Banner just started his 11th grade year and is delighted with his class load that is heavy with Math and Sciences! This past school break he filled his time with volunteer work at the CAM Dept. with John. Along with school and sports, he hopes to be filling his time doing work studies at CAM, Aviation, and the Auto Shop. Please be praying for him this year as he grows in his relationship with Christ, and as he is looking to gain a better understand of what steps God has next for him and his future after school here in Ukarumpa.
Banner and Judah gave a good portion of their summer off of school to help out at the CAM Dept. Their last project was helping John take VES (Vertical Electrical Sounding) readings to determine where we should/shouldn’t drill for water. Everyone learned a lot!
Millie is now a 9th grader… that is a wild sentence to write. She was 3 when we left America for the first time and it’s crazy to think we are entering her last chapter with us at home. She is taking a full course load at school and has been most excited about her sign language class. Millie is also looking forward to having longer nighttime Bible studies with her class (middle schoolers just meet over lunches), and a new job at the Teen Center burger night. Please be praying for Millie to continue to look to Christ as her source of comfort, peace, and joy. Pray for her friendships—that they would deepen and mutually point each other to Christ, building one another up in love.
Can you believe that this gal is 14 now?!
And as always, please keep praying for Nori as she is starting her second year at Lee University! We love her and miss her but are so thankful she has found a place she loves living and learning at.
Kristi has started back with another school year as well:) She is super thankful to have all the routine of seeing all her students again! She was really blessed this week by her supply order (placed in Oct.) showing up just in time for classes. Please be praying for her as she seeks to connect to each of her students from all over the globe. Pray she can see clearly how best to teach and love them individually and as a whole. Please pray over her work at home as well, keeping everything running and caring well and intentionally or her kids and John too while work is heavy for him this season.
John is about to embark on well drilling for our center this week that has been years in the making. It’s hard to put a start date on this project really, but this phase probably started two years ago when we put in the order for our own drill from the US. That arrived here about a year ago now, and then the rest of the materials started trickling in from other places. This last Spring, John reached out to his previous well drilling instructors at Equip International for help, because we just didn’t have the people here to get this off the ground. Praise the Lord, those relationships resulted in two experienced well drilling missions reaching out to us. We’ve had some rocky visa issues to get to this point, but I’m excited to report that a very experienced well driller should be here on Tuesday to help train our team, drill multiple wells, and set up long term maintenance plans for our equipment. We are so thankful! I have to add as well that God’s timing is perfect. It would seem that we are in the beginning of a drought, and it is predicted to get much worse as the Super El Niño builds in the Pacific. Thank you Lord for what You have done and will do!
In the theme of water exploration… Fritz recently visited Ukarumpa and our CAM team (Andrew Good on the right) from Switzerland. Fritz served here in the 1970’s and 80’s and was famous to us because his mark is on every one of the water system plot plans that we still reference to this day. He also had stories of drilling some shallow wells during droughts over 40 years ago!
Not a great quality picture, but a great picture all the same. Part of our daily CAM work is backflushing our current “creek collection” water system that regularly clogs up with silt. John was on-call for CAM and Matt Young wanted to get a bee hive (they lead the 11th grade boys’ community group together). Those men are so much fun to be around that all the boys wanted to tag along after community group was over.
Banner and Judah hammered metal probes and then pulled them out so many times! We took VES readings along a 400 meter straight line across our mission center, where nothing is straight!