Prayer Log

Just a quick update–roof #1 is on!

Our new home is taking shape!  As you can see, the huts are going up and down–the first hut is almost done and a nice foundation has been dug for the second.  It seems to really be moving forward quickly now, and we are thinking that we’ll be able to move out soon.  We’re hopeful that we’ll be ready to start spending half-weeks in the village at the end of January, but holding that loosely.

We had a great Christmas and New Years with my (Corey) dad and his wife.  They came from NC and were able to spend almost three weeks with us.  They got out to the village a couple of times with us and dad helped us get gravel from the quarry one day!

More to come as it develops–for now we’re getting together the materials for the roof and enclosure.

When we first came to Kaffrine back in 2003, we were working in six different villages, sharing the Gospel and trying to minister to people as far and wide as we could.  As time has gone on, we have felt led in stages to go deeper in fewer villages.  That has culminated in our recent decision to move out to our main ministry village so as to be there even more, and especially to be there during those evening hours when so much socializing happens.

After much thinking, prayer, and conversations with each other, our girls, our teammates, and the villagers, we have decided to spend half of each week out in the village.  We will have two huts, one for Katie and I and one for the girls.  The pictures above of are of the site on which our host is going to help us build the huts.  We anticipate starting spend to half-weeks in the village in mid-January. We will continue to rent our apartment in Kaffrine and spend the other half of each week there, doing computer-related work, team meetings, continuing town ministry, and, no doubt, recovering from the harder village life!

We hope that moving out to the village will help us with a couple of key things.  We are experimenting now with having more but smaller storying groups.  Instead of having one main group that everyone in the village has to come to, we are planning to do many small groups, getting people who are already close friends or neighbors together to hear the stories.  We are also experimenting with a shorter storying track, doing about 25 stories rather than 52.  That will allow us to share more quickly with more people.

We are also looking forward to being able to actually demonstrate the ways of living and farming that we are teaching about in our community development program, and we hope that as a result more people will catch a vision for some of these healthier methods of living.  As we live with the villagers, we will also be more visibly demonstrating the Christian values we hold, such as not beating my wife and children, and sharing a hut as a husband and wife (instead of each wife and her children sharing a hut).  We will be striving to live in as Wolof a way as we can, adapting in every way possible, while making changes that they could make to live according to God’s Word and in a more healthy way.

Please pray for our family as we make this major lifestyle change!  The girls are excited about this and thoroughly enjoyed our test run sleepover last month.  They helped with peanut harvesting and shelling, sweeping the dirt yard and other household chores, and they especially liked bathing with a bucket of water and a cup standing on a rock!  Our prayer is that God will bless and enable us to better share His love and His truth as we seek to follow His leading in this new way.

We knew this fall going into winter was going to be busy, and we are just trying to hold on!  We wanted to share with you some personal and ministry highlights of these past weeks.

• I (Corey) have done a couple more stories with my small storying group in our main ministry village.  The group’s host has really enjoyed the stories and has asked for a printed version of what we are learning–it has taken some time to locate a version of the stories in the Arabic-script Wolof that he reads, but our colleague Jim Vaughn was able to find a set and I am going to give it to him soon.
• I was able to go on the Missionary Men’s Retreat, including the all-important motorcycle ride up the beach!
• We were invited to speak at my mother’s church in the United Arab Emirates. We had an intense series of days as we led the church’s annual retreat and then spoke to various groups from the church on the subject of missional living, followed by some special family- and vacation-time with Grandma Janie for Thanksgiving and seeing the Emirates.  We were very blessed by the many very engaged Christians we met in this unique country and were particularly encouraged to meet believers from all different national and religious backgrounds.  We even learned a bit of Arabic!
• Many of you know that our colleague Etienne Sene and his family have been planning to move to Kaffrine to join our SIM team.  Etienne feels that as things have progressed in his family and church’s life he can not leave Thies at this time.  He will continue to come help us out in Kaffrine from time to time as he has been doing.  We are sad that we aren’t going to have these wonderful folks as full-time teammates! But this decision was made with prayer and I believe it is the Lord’s leading for this time in Etienne’s life.
• With Christmas approaching we have done and are planning some more events related to Jesus’ birth.  Katie and Magg’s girls’ group had a great time (with the help of new teammate Esther Smith!) listening to the Christmas story and then acting it out with a creche.
• On the horizon for us:  a visit from my dad and his wife for Christmas time!

We also have exciting new ministry news to share… stay tuned later this week for more about that!

May God richly bless you as we remember Jesus’ birth!

This past month has been a whirlwind!  The main event of the month was the Wolof Kids’ Camp.  Helping us this year with the camp was a team from Katie’s parents’ church in Maine, Windham Baptist.  We had a great group of seven including Katie’s parents out to help us do some maintenance and repair to the camp grounds, and then help out during the camp.

We had 70+ kids at the Wolof Kids’ Camp who had a great time listening to speakers, playing games, and having good fellowship.  It was a good time for the kids to get away from home and have some concentrated time to think about Jesus in a stress-free environment.  The theme this year was “What Is The Way of Salvation?”.

Then we were back to Kaffrine with the team for some time in the villages and sharing our lives here.  Katie’s parents stayed for three days after the team left and we had some good family time in Dakar.

We then picked up a small team of two from Wintonbury Baptist Church (Connecticut) in Dakar and headed back to Kaffrine.  Wintonbury has just “adopted” the Wolof people and we had a good time discussing possibilities of what that could look like as well as visiting some villages.

Then we had a week of catching up on regular life, ministry, relationships, school, etc. and resting a bit.  Now here we are already getting to the end of October!  It has been a very full month, and God has sustained us through a lot of work and given us a lot of joy in being with folks we love.

Now looking ahead to the rest of the year, we have a number of exciting things coming up:

• Our teammates Steve and Esther Smith are arriving from the States on Oct 26th!  They have been teammates in Senegal throughout our whole career here but we’ve never lived in the same town–we’re looking forward to being able to work closely with this family that loves God and the Wolof so much.
• We continue to administrate the Wolof Scholarship Program: October is back-to-school time here, so we’re helping get kids registered and buying backpacks and school supplies in the market…
• We’re heading to the United Arab Emirates for two weeks at the end of November to speak at a family conference at the church where my mom, Janie Garrett, has been serving for the past eight years.
• In late December my dad and his wife are coming for a Christmas visit.
• Plus: storying groups and CHE work, homeschooling, etc!

We appreciate your sustaining prayers!