...and he rested...

We have spent our last two weeks on vacation in the Gambia and I want to share some pictures with you.  It has been so much fun these past two weeks just being a family and relaxing together.  We have done shopping, eating out, going to the beach and a monkey park and we have watched several movies. I think the best day was the day that included the monkey park and the beach.  The water was amazing and the kids had so much fun jumping over and diving into waves.  

 

This is the Gambian beach where we swam and played. 

This monkey is nursing her baby. That was pretty cool to watch. Seriously how cool is it that we got to watch it happen in the wild!?! 

 

This monkey 'led' us down a path until eventually he ran up a tree. 

Taking a snooze in a tree.  Looks relaxing. 







We are all ready to return to the village and continue to serve God in Catel. For me personally, I am most sad to leave running hot water and an indoor toilet.  That was really a blessing to have and to enjoy. While we have been here I have thought about what we live without, like running water, a refrigerator, indoor bathrooms, but in the end, I am truly at peace with living the way we live because it is God's will for our lives.  We believe that when you live in God's will you have total peace in your life, no matter how hard or difficult your living situation is. 

And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done.  Genesis 2:2

Provisions

Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it.  John 14:13  How true those words are.  Before I had left for Gambia with the little girl that was to have surgery, we had prayed that I would have a supernatural ability to speak and understand Creole, and God gave me that.  Since I have returned, I have still been able to speak and understand Creole, just not as well as I did in the hospital. We had prayed for Ramatulai to have this surgery and for God to give her a smooth and quick recovery, and God granted that to us.  Ramatulai had her surgery and recovered nicely.  She still cannot speak smoothly, but truly, she needs speech therapy to relearn how to form her words.  However, reading that verse from John, I know that God could make her speak clearly.  God was walking with me every step while I was in Gambia with Ramatulai and her family and He continues to walk with me every step today.  God is always with us.  It is when we stop seeking Him that we think he left us, when in reality, it is us that left Him. 

Here are some photos to show how God has provided this past month. 

Ramatulai just days after her surgery.  The reason she has white tape on her face is because she had a feeding tube. Today she can eat rice! 

We started an addition onto our house. We thank God for this blessing and for all the materials, the funds and the people to get this job done. 

One night while I was cooking supper, my gas ran out for my stove.  We had no more to replace the tank, so I finished our supper over fire.  I am so thankful for how God provided many opportunities for me to learn from the women here how to cook over fire. 

God continues to provide us delicious food. There is also always enough for us to share, even when I think there is not enough.

God also provides us opportunities to rest and enjoy a little comfort food. 

We are currently on vacation and enjoying rest and relaxation.  God has provided people along the way to make our time even more enjoyable.  

But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. Matthew 6:33  

Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. James 4:8a

Challenges and Blessings

You know when you think life is going good and then all of a sudden there are challenges? What do you do in those challenges? The right answer is 'turn to God', but that isn't the truth for everyone. Many people ask, "Why God?"  We have been finding blessings within all of our challenges. Right now our two long term missionaries have left the field because their terms ended, Michael is in our village with all of our kids alone right now because I am with a little girl that is about to face a challenge. While Michael and I could dwell on the challenges of being apart, him being home with the kids alone, and struggling our way through the language, we are seeing Gods hand in all of this. Our God has a big plan for us, and if we dwell on the challenges, we miss His blessings. 

I left on Wednesday with a husband and wife from our village and their daughter to go to The Gambia. Their daughter, Ramatouli, has cleft palate, and an opportunity has come up for her to have it repaired. You see, I'm not a nurse, I can barely speak the language, I've only lived here for six months and I definitely don't know The Gambia, but God had it planned for me to be here. Our nurse in the village had to go home with her husband because his mom died. Michael couldn't come because he doesn't have his Senegalese visa, so that left me. The morning we were to leave, I didn't even know the hospital name or the doctors name we were meeting.  All I knew was that there is a group from the Mercy Ship (learn more about the Mercy Ship here or to read about where Ramatouoli will be, click here) at the hospital. I was to meet the family at 10:00 but at 10:00 I decided to check our email one more time. It miraculously worked and there was an email from the doctor. I learned what time to be there and where to go. That was a relief and a blessing from God. We arrived in Gambia after a very long day of traveling and stayed with a friend for the night. That is when I started to see a miracle. Truly it was supernatural, I was able to speak and understand creole! It was a blessing. The next day we went to the hospital, and God went before us making our travels smooth and we found the place easily. We were early, so we got a sandwich for breakfast and waited. Once the doctors arrived, they right away knew who we were from email contacts and Ramatouli was the first child to be examined and admitted. They saw her mouth and said it would be an easy repair (this doctor has done 100's of these repairs) and because we came from so far Ramatouli would be one of the first surgeries. This was a blessing. God works in good times and difficult times. Even in our challenges we can see blessings. 

Ramatouli will be having her surgery on Monday. We would appreciate prayers on her behalf and for her mom and dad. This will be a challenging time, but my  prayer is they all see the blessing in it. Please pray for the doctors for they will be doing many surgeries starting Monday. Also pray that this family will be strengthened in their faith. 

Everyone Needs Compassion

We are not in short supply of interesting people that are living here in Catel. We have had a lady that lives next door to us that yells all night long pacing the path in front of our house and hers.  Her family has now sent her on to extended family in another village.   We have a man that is known to roam the village talking to himself.  One story we heard about him was that he is talking to a spirit.  He started coming to our compound selling lemons.  He would sell us an entire bucket incredibly cheaply.  Then he started coming every day.  We wondered where he was getting these lemons from.  The story we heard did not encourage us, we heard he was stealing them.  When we told him we didn’t want anymore lemons, he came with pumpkins.  Michael’s heart was filled with compassion and he kept on buying from him even when we were overly full of lemons and pumpkins.  One day, I (Karen) was hanging out at a neighbor’s house when she asked me if I bought lemons from this man.  I told her I did and asked her if she knew where he got them from.  She said his family has a lot of lemon trees and grows pumpkins.  This was encouraging as we no longer were thinking that we were buying stolen goods, but now we knew they were legitimately his to sell. Michael continued to buy lemons from this man and then he started buying pumpkins from him.  At one point, we had 10 pumpkins in our kitchen. Here is an example of Michael’s compassion for this man. Michael continued buying even when we really didn’t need more. 

Michael's compassion in the form of lemons

The kids have enjoyed the lemonade they make out of all the lemons!

Our village has another lady that roams around, but she just yells and ‘plays games‘ with people.  She is either not right in her head or possessed by a demon, we aren’t sure, but that is what we have heard from others in the village. She does some pretty outrageous things, like guard the well that everyone gets their drinking water from and tells everyone they can’t get water. She would actually chase people away in order to make sure no one gets water.  Her first time of doing this, a man filled a bucket with water and she started yelling at him and telling him he had to drink the entire bucket right then. He just walked away with his bucket. Another day, I was taking Micah and Isaiah to school when she decided it was a school only for white people and she sent all the other kids home, Micah and Isaiah are the only two white kids in the school. She picked up a stick and would try to hit any kids that tried to go to school. Kids are fearful of her.  She also says some of the most outrageous things too.  She says that I am her child, my children are actually her children, some other missionaries we serve with our her parents, and every day a different man is her husband.  One day she decided that another missionary we serve with was her husband and he owed her 8,000,000 CFA’s for her cows that he would pay to have her as his wife.  He happened to leave the next day to visit a neighboring country and this lady, got incredibly upset with him.  She demanded Michael, my husband, to pay her the money and then I could marry the other missionary.  She just says the most outrageous things. Her most recent ‘game’ is that our house is hers and she comes over to sweep the yard in the morning.  The problem with this is then she gets upset when it gets dirty from the kids playing.  She has started chasing children out of our yard and has hit some of the children. 

Her family has brought her to the witchdoctors house here in our village for treatment.        The witchdoctor put a log on her foot to keep her from roaming the village.  When she roams at night, she just walks the road and yells all night long. For Christmas, he removed the log but within a week she was trying to get hit by cars in the road, so the log went back on. It is heartbreaking to see her with this log on her leg, but sometimes it’s a relief because you know she won’t be terrorizing people any longer or endangering her own life.  Today she is log free and roaming everywhere. 

This is the lady with a log on her leg.  

However crazy she may be, she needs prayer. There are people everywhere that are disturbed either by mental illness or demons. Remember to be in prayer for these people and the people that are around you.  Maybe they don't act as obvious as people in our village may act, but you never know what goes on in others minds and souls. 

  

A Night Away

In America we often had offers for people to watch our kids. Many times we were able to get away for a date or a night away to reconnect as a married couple.  Having children keeps you busy and makes marriage more challenging. Living in a different culture adds to that challenge, living in a third world culture adds to it even more.  This week in Catel, we have visitors, two of which include Andrew's parents. Andrew and his parents asked if they could watch our kids so we could go away for a night.  This would be our first get away in the five months we have lived here.  We were so excited to be able to just be with each other for a day, a night and some of the next day.  We left our house at 8:30 a.m., but by the time we got to Ziguinchor is was 12:15 p.m.  We waited quite some time in Catel for a car, then we waited another chunk of time in Sao Domingo.  By the time we left Sao Domingo, it was after 10:30.  We were going to Beryl’s house first then Beryl was taking us into Ziguinchor.  Beryl’s house is so adorable and he has done some nice landscaping with it too.  It looks like a great retirement home.  Once we got to Ziguinchor, we stopped at the stores, got a little supplies, and then started looking for a hotel.  We wanted to stay somewhere nicer than usual. We first stopped at Hotel Aubert and got to see a room there.  It was nice, it had air conditioning, running water and hot water, a double bed (our usual stay with the kids does not have a double bed, only twins) and wireless in the room.  We then went to a hotel that is next to our usual stay with the kids. This hotel was nice.  They had a standard room, which was not as nice as Hotel Aubert, and a luxury room.  The luxury room was nice and the view was amazing. It was on the river, it had a beautiful pool (hotel Aubert had a pool as well), the room was spacious with a big bed. However, the difference was that room was 50,000 CFA and the Hotel Aubert was 38,000 CFA.  That’s a huge difference for less than 24 hours of staying there.  We decided to go with the Hotel Aubert and pray we get a weekend away where we can stay at the nicer one and get to enjoy it.  So after we checked into our hotel room, we decided to go walking to find the market we have heard so much about.  We knew the general area it was so we started walking.  It was much easier to walk without our backpacks and five children in tow.  After walking and seeing many little stores, we found the big market. There were women sitting outside the entrance with veggies and when we walked into the market it was busy with people and stores galore.  I believe we could find just about anything there.  We weren’t there a few minutes before we noticed that we were being followed.  We are white, so of course in their minds we have money and they can get something from us.  We walked quickly, barely looking at anything as we tried to get him to stop following us.  We made it around in a big circle when we passed some other white people and the man decided they would be better to follow.  Then we were able to look around and absorb everything.  There were shops with jewelry and hair ties, with fabric, clothes, hardware, traditional African decor, shoes, baby toys, literally anything you can think of.  It was a total cultural experience. We are thankful we found this market without kids (at least for our first trip it was nice to not have the distraction of keeping hold of the kids) and after we have been here for almost five months we were better able to get around.  We were able to bargain and get use our Creole.  We even bought Michael a pair of much needed jeans and me a necklace.  We both didn’t really want the necklace, but the store keeper really wanted to make the sell, so we got it for an incredibly low price.  We left the market and came back to the hotel to relax for a little bit before going out for dinner.  

Once we were back at the hotel, we both wanted to wash our feet, as they get filthy walking around.  This hotel has hot running water.  We haven’t had hot running water for five months, with the exception of me going to the retreat in November.  We turned on the water, and proceeded to lather our feet up, but then quickly realized we forgot how hot water gets and started scalding our feet.  We frantically adjusted the water all while scalding ourselves with water going everywhere and soaking our clothes before we adjusted the water to what was comfortable.  We thought it was a wonderful temperature and proceeded to clean our feet.  When we turned off the water, we turned off the cold first to see that we only had the hot water trickling out.  Maybe we are more accustomed to bucket showers than we thought.  

About 7:30 we decided to go out to a restaurant for supper.  We walked a few blocks down to our usual La Kassa restaurant.  It was beautiful there with lights everywhere and music.  We felt like we were on a date.  We shared a small pizza and french fries and then came back to the hotel.  Ziguinchor comes alive at night and is quite safe to walk around.  There were guards on every street and in front of every hotel, including ours.  Once we got back we watched a few episodes of a favorite tv show that we brought along and I quickly fell asleep.  Michael couldn’t sleep so he skyped his parents and somehow I woke up around 1:00 a.m.  We decided we were going to live up this night without kids and watched another episode and didn’t sleep again until 3:00 a.m.  We wanted to enjoy our time without kids as much as possible as it may not happen again for a long time.  We slept in and took our time getting ready for the day.  Now it is 30 minutes before check out time and our time of going back to reality.  It has been a blessing to enjoy being a couple and a night away from village life, but we are looking forward to being back with our kids and friends in Catel.  

If you are married, don't forget to date.  Remember marriage is being with your best friend, not just parenting.  Enjoy each other and if you wake up in the middle of the night and have no kids, don't feel pressure to sleep right away if you can't, enjoy being together no matter what time of the day it is.  When your children are raised and off on their own, you will still have each other.  Love is more than just physical, it is being friends too.  Thank you to Andrew and his parents for being brave enough to watch our children and bless us.  

A Different Christmas

Many have asked us 'what does Christmas look like in Guinea Bissau'.  We have also heard 'it must be very different for you this year'. We want to attempt to answer these questions. First, yes it looks different, it is warm, no snow, no lights, no trees, no craziness of the commercial season. It does not feel like Christmas because every day is pretty much the same each day, in fact most days we do not even know the date. Christmas here is very low key, people cook a huge meal and then share with their friends. You can go from house to house eating food and hanging with friends. It is all about giving here, not what you get. People do get a new outfit for the festa (party), but that is not everyone. This is about the only time of the year they may get new clothes. They get all fancied up for Christmas too. Girls will get their hair specially braided and have extensions braided in as well, mainly little girls. This is a trend that has started because of how they perceive the West. They only know what they see in movies, so they believe this is the way all Americans are.  In the church we have a Christmas Eve service and we will go caroling in the village.

That is a glimpse of what Christmas looks like now for us. Yes, it looks different, we are in shorts, we have no tree or decorations, we have had no begging from the kids on what they want, but it has been relaxing. The only thing we brought was our Christmas stockings. We plan to have a few things for the kids in the stockings, read the Christmas story together, and sing a few songs. The rest of the day we will hang out with friends, eating yummy food, and serve yummy food at our house. We are excited for Christmas this year. It is simple, low key, relaxed, and the main focus is serving others. In this pagan culture the message sent is to take care of others. That is exactly what Christ ultimately came to do, be a servant. It amazes me how much God speaks through creation, traditions, and cultures even when they worship false gods. You can still see God working and it gives perfect examples pointing back to His word and showing them the truth.

This is Christmas, and we are looking very forward to it and for the next few beyond. Yes, we miss family, friends, snow, the fireplace or stove, hot cocoa, and cookies. Instead, we are starting new traditions in our time here and focusing on the real reason for the season and that we always have family as long as we are together.

What are you missing

Karen normally writes these and honestly does a better job, but I want to take a minute and share a reflection. Men or whoever is the bread winner this is for you. 

In my 3 months here I have realized what a workaholic I had become and was satisfied in my work. First this was sinful because I was not be satisfied in God and who he made me to be, second I was neglecting my marriage and spending quality time with my wife, and third I was missing so much with my kids. I have missed a lot of firsts in there life or been late because of work.

We need to work and be responsible and of course pay our bills. I am learning we can live with a lot less I mean a lot less and still be happy. Living with less means buying less which means spending less and all this adds up to less overtime or second jobs and time with our families.

I cherish helping teach my kids, walking Isaiah to school, going to the store with a kid to get bread, or taking them on a bike to get water. I am around more and a part of there life yet still working and doing the things I need to help these leaders and church grow and wean off EMM and the missionaries.

Obviously this will look different for everyone, but my children now have very little toys and yet there happy. I believe looking back at this 20 years down the road my kids will be thankful I was there and not to concerned that they did not have a iPhone or wii or something like that.

I also realized consumerism and convenience have become gods for Americans and we did even see it hit us, it snuck in on our back side and before we knew it we were caught up in it. The sad thing is that evil parts of our society are coming this way and a culture that was once grounded on family and proud of that is becoming one who needs more, needs the newest, and what you have determine who you are. 

I had forgotten I was a child of God and needed nothing, I was keeping up with the American Dream and did not even realize it. 

Maybe this is not you or your story, but I challenge you bread winners. Where are your priorities, what do you make sure happens first there your heart is, what have you missed in your kids life to make them happy, and are they happy?

Some things to think about. i have no regrets because God is always teaching and if I had not strayed I would not have learned, but I am thankful for what I am learning and the time i now have with my wife and kids. 

I realize we can live much cheaper here, but in American we can live simpler also. 

So let some things go, say no, and spend time with your family, wife , and kids. I do not believe it is a decision you will ever regret. 

Just wanted to share some things I am learning, I hope you are blessed and challenged. I know I was and it has been hard to say no and not work all the time, but I am a work in progress growing everyday, I hope to be a imitator of Christ.

In this together,

Mike