Trying to bring the pearly gates to the pearl of Africa

Hello from the Pearl of Africa. First, as always it seems, we must apologize for the elapsed time since our previous update. We are currently running on full cylinders in so many areas that to stop and report on all of it is both difficult in trying to encapsulate all of it, and also in trying to understand how transparent to be. With three schools and two homes, new needs arising every day, and a seemingly always depleted box to pull resources or money out of, we walk daily on a reliance of God and a struggle not to lose our minds.
So where to begin. With the bore-hole breaking and car collision both occurring in August we dropped behind a month's budget. Our current situation, which we hope to change in the time we return to the states, is a meager one; always just barely making it through each month looking back and asking how we did it. We live month to month on the sponsorship and aid you who support the home offer and like most families in the world, try to budget needs over wants providing for them the best we can, but watching so many fall through the cracks because we simply don't have the money. Its a headache, but we remind ourselves that this is the current position all over the world, and we certainly didn't think we would be living the high life in offering our time to work in a 3rd world country. It seems the state of the world to have more need than the resources to meet it. Or, perhaps the resources are simply misappropriated, either way, millions go hungry every day and millions have more need than can be met. Above all things though, there is a paradox in the need that develops offering a hunger and reliance on God deeper than ever before. Verses showing God as a provider speak loudly as comforts and there is a beauty in finding peace in him for the ability to provide daily meals.
Money ran out over two weeks ago and only through the grace of God have we been able to keep the home going. Your prayers are needed. They are powerful and they do bring help, so please keep offering them for the children and work going on here.

In the last post, we discussed the music tour. As stated, when the doors starting opening for it to happen, and advice from those who have worked in Africa for several decades showed us how much benefit a tour can have on the children's lives and in raising awareness and support for the home, we began taking steps to make it a reality. The constant prayer that Kami and I asked was for two things: that God would speak through people we trusted to show us whether or not to continue, and for him to close doors if it was not the right time. In response to feedback we have had from people we trust, and in looking at the current situation of the home, and of course the struggling economy in the states and all over Europe, we have decided that it is not the appropriate time for this kind of tour. When we are struggling to make it through each month, to raise money for a tour seems unethical (whether the tour's purpose is to bring in support or not.) It seems more appropriate to work through many of the volunteers who have brought up ideas for raising support, organizations and churches who have wanted to join in the mission, and other encounters we have made to find a sustainable income for the home through out the following year. If this is in place, then we can begin work on a music tour.

But, we are extremely content with all the benefits our work on the tour has already brought us. First, in beginning the work, both Kami and I saw the need for us to continue in this capacity at least for the following year and in whatever need follows. In short, we are still planning on returning and working here next year. Second, it opened many doors and excitement in churches and individuals not only for the music tour but in looking towards ways to be apart of the home in the future. It also prompted us to get paperwork and background documents on the children which has allowed us to begin a full filing system of each of their history's (two nurses from Tennessee are performing physicals and filling out medical sheets on the kids next week to add to those files). It has opened up doors to us in several levels of the government including passports, immigration, district officials and several others. And all of the work started can easily be continued even if it is some time down the road.

The rain continues to pour at least once a day, bringing booming vegetation, deep greens and lush gardens all around us. Each of the teachers, besides a salary are given a room to live in and a their own plot of land to grow food on. With these added to the gardens of the home, the compound looks beautiful. The rain brings with it sickness and more of the children have fallen ill recently but quickly recovered. I was down for a few days with a bad cold and chills, but also am feeling better.
There are so many struggles and so many rewards in work like this. On one hand there is the stress of money, meeting needs, budgets, paying workers, and directing the home, and on the other is watching kids grow up in front of you, bring home good reports from class and learn to tell time on a hand watch. There are chores and laughs, morning rituals before school, wrestling matches, singing and dancing, hide-and-go-seek and kick the can. There are hard times and trials which lead to such rewards in the good events and successes.
And there is the continual and never ending struggle to let go of ourselves and find that in giving them up we find such better lives in place. And yet, even when learned, the next day it is a struggle again.
The impossible and never-ending letting go.