Three weeks at a glance

As most of you know, when you go away for a holiday you come back with stacks of paperwork on your desk from being gone for a week or two. Well with us being gone a month you can only imagine. We have been backed up with work since we arrived. We had a team from Delaware already on the ground and we have managed to work every day since we have been back. We did get the new property at Living Way and because the college knew they were leaving they left us with a huge mess to clean up. Luckily this team of students has had lots of energy and provision to employ some locals to come along side and help us get it cleaned up and painted so we can focus on getting the classes started. Mike will be talking about all of the details of the property in the newsletter. We did get to celebrate Mike’s birthday. I gave him a surprise birthday party at the office and then we cut out a couple of hours early and went to a restaurant that was rumored to have great cheeseburgers. I must say they were good!
The wedding that God orchestrated was a huge success! It was this past Saturday and the bride and groom are still smiling. It is sad to see them living in such poverty, but at least they got to have a “real” fairytale wedding and honeymoon night. We picked them up the next day and took them back to their shack and it wasn’t long before reality set in. Blessing decided to walk by herself to her dad’s and was wearing her engagement ring and band, when three young men came up to her with a knife and demanded her rings. She refused to give them to them and took off running. She ran to one of the shacks and began banging on the door and the people that lived there let her in. The boys and some girls were laughing because they knew how scared she was. It is awful to have to live in these townships and have to deal with stuff like this every day. Brian had given her the engagement ring the week before and I asked her why she hadn’t been wearing her ring and she said, “Because someone will steal it from me.” I thought surely not, but I was proven wrong, it took less than a week.
This coming Saturday we have an all day seminar on training trainers in thinking skills. This is the last of the Grassroots classes that began back in October. We are looking forward to implementing the course at Living Way. It is designed to help us help the locals how to write affirmations, build up their self -esteem and see beyond anything they could ever imagine. Of course, we always reap some of the benefits.
We are looking forward to the next few weeks as we will begin getting our classes ready to start. Please pray for us to get all of the curriculum written and that we will find other people to help us train. We want to be good stewards of what God has entrusted to us and it all starts with the right people for the jobs.