of deep importance.

PRAYERS ANSWERED
We were so blessed to have Chris and Beka with us this past week to encourage us and share with us their wealth of experience as team leaders, as well as just to pass some time with them as our good friends.  We are happy to see that all our teammates are progressing in language and continue to make contacts and friends in their communities. A good friend talked about standing strong for what she believes against neighborhood pressure against- we're proud of her.

 PRAYERS REQUESTED
Pray for our language learning!!!  For perseverance and encouragement; for the right language helpers and the right subjects to study; for the time to study; for the balance of listening, speaking, studying, visiting, practicing and resting; for a thirst for language; for brains that would grasp grammar, understand different accents, remember new vocabulary, pick up on pronunciation, and increase in speed and accuracy; and to remember the prize and to keep our eyes fixed on the ultimate goal so as to bring us hope in the midst of discouragement. Continue to pray for Megan’s back--healing is coming, slowly.  There is a large rat running around our house that has, as of yet, avoided our traps.  As you feel led, pray that he would no longer bother us :)