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!