Hello everyone! We have safely made it back to the good old U. S. of A. It is nice to be home! Our last couple of weeks in Nigeria were busy but very good. The Thanksgiving service was fantastic! Everyone was dancing and singing as they brought their gifts up. Afterwards, everyone wanted pictures with the white people, so we stood and smiled for what seemed like forever! Here’s a picture of us all dressed up in our Nigerian clothes with a bunch of our church members. It was difficult to leave all of our wonderful friends behind! Before we left, Jamison and I were able to give them some small gifts, everyone was so happy! We were especially glad to be able to give some gifts to our Fulani friends. Jamison and I are sponsoring one of the little girls here through International Childcare Ministries, so we were able to give her and her family a special gift of clothes and school supplies. Here is a picture of us with our sponsored child, Aisha. My mom is also sponsoring a child from our school, so we gave him a little gift too. There are many children here needing sponsorship, I wish we could do more to help them. If you would like to sponsor one, visit the International Childcare Ministries website at:http://www.childcareministries.org/sponsor/. We are so thankful for all you have done for us while we were gone. It has been wonderful experience to be able to be in Nigeria and to work for God for the past five months. We could not have done what we were able to do without your support. We love you so much!

Hello everyone! Things are wrapping up here. I got the mural finished, it turned out better than I could have ever expected. Here is a picture of me and the finished product. The Fulani that come to the school sit and stare at it. It is amazing to me how much they appreciate it. God is doing an amazing work in their lives; one day there will be a great harvest of them coming to know the Lord. It is exciting to be right in the middle of all that is going on here. Paul, Eddie and Jamison have been working really hard to get all of their projects finished before we leave. They got the bathhouse finished, it is looking really nice. Here is a picture of it. All of the huts are finished, all that is left is making a covered meeting place in the middle of the dormitory area and children will be able to move in. It should be ready at the beginning of the next term. We are really enjoying our last week here. Our church is going to have a big good-bye celebration for us on Sunday. They are bringing in a drummer and a keyboard player for music, so there will be dancing. It is going to be a Thanksgiving service. Each family will bring an offering to God to thank him for the year. They will be called up family by family to present their offering. It is going to be very exciting to participate in this service. We have been so blessed with this little church that we are a part of. God is going to do amazing things in this little village. It is going to be difficult to not be here, but we are ready to go back and see our families. We will be back in San Andreas on Friday, December 5^th. My father had his surgery last week to remove his cancer, and the surgeon said that it went perfectly! We are very glad that he is doing well. Thank you for praying for us, we appreciate it so much.

Hello! Things are going great here. We hope all is well with you.  The Bishop for Nigeria came with his wife for our general conferences. They are in Akwa Ibom now with Phyllis and our cook, Bassey. (Jenny and Sue can cook, so don’t worry, we are having more than just spaghetti!) It has been really great to be able to get to know them a little bit. They are very nice people. It is amazing the things that God is doing in this place! We are surrounded by people that love us so much! Last week, Bature, the Fulani man who helped Phyllis establish the school here, took us up to his camp. They dressed me up like a Fulani woman! It was a lot of fun. Here is me and Jamison in our Fulani garb and Bature, who is helping me balance the bowls. Work has been going along very well. Jamison has gotten much of the electrical updated, it works very well now. He even ran power down to the new bathhouse for the boarding area. The huts are nearly finished, all we need to do now is make beds and it will be ready for children to move in. We are hoping to be able to get the roof on before we go back to the States. The mural is coming along well. There isn’t much of a paint selection here, so I have to mix a lot of the colors to get them right. I haven’t mixed paint before, so it is an adventure! I have repainted the sheep several times to try and get them to look right. It will all look great when it is finished. Here is a picture of me painting the shepherd. We are getting ready to come back to the States. We will greatly miss the people here! We have fallen in love so much with all of the children and the members of the church. They have become a second family to us. But we are also excited to be able to come home and see all of you again! We love you and miss you and we hope and pray that you are well!

Hello! We pray that all things are going well with all of you. Phyllis came back safely from the US. She says that the memorial service was very good and that everything went smoothly. We are so thankful that she is back! Since she’s been back we have been doing a lot of filming for the second movie she wants made for her deputation. It will be a good movie when it is all finished; it is about the little shepherds that go to our school. While she was gone, we were very well taken care of by the people here. One of our pastor’s brother invited us to a revival at his church and to lunch at his house. We had a wonderful time listening to him preach and spending time with their family. The people here have been so kind to us, it will be difficult for us to leave in December. Next week, Bishop Kendall, an American man who is the bishop over the conferences here in Nigeria, will be here for the general conferences. He will be here in Kogi for a few days, then he will head down with Phyllis to Akwa Ibom to work with the churches there. While he is here, we will stay in Kogi to continue the work. The men have been working very hard on getting the foundation poured for the bathroom. It is going to look very good when it is all finished. On Saturday, we took the day off to travel across the Niger River. A missionary couple over there named Robert and Joyce Hyslop, have been working for many years to translate the Bible into one of the tribal languages. Robert died several years ago and is buried here in Nigeria, but Joyce still comes for three months every year. The translation is finally completed and they were dedicating it, so we went to join the celebration. We got to take a ferry across the Niger River! The service was very nice, but very hot, so we only stayed for a couple hours. It was a great experience to go and celebrate with the people. We are really enjoying our time here. It is amazing to see all the good things that God is going here. We miss you and love you and pray you are doing well.

Hello! We hope you are all doing well. Things have begun to calm down here. Phyllis left on Thursday to go back to the States for Jim’s funeral. She will be coming back in a couple of weeks. We are hoping and praying that she can get all she needs to get done in that time. While she is gone, the church and our Fulani friends will be making sure that everything goes well at the school. There is no need to worry, we are well taken care of. Every day people come by to make sure we are well and our guards had a big meeting before she left to make sure they will keep us safe. Though Phyllis is gone, work has moved forward on the projects here. Jamison has been re-wiring much of the electrical system here. The panel was too small and overcrowded, so Jamison installed a new one that will allow them to expand. He also installed a switch to change from power to generator that will make switching power over easier. We got to test it out on Sunday when the power came back on; it had been off for nearly two weeks! But our generator had been keeping the lights and fans on, so it wasn’t too bad. It is really nice to have our air conditioning back! Many people from the village had been coming to charge their cell phones here, since we were one of the only places in the village that had power. The men have been working hard on getting the foundation of the bathroom ready for concrete and working on the plumbing for our new well, which is producing much better than the last one. The women are continuing painting shutters. I have begun working on the mural. I have never done something like this before, so it should be interesting to see how things turn out. I have nearly completed sketching it out; it will look nice when it is all done. Continue to pray for Phyllis as she has much to do in the next couple of weeks. Thank you for all of your prayers, we appreciate them so much! We love you and miss you!

Hello. We hope you all are well. Please pray for us here. On Thursday evening, Jim Sortor died.He had been sick for several days, and the doctors here couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him. In the end, his heart gave out. It has been such a shock! The church we go to here has been really supportive, doing anything needed. Phyllis will be taking him back to the US on Thursday, October 16. She will stay there for a couple of weeks, then she’ll come back here. Things have been so hectic in the last couple of days that it is unbelievable. It all feels like a dream. Phyllis believes Jim would want the work to continue, so we will stay here and continue our work. The men are finishing up the foundation for a bathroom for the Fulani village in our compound. The women are working on painting the shutters of the new classroom block. I am preparing to paint a mural on one of the walls of the assembly hall. We also have a crew from near Abuja that has come to drill us a new well, the one we have isn’t producing enough water. Work has stopped on everything for now; we are just trying to figure out what to do. The US Embassy, Free Methodist World Missions and the Sortor’s insurance company have being handling the arrangements needed. Phyllis is functioning, but she’s just in shock. Please pray for her, she needs it. We will do our best to keep you updated on all that is going on. Thank you for your prayers and support. We love you and miss you.

Greetings everyone! We hope you are well. Things are going very well here! Our visitors made it safely on Monday night. There are two couples, Paul and Sue Frazier and Eddie and Jenny Mack. They are from Pennsylvania. Paul and Sue have been working building churches in Venezuela for the last seventeen years. They heard Phyllis speak at the Free Methodist General Conference a couple of years ago and God called them to come. They are here to help finish the classrooms. They are going to plaster the outside of the buildings, put ceilings in and help Jamison fix the drainage problem. Here is a picture of Jenny and Sue painting some of the trim on one of the classrooms. They are very knowledgeable about construction and it will be a great blessing for them to be here. It is great to be surrounded by so many people who are so strong and wise in their faith. I know Jamison and I can learn a lot from them. Jamison is enjoying having something more concrete to do, he jumped right into helping in any way he can. I am enjoying my birthday here, I got to pick out what food I want to eat and the children of the school sang to me during their morning assembly. I also got some packages that people sent with the two couples. Thank you all so very much, it was the best birthday present I could have hoped for. I am nearly finished with the first movie Phyllis is having me work on. We will start filming the next one soon. In the meantime, I am going to be painting a mural of a shepherd and some sheep on the wall of the assembly hall. Since so many of the children are shepherds themselves, it will be very fitting. We are really enjoying being able to get to know some of the Fulani very well. A week ago, a new baby was born, but she had some kind of blockage that wasn’t allowing her to pass anything. We took her to the hospital, where they did some tests. It was some kind of infection, but she is doing very well now and was able to come home yesterday. It worked out nicely, since the Fulani name their children on the seventh day, she is named Haggi. We were able to go and celebrate with them. This is me with one of the Fulani girls, Aisha. They fed us some Nigerian food and some home made butter milk. It was all very delicious! We miss you all and love you very much. Thank you for your continued prayers and support, we are very grateful. Have a wonderful week!

Hello from Nigeria!   Things are going great here; we hope you are all doing well. We have been keeping up our hard work here in Kogi State. Jamison has become a general handyman, fixing the classroom block drainage problem, and dealing with several electrical problems that have come up. In order to make room for the new couples that are coming on the September 29^th, we needed to move the dining room table out of the dining room and out into the assembly hall. Jamison installed a ceiling fan, a light and some outlets to this new extension of our home. It is really nice to have such a great workspace outside where we can watch the cows grazing in the front yard and be more available to the children that come to visit. Here is a picture of one of the students here watching over his family’s herd of cows. This is right out in the school yard, they cows come through here on their way to the creek at the edge of the school property. It is very exciting to be right in the middle of all that is going on! We don’t think the Nisoma is going to be built while we are here, there isn’t funding for it. We are feeding the children every day, traditional Nigerian food, and they are very thankful for it! I am still working on editing Phyllis’ movie about life in Nigeria. After that is done, we will begin filming another one that will tell the story of the little shepherds of the school. While we are doing that, Phyllis has one of the Fulani couples that live nearby building Fulani style huts on our compound. It will be a Fulani camp for boarding Fulani students. There is a clan that lives in a different state that wants to send their children here, but don’t want to move here. Once these huts are finished and a bathroom facility is built, they will be able to come and live on our compound. It is very interesting to see how the Fulani build their homes. Here is a picture of me sitting inside one of the unfinished huts. We are excited about all the wonderful things that are going on here. We are very thankful for all of you praying for us and supporting us. We could not be here without you! Thank you, we love you and miss you!

Hello all of our friends and family! We miss you all so much! We hope that all of you are doing 

well. We have safely made it up to Kogi State. This is where all the Fulani are living. School started on September 8^th and things are very busy here! The classroom block that we told you about in July is still being worked on. It only needs shutters and doors now. The carpenters have finished the desks, so they are using three of the four classrooms as they are. The building has some drainage problems, so we are trying to get things figured out. Life is different up here; we are a half an hour away from the nearest town, living out near the bush. It is fun to live right on the school site, though there is much less privacy with all the children running 

around all of the time! We love it though! We have yet to begin work on the Nisoma; we are waiting for funding to come in. There will be an article about the project in International Childcare Ministries’ upcoming Love Link, which is an online magazine that can be found on their web site. We have gotten some of the corn and soybeans that we will use to make the cereal planted. Soon we will be able to harvest them and make something to feed the children. In the meantime, the Fulani children are being fed garri, which is a sort of cream of wheat made from cassava root, cream of cassava if you will. It doesn’t look appetizing to us, but the children love it. Here is a picture of the children waiting to get their garri. While we wait, Kristie is working on editing a video Phyllis made about life in Nigeria and Jamison has been working on fixing some electrical problems in the house and is doing some painting on the new classroom block. We are adapting well to life here in Africa, Jamison even let Kristie give him a new haircut! You can see it in this picture of him painting. We miss you all tons and love you very much! Thank you so much for your prayers and support.

Hello! We hope and pray that you are doing well. Things here in Nigeria are very fine. We are finishing up the painting at the school. The outsides of the buildings are completed; we are just working on getting some of the rooms in the administration building painted. Here is a picture of the finished classroom block. The place looks very nice! A week from Thursday we will be heading back up to Kogi State. We are sad to be leaving the people here, but excited to return to the Fulani and work on our Nisoma. (That is the factory for making nutritious cereal we mentioned in July, it is Ni for Nigeria, the Bu of Busoma was for Burundi, where it was started.) This Sunday we will be returning to visit the orphan children that were branded witches or wizards. We will be having a small church service and presenting a wheelchair to one child who has tuberculosis. We are very excited to go and see them again! If you would like to know more about the work Sam is doing, you can visit their web site http://www.crarn.org/.We would like to ask you to pray for our conference superintendent, Reverend Joel Iwuk and his family. Here is a picture of him and Kristie. He has been visited by armed robbers three times in the past two weeks. Robbery is not very common in this part of Nigeria, especially for it to happen so many times to one person! The first time they just took money and electronics but no one was hurt. The second time they came and searched the place, removing things from shelves and taking what they wanted. They also beat his wife, but she was not too badly hurt. The third time was just two days later, and they came not to steal things, but to kill him. Luckily, the family did not stay at their house that night, so no one was there. He has taken his family and moved them somewhere to protect them. He as reported all of this to the police, and they are working with the people of the village to patrol at night and try to capture these people. A few suspects have been arrested, and they are looking for more. We are praying that God would keep Reverend Joel and his family safe from more attacks and that the person who is behind this will be revealed and brought to justice. We are safe and well, we live about a half an hour away from there. We will keep you updated on all that is going on. Thank you for your prayers and support. We love you and miss you all.

http://www.facebook.com/p.php?i=56900931&k=Y3CXXXPXVV6M5FFFYCXYTP

Follow this link to see the pictures we have posted on Kristie's Facebook. You don't have to sign up for Facebook to view them. We are doing good, the painting is almost finished! Enjoy!

Hello everyone! We hope you are all doing well! We have been very busy this past week! Last Thursday, we drove over to the next state, Cross River, and went to a Drill Monkey Reserve. It was fun to be in the jungle and to see some real wildlife! No elephants though… After that, we went to visit some churches in that state. We distributed a gift that was given to the sponsored children there. It was very nice to be able to see their happy faces when they received their new backpack, notebooks, pencils, drink mix and Bibles! On Sunday, we went to church here in Eket, at the church in our front yard. It is nice to be so close to a place of worship! A man named Sam came with a group of children. They are orphans who have been abandoned by their families because they have been accused of being a witch or wizard. Some corrupt person in their church claims to be a prophet who can discern if a child is a witch. They then choose a child and charge the family large amounts of money to exercise the evil out of them. When the family runs out of money, the child is abandoned on the street. When Sam hears about one of these children, he takes them in and cares for them. After church, we went to visit their compound. Here is a picture of Kristie and one of the children, named Victoria. There are over 140 children there! It is so sad to see such beautiful children treated this way! We are hoping that they will continue to come to the church and are going to visit them again. On Monday, we went and worked at Hope Academy. The painting is nearly finished! The construction is coming along very well. Both of our vans broke down on Tuesday, so we stayed home while they got fixed. On Wednesday, we went to Port Harcourt, one of the major cities in Nigeria. An organization in the States has 500 free wheelchairs there waiting to be distributed. There is a Fulani boy in Kogi State who needs one, which is how we found out about this organization. They wanted to give us all 500 so we could distribute them, but since there isn’t that much storage available where we are, we only took 200. They are very cool! This is Jamison putting one together. It is amazing to see all the wonderful things God is doing here in Nigeria. Thank you for your support and prayers. We love you and miss you all!

Hello! We hope and pray that you are doing well. It is hard to believe that it is already the end of July! Things are going wonderfully here in Eket. The painting of the school is going more slowly now. This is a picture of one of the classroom blocks. We are doing mostly trim work, which takes much longer. It will look very nice when we are finished with it. They use oil paint for all of the trim and the stripe on the bottom of the buildings here. Their water based paint is not very weather proof. It makes cleanup slower, but it will last longer. The construction of the hostel is coming along very quickly. Though it has been raining quite a bit, they have been able to nearly complete the foundation. When it is finished, they will pour the floor and be able to begin building up the walls. It is very exciting to see it begin to take shape. This is the beginning of the foundation. You can see the trenches they dug, the block they have laid to bring it to the floor level and some of the rebar reinforcements for the support pillars. It is looking good! Six hundred bags of cement arrived yesterday, along with some gravel and sand, so we have all the supplies needed. They mix their own concrete as they go, and a couple of guys have been working hard on making blocks. It is very different than the way we build things in the States, but they all seem to know what they are doing. When we are not working, we spend time reading and playing games. It is really nice to be able to come home and rest at the end of the day. There is a church that meets in the front yard, so sometimes we come home and there is a service going on. The pastor lives in a house on our compound, so we hang out with him and his wife sometimes. They have several children who keep the place from getting too quiet. It is a very nice house, we are very happy here. We hope that all is well with you, we enjoy hearing from you! Thank you so much for your prayers and support. Have a wonderful week!

Hello! We are doing well and we hope and pray that you are as well! We are getting quite far in our painting of the school. It isn’t quite looking like we thought it would, but it is nice. Apparently, color charts here are not as accurate as they are in the states. Also, just because two kinds of paint have the same number does not mean that they are actually the same color. In this picture, you can see the Administration Building, the brown color on the bottom and the pink color on the

walls are supposed to be the rust brown color. They are also supposed to be the same color. We are just happy that it looks nice. We are undecided on if we want to use blue for the shutters or the dark brown color. We are going to test them both and see if which one we like more. While we are doing that, the workers have begun digging the foundation for the dormitory. In this picture, you can see the trench they have dug, and the stakes they have put in. They are going to pour cement up to the top of the stakes, then begin putting blocks on top of that. Everything is built of block here, and done by hand, so it is interesting to watch. We are enjoying being here very much. Thank you again for your prayers and support. We miss you!

Hello our wonderful friends and family! We hope all is well with you. We are doing well here. We are now in the southern state of Akwa Ibom in a town called Eket. This is where the Sortors started their work in Nigeria. Here they live in town, so close we can walk to check our e-mail. Their house here is very nice; I can understand why they were excited to be coming back here for a time. Our project here is painting the school. There are two Nigerian men that are helping us, but it is going to take some time to get it all done. The school is quite large, four classroom blocks, an administration building, an assembly hall and a dormitory. This is Jamison and Phyllis checking out the unpainted assembly hall. While we are working on that, Jim and Phyllis are overseeing the building of a second dormitory. The school is going to be a rust brown color with cream trim and bright blue shutters and doors. It is going to look very nice when we get it all done. We are greatly enjoying our time here. The people are very friendly and easy to get along with. The second picture is Jamison playing hopscotch with some of the school children. They are so beautiful! Kristie hasn’t been feeling well, so pray that she remains healthy. Also, pray for her family. We recently found out that her father has non-life threatening cancer. It is scary news at any time, but especially to hear when you are on another continent. We miss you all more than you know, and love you dearly. Thank you for your prayers and support!

Hello! We made it here and we are happy. God has been so good to us. We arrived on time and the Sortor’s were at the airport to pick us up. We stayed the first night in Abuja, the capitol, and arrived here in Lokoja on Friday. We will be here until Tuesday, then we will drive down to Eket, where we will stay until September. Then we will come back up here for the start of school. Check out this map to see where these places are, Lokoja is just south of Abuja, which is in the middle of the country. Eket isn’t named there, but it is down in the southeast, near Port Harcourt. Things are very nice here. We are living in an apartment that is attached to the back of the assembly hall here at the school. It is quiet here now, but I imagine that once school gets started this becomes a very busy place. They have almost completed the building of a second block of classrooms here that would allow twice as many children to attend school here in the fall. We are waiting for wood to be planed for the door and window frames. The power is very inconsistent here; we had just an hour of it yesterday, so it has been difficult for the planers to do their work. We are hoping the power stays on for longer today. There is a back up generator here, so when the power shuts off, we still have lights and fans. We have begun planning for a project we will be working on in September. We will be building a Busoma. It is like a workshop for making a very nutritious cereal for the children. We are very excited to be heading this project. To learn more about a Busoma, you can got the International Childcare Ministries web site, where they have a video explaining how it works. It is the Burundi Food Fund video. We love you and miss you greatly. Continue to pray for us, we need your prayers now more than ever. Thank you!

Well, the time is finally drawing near. We have been packing for the last week, and today we are heading back up to San Andreas. It is going to be hard to leave all the wonderful people we have gotten to know here, but we know God has plans for us, and we need to follow through on them. We will be in San Andreas for a couple of days, then on Wednesday, July 2nd, we fly out. We go from San Fransisco to Amsterdam, have a layover, and then fly down to Abuja, Nigeria. We are very excited to be going! We have be planning and preparing for so long that it is hard to believe that the time has actually come for us to go! Thank you for all of your prayers and support. We could not be doing this without you.

Hello everyone! Thank you so much to all of you who have been faithfully supporting us and praying for us. The lack of freaking out at our apartment is evidence that God is in control. We are getting very excited about going! It is less than a month from our departure date, and things are still going smoothly! Man, our God is good! We have both told our jobs that we will be leaving, and it went well, so that is a relief. On a side note, if you have sent stuff into Visa Ministries and not gotten a receipt, please e-mail me so I know and can talk to them about it (joylovessonshine@gmail.com). Thanks again for all of your love and support!

We got our visas!! The Consulate of Nigeria in Atlanta, Georgia was very quick to get them back to us. This is a great relief. All that is left is for us to purchase our medical insurance and to figure out what to pack. THANK YOU so much to all of you who have been supporting us. We are half way to our total fund raising goal! It is very exciting to see God work in the hearts of those around us and to see him provide for out needs. We could not do this without you and we are eternally greatful.

We have officially sent out the paperwork for our Visas! They will be arriving at the Consulate in Atlanta, GA on Tuesday, May 6th. It hopefully won't take the Consulate long to approve them. Once we have them back, we will be legally ready to go. We still need to buy our travel insurance and raise some more support. We are about a quarter of the way to our total goal, and about half way to raising the money we absolutely need. Thank you to all of those who have helped us out this far! We could not do it without you!

So all of the support letters have been handed out or mailed... All we can do now is wait for God to do his thing with the money side. In the meantime, we are working on getting our visa paperwork figured out so we can get it sent in. Unfortunately, Nigeria recently changed how things are done, and not everyone has updated things to match, so there are some contradictions on what to send in and how much it is going to cost. We're going to make some phone calls on Monday (the embassy is closed today) and try to get everything figured out. Thank you to all of you who have supported us so far, we are greatly encouraged by what has come in so far and how many people are praying for us...

so some of the support letters have gone out and we have spoken at both services at our church here in azusa. in two weeks, we head up to san andreas to talk at the church there and hand out more support letters. money is beginning to come in, thank you to all who have been sending it! we also bought our plane tickets last week, so it is official, we are going! we are flying out on july 2, and returning sometime in early december. we are toying with the idea of spending sometime with some former exchange students in belgium and/or germany on our way home, so we don't know the exact date we will be back in the states. the next thing we need to do is secure our visas, but we are waiting on a letter from fmwm to do that. thank you for your prayers, please continue to pray for us as we get things ready for our trip.

hello! we are continuing to prepare for our trip to Nigeria. support letters will be going out soon. we are talking with FMWM about getting our flight dates settled and our visas in order. we are also doing our best to prepare mentally for being away from home and in another culture. some days it is exciting, some days it is frighting. but we are committed and moving along. thanks to all of you who have been praying for us. we know that God is with us and guiding us. we are hoping to update more frequently as our departure gets closer. once we are there, we should be able to update once a week or so. keep checking in to find out what's going on. have a nice day!

so, as a new year begins we are beginning some new adventures. we are officially going to nigeria this year from july to december. we are going though free methodist world mission, and as soon as we get our budget turned in and approved, we can begin fundraising. this is an incredibly daunting task for us, it will cost around $20,000 for us to go, and we need to have all of the money raised before we leave. we trust that God is good and we know that he will provide a way, even if we cannot see it right now. pray for us as we prepare to go, there are many things we need to get done, including finding a home for our cat. we hope you are jumping into some new adventures this new year as well.