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.