Roommates Reunited

Larissa and parted ways in Uganda three weeks ago as we each started our travels back to the US. On Saturday I got spend the day with her at ECHO, the Christian agricultural training center where she will be studying for the next month. It was a beautiful sunny and cool South Florida day. We walked around the farm and taste tested several types of citrus grown at ECHO. We sat in comfortable chairs on her porch and talked about our transitions to life in the US, the news from Sudan, and prayed with each other. It was a great day and a blessing to be reunited the woman who has been my roommate for the last two years.

The Hope of the Gospel Around the World

I have been traveling a lot over the past few weeks from Mundri to London and then home to South Florida. It is hard to see any similarities between the three places. My wardrobe has changed drastically. In Mundri I was wearing long skirts and sunscreen. In London I put on a down coat I got in the used clothing market in Kampala. Arriving in South Florida I put on my sunglasses and opened up my closet to find heels and sweaters I haven't worn in over two years.

After a busy first week in the US filled with doctors appointments and errands, things are settling down. As I have been praying about the past few weeks, I am left with a deep feeling of thankfulness.

I am thankful for peaceful voting in S. Sudan.

I am thankful this time in South Florida with my parents.

I am thankful for all my friends who I can talk to and laugh with as if I have seen them everyday over the last two years.

But today I am most thankful for the Hope of the Gospel that is the same in Mundri, London, South Florida, and everywhere in the world. I have met people from many different cultures with different struggles and different dreams. It makes me smile to know that the Gospel is as relevant to each of them as it is for me personally.

Last Week in Mundri

I am leaving Mundri one week from today. I have started to say goodbye to friends like Jomima and Silivia (pictured below), and I am sad. It is a going to be a busy week as I visit friends, attend celebrations for the new year, wrap up things at the water projects, and pack up our houses. I am also really excited that I will be seeing my parents in two and half weeks!

Please pray for me this week as I prepare to leave Mundri! Pray that I would have good times with God even in the busyness of this week. Pray for my goodbyes.

Pray for me in the next weeks after I leave Mundri. Pray that I would have time and space to process everything that I am feeling and thinking. Pray for me as I travel from Sudan spending a few days in Uganda and London and then finally arriving in Florida. Pray for me as I transition back to life in the US.

I am keeping this short, but I wanted to quickly share my prayer requests, because I need prayer!

Decompressing

Last night Larissa and I needed to decompress. I had been grading Physics exams all afternoon and Larissa was working on her expense reports, and we were both mentally spent.

Since it was just the two of us for dinner, we scrounged up some leftovers, and then moved into the living room for a pretty perfect roommate relaxation night.

I set up the projector and DVD player, and we put in disc one of the A&E version of Pride and Prejudice.


I sat down to enjoy the movie and finished giving myself a pedicure. There are few things I enjoy more in Sudan than the feeling that my feet are clean. They don't stay that way for long, but it is still worth it, especially with the Shea It Isn't So Foot Cream that Linda brought for us!

About half way through disc one, we paused and decided to bake Andes mint chip cookies together. Yum! We watched the rest of disc one while enjoying warm cookies and cold drinks (milk with ice cubes for Larissa and cold water for me).

Now that it is the morning, Larissa is off to give her Biblical Counseling exam, and I am off to deliver the Physics grades to the secondary school.

Basketball in Mundri!

Basketball makes its Mundri debut!


I'm not sure what to call the whole assembled thing that John and Phil built. Is it a goal, a basket, or a hoop? Whatever it is called, we are very thankful for all the hard work John and Phil put into bringing basketball to Mundri! John was drenched in sweat after digging a hole over a meter deep into the hard Sudanese ground to support the weight of the iron pole and solid mahogany backboard.


We have been playing with the Bishop's children who are in Mundri for their school holidays. After only a few days of practice, Bishop's two teenage sons have already passed my limited basketball skills. =)

Advent

During this season of Advent, we have been taking turns preparing an Advent meditation for Sunday evenings. We sing Christmas carols together and light the candles of the Advent wreath. Bethany and Larissa have also been busy in the kitchen baking Advent cookies every week with real butter flown in from Kampala specifically for Christmas.

This Sunday was bittersweet for me for a lot of reasons. We are now a team of four people, and since John and Phil had been our guitar players in Michael's absence for the past several weeks, it was hard to not to miss them. I was also missing the Masso family, Kim, Melissa, and all the voices that have been a part of our Sunday worship in different seasons of our team.

This week I lit the candles in the Advent wreath, and as I was moving around the wreath I was hit hard by the realization that after we light the Christmas candle I will have only a little over a week left in Mundri. The wreath seemed more like a painful reminder of the fact that I will soon be leaving the place I now call home.

As we continue to pray for peace and justice in Sudan in this season of Advent, I was also filled with hope and joy as we sang carols about the Prince of Peace.

O come, Desire of Nations, bind
In one the hearts of all mankind;
Bid thou our sad divisions cease,
And be thyself our King of Peace.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

During dinner we were listening to Andrew Peterson's album called Behold the Lamb of God: the true tale of the coming of Christ. If you haven't heard it before, I highly recommend you buy the album. I was encouraged especially by the song "Deliver Us" which was inspired by the years silence between Malachi and the New Testament.

"Our sins they are more numerous than all the lambs we slay
These shackles they were made with our own hands
Our toil is our atonement and our freedom yours to give
So Yahweh, break your silence if you can "
~ Deliver Us, Andrew Peterson

Anyway, those are just some of my unrelated thoughts from the third Sunday of Advent. I pray you will all encounter Christ in new and real ways this Advent season!

Okari Church

Bethany and I attend a small church called Okari Sub-Parish Church. It is mud building with a grass roof and mahogany 2x4's as benches. There are strips of African cloth hanging from strings running up and down the church in bright beautiful colors. There are A LOT of kids at church every week. About 80 adults attend most Sundays. Okari is now our church, and we are not considered visitors.

Last Sunday Bethany and I were running a bit behind schedule. Usually we aim to leave on our bikes at around 10:30 realistically leaving at 10:45 to get to church at around 11. We arrived at church last week around 11:15. After we were seated, the pastor paused to tell us the verses for the old testament and new testament readings that we missed. Church was well underway. At Okari church the preaching is usually in Arabic and translated into Moru. I sometimes get a few key words, but usually I don't understand much. I am so thankful for the pastors at Okari, who usually call my name and give a one or two sentence summary of the key point of the sermon in English just for my benefit.



Today Bethany and I were surprised when we arrived at church. Good thing Bethany had learned the Moru word for surprise last week! We actually got to church at 10:55, and there were only two or three people sitting in the church building. Shortly after we sat down in the near empty church, a van filled with young adutls from Mundri showed up. It was the drama team who had come to Okari to perform dramas about HIV/AIDS and about the referendum. Then we saw the Sunday school kids processing towards the main road, and after asking around, we found out the commissioner of Mundri was coming to church today (pictured above). When his car got close, the commissioner got out and walked the rest of the way to church surrounded by all the children singing welcoming songs. We sang several Christmas carols in Moru this week including "I Saw Three Ships", evidence of the long history of British missionaries in Mundri. I didn't understand much of the speeches given by the commissioner and other community leaders, but I did catch that they were encouraging everyone to get radios and listen to the new radio station called Miraya FM which broadcasts in English and Juba Arabic. It has been big news around town for the last several weeks. Church ended like it does every week with everyone lining up outside the church to greet all the other church members by shaking hands, kind of like a receiving line. Bethany and I left before the dramas because we had a team Advent celebration planned for that afternoon.


During the church service, Bethany were surrounded by a group of children who are now pretty comfortable with us. Sometimes children are afraid of us at first. The activity for this weeks church service for several of the young girls was to compare their hands to my hands. They found all my birth marks and freckles and traced patterns between them with their fingers. They were also fascinated by the Japanese fans Bethany and I always bring to church to help us cool down after the bike ride.

That was just a small glimpse of the past two Sundays at Okari Church.



If you see me at a church service in the US, you might convince me to demonstrate the hand shake dance or the hand warming three clap applause which are both typical at church in Mundri.

I am so thankful for Okari church, and I am looking forward to celebrating Christmas with my church family!

Team Blogs

I am so thankful for my teammates in Mundri! You may already be reading all their blogs which are linked to my blog, but I wanted to highlight a couple of recent posts by teammates.

Dedication of the Hai Salaam Water Project:
http://bethanygrace.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/running-water/

The Daily Diversion: A look at a typical day in Mundri:
http://larisochka.wordpress.com/2010/12/10/the-daily-diversion/

Papparazzi: A photographer visits our team:
http://bethanygrace.wordpress.com/2010/12/03/paparazzi/

BNTC Water

John has been hard at work on the Bishop Ngalamu Theological College water project over the last few weeks, and water is now flowing into the tank! Praise God!

We learned a lot from the Hai Salaam water project, and we are still learning a lot about working as water engineers in Mundri, Sudan.

At BNTC instead of building a new tank, we rehabilitated a tank that was abandoned on the college campus. The picture above shows John and Michael checking out the structure a few months ago. I was on the ground since I am afraid of heights. =)

I took this picture of the tank yesterday. It may look like the tank just got a new coat of paint, but I can assure you that there was a lot more to the process getting the tank ready store water and connecting the water pipes the tank.

We started by removing the riser pipes and hand pump from the borehole. Some of the pipes in the borehole were the blue PVC pipes we brought to Sudan last year as a trial. It turns out that the pipes crack often when the water office staff use their normal tools to remove pipes from the boreholes.

Kids gathered around us as the work continued for most of the morning.

John did the final wiring on the solar panels on the roof of a building near the borehole. For now the wire crosses from the roof over the road to a large tree and then goes down the tree into a trench in the ground. In the future we will probably bury the wire at a depth of at least 1 meter under the road.

On work days it seems that usually around 1 pm just when you think you can finish all the work before lunch which is around 2 pm in Sudan, something goes wrong. As the pump was being lowered into the borehole, it got stuck about half way down. It wouldn't go any lower, but it also wouldn't come back up. We stopped the work, prayed, and sent the water office staff to town for their lunch break. After confirming in the final depth of the borehole to be sure we hadn't hit the bottom, we decided to just pull really really hard until the pump came back up. Praise God it came back up, because I really have no idea what we could have done if it was truly stuck. We found that a metal hook that is attached to the pump was too wide to enter into the lower section of the borehole. The hook is used to tie a safety rope to the pump so that if the pipe breaks the pump won't fall to the bottom of the borehole, and you can then raise the pump with the rope.


We bent the hook into a flatter shape, and then the pump was lowered into the borehole with no problems!


It was almost 4 pm by the time we got everything connected and water started flowing out of the tap. Well, it was trickling out. We have some troubleshooting to do over the next few days since it seems that we have a problem with the connections at the solar panels.

This morning we were at Hai Salaama for prayers and to dedicate the Hai Salaama water project in the name of Jesus Christ. BNTC is near Hai Salaama so John rode over on his motorbike and there is now water in the storage tank!

Praise God for the water that is flowing at BNTC! We still have to build several taps and dig several hundred more meters of trench, but it is always a great moment when water starts flowing into the tank.

Thankful Hands

I am so thankful for our Thanksgiving celebration!

Jomima, Mary, and Silivia who all attend Mundri Secondary School joined us in giving thanks to God. I love laughing with these women!

The day started with James and John killing the turkey we bought a few weeks ago in Juba. I will spare you the pictures of the turkey while it was being prepared.

The final product was truly a thing of beauty and it tasted fabulous!

We had a true feast! Many of the foods we served are available locally, but are prepared differently. I was truly thankful for pumpkin, which is currently in season in Mundri. I was also thankful for cranberry sauce which came from America thanks to Linda and Ginny!


After dinner we took a break from eating before serving the desserts. We took that time to write 5 things we are thankful for on each of the fingers of the construction paper hands.

Collectively we thank God for...

Family and friends in Sudan and in America
The Thanksgiving feast
Cool nights and rain
Every living creature
Gumboots
Pumpkins
God's patience
Safety
Games including Bananagrams, Dutch Blitz, and Settlers of Catan
Singing and laughing
Paradoxes of the Kingdom of God
The gift of life
Flowers
Coffee
God's provision
Knowledge
Jesus Christ who died on a cross for our sins
Beauty in Nature
Peace
Cold showers
God's blessings
Hope
Skype
For the opportunity to study at a school
Differences in people and cultures around the world
A stable marriage at home
Music
God's love for us all