October Journal

What a busy month!

1st-We started off the first day in a rural community called Gaigai (gey-gey). We did our first training and crusade back to back. It made for a very long day, but went extremely well. We got there and did training on the importance of children’s ministry and some practical how to’s and some hands on practicing of what we just taught. We took an hour break then got ready to bring in the kids. We have a blue gorilla costume that we are currently borrowing, until we can find our own, and a battery powered megaphone. We brought in over 80 kids in the community and a few adults to bring us over 100 people in this church. Mind you the church is a small room off of the back of a market that has a big pole support beam right in the middle of it. The crusade went from 2:30-4pm and lots of kids wanted to invite Jesus into their hearts and come back for Sunday school the next day! Our goal is to help churches develop or strengthen their children’s program and get the community to know more about the local church and show kids serving God can be exciting. After getting home we about collapsed though. The kids stay with a babysitter during the day as it is too hard to take them out all day and keep and eye on them.
Kylea and I decorated for fall, even though we are headed into the summer here. Another tradition that I want to keep up for my kids, and we really don’t have the true season changes like at home so we do our own season changes with decorating.
We are getting closer on the pool project. Doug has built a waterfall into the pool as the inlet, now we are just waiting for the electrician to come out and hook up electricity to the pump and stuff!!

10th-We are doing a small group with five other couples and going through “Growing Kids God’s Way”. We decided to take a family day and go to Badplaas (bod-plauce), South Africa. About 1.5 hrs from home. It is a very small town with pretty much this little hotel and water park. It was fun though; it in a way reminded me of starting a tradition like camping with all of our family and friends when I was little. They had four speed racing slides and one long winding slide, an intertube run, a kid’s pool and two hot springs pools. It was small, but nice to get out of Swaziland and have fun with family and friends.

19th-Our home church in Issaquah (Eastridge Christian Assembly) came for a trip this week. It was sooooo good to spend some quality time with Pastor Steve and Cheryl (since that is my love language). We had a great time as Pastor Steve spoke here at the Bible College and then in the afternoon’s we hung out. Wednesday, Cheryl came to be a part of the bible study I am leading at my home, which was incredible! Doug and Pastor Steve hit the greens as it was well above the 90’s. The rest of the week we had a chance to eat out and in our home and give them a small tour of some of the local places we have done some work with.

22nd-We had another back to back training and crusade, which went well also. This church is not far and we had 9 workers who came for the training! The kids kept on coming and coming it was great, we had 137 kids there. It is so encouraging to train these leaders and get them right back involved with the crusade, helping with worship, the bible story, etc. It is encouraging to go from church to church and see the people with a heart for kids already!! That night we came back just in time to put some lasagna’s in the oven and get ready to feed the whole ECA team (11). It was nice to have them all in our home especially with all the church has done for us! One of the girls stayed at our home for the next three nights as they did some local ministry.

24th – We took our first swim the pool, finally! It was so nice after waiting for a year of it being
built, falling apart then rebuilding it; things seem to take sooo much longer here. It is perfect timing though as summer and rainy season are upon us and we are averaging 90+ days two 110 degree days back to back, yikes. Coming from Washington, we are not used to this but it is quickly becoming the norm. It will be quite the change going home for Christmas in a few weeks here.

26th-I am realizing more and more how different boy’s are from girls-ahhhhhhhhhhhh! Today I had bible study and there are three little toddlers, 2 of them are two and one is three. Well I decided that I would have them watch a movie in the office on Doug’s lap top while we did our study since none of them wanted to just play. So, I turned on a spiritual movie, veggie tales of course and the next thing I knew was that they came out covered in markers, not just one color mind you, a rainbow of colors. I walked in the office to see markers from my teaching bag everywhere with no lids!!!! As I looked around I noticed the desktop computer turned into a work of art. All over the screen, keyboard and white desk! It took us about 45 minutes to clean it all up using a q-tip to clean in between each of the keys.

29th- We ended the month with our annual little harvest party for the kids. We had 7 families that we had another party for. We had the kids dress up and went around on the campus here to a couple of other missionary homes (some had 3 doors that we went to). We came back to our house where Doug had set up a couple of games. It was fun just remembering some of the things we do at home, it helps us not feel so far away.

Kylea's comment of the month: I had read the story of Peter and Paul to the kids before bed, then taught them the song that goes with it “silver and gold have I none . . .” At the end of the song it says “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk”. So Kylea was walking around the house the next day singing it again and again then stopped and asked me “ Mommy if I told someone “In the name of Jesus Christ stand up and walk” would they?” I informed her that healing had nothing to do with her, but Jesus using her to heal someone. We talked about this for a while that Jesus uses us to love, heal, encourage others. We are not to be proud or get the glory for it, because we did not really do it, Jesus did. I explained that Jesus died on the cross and because of that He has the power of healing people. I asked her if she died on the cross, she thought about it a while and said “No, but I’ve been hurt pretty bad before!”

September Journal

We are finally getting some work done on our bridge. We had to get all new support beams and slats (almost 300 slats). At home this job should have taken 2 days, but here we don’t just have Home Depot down the street. We had to order the wood, and then treat it with tar/cresol stuff and then screw them in. Unfortunately you cannot buy screws in bulk so we are working with little packets of screws. At least the bridge will be safe and usable again soon.

I went to a meeting tonight dealing with the AIDS pandemic here and the government is having a consensus taken in all the regions of what to do, how to do it, and who to help. It is crazy over here. The published rate of AIDS as of 2004 was over 46.6% which was determined by testing only pregnant women. So if you throw in the men to that number we are talking over 60% said by some doctors. We discussed the effects of AIDS on individuals, families, communities, etc. We talked also about the overwhelming orphan increase and how to deal with it all. We came up with a couple of things. We are in desperate need of education/counseling centers. This would be for people who are affected with AIDS or working with AIDS people, the medical workers are burned out and loose hope as well as the people in general. We came up with coming back to the importance of family, family structure, and influencing leadership. When the culture and leadership of this country is polygamist it is really hard to make a change for the better with abstinence or remaining faithful to your wife. Swaziland need our help and more so our prayers, as it has gone too far and needs God's mercy.

Kaden poked himself in the eye with his screwdriver as he thinks he is Bob the Builder (which is the theme of his party this month). My mom sent these cute little kid friendly ice packs called “boo boo buddies”. He is still working on all of his sounds so for him it comes out “boobie bunny”, he is such a cute little guy and for the most part the kids play so good together. I guess they really have no choice!! He has been trying to catch up with big sis and is counting and they love the 1-2-3 count with me by sesame street video. He is counting up to 11 missing only 5 and is shocking Doug and me. Sorry had to brag a little. Kylea is working still on her fruit of the spirit chart and has to count her stickers to see how far she is. When she reached 25, we took her to the store to pick out a candy bar; of course she chose an ice cream bar. She is now close to 50 which she will earn another candy/ice cream bar and an extra family party night on her choice of night (family party night for us is every Friday night, we have a fun dinner play games make milkshakes and watch a movie together). Kylea is now counting to 39; she is doing great and is remembering all sorts of stuff that Doug and I don’t even remember. She is excited to come home for Christmas and make snow angels (we make water ones here in the bath), a snowman and throw snowballs at Papa!! She is quite the artist!! I would love to get her into art lessons with a friend of ours but it is the same time a ballet, we will see. She is just enjoying life and curious about everything, esp. God and how it all works right now.

Today we trained another church, well actually two as the original church invited another church. We did training on the importance of children and how to do a program with and for children then did some practicals and demonstrations. Next week we will return for a kid’s crusade.

Today after church we went again with Lad and Crystal to the Lugogo, which is one of the nice hotels in the area. Lad has the entire Dream for Africa teams come in and stay there so he has good relationship with them and we can swim at the pool if we eat there.
After we got home one of our boys from church that we teach came to our home and told Doug he ran away from home. His parents are out of the country and have been for almost month and left he and his sisters there home at the homestead with the neighbors. Well the neighbors are accusing him of breaking some things and are threatening to beat him and he obviously does not feel safe so came here. Doug and Musa (the bible college student that we are training and run the children’s church here) are meeting with him now in the living room. Doug counseled with him earlier and we took him back home and he returned not feeling safe to stay there. Oh as Americans we are so spoiled and guarded by laws and organizations. Here no one really seems to care about the children. My heart breaks that these parents would even leave for such a long time. Lord have mercy on the children here as they are so innocent, most of them and still have so many horrible things happen to them. In our bible study tonight we are going through Growing Kids God’s Way and learning about child-centered homes (where parents put the child as most important in the family, where that is not how God intended the family to be, your relationship with God should be first then your spouse then your children). It is weird to think that it is the opposite here. Sometimes children are not even considered! Pushed to do the work, or not even cared for. Lord have mercy on the parents!

We are doing great, Kylea just started her third term of preschool and will finish for summer break in Dec. (weird huh) Yep, we are heading into summer here and it has been hot, at least the mid 90's. Kaden turns two Sept. 21 and is talking up a storm and love to make believe and go on walks around the bible college campus with mommy. We have stayed pretty busy on the weekends with children’s ministry training. we are going out to churches and training leaders on the importance of children and training them while they are still young, we also help churches plant a children ministry by training and getting some simple supplies to them like Sunday school curriculum, paper (the end of a newsreel), markers, and sometimes sock puppets (which we teach them to make and use) with a mini puppet stage. Following the training the next weekend we do a kid’s crusade which on avg. we have 150-200 from one community come. We have also started doing kids clubs running 3-4 consecutive days. Doug during the week is teaching part time at the bible college, training and building relationship with pastors. It is funny because we are not doing all that we though we would be doing here, working with orphans and AIDS, in a way we are, but not as we pictured. We totally feel like God is laying a foundation for us as we are still learning the culture and language. Please pray with us though, Swaziland is at the top of the charts with this aids pandemic, it is absolutely crazy. In the papers we on average are counting around 50 deaths per day (not including the rural communities where they are so poor to even advertise), and in a country that only a few years ago was 1 million people (obviously smaller now) that is a lot. The king has recently redone the constitution and taken out that Christianity as the main religion, and suddenly Islam is everywhere. The latest paper advertised scholarships for school if you would convert to Islam, yikes! Please pray for us, the only way this battle will be won is on our knees.

So the saga with the package is this: we got the notice in our box this morning that we had a package and it said from USA, so we knew it was yours. Looking at the slip we saw that we would owe 336 rand to get it, which equals almost $60. Doug has made some relationships with a man in customs so we went to try and find him to see if we could only pay the tax which was 130 rand = $20+. We went to the building where customs used to be and it moved. After four stops of trying to find the correct building, keep in mind not many places are marked here, Doug finally found it. He went in met the prince, who is in charge and is a Christian man. He told his secretaries to get what Doug needed, he had to leave. The ladies told Doug he would have to go across town to the post office to get the form first, come back and they would sign it and then go back to get the package (these two places are on opposite sides of Mbabane). So Doug came back out to the car and we were out of gas, due to parking down slope. Two guys towed us out of our parking spot so we were now faced up slope and had enough gas to get down the hill to the station. We then headed to the post office and were told there is no form. Doug got them to officially write down all the information on the package, they informed him that a signature would not work, and we would have to bring someone down from customs to deal with the situation. We left and went back to customs and got the secretary to sign the paper. We headed once again back to the post office and the lady had to talk to her supervisor and finally agreed to give us the package only charging sales tax. This episode took over 2 hours, yikes! Can you say we need a little organization and efficiency training here in Swaziland? I am not telling you this to make you feel bad, just a little humor of our lives here.

We had Kaden’s Bob the Builder 2nd birthday party on Saturday the 24. We had a blast playing pin the wrench on Bob’s tool belt and dressed all the kid’s up with mini tool belts and hats (all the stuff was from the states of course). I gave in a made another cake, though I had resigned from that position on the last birthday party as making and decorating cakes is not my gifting. After he opened all his presents, Doug brought out a train table that he made (I found a picture of one that I liked in the Pottery Barn for kids magazine). My parents got him a Thomas the train set, which he wore the first set of batteries out in 4 days. We are still on the second set. He is now officially into cars, trains and crashing them into each other. Boys will be boys.