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!