So Long Trina!

This is Trina Schmitt (the white one) with her friends Famatta (the girl) and Charlie(the boy). Trina has been here for about a year and she's leaving at the end of the week. (boo hoo!) Trina came to do youth and children's ministry. She led a girls' Bible Study, organized a teen sport time on Friday afternoons, helped a local church launch their children's Sunday School and Junior Church programs, spent time in a village helping the pastor and his wife in their kindergarten school and sharing the word of God with people, and lots of fun stuff too. We went to her church today for their good-bye program and it was pretty teary. But as several people said, it was also a celebration, because the purposes for assigning her to that church for the year were accomplished in wonderful ways. Just having someone there to help train teachers (even though she didn't feel she was equipped in that) stimulated the church to get a shelter built for the children's program. The youth group was going through a transition in leadership and she was able to encourage the new leader to be active and develop the program. In conjunction with her girls' Bible Study, she organized a retreat that the church is planning to continue holding. Though the church will miss her a lot, they are equipped, encouraged and completely able to carry on these ministries on their own.

ECF's first Children's Christmas Program

Trina's time here really illustrates for me the role that missionaries still have to play in the church in Liberia. Liberia's churches have many strong believers, who love the Lord and are willing to serve Him. Sometimes they need tools and skills. Sometimes they just need help getting something started because they feel inexperienced or inadequate. It's amazing what can happen in a year - how the ball can really get rolling.

So thanks, Trina for coming! We know you would give the Liberian answer: Thank God. And we do. We know He was the one who sent you and He kept his promise to complete the work that He began in you, and through you. Bon Voyage and a bientot (that means see you soon!)

I just can't resist saying it

The saying "the difference between men and boys.....is the size of their toys" seemed to come to life last week when Jim Molenhouse, from the Wheaton Bible Church team, spent much of his last 24 hours in Liberia getting this old dinosaur running. It's a road grader and it's about 50 years old. (only MACHINES this old are dinosaurs...) Here he is doing a little work at the end of the driveway next door which had a nasty divet that even our new jeep couldn't get over without a good jolt. He didn't get to do much grading because he needed some good "laterite" clay soil to spread around on the roads and there wasn't time to get it. But he still had fun with the few spots he could do, and the suspensions on our cars are grateful (I often apologize to my car when I can't avoid the most serious holes and ruts- ouch.)

Notice who just had to join Jim in the driver's seat.....it's Jared of course.

January Update

We sent this short update out last week. If you get it, sorry that you thought we had a new post and it's old news to you. If you don't get it, you can check here for monthly updates (about) or drop me an email to say you want to get it via email.

I'll write more soon.

Dear Friends –

Happy New Year! We’ve hit the ground running, with a construction team from Wheaton, Illinois, that arrived on January 3. They’ve already got most of the framing for the roof of the new Services Office Building in place (a couple of them arrived the 29th and got started with the Liberian carpenters the next day). In addition, we moved our SIM office to our new location on the ELWA compound this week. (Moved, but not really moved in- but it’s a step in the right direction.)

We enjoyed a great holiday with a nearly 2 week visit from Rick’s dad and his brother Doug and his family (wife Deidre, daughters Haley, Hannah and Maddi). There was lots of beach time, tours of Monrovia and ELWA and even a jaunt out of town (see our blog at http://iscripts.blogspot.com for proof!)

It’s a little scary to face this, but our schedule for 2007 is very quickly filling up. We have a steady stream of people coming over the next 6 months, for a variety of reasons. Medical students, short-term docs and nurses, radio consultants, teacher trainers, administrative consultants, and more. It’s even beginning to get tricky to be able to house everyone.

The logistics of getting all these people here and finding a place for them to sleep is a big enough task. But it looks like we will be really having to work a lot on our mentoring and support systems for all our new people, both short term and long term. We have been developing some materials for orientation, but they still need more refinement and some kind of structure to be a real “program” that will help get our new missionaries plugged in to their ministries and the Liberian culture. We want everyone to have a positive experience here but we’ve pretty much been flying by the seat of our pants during the lean years. Admittedly, we haven’t always been successful at that, and we’ll be even less so as we start receiving more people, unless we get more systematic about it.

We do love interacting with newly arrived missionaries -- we enjoy their enthusiasm and zeal for ministry and are happy to help them understand more about the people of Liberia and their way of life. But you can imagine that it is also a challenge to be involved with people as they get through the ups and downs of culture stress and adjustment, finding their niche in ministry and sometimes just growing in the Lord and as a person. Our prayer request this month is for the power of the Holy Spirit to uphold us and flow through in this role – to have love, and joy, and grace, and patience that really come from the heart of God towards our new missionaries and not to be relying our own strength.

These folks are expected in January and early February:
Frieda Schmidt – dental therapist, new SIM member from Canada (arrived 1/5)
Beth Larson – medical student, 5 weeks.
Hannah Cho and Eun Yung Ahn - medical students from Korea, 4 weeks
Tom and Melanie Goodnow, plus 4 – nurse anesthetist, 6 months
Gary and Tammy Dunseath, plus 3 – pastor’s training, new SIM members from USA

Pray for them and for us!
His Kingdom Come, Debbie Sacra

Happy Birthday Caleb!

Today is Caleb's birthday - he is 10 years old! That's it - all of them are now in double digits. His birthday often gets overlooked, being right after Christmas, so I really wanted to make an effort for him this year, even though when I first asked he didn't really sound like he cared. After a little pressing, he decided he wanted to have a dinner party - Italian food. So we decided on lasagna (no small feat since I have to make the ricotta myself; at least I don't have to make the noodles) - and he adds "with olives on the side, for those who like them..." So I asked, "do you like olives?" and he replies "no, of course not, but someone might." He often cracks us up with such funnies. I know I should write more of them down, but I suspect they will keep coming. (Yes, I did serve olives) Caleb is our people-person - he prefers to be with someone, and actually it doesn't really matter what they are doing- he's flexible on that. He sat in "jail" this evening while playing capture the flag with a high school guy from the construction team that is visiting without much angst - Joel said Caleb said that when they get released they should run out in triumph. Where does he get these images? Actually, I suspect that much of it comes from Calvin and Hobbes.

We love you Caleb! Happy Birthday and God Bless You!

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and hello again after an absence

Hey everybody! Sorry for it to be so, so long since we have posted! Rick's family from Massachusetts came over to spend 12 days--over the holiday--it was fantastic! They just left this afternoon.

Wednesday (the 27th) we took our family up to the Bomi Lake area, did some swimming and then climbed a very beautiful hill with wonderful views all the way around. Here are a couple pics--The first one is the six cousins up in the "Pak's Point Palace" or treefort. They are (in order of birth): Max, Haley, Jared, Hannah, Maddi, and Caleb. The second one is GrandDad, Doug, Dee, and their 3 girls overlooking Bomi Lake (as you can see from the sign!!!).

More soon................................................. Lotsa love, Rick for all of us

November in Review....

Sorry we haven't posted in SOOOO long. It's been a busy month. This is going to be a long post.

Rick and I went to Senegal for a week for our area Leadership Training and Business meetings. As an added bonus of course, we got to spend a lot of time with Max. He's doing great! He loves school, likes his friends and his teachers, and enjoys living with Deckers even though Aunt Mary is sometimes tougher than his mom. We got to meet his teachers, go to his softball game, and go to a school event they called "International Awareness" Night. He really didn't have any complaints at all - and no one had any complaints about him. It's nice to know that when your kid is away from home, he really does know how to behave himself. But we do think he was glad to see us -maybe he was missing us a little. It was nice to get to see him in the middle of the semester. He'll be home on the 17th for 4 weeks for Christmas.

Max at bat

The other added bonus was that our friends Dennis and Meg Woodruff were there from Massachusetts to lead the Leadership Training. It's what Dennis does for a living, so it was kind of cool to see him in Professional Action. But what is really fun is having our two worlds connect again - and it will happen again when Rick's brother Doug and his family and his dad come for Christmas.

Den and Meg Woodruff

I got to go ahead of Rick by a couple of days for a nice women's retreat for missionary women - about 200 of us. I only knew a handful, but the teaching was encouraging (led by Noel Piper, John Piper's wife), the worship times refreshing and the air-conditioned rooms and buffet meals a nice escape from my usual standard of living. So I had a nice time. The highlight of the weekend for me was swimming about 1000 yards from the mainland where the hotel was to a little island. It was a calm little inlet we swam across, not really too challenging. And of course, we had to swim back again! There were 14 women who did it, most of us in our forties or older. It was fun, and it was good for my self-image - I wasn't sure I could do it, but I did! This is a pic
from the island looking back at the hotel beach where we started.

What do you think? Is it far? I don't think it looked this far in real life.

I have really been thinking about how out of shape I have gotten and how I am losing my strength and energy because of it. And how risky that is. We have had enough family and friends who have faced major health crises lately - cancer mostly - that I have realized that you have to have both emotional and physical strength to fight it. I might have the emotional and spiritual strength, but I doubt I have the physical strength. And that kind of scares me, because you never know when something is going to happen. I actually went to a workshop on the retreat about staying healthy, expecting some advice about my physical health, but actually the speaker focused more on the emotional and spiritual side of things.

So even though it is a little early to make a New Year's resolution, I think this is going to be something I will work on for 2007 (starting now). I don't have a lot of options here - no health clubs or diet foods. But I can walk and try to eat more whole grains and fresh vegetables and fruits, even though it is a challenge to get them sometimes.

It seems a little funny to post this so publicly, but I bet I am not the only one who is looking at her mid-forties and thinking that as the years go by we can't take our health for granted. If anyone wants to buddy up with me in my efforts, email me so we can encourage one another.

So that's the sum-up of the month. Hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving holiday. More again soon.

Our new location

Do you like it? I think it's pretty. I'm kind of getting into this web stuff - I've even been working on our geocities site and I'll let you know when it is worth looking at again.

Unfortunately, our digital camera does not seem to be working, so there will be a serious lack of visual aids for a bit. But let me refer you to a friends' blog which has some amazing pictures of the rain... http://reedsinliberia.blogspot.com/2006_09_01_reedsinliberia_archive.html (by the way, this is a great blog and if you are interested in mission work, you should check into it regularly )

There is really nothing that can give you an idea of what the rain here is like, not even Bob Reed's pictures. We thought we were going to get off easy this year - in July and August we had lots of sunshine, and one bad week in August when it drizzled and was windy and just damp, but no real heavy rain. But September and October made up for whatever grace we received in the "summer". Day after day of rain delayed the work that was being done on the building where we are moving our SIM office, laundry didn't get done, roads became impassable. I bet we got 30 inches in one week in October. After saying that I thought we'd have a light rainy season, I think we ended up having one of the heaviest of all the years we've been here. But thank God for our friends and family in America, it didn't seem to be the kind of rain or storms that spawned hurricanes. And the dry season feeling is in the air finally.

Today was a holiday here - Thanksgiving Day. It is actually kind of a forgotten holiday here - when the kids' school made up the schedule for the end of marking period tests, they actually overlooked it and had to rearrange the whole schedule. So I am wondering what the real history of this holiday is in Liberia- whose idea was it? They don't forget the holidays that really mean something to them- their former presidents' birthdays, or their Independence Day, or Decoration Day (like Memorial Day). My theory is that this was someone else's idea (not a Liberian) and there really isn't anything behind it for them, but I would like to know. One year we had a nice service at church, but we haven't done that again. I will admit it is nice to have a long weekend.

Today we went to visit some friends who have just moved into their new house - it's not finished, but there is a roof and windows and doors. No bank mortgages here in Liberia, so you just work on it "small-small" as you can find the money and time. Anyway, it happens in America too, doesn't it?

That's all for now from this side -- more when there's something to say. Debbie