George's in Moz!

Winter 2011...

2012-01-20T05:33:00.000-08:00

Time just seems to keep flying by. We now have less than 2 months left before we head back to Mozambique. We are excited about going back, but also are trying to get in as much family and friend time as possible. Our daughter is due any day now, so we are just anxiously awaiting her birth and then we will get our plane tickets bought and start the whole process of birth certificate, passport and visa for her.

We have had a fun winter so far. The kids were so disappointed that we have had such little snow this winter. We prayed and prayed for snow before Christmas. The night before Christmas Eve, Karis was praying for snow and I decided to just look out the window and we saw the ground was covered! Karis was so excited God answered her prayer so quickly. She couldn't stop giggling!!
Of course it only lasted a day, but we have now gotten our snow, so the kids have been enjoying playing and sledding and building snowmen.

Here are some pictures of from the past couple of months....

Karis and grandma decided to try sledding backwards!
Traeger and grandpa going for a record.

The girls enjoying the snow we finally got!

Traeger and his best buddy and cousin Grant.

We spent a week in South Carolina after Christmas. The kids had a great time with cousins and they all decided it was going to be a Holloween Christmas this year.

We did a visit to Jaidyn's grave on Christmas Eve, which has been a tradition since her funeral, 9 years ago. We can't believe it has been 9 years. The kids really seemed to understand this year and we had a special time talking about her and showing them pictures and keepsakes from her short life.

Kallen and some of her favorite gifts.

We celebrated Christmas with the High family over Thanksgiving break, because Kristi was able to come then, but not for Christmas. It was a little difficult to find a tree a week before Thanksgiving, so we have a great story about this beautiful tree we were finally able to get, it is a long story, so I won't tell the whole thing, but just to give you some perspective, it is the top of a 30 foot pine, which was the only option.

A good friend of ours, Amanda Currie with Picture This Photography took some family pictures for us.

Here are all the "High" grandkids.

Holloween 2011...

2011-11-03T09:51:00.000-07:00

Our kids had a great Holloween. This was their first time trick or treating and they thought it was the greatest thing ever. After trick or treating at Grandma Fishes work, GFS, school parties, then trick or treating Monday night, and Northland's Trunk or Treat, we now have enough candy to last us the next 3 years in Mozambique, so Grandmas, remember no sending candy when we get back to Mozambique!

Here are some pictures from the school parties and trick or treating...

Karis, the black cat.
Karis' kindergarten class

Kallen

Traeger, Obi-won, and friends...

Traeger's 1st grade class.

Trick or Treat.....

Fall...

2011-10-14T11:18:00.001-07:00

Hard to believe we are already in the middle of fall. We have had an extremely busy past couple of months. The kids started school at North Oakview Elementary, right down the road from us. They are doing really well and enjoying it. Traeger also started soccer this fall and is doing so well. He loves it and has scored in all but one of his games. It has been fun for us to watch him grow not only in the area of soccer, but also socially. Karis absolutely loves school and cries when I tell her I have no more homework for her to do. She seriously could do school work all day everyday and never get tired of it. Kallen likes having mommy all to herself every morning and then her and Karis get some girl time in the afternoon until Traeger comes home.

Tim and I took a trip with some good friends to Boston to watch a Patriots game(which has been my dream for forever). We had a great time sight seeing in Boston and then watching the Patriots clean up on San Diego!

The next week we were in Arizona for STS(Simply the Story) training. It was training on how to do inductive Bible study orally or telling the story of the Bible orally. It will be so valuable to us, going back to Mozambique where it is a very oral culture.

The first week of October, we were at Rothbury Community Church, participating in their annual missions conference. We had multiple opportunities to share what God is doing in Moz. Michele spoke at a ladies luncheon and Tim presented on two different nights. We always enjoy our time in Rothbury. They have been such an encouraging and supporting church to us. We are so thankful for them.

We also wanted to give our upcoming schedule as many people have asked when we will be speaking in the area. It is as follows:

Oct. 15th-- We will sharing about 10 minutes in the evening service at Blythefield Hills. The service starts as 5:30pm

Oct. 22-26--We will be in Akron Ohio, participating at The Chapel with an annual Missions event

Oct. 30th--We will be Hopevale Church in Saginaw, MI

Nov. 6th--We will be at Northland Baptist Church here in GR and we will have the entire morning service to share. I believe the service starts at 10:30am.

Nov. 13th--We will be at Faith Fellowship in Irons, MI and will be speaking in their morning service, which begins at 10:45am.

Nov. 20th--We will be at First Baptist Church in St. Johns, MI and will be speaking at their 6:00pm evening service.

I believe that is all that is on the schedule for now. We will let you know if other dates or opportunities become available.

Here are some pictures from the fall:

The kids have loved fall. They love playing in the leaves and pumkins and playing sports in the yard.

One thing I wanted to do this fall is go on a "color tour". We used to do that every year when I was little with my cousins and I loved it, so we enjoyed a very warm day, travelled up North, and enjoyed God's creation with my parents.

Karis getting off the bus. She loves riding the bus.

Traeger and daddy carved pumpkins and the girls painted pumkins with mommy.

Traeger scoring a goal at one of his soccer games(he is in the purple shirt).

Just a picture from our trip to Arizona. Neither of us had every been to Arizonia and we enjoyed some beautiful scenery.

Our trip to Boston at Gillett Stadium.

Tom Brady for of those of who don't know #12!!!

Lesley and I.

Boston from the Harbor.

Tim and I with Dan and Lesley in Boston.

Summer Times!

2011-07-29T06:00:00.000-07:00

Well it is hard to believe that it is already August. The summer is flying by. We've been home two months now and have fit in about 6 months worth of activities in those two months. We spent 2 weeks on Lake Michigan with Tim's family, we celebrated Traeger's 7th birthday, have been to Fredrick Meijer Gardens, the Children's Museum, and the zoo. We have been camping and spent a day at Michigan's Adventure. Traeger spent a week at Spring Hill Day Camp, Karis has taken horse riding lessons, besides many days spent swimming at the lake and pools. It has been 5 years since we've been home during the summer and we are trying to fit in everything we've been missing into these few months. We also did a VBS at Northland Baptist Church and spoke at Calvary Church of Muskegon. We have visited with supporters from Chicago as well as many others from the area. It has been a full two months! Here are a few pictures of the past months events...

New Easy Donation Link...

2011-06-22T06:19:00.000-07:00

We have just added to the blog on the right hand side and easy link to donate now. If you click on either ministry account(for vehicle and ministry needs) or support account(for the additional monthly support we are trying to raise because of visas), it will automatically take you the SIM website where you can enter all the information in to donate immediately or set up montly donations. Please give us feedback if you have trouble with this or it does not work properly.

Home...

2011-06-21T10:38:00.000-07:00

Well I apologize for taking so long to give an update. It has been very busy and I keep sitting down to do it and get distracted for some reason. We arrived back in the US on May 24th, but spent 3 days at SIM head quarters doing debriefing and then we spent another 5 days with my sister in South Carolina. We arrived back in Grand Rapids on June 2nd.

We have now moved into a house where we will be staying during our time here. One of our supporting churches is letting us use their parsonage. It is nice to have our own place and be able to put clothes away and not live out of a suitcase any longer. The kids have plenty of room to run around and play.

We have enjoyed spending time with family and friends and going to church. The kids are getting spoiled by grandparents, playing with cousins, making new friends, and they love their sunday school classes. So far everyone has transitioned really well. We are getting adjusted the light and late nights here. In Mozambique it is always dark by six and life shuts down. There is no such thing as a night life there. Karis still every night complains she has to go to bed so much earlier here, because even though she truely goes to bed quite a bit later here, it is still "morning time" here to her because of how light it is.

We have a busy summer planned and we found out while at SIM, we need to do some more support raising while we are here. Our residency visas for Mozambique went from $60 a person to $600 a person. So that is $3000 a year for our family just to live there. We need to raise $250 a month more support just to cover this cost. Also, we sold our vehicle before we left Mozambique and plan to buy a new one when we arrive in Maputo and then drive it back up to Lichinga. So we need to raise additional funds for a vehicle. Our goal is somewhere between $15,000-$18,000, since a 4x4 vehicle is required for the roads we need to drive on.

For our upcoming schedule, we will be speaking at a VBS at Northland Baptist Church, July 11-15. We will be speaking at Calvary Church of Muskegon July 23rd and 24th. We will keep you updated when we will be at other churches as the time gets closer and we get them on our calendar.

Here are some pictures of our time here so far. Sorry no pictures with the George family yet. We are going on our vacation with them next week and I will have plenty of pictures to add of them when we get back. These are mostly from our time in South Carolina visiting my sister.

This is Karis and Ethan, my sister's oldest (4yrs)

Kallen and Jamin, my brother's youngest(8 months)

Traeger, Kallen, and Brielle, my brother's oldest (2yrs)

Grandma and Kallen

Grandma and Karis

Papa and Traeger(in matching swimsuits)

We also were able to get together with my cousin Sarah, who lives in Charlotte, NC. It was great to get us all together again, with 9 children ages 6 and under.

Tim and Jason with Noah(Kristi's, middle one 2yrs) and Traeger.

Grandma reading to the kids.

A visit to the zoo in South Carolina

Wrapping up...

2011-05-18T06:48:00.000-07:00

Well we leave tomorrow. It is hard to believe. We will fly into Maputo and spend the night and then leave Maputo Monday afternoon and arrive back in the States Tuesday at 6:14pm into Charlotte North Carolina. Yesterday, of course, Kallen and Traeger came down with colds. So please just pray that this trip goes smoothly and we all survive the 3 days of travel!

Before we go, we just wanted to give you an update of a few things that we have been doing the past month. We finished our parenting seminar, sort of. It was really a disaster over all. We only were able to do 2 out of the 4 weeks planned. The 2 we did do, however went well. We had to deal with a lot of sickness and we had a really difficult time arranging transport for everyone. We will try it again next year, after we get back. Tim finished his class on the doctrin of Salvation with the Anglican Church. We've said many goodbyes. We gave our cat to another family to care for while we are gone and the kids have shed many tears over the cat. Our dogs will stay here with Eden's who will be living here the 9 months we are gone.

Overall, I think we are ready to go. We've got everything packed up (almost) and we are looking forward to seeing everyone again.

Traeger teaching Vader a new trick. He is just a little bit too big for Traeger to control.

One of Karis' favorite friends here, Tessa. They had a goodbye sleepover last week.

Tim's class on Salvation. 16 people attended and everything went very well.

Because of the lack of transportation to get people to our parenting seminar, we hired a friend to drive for us. He is one of our guards and he does driving on the side for another friend of his. Well on our way to the seminar, he lost control of the car and got into an accident. Thankfully no one was really hurt, but the car was pretty damaged. We quickly discovered, that without tow trucks, it is really difficult to get a car back to the city for repairs. We stopped a big truck heading to Lichinga and asked if we could put the car on top. The guy agreed (for a very high price and of course being the only people with money we had to pay). It took us all afternoon to get this car on top of the truck. Complete "man-labor" to get it on top. So we didn't end up getting to do our seminar that week and we had to deal with getting our guard out of jail and lost a lot of money on top of it, so needless to say, we won't be hiring another car!

getting a little bit closer...

Finally...all loaded up...

Traeger's friend Merito. He is one of the sons of Michele's language helper, Beatriz.

Karis and Idris, Beatriz' other son.

Michele did a small teaching in Yao at our church last Sunday. Of course, she only read it, but still it was good pratice.

25 days and counting...

2011-04-27T23:56:00.000-07:00

It is hard to believe that we will be heading home in just 25 days. We do feel like we are at a good point to leave, but we never realized how hard it would be to up and leave for 9 months. There are so many things to arrange for and think about. We do have a family who will be living in our house for the entire 9 months while we are gone and they are good friends of ours so we trust them. But we still have a lot of things to pack up and store away. We have had to make arrangements for running the guesthouse and library while Michele is gone. There are lots of goodbyes, as for the kids especially, 9 months is a long time. They have made some good friends they will need to say goodbye to and they will also have to say goodbye to our 2 dogs and cat. Karis has already cried because we can't take Obi our cat to Michigan with us. There will just be a lot of transitions for the kids going back to the States, so please pray for them.

This past month has been very busy for us and it will continue to be busy until we leave. We have a lot to update you on though.

Michele hosted a homeschool conference here at our house. We had 2 ladies from England and 1 from South Africa come to run the conference. They work for Anchor Education and they travel all over providing these homeschool conferences for people in areas where homeschooling resources and support are hard to come by. They also provided testing for the children, so parents could determine where they were at academically. We had 11 women, 1 man, and 30 children. The ladies offered testing for the children and ran a childrens program as well as 4 sessions a day for three days. It was very helpful and it was a great time to connect with other moms and build a support network. It was a busy time for us and we had 2 other families living in our house with us and we hosted the conference in the house, so we are still trying to catch up from that.

This is Kallen's friend Isabel. Kallen refers to her as "my Izzy". They are so cute together and walk around all day laughing and playing and holding hands. Isabel's mom attended the homeschool conference, so Kallen got lots of time to play with Izzy that week.

Here is the homeschool crew.

Tim finished his first class on Psalms with a group of women from the Anglican church. It went really well. He had about 22 women attend. There is still a problem with the language barrier, even though most of them spoke Portuguese and Tim did his teaching in it, there were still some women who didn't speak Portuguese or Yao. The women really did get a better grasp on the Psalms and how to apply them to their life. Song and dance are very important in their culture and in the end they came together and wrote a song about they had learned. It was very encouraging.

We also started our parenting seminar out in Lumbiza. The first week went well, but parenting is tough subject here. We will take pictures next week and update you more later on this class. We have 3 more weeks left before we leave. Just pray for health, because many people are having to miss because of sickness. Malaria and colds are really common this time of year. Pray that God will work in their hearts in the area of parenting and they will get a better grasp of God's plan for us and children.

For other issues of prayer in these last weeks, please pray for Tim as he now begins his second class with the Anglican church. This will be a mixed group of men and women and he will be teaching doctrine issues such as grace, mercy, salvation, heaven and hell.

Then pray that we would finish well with language. Tim has been preaching on sundays in Yao and is making huge strides in the language. Michele is moving along, but is moving slower than Tim. Just pray that we would finish well and then be able to keep up with it while we are home for 9 months, so we don't forget it!

Pangolin and Genets...

2011-03-14T10:38:00.000-07:00

Most of you know, I love animals. God has given me some amazing opportunities to view wildlife here and actually interact with it. One of my friends here, Veronica, has taken in some baby Genets. Genets are nocturnal wild cats. They were in a tree that was cut down by a local and Veronica is raising them until they are old enough to hunt and find food on their own and then she will release them back into the wild at a conservation camp. I have been able to hold and play with these beautiful cats.
Then today, a man came to my house trying to sell me something, a Pangolin. I knew it was some kind of animal, but not what type of animal. He wanted me to buy it for about $6,500. I told him to bring it because I was curious what type of animal it was. After he left to go get it, I called Veronica, because she knows animals like this. She said that it was highly illegal to sell these animals. She said that when he brought the animal to my house, pretend I am interested and she would send guys from the department of argiculture to my house to confiscate the animal. So that is what I did. He brought the poor thing tied into 2 burlap sacks and then put into a duffle bag. The four guys from department of Agriculture took him and the Pangolin back to their office. Apparently, you receive a huge fine for this type of thing and if you can't pay it, you stay in jail until you pay it. However, this guy just got a stern warning not to do it again and was released. Most people could never afford to pay the fines, so they often just get away with it. But the Pangolin will be released at a conservation camp. The Pangolin is an amazing animal, like nothing I've ever seen before. He is covered with plate like scales and eats ants and termites with a long sticky tongue like an anteater. Here are some pictures of these animals.

Veronica gave it some termites to eat.

The guy who tried to sell me the Pangolin said that if I took it back to the States, I could get about $20,000 for it. If any of you are interested in paying me that much for one of these, I'll see what I can do:)
When they are scared or sense danger, they curl up into a ball, completely covered by these plates.

Here is one of the Genets. They are only about 6 or 8 weeks old.

Their fur is so soft. They have the most amazing tail.

An unforgettable story (reader discretion advised)...

2011-03-02T05:49:00.000-08:00

For our Chiyao language classes, we have been telling stories and recording them and then listening to them and translating them. I tell a simple story about my life or my childhood and then my language helper, Beatriz, tells one about her life. It has been very interesting. Well the other day we went to her house and her mom told us a story about her life during the Portuguese/Mozambique war, when they were fighting for independence. We recorded her story in Chiyao and then with the help of Beatriz translated it into Portuguese and now into English for you all to read. It is an incredibly tragic story that depicts life here during the time of war and all that the people faced during this time. This is her and her story:

During the time of the colonial war against the Portuguese, I had my first child, a boy. We ran away into the forest because of the war. When we lived in the forest, we built homes out of grass. The sides of the house, the roof, everything was made of grass. During the second year of the war, some lions appeared where we were living. Goats and other animals slept outside the houses and us people would sleep inside the houses. When one lion appeared, he hit my house where I and my child were sleeping. I tried to scream, but no one heard me. At this place, there were many people, but no one could hear me. That lion ripped my house and came inside until he was able to take my child. I left the house to call help, "come here and see, a lion came and took my son." When people came and saw me, they found me wounded badly and my whole body covered in blood. After, the people began to scream, and many more people appeared. When they arrived they didn't find the lion. He took my son and ate him. There in the forest, where we lived, was only his head. The people found the head and they brought it back to me to bury. The lion returned a second time to take the mother of the child (me), but he found the place full of people screaming, and he ran away. This happened during the time of the war. During this year, we left for Malawi because we were afraid of the war of guns and the war of lions. There in Malawi, I gave birth to 5 more children. I then returned to Mozambique and had 7 more children. After this, I lost my husband. This is when I began to live with my children.

Here are some of the scars from the lion that attacked her. She also has many scars on her legs that she showed us, but we didn't feel comfortable taking pictures of.

This is me, Beatriz, and her mom. I look like a giant compared to them. They are both so small. Beatriz is 5th or 6th in line of the children and her mom gave birth to 14 children in all.

Likoma Island...

2011-03-01T03:22:00.000-08:00

We spent the past weekend on Likoma Island. It is actually an Island owned by Malawi, but is only 6 kilometers off the shore off Mozambique. We boated across and stayed one night on the Island. It was very beautiful and relaxing, and we had a nice time with friends.

We went with some friends of ours, Jan and Bonnie and their son, Joseph. They also have a daughter, Deborah. Jan is from the Netherlands and Bonnie is from the States.

Keith and Bronwyn. They are from South Africa, and have a daughter, Zoe.

This is Hugo and Esti and their son, Samuel. They are from South Africa as well.

This is where we stayed on the Island. It was beautiful from the outside, but the inside wasn't so great.

This is a view from the chalets.

After a rather large scorpion ran across my foot in the shower, we found this guy under the bed Karis was sleeping in. It is a centipede that has a nasty bite!

This is called a water scorpion, but is relatively harmless, but very scarey looking. We found him in our closet.

Relaxing on the beach!

We boated around the entire Island. It is about 18 square kilometers. The Island is pretty much empty, except for a few lodges and villages. This was one lodge that was beautiful.

Another Chalet.

This was the very tip of the Island, just a big bunch of rocks. It was interesting how diverse the landscape was for such a small Island.

We stopped to get some fuel for the boat and we were instantly surrounded (an unexpected stop at the zoo).

This little girl watched us the whole time, but wouldn't come near us.

Girls, Girls, Girls...

2011-02-21T08:58:00.001-08:00

Karis turned 5 years old on February 15th and we had a little girls party for her. It was really fun. She had a great time with her friends. Here are some pictures of the party. It was actually a joint party with a colleague's daughter, Abigail, who also turned 2 this month.

Just to give you a feel for how "international" life is here, I'll tell where all the girls in the picture are from. Starting from the left is Abigail, her mom is Romanian and her dad is Mozambiquian, Zoe(behind Kallen) is from South Africa, Deborah(next to Zoe), her dad is from the Netherlands and her mom is from the US, Clara and Victoria(in front of Deborah) their mom is from the US and their dad is from the Congo, the two girls to the right of Karis, Samara and Natanya, are from Singapore. We Americans are actually the minority here. Tim made the girls animal balloons as they arrived.

The cake.

Karis eating the cake.

We put out all our playdough and all the girls made something out of playdough. They loved it and played and played.

Karis opening gifts.

Here are the girls opening their goody bags.

"At the Zoo"

2011-02-21T03:10:00.001-08:00

Life in Africa many times feels like life in a zoo. Just like the picture above, this is our life here. We are constantly being observed. When we stop our car, people flock to our car and stand around observing us like we are an exhibit in a zoo. Many times it is funny or almost flattering how people find us so interesting to watch. However most of the time, it is very difficult. The kids get shy and hide and refuse to talk. It can be very overwhelming to them when kids climb the car and look in the windows or try to touch their hair through the open windows. But one of the hardest times for me is when we are at church. I consider going to church like going to the zoo, not to see the animals, but to actually be the animals! This is especically true when we visit new churches. The past couple of weeks, we have been visiting new churches. This church we attended a couple weeks ago, was a baptist church in the area. We went because the new church that we have been a part of in Namakula has joined with the local Uniao Baptista Church and they were having an ordination service for our pastor and another church leader. It was really a great service over all. But for me, not so great. They had Tim sit in the very front with all the church leaders and so I was stuck in the back with all three kids by myself. The church was packed. We sat on a bench in the back and at first it was just me and the three kids. We fit comfortably on the bench just us, well as the service progressed, another lady joined us and then another and another, until it was me, the three kids, 3 other ladies and another girl, so Kallen was on my lap and Karis was on Traeger's lap. The kids were not too happy about this and by now it is also starting to get very hot. The whole bench in front of us is turning around watching us and laughing at the kids. Kallen keeps climbing the lady next to us and Traeger and Karis are fighting about sitting on each other and bumping into the lady in front of us. They are crying because they are hot, and hungry and I can't even move enough to reach our bag to get food. I eventually reach the crackers and end up feeding everyone in the last 2 benches of the church. Finally after we can take it no longer, I decide to just go outside with the kids. So we go outside and about 1/2 the kids follow us out. We then go find a place to sit down and are immediately surrounded by people. The kids have to use the bathroom now, so we search for the outhouse. We have kids follow us there and wait outside until we are done. Then Traeger and Karis start fighting about something and I am trying to discipline them without anyone knowing what I am doing as the whole world is watching. Kallen wanders off and I can't find her. Eventually I find her with some other children, with someone's, who knows whose, half eaten sucker in her mouth(like the zoo, maybe I should make some signs, 'please don't feed the children'). Of course she is the only one not shy with the other kids. I get my kids gathered once again and then someone else has to use the bathroom, so back to the outhouse we go, with another crowd of kids following us...and so it goes until church finally ends and after much shaking of hands and greetings, we can pile into our car and head home for some peace. Until next Sunday, when we go back to the zoo...

This is the Uniao Baptista Church. This is our group of people from our little church in Namakula singing a special number at the church. Our pastor Geoffery was ordained as well as the other leader in our church, Peri-Peri.

The next Sunday after we visited the Uniao Baptista Church, we visited this little church, not far from our house. This is the church we have matched funds with to build a new church building. Tim spoke at the service and presented the rest of the funds we matched for them. They were so grateful and as you can see truely are in need of a new building.

This is a picture of the outside of the church. They will be building the new building where the cornfield is, behind the church.

Here is Tim presenting the money to the pastor.

Here is Kallen with one of the girls she befriended at the Uniao Baptista Chruch.

2011-02-02T02:30:00.000-08:00

"Your will is that I should praise you, O Lord my God, who gave life and a body to that infant: you will me to praise you who equipped him with faculties, built up his limbs, and adorned him with a distinctive shape, as we can see. You implanted in him all the urges proper to a living creature to ensure his coherence and safety; and now you command me to praise you for those gifts, and to confess to you and sing your name, O Most High, because you are God, almighty and good, and would be so even if you had wrought no other works than these, since none but yourself, the only God, can bring them into existence." St. Augustine (the confessions)

This picture is of Rosa and Kanita, two of the children of the family we lived next to in Muembe. Children are so fragile here. Almost every week we hear of another infant or child that has died of malaria or some other sickness. Just this past week, we know of two who died of malaria. It seems so hopeless at times and scary to think of raising our kids here, but then we are reminded of who gave life and body to that child, who brought them into existence, and He is good. We praise God for the lives of these children and our own. We praise God that we can be here sharing the hope He brings because we already have this hope living inside of us.

All heart...

2011-01-19T22:30:00.000-08:00

I love this picture, because it is so Tim. He talks to anyone and everyone. He is always practising his Yao, even with the people who don't speak Yao, because well, there are some words similar in all these African bantu languages. I often get annoyed and I am always saying, "Tim, they do understand Portuguese, why don't you just use that." Or when he is in Malawi, "hello, they speak English, what are you thinking??????" But really I am just jealous. I am so much more timid to use my Yao or to even try to communicate that I just stand there and smile. I miss out on so much because of this. I mean look at the lady in this picture. How amazing is that, because he is willing to try and doesn't care if he messes it all up and just has this incredible desire to connect with these people in their heart language, he gets responses like this all the time. And every where he goes, people love him, because he is willing, because they know he cares and truely wants to get to know them. Man, do I need to take a lesson. I pray God gives me the courage to follow suit!

Happy Holidays!

2010-12-27T02:51:00.000-08:00

We didn't do a Christmas newsletter this year. We are going to try to do one for January, but we wanted to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

We spent a week before Christmas in Malawi with some friends at a cottage on the lake. We had great weather and the kids spent A LOT of time in the water. Traeger learned to swim under water for the first time. Kallen loved the water and is a little dare devil. We had to be watching her every second. We arrived back in Lichinga on the 19th of December and we had a very nice Christmas at home. We had a big turkey dinner here, Christmas Eve, for some collegues of ours. It was very nice. We sang Christmas carols after dinner and read some scripture. The kids are old enough now, that they are understanding better the true meaning of Christmas. We spent a lot of time reading Bible passages and talking about God sending Jesus to be our Saviour. Traeger and Karis slept in the living room by the Christmas tree and then Christmas morning we opened presents. Later that afternoon, we went to our church in Namakula for a Christmas service and lunch. So our Christmas dinner was beans and rice! Overall we had a very nice Christmas, but we are looking forward to being home next year and enjoying Christmas with family. Here are some pictures of our festivities.

We had a "band" waiting for us when we arrived at the cottage in Malawi. The local kids were trying to earn money by singing and dancing and playing the drums.

This is the front view of the cottage we stayed at.

This is view looking out from the cottage towards the lake.

Here is the beach.

We had a couple big storms come up on the lake while we were there. It was really incredible to watch.

Karis washing her hair in the sprinkler.

This is a colorful chinchilid from Lake Malawi. It is famous for these colorful fresh water fish.

Karis and her "princess" sand castle.
Traeger learned to swim underwater and jump from rocks into the water. He has been so cautious about the water, it was fun to see the progress he made in the week.

Kallen learning to swim.

Singing Christmas carols on Christmas Eve.

The kids opening presents "in front" of grandma and grandpa on Christmas morning. It was about 5:30am our time and 10:30pm, Christmas Eve, their time. And no we didn't plan to get up that early, the kids were up and ready to open presents by 5:15am!

As you can see the kids were spoiled this year, we received about 7 packages of Christmas gifts from Grandma and Grandpa, aunts and uncles, and friends, so there was no shortage of gifts this year.

Kallen really enjoyed opening her gifts this year.

Our family Christmas 2010...

2010-12-05T02:44:00.000-08:00

I had the great idea of taking a family photo for Christmas this morning. Here is how the morning went.
Mommy: alright kids, I already picked out your clothes for today, we are taking family pictures. Put these on.
Karis: I hate that skirt. It feels hard. Do I have to put it on?
Mommy: yes, I get to pick out your clothes today, you can take them off right after pictures are done.
Karis: alright.
Traeger: These sleeves bug me, why are they like this? I can't get my pants pulled up. These are too small.
Kallen: I no like it mommy. Want nother one.
Mommy: TOUGH! I get to pick out your clothes today.
Mommy: Karis, come on lets do your hair.
Karis: I don't want my hair done. Do I have to have barettes? I hate barettes. Can you please just comb it.
Mommy: No I can't just comb it. I am putting barettes in, otherwise your hair falls in your face and we won't be able to see you in the pictures.
Karis: I don't care. I don't want to get my picture taken. I am not going to smile.
Mommy: oh, yes you will.
Kallen: Ouch, no like it mommy, no like it.
Mommy: I don't care, your hair is a mess, it has to be combed.
Traeger: I have to get my hair combed too, I thought that was just for girls.
Mommy: Hurry everyone get in front of the Christmas tree, we are going to take a picture. Where is daddy?
Daddy: I am in the shower.
Mommy: What??? Everyone is ready, we need to take this picture NOW!
Daddy: I am hurrying.
Mommy: Karis, stop rolling on the floor you are messing up your hair. Kallen don't eat that peanut butter toast right now, I don't want you dirty. Come on, lets pick up this mess in front of the Christmas tree. Kallen, put the cushions back on the couch. Traeger stop pulling your sisters hair, you are messing it up. Come on, CLEAN UP!
Traeger: But we don't want to take pictures. This is not a good idea.
Mommy: Ok fine, if everyone smiles for the pictures and sits still, you can all have cookies for breakfast.
Kallen: I do mom, I do. I want cookie.

Finally, daddy arrives and this is how it turned out:

Another one of mommy's brilliant ideas for a family photo.

After about 200 pictures and enough yelling that I feel slightly horse, this one turned out...ok...not great, but it will have to do, I am not doing that again!

And here are those angelic children:)

Holidays...

2010-12-04T01:19:00.000-08:00

Well it has been awhile since we've updated our blog. We've been busy with holidays and school. Tim has been doing a sermon series at our new church on going through the Bible chronologically. It has been going really well. Michele has joined the ladies group at church, which meets on Thursday afternoons. She led the study for the first time last week. The great part about this group is that they sing and yes, dance, at church on sunday mornings and you all know how talented Michele is at singing and dancing!

Language studies for Tim and Michele have been continuing as normal...slowly we are getting the hang of this language. Michele has started 1st grade with Traeger now and it is going well, but takes up a lot more time than Kindergarten did. We are still waiting for the rains to begin. We have had a few short rains, but not much yet.

Here are a few pictures of the past month.

This was our Thanksgiving school project. The kids decorated the feathers and then we wrote what they were thankful for on the feathers.

Here is a picture of Thanksgiving dinner at our house. We had 17 adults and 21 kids. We had a full house and lots of really good food.

Then we decorated for Christmas. It looks pretty Christmasy inside, but outside, it is 85 degrees and very humid, not very Christmasy at all!

This is how we found Traeger and Karis when they were supposed to be hanging ornaments on the tree.

Traeger lost his first tooth. We can't believe he is old enough to be losing his teeth already.

Our baby is no longer a baby and is making up for her amazing first year. Year 2 has been so much work keeping track of her! She is all over the place and the busiest 2 year old ever!

Now and Then....

2010-10-25T03:47:00.000-07:00

We are at the end of the dry season here in Mozambique. We are blowing dust off our computer as we type. We are having to wipe our dining room table off every hour or the kids write their names in the dust. We are grinding our teeth on dust and our snot is brown all the time. If the kids get water splashed on their face, it streaks brown as the water runs down their faces. We are so ready for the rain! Of course then we deal with mud, but I will take mud anyday over the dust. At least mud stays on the ground(well most of the time), but the dust is everywhere. There are benefits of the dry season however. One of them being that the people are around. Normally in the rainy season the Mozambiquians spend the majority of their time in their fields, preparing, planting, taking care of, and then harvesting their crops. The dry season people are enjoying the fruits of their labor and are home, so ministry is most effective during this time. The rainy season also makes travel almost impossible. Most of the roads to the villages are all dirt and with the rain, they are almost impossible to pass. The rivers also flood and cover the bridges. So we are thankful for the dry season and what we are able to do and relationships we are able build during this time, but we are also thankful for the rain and the relief it brings. Without the rain, the people here would not survive. Rain allows their crops to grow and produces the food. Rain brings cooler weather, as right now is the hottest part of our year. Rain makes everything green again and stomps that awful dust deep into the ground!

The following pictures are an example of the dry season vs the rainy season. These pictures are of the same hill in Chiconono.

This picture was taken in August of this year.

This one was taken in February of this year.

Happy 2nd Birthday Kallen!

2010-09-07T03:46:00.001-07:00

Happy Birthday,

To You.

Happy Birthday,

To You.

Happy Birthday,

Dear Kallen.

Happy Birthday,

TO YOU!

Marriage seminar update...

2010-09-07T01:14:00.000-07:00

We just wanted to give a little update on the marriage seminar that we have doing during the month of August. It has gone very well. We actually extended an extra week and they still don't want it to end, so they have requested another week. We will be doing another week on the 18th of September. We have had between 30 and 40 people each week and we have had great discussion and response from the people attending. Tim has been teaching straight from Genesis and also using Ephesians. Many of the people didn't even know that the Bible talks about marriage or that it was created by God. They don't have any confidence in their marriages because they end so suddenly. Being a matrilineal society, the wifes family can take her back if they are unhappy with anything the man does. So the men don't take their marriages very seriously. We have talked a lot about leaving and cleaving and the importance of the marriage relationship in God's eyes. Tim teaches in Portuguese and then it is translated into chiyao. We have a couple strong believers who have really led the discussions for us and at times they are all talking and discussing in chiyao for up 1/2 hour at a time and we just sit there. They are really taking seriously the areas that the Bible and their culture conflict in the area of marriage and the roles of men and women within marriage. For example, last week they had a very heated discussion about the traditional role of women and doing the laundry. Here the women always do the laundry and they do it by hand. They have to either go down the river or stream or to a well and scrub by hand all the clothes. It is a very tough job and takes a long time. So the men are wondering if they wanted to be helpful to their wives and help them in this task, how can they do this without looking totally crazy by joining all the women in the area at the river or well and washing clothes. It is good that they are wanting to do something about it, but we also see the struggle in it as it would be awkward. This is not a minor issue for the most part, but you can see where traditions and culture can hinder their marriage relationship. They are wondering how they can follow God and the Bible, while still keeping the traditions in their heritage and culture. It is tough for them as we have talked about at times having to go completely against their culture to follow Christ.

Also, we have an exciting update about Caia, where Tim has been going to disciple the new believers every friday since we arrived here. We had a baptism last sunday and 4 of the new believers were baptised. There a few more women who would like to be baptised now, so we may do another one in the near future. It has been an exciting step forward as it has been a slow process to get them to this point. We had quite a crowd watching, so we are hoping the questions will draw more people into the small church there.

These are the four guys who were baptised sunday.

This is Peri-peri, who was baptised on sunday. He has been one of guards in Lichinga for the past year and has grown spiritually by leaps and bounds.

We had to take a walk down to the river for the baptism. We had to literally climb down to the river.

This Pastor Musa, who did the baptism.

Here is Tim with some of the men from the marriage seminar.

After each meeting we eat lunch together.

This is where we meet for the marriage seminar out in Mapudje.

What we've been up to....

2010-08-02T06:09:00.001-07:00

A lot has been going on since we last updated our blog. Tim finished his teaching at YWAM's discipleship training seminar on missions. We celebrated Tim's birthday and Traeger's sixth birthday. We made an emergency trip to Malawi for Michele to get IV antibiotics for a cellulitis infection on her nose and face. We've made another trip to Malawi to pick up Michele's good friend Kendra, who is visiting with us for a month. We spent a week in Muapula for our annual SIM spiritual life conference. We have dug a matekanya egg the size of a pea out of Kallen's little toe and we survived another 3 weeks without internet because the fishing boats again cut the line. It has been a very busy July and we can't believe it is already August.

Please be praying for the marriage seminar we will be teaching starting this saturday in Mapudje. The teaching will continue the first three saturdays in August. Just pray that we could make our teaching relevant and that God would use us to somehow touch them where they are at in their marriages.

Here are a few pictures from the past month. Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of the Matekanya egg we pulled out of Kallen's toe. It was much worse than squeezing the fly larva out of her head some months back. All I kept thinking was, "am I a horrible mother or what?" The poor kid!

The Lugenda...

2010-06-27T00:00:00.000-07:00

I just got back from a three day canoe ride on the Lugenda river with a friend that I have met here. This river goes through the wildlife reserve in the Niassa province here in Mozambique. It is extremely wild and there is literally nothing along this river except for a few local fishing camps and a few hunting camps. We canoed about 80 kilometers from one hunting camp to another camp. It was such an amazing experience. I really felt like I was living a National Geographic episode. We canoed with crocodiles and tons of hippos. We did get a little too close for comfort a few times to some hippos. Unfortunately it was hard to take many pictures because I had to protect my camera from the water. We also saw 4 elephants and some Water Buck(which is a type of deer). Here are some pictures of the trip.

Here is our car all loaded with the gear. The road out to the bush to drop us off and pick us up was pretty rough. A 7 hour ride on these roads seems like an eternity.

This was our camp the first night. We were all in the water swimming and we heard this very loud sound of an animal running towards us, we look up and there is an elephant running straight at our camp. He stopped right at the little hill behind the fire in this picture and then put his head up and jumped a few times and then turned around and walked away. It was a little frightening to say the least.

The river was full of rapids and we did our share of falling out of the canoe. This was one of the rough spots.

We think this is the elephant that charged at us. We had seen him earlier right before we stopped to camp and he was ripping down trees to eat the leaves. Eventually he wandered back into the woods and we stopped to camp a little ways down stream. We were quit surprised to see him again running right at us!

Here is where we camped the first night, the same place where the elephant charged our camp. We slept in these mosquito pods, which are basically just a mosquito net with a ground sheet. We thought it would be fun to see the stars as we went to bed. However, after the elephant incident, I got a little scared and didn't sleep much that night, waking up to every sound I heard. Then to top that at 4am it began to rain and it NEVER rains this time of year. So we got soaked. I ended up getting up and stuffing my sleeping bag in a plastic bag to keep it as dry as possible and made myself a fire to keep warm. It was a long night!

Here is Veronica and I.

This was the sunrise from our camp the second night. It was a beautiful spot to spend the night and we slept much better with no rain!

This was one of the prettiest parts of the river. It tooks so many turns and bends with tons of beautiful trees draping over the river.

This was our lunch spot on friday.

When we arrived at the hunters camp on friday, Veronica and I went for a walk. We heard a lion calling and it was getting closer as we got closer to our camp. We asked some of the trackers to come with us and track this lion. We followed it up and down the hills all through the woods. We crossed three streams and finally lost it. Here is one of the foot prints. It is a little tough to see, especially in this small picture. But by the foot print they could tell it was a large male lion.

Here are some of my wounds from the trip. My whole body is so sore, but it was sooo worth it.

New Ministry Opportunities...

2010-06-22T03:24:00.000-07:00

Just thought I would give a little update on some new ministry opportunities we have had. Recently a missionary couple left Mozambique and is beginning a new ministry in another country. They were working very closely with a Mozambiquian christian and his family and they were doing some discipleship/evangelism in a village about an hour and a half away from Lichinga called Mapuje. When they left, they asked Tim to continue mentoring and discipling this Mozambiquian believer, Hussein. Tim has agreed and we have been going out to this village building a relationship with Hussein and doing some discipleship classes as well as evangelism with him. Also we both will be doing a marriage seminar in that village during the first 3 weekends in August. Hussein and his wife have been having a lot of marriage issues and so have many of the other young believers there and here in Lichinga. So our plan is to get them all together 3 saturdays in a row and do a marriage seminar with them. Please pray for us in this, because marriage is so different here. It is hard to know how to relate to them and reach them at their level.
Tim is also teaching at YWAM's (Youth With A Mission) DTS(discipleship training seminar) this next week. YWAM offers an inexpensive, excelerated discipleship program for new believers. They run this program in Lichinga a few times a year. In total there are 12 weeks of lectures and 10 weeks of outreach. So please pray for Tim as he begins this teaching. He will be doing a week of teaching, 4 hours a day on missions. He is a little nervous because he has never taught on missions, but he is looking forward to the opportunity.
Finally, we have paved part of our driveway and put a basketball hoop in our front yard. We like to call this also a "ministry opportunity":) Tim is hoping that he can teach some of our guards to play and maybe draw in some youth from the school across the street to come play. He is excited to start teaching Traeger as well. Here are a couple of pictures of the new hoop.

How time flies...

2010-06-12T23:42:00.000-07:00

Here are some updated pictures of the kids. I can't believe we've been here a year and 4 months already. Traeger is about to celebrate his sixth birthday which will be his second celebrated in Africa and Kallen will be two in September. It is crazy how the time flies...

2010-05-11T03:17:00.000-07:00

We spent the weekend at the Lake and came back to internet after 3 weeks of being without it! For those of you who hadn't heard a boat in the harbor left their anchor down and ripped apart the internet cables. Mozambique, not having the technical ability or equiptment to fix it, had to send for help from SA and after only three weeks it is fixed. Now that we are back online, I am trying to get everything updated. Here are some pictures of our time down in Meponda, on the lake.

Kallen loving the sand. Traeger and Daddy wrestling.

Karis

Breakfast on the lake.

Traeger and Zoe.

Zoe, Traeger, and Karis sitting on the dugout canoe.

The sunset on the lake.

We went for a boat ride down the river. Here is a taxi that carries people back and forth across the river.

Some birds along the river.

Kallen got to drive the boat and LOVED it!

A cargo boat on the lake.

In the end...

2010-05-10T08:37:00.000-07:00

Tim's Genesis class has officially ended. In the end, he gave out 5 certificates of completion. Only 2 guys ended up dropping out of the class and not finishing. One of them moved far away and couldn't attend anymore, so really only one, chose not to complete it. Tim was very happy about the turn out. For the final class the guys assignment was to write a song about the story of creation and teach it to the class. Here the people are oral learners and learn well through stories, songs, and a lot of repetion. Everyone completed the assignment and Tim was very impressed with the end results. He hopes to then to teach, with the help of these guys some of their songs to churches as he is asked to preach or teach in them. Here is a picture of the class and some of them receiving their certificates of completion from Tim. You can pray for Tim as he decides when and what to do for his next class.

Here is Pedro, a local guy that works for a government orphanage.

This is James. His family is all muslim and when he became a Christian his entire family abandoned him.

This is Daniel. He is a youth in the church we attend. He has AIDS and has been in really poor health lately. Tim has really been spending a lot of time helping him with trips to the hospital and receiving the anti-retroviral drugs he needs as well as informally discipling him.

School Days...

2010-04-09T05:41:00.000-07:00

These days have been full of school for all of us. I am homeschooling Traeger and Karis in the mornings from about 7:00-9:30am. Traeger and I are a little over 1/3 of the way through Kindergarten. I hopefully will finish the end of August and then begin 1st grade. Karis will start preschool in September. Right now we are doing a pre-preschool program with her.

Tim and I are both working with language tutors 3 to 4 days a week for about 2 hours a day. We both have started a new language learning program with new language tutors. I am working with a lady, named Beatriz, who is my same age. I am really enjoying getting to know her and have seen a huge improvement in my chiyao since beginning this new program. Tim just began with a new language helper as his other one had trouble with his work schedule and could no longer tutor Tim.

Then Traeger and Karis just started in a new school here in Lichinga in the afternoons. It is really more like an after school program. They attend from 2:30pm until 5pm. We are hoping it will help them with Portuguese as well as develop some friendships. So far it is going well. We had many tears at first, but they are both enjoying it more now and seem to have adjusted to the new routine.

Tim and I are both tired of school and language learning, but we see the great need for it. Here is a great example of the problem of language and the importance of language when living in a foreign country. Today I asked my house helper Clara to wash the kids crocs. I said in Portuguese, "por favor, leva estes sapatos." I didn't pronounce the word LAVA correctly and said LEVA, which means please take these shoes instead of please wash these shoes. So my house helper went home today with 2 very nice pairs of crocs! The only shoes my kids wear. I am just hoping there is a possibility of getting them back. We'll see... It is a little frusterating after speaking the language for 2 years now that I am still making mistakes. And of course now I am trying to learn a third language on top of my second language which is far from perfect yet! I guess I will continue to pray for God's grace!

This is our school room at home, where the kids and I do school every morning. They are enjoying having grandma here to join in with school right now.

This is me and Beatriz doing our language studies.

Here is the inside of their classroom.

Just thought I'd stick in a picture of Kallen too.

This is the kids classroom and the lady who runs the school, Lydia. She is a Brazilian missionary.

All ready for school.

Experience is everything...

2010-02-25T00:21:00.000-08:00

My parents were able to spend three weeks with us here in Mozambique. They were not only able to see where we live, meet the people we work with, and see the country of Mozambique, but they were able to experience our daily life here. They know what it feels like to go into a small village and be surrounded by kids touching and laughing at you. They know what is like to eat shima with your hands. They know what it is like to drive out to a village a few kilometers away that may take two hours to get there because of horrible, bumpy, muddy roads. They know what it is like feel uncomfortably wealthy in the face of extreme poverty. They also know what is like to be able to give and watch a person light up with joy at receiving their first new piece of clothing they have ever owned. They know what it is like to sit in a mud floor church on logs for benches for hours when you can't understand anything being said. They also know what it is like to watch Africans worship the same God we worship with such joy and passion. You can try to explain these things to a person, but you really don't know what it is like until you've experienced it and we are so thankful that when we talk about things here and our life here, they now know exactly what we are talking about.

They also were able to see the grandkids, watch Kallen learn to walk, celebrate Karis' 4th birthday, and participate in Traeger's homeschooling. The kids had three weeks of getting just about anything they wanted and now we are in the process of de-spoiling them. Which we often hear " I wish Grandma was still here." " I want Grandma to do it." and " Grandma would give me it." But it was all worth it! Here are some pictures of their "experience" here.

giving gifts to kids in Caia

Seeing hippos in the river

a view from Zomba, Malawi

a jungle walk to a waterfall

Karis and Auntie Janice blowing out her candles

playing peek-a-boo with Kallen

wrestling with the kids

reading to the kids

helping the fisherman pull in their nets

a walk through Muembe

giving gifts to each of Mateus' family

eating shima

visiting with Mateus and his family

posing for a picture with kids in Caia

Unyagu...

2010-01-25T03:40:00.000-08:00

We had the opportunity to attend an unyagu ceremony or initiation ceremony for Mateus' two girls, who are 12 and 11 years old. These periods of initiation have a very negative conotation and a lot of very scarey stuff goes on during them. The boys and girls have separate initiations and they each are taught about the Yao culture as well as taught what it is to be a woman and what it is to be a man. The boys are circumcised and taught that they can ask for sex from any female they want. It is their right. And girls are taught that they must say yes to any man that asks for sex. Many times they are taunted and stimulated sexually. This particular one, was supposed to take out a lot of the negative teachings and focus more on Yao culture. No one really knows what when on, because they are done very privately. When the initiation period is over, there is a HUGE party. The girls have all new clothes and either have their hair done or get wigs. A goat is killed and relatives from all over travel to come celebrate. We were able to be a part of this party. For Yao Christians, it is a very difficult decision whether or not to participate in these unyagus. If you don't participate, you aren't considered Yao, and yet with such wrong teachings going on during the initiation, you don't want your children to be taught those things. They have to find an alternative or like this create an unyagu that takes out the negative teachings.

Our gift presentation to Rosa and Linda.

We brought some cakes for the party. We never saw Rosa or Linda smile the entire day. They were very solemn. It makes you wonder if they were traumatized or just acting "grown up".

Waiting for the food.

Everyone had a good day except for this poor unfortunate goat. Yum!

The HUGE pan of Shima being made by the women.

On the first day....there were 7 people!

2010-01-10T20:26:00.000-08:00

Tim's first class on Genesis was this past wednesday and he had 7 people show up. This is a great beginning, much better than expected. The class itself went well and everyone seemed to enjoy it. Now we pray that these people continue beyond the first day. It is hard to get people to be consistent here, so please pray that they continue.

4 of the guys attend the Anglican church that we attend the others are just random people Tim has met and started building relationships with. One of the young guys(in the green t-shirt) has been a christian for a few years and his family kicked him out of his home and his been chasing him away ever since, because of his conversion from Islam to Christianity. One of the guys (not pictured) is young and has AIDS.

This is Paulo, who is attending the class as well as tutoring Tim in Chiyao on mondays and thursdays. He is a leader at the Anglican church, almost like an assistent pastor.

Christmas in Africa!

2009-12-27T05:40:00.000-08:00

It sure is different spending Christmas swimming and water skiing at a lake rather than sledding and drinking hot cocoa. It doesn't feel very "christmassy", but we had a good time. The kids loved swimming and we were visited by a gigantic scorpion, spider, and even a hippo. We did have a present exchange and we sang Christmas carols in the tent at night. On Christmas Eve, we went to Muembe to visit Mateus' family and bring them gifts. It was a great time of fellowship and giving. On Christmas day, we stayed home with our family, ate cinnamon rolls and opened presents that grandma and grandpa, aunts and uncles, and a very generous church sent. The kids slept out under the christmas tree the night before and were up by 5:45am to open presents! The day was cool and rainy, so we pretended it was snowing outside and cuddled up in our pajamas and listened to Christmas music.

So our first Christmas away from home, was difficult, but it was also very good. We started new family traditions and were able to enjoy the opportunity to give to very needy people. We are ever grateful for the gift of Jesus so long ago and that no matter where we may be spending Christmas, we can celebrate HIM.

Traeger and Zoe. We stayed with a missionary family who lives down on the lake, Keith and Bronwyn Eden and their daughter Zoe. We have become good friends with this family and have enjoyed spending time with them.

Meet Clara...

2009-11-20T00:02:00.000-08:00

This is Clara, my house helper. She works monday thru friday and does my dishes, laundry, floors, bathrooms, and anything else I need. She is a very hard worker and I am so thankful for her. I am able to do school with Traeger in the mornings while she cleans for me. I am going to be taking over the guest house operation, now that we are back from Muembe and we are also creating a small library for the missionaries in the area that I am setting up and running, so I will now have some added responsibilities and I am able to do this largely because of Clara.

Clara is married and has two daughters. Her husband has two wives (Clara and a first wife). He is also an alcoholic and does not like her working for us. He wants her home at all times (for whatever reason), but he refuses to give her any money to feed and clothe her children, because he spends it all on alcohol or gives it to his first wife. He verbally abuses her and has physically abused the friend that recommended Clara to us and got her the job. When she gets paid each month, whatever she doesn't spend before she gets home, he forces her to give to him. She has recently asked if we would lend her money to build a house for her and her daughters because she needs to get out of this situation and protect her daughters. She fears he will begin to physically abuse her if she doesn't quit the job and she cannot feed her family if she isn't working. Tim and I spent time praying about this and we have talked in depth with Clara about this and have decided to help her.

Here no one is married "legally". It is all done through family agreements and for a women to divorce, her family has to agree that it is necessary to leave and basically "takes" her back. A man can divorce whenever he wants and just gets up and leaves. Clara's father is dead, but she has met with her uncle, who has agreed that she should leave him and has given his blessing on her building a new house. Clara's family is Anglican and she attends an Anglican church here, but we are unsure of her status with Christ. We are praying for her and pray that we are an example to her of a godly marriage and family. Please pray for her as she makes this move and that her husband will not get physical with her when he finds out her plans.

New Buisness in Caia.

2009-11-19T23:40:00.000-08:00

Our newest idea for Caia is an oil press(and yes we donated one of my mountain dew bottles to the effort). This is Geoffery, who will be running the oil press in Caia. He has agreed to move out to Caia to pastor the new church there. This oil press will allow him to earn money to live in Caia while pastoring the new church as well as bring a resource to Caia that currently isn't available. The press is hand operated and you use sunflower seeds and heat to create oil. We figure in 3 to 4 hours a day of cranking you can get about 5 liters of oil and sell it for about 30 meticais or $1 a liter. At $5 a day, Geoffery could afford to pay someone else to help, pay for the cost of seed and supplies, and still make a good living.

Tim and Geoffery are still working out some kinks in the press, but hopefully in the next month, we will have everything set and Geoffery can move out and begin pastoring the church and running the oil press. Please pray with us in this regard.

10 years...don't they go by in a flash....

2009-11-05T07:59:00.000-08:00

Ok. so we debated putting this in our blog. We don't want everyone at home thinking we're spending your money friviously and we don't want you to think all we do here is vacation. BUT, we were given an amazing opportunity to celebrate our 10th anniversary at Nkwichi Lodge and it was so incredible, we had to share it with everyone. Nkwichi is a 4 1/2 hour drive north a long Lake Nyassa and then an 1 1/2 boat ride to the middle of nowhere right on the lake. Months ago, some of the guys who work at Nkwichi came into town for supplies. One of them ended up with Malaria and was very sick. They had to leave him at our SIM guesthouse and I(Michele) took care of him for a few days until they could get back to pick him up. I just brought him medicine and food and kept an eye on him, but the guys there were so grateful, they offered us a great deal to spend a few days at their lodge. They actually run a conservation program as well as the lodge. They do community projects to help the local people learn to farm properly in the sand and also employ many locals to work on their farm and as staff at the lodge. If you want to know more about them, you can check out their website at http://www.mandawilderness.org/. We had a wonderful time our 3 days there. It is the longest we have been away from our kids in 2 1/2 years, so it was so needed. Janice, our field director, sacraficially took our kids for the 3 nights...and she lived to tell about it! We are so thankful for her. Here are some pictures of our trip.

We spent a few hours in a small village called Cobue waiting for the boat to pick us up. We have a doctor friend who lives in Cobue and does training and education as well as medical services for the people along the lake. They have absolutely no access to any medical care whatsoever, so she is it for them. We were able to observe a training on epilepsy that she was doing. She really has done amazing things for the people there. She has people walking for miles and miles along the lake to come and see her.

These are the ruins of an old catholic church left by the Portuguese in Cobue. It is the only structure in the village other than the grass huts surrounding it.

This was a picture I took on our 1 1/2 hour boat ride. These 4 boys are taking a boat out to fish. The lake is life for the people that live here, it is their source of water for cooking, cleaning, and drinking as well as food, mainly fish.

Here is one of our first views of Nkwichi. Crystal clear water and white sand beach. It looks like the Ocean or the Carribean, but is a fresh water lake.

The Beach.

This is our chalet, Nkwazi, which means fish eagle.

Here is the bathroom in the open air, overlooking the water.

The sink and shower.

We were the only people there and we had 75 staff members at our disposal, so we were treated like royalty. We were given the option of eating anywhere we wanted. For breakfast we ate on the deck.
Lunch on the beach.

Dinner at our own private dining area, right off our chalet.

Or right on the beach.

In the afternoons, we would have drinks on the beach in front of the fire while we watched the sunset.

During the days, we relaxed on the beach and snorkled.

The fish are actually very bright and colorful, which is unique for a fresh water lake.

One day it was windy and there were huge waves, so we did a little body boarding, which was super fun. The best part of all, this is a fresh water lake, so no salt up your nose and in your mouth and making you sticky and itchy.

We also took a walk down a foot path that is traced back thousands of years to when the Arabs came and captured Africans to use as slaves. They used this path to bring the slaves back up north. It is one of the longest footpaths in Africa, reaching from all the way down to Johannesburg and up through Tanzania and into Kenya. Along the way, there is this 2,000 year old Boabab tree. It is 29 meters in circumference. During the war, Mozambiquians would use this tree as a hiding place. The inside is all hollow. It was incredible to see.

We also had monkeys and baboons playing along the beach in front of our chalet. They kept us entertained.

Where is Fluffy?

2009-10-19T23:29:00.000-07:00

Our new cat Fluffy has gone missing many times and we never seem to be able to find her. Here are some places we have found her and I wonder how she got in these places????

In a box...

In the toy box...

In the night stand...

hanging on the wall...
And yes in a plastic bag, luckily we caught this one before she suffocated. And yes Karis is the culprit...

But she LOVES her kitty!

Kallen One Year (13 months)...

2009-10-19T23:01:00.000-07:00

Dancing In The Streets

2009-10-12T05:48:00.000-07:00

Before the film we played music and the people in Caia danced and boogied their way into the night.

We told you about showing the Jesus Film in Caia a couple weeks ago, so we thought we would share a few photos from the event. It seemed almost the whole village was there and they stayed right on till the end of the movie. Before the film several testimonies were given by Africans in Chiyao and a short evangelistic presentation by another Yao woman. This has opened up many doors for discussion and in fact the Regulo (chief) came the next morning and asked many questions about Muhammed and Jesus.

We want also to give a big thanks to our missionary friends - Jesse, Christian, Victor, Jeffrey and the others that came along and provided the equipment.

We are also considering doing a developmental project in Caia based on the needs of the people there. Currently their well is broken so good clean water is non-existent and the water they do have is far away. If you would like to support us in this developmental project or other evangelistic efforts such as the Jesus Film please contact us at tim.george@sim.org.

Happenings...

2009-09-24T07:14:00.000-07:00

Sorry it has been awhile since we updated the blog. With my camera broken I have not been motivated to update the blog. Thankfully, we have a very generous collegue here who loaned us a camera until we can get a new one. It has been so nice to have a camera again. We have been busy the past couple of weeks going back and forth to Muembe and there have been some new happenings.

One thing that impressed us the past couple of weeks has been the seriousness of the health situation here in Mozambique. On our way to Muembe about a week and a half ago, we came across a bad accident. One of the chapa(taxi) trucks had tipped over. These trucks carry many passengers in the bed of the truck as well as inside the truck and there were probably about 20 people needing to go to the hospital. We were the first vehicle to pass and the accident happened about a half hour before we arrived. There is no cell phone coverage in this part of the country or anything, so we with a full carload and an extra passenger, because we were giving her a ride out to Muembe, we played ambulance and carried the four worst of the injured back to Lichinga to the hospital. We put a lot of cargo on top of the truck and Traeger and Karis and Kallen all sat on my lap, while we had two barely conscious people in our backseat. We also loaded another two in the back of the truck, one with a very small infant. It took us about 1/2 hour over very bumby roads with them riding like that to arrive at the hospital. We have no idea to what extent these people were injured, only that they were barely conscious, but when we arrived at the hospital, they just pulled them out of the vehicle like they were dolls and carried them in and because they were short beds, laid two people on a bed the short way! It was a scary experience and makes me pray every trip out to Muembe or anywhere for that matter that we are protected from accidents. Also in the past few weeks team members of ours have had very serious health problems and one had to be med edvacuated out of the country to Joburg and the other almost. We are thanking God for his provision of health for our family thus far and ask that you all continue to pray in that regard.

We also killed our first poisenous snake in Muembe. There was a Mamba, which is very deadly, in Mateus' garden, so we were called over with Tim's big Katana to kill it. He sliced it in half and it fell into a trash pit, which we then lit on fire just to make sure it was dead! We always knew these were around, but we didn't know if we would come across one, at least we can rest knowing this one is dead.

On a lighter note, Tim constructed a swingset for the kids in our yard in Lichinga. The kids have been loving it and we are pretty proud of Tim's first construction project ever. It's a little bigger than we planned, but at least there is room for growth.

Tim is going to be going out to Caia tomorrow for an outreach event. They are planning on showing the Jesus film in Yao for the people there. Jeffrey, our guard, will be presenting the gospel afterwards, so you can be praying for him and the whole event. Tim will spend the night out there and meet with any people the following day that have questions, want to know more, or want to make decisions.

Our last bit of news is that Kallen is finally crawling!!! 2 weeks after her first birthday and she has finally started crawling. It has been fun to watch her and she is getting around good. She now follows me into the kitchen and her knees are permanently red. While in Muembe this last time, we had to keep her in the sandbox or in the house so she wouldn't crawl through the red dirt. She still got pretty dirty of course, but at least is wasn't that red awful dirt.

Here is our swingset, with one swing for each of the kids.

I also got to play barbershop in Muembe this week. I brought my clippers to cut Tim and Traeger's hair and I ended up cutting almost Mateus' whole family as well. They all got a buzz cut!

Happy Birthday Kallen!

2009-09-06T00:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we celebrated Kallen's first birthday. It is crazy how fast time flies. We just spent the day with our family. She was so happy all day. It was a bittersweet time for me. It was a good day, but so sad that no one could share it with us. I think first birthdays are more for the mom that the one year old. She doesn't know what is going on, but I felt so sad for her that no one could be there to celebrate with us. My camera broke while we were in Muembe(our guard dropped it) and I was so disappointed I barely got any pictures. These we had to take with our cell phone, but they just don't come out great. I am lost with a camera, it so key in our communication for this blog, for the grandparents, and events like these, that are only able to be witnessed through pictures, so please pray that I can get another soon. Here is a little video of her eating her cake. She enjoyed it as you will see.

The time is now

2009-09-05T09:19:00.001-07:00

A short video...

2009-08-16T09:15:00.000-07:00

Here is a video of Kallen's newest thing, fake crying. If you tell her no or look at her sternly, she pulls out this fake cry and we just laugh at her. It is so funny.

A new faith...A new church...

2009-08-16T07:04:00.000-07:00

After 2 weeks in Muembe, Tim spent 3 days in Caia, with the new believers there. There have been 7 professions of faith in the past couple months in the village of Caia. They recently constructed a new church "building" for the new church to meet in. Tim and Jeffery, our guard, spent three days, discipling and teaching the new believers there. They talked about baptism, confirming and making public their decision to follow Jesus. They also talked about church and what it looks like to part of a body of believers. It was a great time getting to know the people and how they live as well as showing our commitment to them and willingness to invest in their lives to teach and train them as they begin this new church.
Here are a couple pictures of the new church "building" and the new believers there as well as one of our meeting times, where a lot of people from the village came out to listen.

Muapula...

2009-07-28T04:20:00.000-07:00

We spent last week Muapula at an SIM spiritual life conference. It was a good time. We were able to meet the whole Mozambique team for the first time, which was nice. We also had a great speaker from Nigeria. He challenged and encouraged us spiritually. The kids had a program as well and really enjoyed it. It was a week of sunday school, which is so nice, because that is one of things we miss the most here.

On sunday Tim preached at the Anglican church here in Lichinga. It was a 4 hour service, and we also had lunch afterwards, so it was a long day, but it all went well. Tim did a great job and he got to share his time with the Anglican Bishop, so the service was packed. The Bishop also just happens to be a relative of Tims. I am sure most of you have heard the story, but if not...Tim's dad and Mark's mom are cousins, and we discovered this detail after we had already decided to move to Lichinga. His family lives in Rockford, which is another crazy detail. Mark was voted on by the people as the bishop, which is remarkable as a white man. The people like him, because he is honest and money actually goes to the church and not to line the bishop's pockets.

Anyway, here are some pictures of trip to Muapula, it is beautiful country and in the middle of nowhere.

This is elephant dung. We saw many piles of it along the way, but unfortunately, no elephants.

We did see plenty of babboons like this one.

Here is Tim giving his message in Portuguese. The guy in the white robe is translating to Chiyao for him.

Here is Mark, the Bishop of the Anglican church in Mozambique.

Confirmation...

2009-07-17T04:55:00.000-07:00

After a difficult week the last time we were in Muembe, this past week and a half was great confirmation. After all the discouragement came all kinds of encouragement. We started our time there celebrating Traeger's 5th birthday. He had a great time at our little party and was able to share it with true friends. The next couple days Tim had the opportunity to teach at a conference for the Anglican church there in Muembe and he did a great job and had wonderful feedback from the pastor. We are confident this will lead to many other opportunities of teaching at the churches in Muembe and in Lichinga. He also was able to really develop more of friendship with Pastor Luis and hopefully they will be working together a lot more in the future. He will also be starting a Bible study with Mateus' oldest son, Jildo(who we also hired to guard our house while we are away, so hopefully there will be no more robberies). We are really starting to develop great relationships with Mateus and his family and that is so encouraging. It is amazing how fast relationships can form when you are with each other 24/7, well almost anyway. It really feels like family in a lot of ways. We were also able to visit some missionary friends of ours in a nearby city and their dog just had 9 puppies, so the kids were thrilled to be able to pick out another puppy to replace Jalea. We will have to wait another month to take it home, because it was just born a couple weeks ago. So, we praise God for the confirmation and encouragement after all the distress and discouragement of the previous week. Thanks also for all your prayers and encouragement.

Enjoy these pictures of the past week and half.

Mateus' family made this flower arrangement in honor of Traeger and here is Mateus presenting him with it. Of course he cried because everyone was looking at him.
Now a bit happier with his birthday dinner of shima(the white glob is shima) and beans, papaya, and banana bread(the only thing he ate that I actually made).

The birthday cake, made by mom(I am not very creative)!

The "feast".

Traeger and Armindo.

We also made a trip to the "mato" or forest to cut fire wood. Here is Tim cutting down a tree that he and Jildo cut into firewood size pieces and put into our truck.

Here is Kallen tied to Louisa's back. She gets carried around by one of the girls a lot of the day, it's great having so many babysitters!

Karis decided she wanted to carry around here baby, so the girls helped her tie her baby to her back.

The kids most of the day, look like this.

Stopping for a break and some bread.

Here is our kids favorite snack, suger cane, and this is how you eat it, you peel the skin off with your teeth(who needs a knife when you have teeth), and then you chew on the inside until all the suger is extracted and spit it out. It is soooo fun for kids, but a pain in the neck for mom's and dad's and they have to clean up the mess it creates.

The Lord gives and the Lord takes away.....

2009-07-05T05:34:00.001-07:00

Over 60% of the Psalms are songs of lament which means we live in a fallen world and often times need to express to God the emotions of loss and sadness. Sometimes we just want to ask, "Why?". However, when reading the lament psalms we come across a crossroad where we have to decide whether we will let your sadness turn to bitterness and anger at God or decide to turn to praise and let the sadness we feel grow into a subtle and ever-increasing cry of praise to our majestic creator God who is sovereign. We are then able to long for a fully redeemed earth without pain and sadness and where God reigns in all His glory.

Well, this was one of those weeks. We left for Muembe just after my birthday (this is Tim). (My birthday was nice. Michele and I had the opportunity to leave the kids for a couple hours and just have a nice simple dinner together. Our distant relative that lives in Lichinga took the kids.) When we arrived we found that our house had been broken into and had several items stolen. Thankfully they stole items that are common here (for instance they left the sleeping bags but stole the mattresses). And thankfully almost everything will be replaceable except for a memory quilt Michele's mom made for us. We estimate the value of everything at around $500, but the quilt is the thing we are most disappointed about.

In addition to this news we were saddened to see our puppy get worse (some of you may not know that our puppy became sick a month or so ago. We thought we had a proper medicine for the problem.) and worse despite the medicines we were giving her. Her suffering became more and more evident until she spent a couple of days barely moving from her bed, so this week we had to put her down.

It was a tough week in some regards but also an encouraging week with ministry. The Bible study Tim is attending is going well. The study is on prayer and there are 3 young Christians attending. Next week Tim will be leading the study so please pray.

Also, we are going to be planning a time to publicize and show the Jesus film in Muembe. It think it can be a very productive thing especially if we are able to do follow up there and meet with anyone who makes a decision or is interested in hearing more.

The church we attend in Lichinga is also holding a conference in Muembe on July 11 and 12. (It is a strange coincidence but the church in Lichinga actually oversees the church in Muembe). Please pray for this as we will be attending and helping in any way we can. The church is very very small and doesn't receive alot of attention from the pastor in Lichinga because he has no transportation to go there.

God has also given great friends for our kids in Muembe. We laugh everytime we find Traeger and Karis over at Mateus' house eating wugadi (nchima or the staple food in SE Africa) and beans. They even started to complain about our food and request wugadi and beans. Guess we will have to learn to cook something new. Lately we see our kids in the morning and then don't seem them 'til dark. As Mateus says, "somos familia" or "we are family."

So as we conclude this week it has been important for us to cry out to God about the things He has taken away, but also give praise and thanks for the things He has given and continues to give. God is good.

Enjoy these highlights from the week, sorry we have no pics of the robbers, wish we did :).

Sing It . . .

2009-06-19T22:34:00.000-07:00

Here is a little video of the children's choir at the church we attend in Lichinga. We thought everyone would like a little taste of church in Africa.

New Friends in Muembe...

2009-06-18T22:36:00.000-07:00

Well our second week in Muembe went much better than the first. We at least had silverware and we arrived in the morning rather than late afternoon and we even remembered a broom, so things went smoother. It is still hard getting used to cooking everything over a fire and hauling water from the well, but we are starting to get things figured out. I know we need to start lunch by 10 am and dinner by 3pm and we need to have the kids bathed by 5pm, so everything is on a tight schedule ruled by the light of day. We are in the shortest days of the year here now, so it is dark by 5:30pm.

We are really starting to see the benefits of learning Chiyao there. We had some great talks with Mateus and just having his kids around all the time, we hear a lot of Chiyao. Even if a lot of people know Portuguese, you never hear it, so it is a good setting to learn in. The kids spent a lot of time with Mateus' kids this last week and have become great friends with them. I have included a bunch of pictures of them. We are now home for the weekend to do laundry and buy some more supplies to take out with us and we will be returning sunday or monday.

Tim is going to be leading the evangelism/discipleship group out in Caia today, so please be praying for him. Hopefully we will also be setting up a date for the baptism of the new 5 believers there! He will also be leading a Bible study in Muembe in the next few weeks.

Here is Kallen getting a bath. She loves her baths!

At one point we about 20 kids in our quintal(fenced in area). They all stand outside our gate and watch us all day, but we hung up a hammock and everyone wanted to try it out. We let a few kids in and within a few minutes, we had almost the entire village(of kids) waiting for a turn. We eventually had to send them home, because it was a little bit crazy and I was afraid someone was going to get hurt. Of course everyday after that they all wanted to come in again. It is hard to know how to set limits and boundaries, because if you allow too much freedom, we could really be taken advantage of, but we also want to be friendly. We have decided that Mateus' kids are allowed in at anytime and they can bring over one or two friends if they want, but we can't do the whole village again:)

Here is Traeger playing ball with Rosa, Graca, Linda, Miseria, and a couple other kids. Mateus has 8 children, so there are always plenty of kids to play with.

Here is Traeger play fighting with a neighbor kid.

Karis coloring with "the girls". Rosa and Linda are in the green and tan, they are Mateus' daughters. Miseria is in the Maroon and she is a neighbor girl and her sister is the baby named Sheylah. Miseria has the baby all day while her mom is busy working in the fields or pounding corn. It amazing the responsibility these kids have at such a young age.

Traeger and Karis with Graca. Graca is Mateus' 7 year old daughter.

Traeger and Graca just sitting in a tree, playing house.

Karis even ventured out on her own and made some friends. It's harder for her, because she doesn't speak Portuguese like Traeger does. But I have been impressed with her courage to talk to some kids on her own.

We even watched a little veggie tales in Portuguese one day.

Playing Futebol in the campo (field).

Malawi...

2009-06-11T03:36:00.000-07:00

Hard to believe we have been in Mozambique for over 3 months now. We have all been missing home lately. We've heard the three month mark is when homesickness hits. So it was nice to have a change of senery and visit Malawi for a week. We had to get Kallen's 9 month vaccinations and wanted to do a little shopping for things we cannot purchase in Mozambique, so we took a trip to Malawi. We had a great time and Kallen is now all caught up on her vaccinations, so it was profitable. We are now here in Lichinga for a few days and then Saturday we head back out to Muembe.

This picture is actually of a princess birthday party Karis attended before we left for Malawi. There are a lot of little girls here, unfortunately for Traeger, there are very few boys.
Here a picture of one of our first views of Malawi. It has so much more infostructure than Mozambique. It is amazing the difference as you cross the boarder, all the streets are paved, houses made of bricks instead of mud and a lot more tin roofs and buildings. The minimum wage in Mozambique is actually higher than Malawi and the cost of living is higher in Mozambique, but because of the war, there is so little infostructure in Mozambique, so Malawi seems so much richer.

Karis got bit by a dog(the gash under her eye) on our first stop in Malawi, luckily the dog was owned by some missionaries and has had all it's shots, so we didn't need to worry about rabies or anything.

Here is Kallen at exactly 9 months old, enjoying the beach in Malawi.

There were monkeys that roamed all throughout the property where we stayed. They often would come and play right in front of our room.

The kids throwing the monkeys bread.

Here we are in front of our room.

Kallen's first swimming experience. She really did enjoy the water, once she got used to it.

We survived...barely!

2009-05-28T23:36:00.000-07:00

Well we survived our first 5 days in Muembe. It was not a pretty sight, but we did it. We were a little unprepared. Our first mistake was leaving at 2:00pm on Saturday instead of right away in the morning. On the way, Jalea, our dog, threw up all over and caused a little bit of delay as we sat at the side of the road trying to wash out the car, Karis' foot, leg, and shoe with our limited supply of drinking water. We didn't end up arriving until about 3:30pm and the water pump was about to go off, so we had to really quickly run to the well and get the water we needed for the night. Then we thought we better get a fired started to start our dinner. We bought charcoal from some locals on the way up. Tim tried to start a fire for over an hour before Pastor Matias came over and let us know that we had bought bad charcoal. We didn't know there was such a thing as bad charcoal. So finally he helped us get a fire started and we started our dinner of rice and chicken. By then it was almost dark and we still didn't have our beds set up or anything. Our solar powered laterns didn't work because we didn't have time to set them out in the sun to charge and I realized we had left the silverware at home, so we had Kallen's baby spoon and a spatula for all 4 of us to eat from. So for the next four days that is all we had for utensils. We are perfecting the art of eating with our hands, although soup doesn't work that well with your hands, so we either drank our soup or shared the baby spoon. We took freezing cold bucket baths. Karis didn't even mind, Traeger threw a fit! It was pretty miserable I have to admit. Traeger got sick and threw up one night three times and it was really fun cleaning up throw up in the dark with buckets of water. The one night all of us were sleeping on the blow up mattress together because Traeger was sick, and Karis wouldn't sleep alone, so needless to say it was a sleepless night.
On the bright side, overall it was very valuable. We learned a lot and made a huge list of things we had not thought of or had forgotten that will make our next time there much easier. We were able to really get to know Pastor Matias and some of his family better. Traeger made great friends with one of his sons and is rattling off his portuguese again. The kids had a great time getting dirty and playing in the wide open spaces. The people were very friendly. We are literally the only white people in the village, so the first day we walked into the little market, everyone in the village stopped and just stared at us. The kids followed us around everywhere and at one point all surrounded Karis and pet her hair. she just stood there staring at me with a look that said, help mommy!!! The kids would all stand in the grass outside our door yelling "usungu"(white person). We would wave or say hi and they would all scream and yell and laugh. Overall it was good to really be able to walk beside the Africans, living life exactly how they live, but also makes us really glad to be able to come back here to Lichinga for a little break now and then.

Here is a picture of our bathroom(after it has been cleaned). It isn't a pretty sight, but at least we have a toilet. We flush it with a bucket of water.

Here is Tim carrying water on his head like the Africans do.

Cooking our dinner on the fire.

Doing dishes by the well.

Traeger playing at Jilo's house(one of pastor Matias' oldest sons, and one of his daughters is the girl in the yellow).

Here is Traeger's new friend, Armindo. They had so much fun together.

Giving Karis a bath in the trash can:)

This is why Karis needed a bath. I about died when I saw her like this, but of course I got myself together enough to take a picture. Oh and she dressed herself by the way. She sometimes just goes in the house and comes out in totally different clothes. This day she for some reason decided to wear my underware, pajama pants and a t/shirt(both inside out). Hey, it's Africa, I don't care!

Thankfully we were able to come home to this. Now that our container has arrived, we have everything put together and it is so nice to have a place to come home to. The girls on the couch are some fellow missionaries kids.

Here is Traeger and Karis' room.

This is Kallen's room.

Here is Kallen after having great fun with our spagetti sauce spoon. I was doing some dishes after dinner and came back to find her like this. I had left the leftovers on the table, unfortunately.

The kids all clean again.

Our Container has arrived!!!!

2009-05-20T10:22:00.000-07:00

On Monday, Tim was out running at 6am, when our container passed him on the street. We were unloading it by 8:30am. It is such an answer to prayer. However it did cost a lot more for transportation than what we had estimated(because the original company refused to drive to Lichinga because the roads are so bad). And now they are trying to tax us on our appliances because they were new, even though we had to buy new ones because we needed 220volt instead of 110. But all in all, it has been wonderful to unpack and get things set up here. It's the first time in 2 years we have used our own things and we are loving it. The kids are finding toys they had completely forgotten about and it feels like Christmas. We are able to sit on the floor for the first time and we just discovered that Kallen knows how to sit. She has never been sat on the floor since we arrived here. She is either in her car seat, in her bumbo seat, or being held(since all the floors are either dirt or cement). Thank you to everyone who has been praying!!! Some good friends of ours said that we needed to be sure and take lots of pictures of it arriving, but we were so excited and surprised when it arrived, I never even thought about the camara. So no pictures, but I have pictures of Lake Nyassa. We spent a day down at the lake with some missionary friends who live on the lake. It was beautiful and the kids had a great time swimming. These missionaries don't have a house, but a small building they sleep in, a storage building and a bathroom all separate, and it is beautiful. Their kitchen and living room is in a tent. Here are some pictures.

The road to the lake is terribly bumpy. 60 kilometers of all dirt roads with huge potholes and it took us about 2 1/2 hours to drive it.

Oh, and some very fun bridges to go over.

But so worth it when we got there!

Here is there sleeping building and kitchen/living room.

Here is Tim and Keith going for a boat ride.

Tim even got to try water skiing, which makes the only two times he has ever been water skiing, on the Amazon river in Brazil and on Lake Nyassa in Mozambique, kind of ironic since he has lived his whole life only a half an hour from Lake Michigan and has never been water skiing on it.

Here is Traeger and his new friends, Zoey and Jade, on a boabab tree that fell over about 5 years ago, but continues to grow from the ground.

Here is their bathroom, which has an incredible view of the lake(and Traeger on top of the rocks, if you can find him).

May update...

2009-05-06T22:31:00.000-07:00

We are planning to move to Muembe next week. We made a trip up there this week and moved our beds and some furniture. We will make another trip this weekend and then next week move for good. Please pray for the transition and that we would learn the language quickly. We are beginning to realize how hard hauling water from the well will be and how hard it will be to cook over charcoal everyday. I have so much to learn and I am hoping we don't all starve before I learn!

We learned some really exciting news this month also. We have mentioned that we have been going out to the village of Caia on fridays with Janice and one of our guards, Jeffrey. Well last week one of the men told Janice and Jeffrey that he wanted to follow Jesus with his whole heart. He shared this with the whole group and said he was willing to be baptised as a step of faith. In a muslim community this means a lot because he could be totally rejected by all his family and friends for this. This week we will talk more with him about this step and if he is still willing set up a date for the baptism. Janice and Jeffrey are very excited because they have been going to this village for a couple years now and this is the first real fruit they have seen. All it takes is one though, if this man is willing to be baptised and take this step, others could get the courage and follow. Please pray for him and his spiritual growth and courage.

Another answer to prayer, our container has arrived in Nacala. We are now working on details to get it shipped up here to Lichinga. Please continue to pray that it will arrive here safely and quickly. We have been going back and forth with our clearing agent trying to get all the details taken care of, but it seems like something keeps coming up.

This is the kids new favorite thing to do, climb on top of the car(it's there house of course).

Another thing we did was attend a ceremony for our collegues, who are going to be building a house in this village. They had a big ceremony where all the officials of the province, distict, and village came together to give them permission to live and work in the village and introduce them to all the people. It was a very interesting cultural experience. Our collegues, Alfred and Belinda, provided food for all the officials and we had a feast after the ceremony with all of them. The adminstrator of the district gave a speech which was very welcoming and he even told the people that they were missionaries and were here to tell them about God and that SIM is a good organization and recognized all over the country. It was very encouraging. These are the people of the village that attended the ceremony.

Here are all the officials with Alfred at the ceremony, Alred is on the far left and Janice is sitting next to him.

This was at the feast afterwards, Kallen took her nap on Janice.

Here are the kids eating their rice, without silverware again, to their enjoyment.

This is in Muembe. Karis wanted to help all the ladies carry their water from the well back to their houses, Karis is carrying a jug to our neighbor's house for her.

Here is Tim at the well getting some water for our cleaning.

This is our house. These guys live next door and help watch it while we are away.

Here is the veiw from our house. We have this great Papaya tree in our yard. I love papaya, so I am excited to be able to enjoy fresh papayas from our own tree.

Karis cries and complains about taking naps, but if she doesn't get a nap, she will still fall asleep somewhere at sometime. It's always fun to see where she ends up crashing.

Here we are with Bonamar enjoying a great snack of suger cane. All the kids love it.

Here is Karis, looking so grown up these days.

A gift, our car, and Caia.

2009-04-24T04:46:00.000-07:00

We went this morning to visit the family of one of our guards, Bonamar. His family lives about 30 minutes out of the city. We brought him and his half brother and our family. His father was so thankful we were willing to bring Bonamar out there and that we wanted to meet him. He gave us a goat as a gift. We now have this goat in a trailer because, the dogs attack it. We don't have a fence to keep it in or anything, so we will probably have to have it butchered in the next few days. When we mentioned that the kids, they were devestated, so we will see what happens. The picture below is us with Bonamar, next to Michele, and his brother, next to Tim. His family only speaks Chiyao, so we could not communicate very well with them, but Bonamar translated for us. It was a very humbling experience as they also fixed us rice with some beans and sent us into a hut all by ourselves to eat the food, while the family stayed outside and ate nothing. We also ate rice and beans without silverware for the first time. The kids had a ball of course!

This is our new car. We are really enjoying have wheels.

Here is Tim and Jeffrey, our guard doing some evangelism in a village called Caia.

This is the greeting we received when we arrived in Caia. The kids swarmed the car. We could barely get out. I had to distract them by taking their picture.

This is what Traeger thought of the attention. He was quite intimidated at first, but eventually warmed up.

Jalea.

2009-04-08T03:37:00.001-07:00

This is our new puppy Jalea. Jaleo in Yao means giant, we changed it to Jelea to make it more feminine, since she is a girl. She is a Great Dane and Ridgeback mix. Some YWAM missionaries raise Great Danes and tried this new mix, they gave her to us for free, so we were so happy to get a great dog like this for free. She was the tallest of 13 puppies, so she should be a giant as her name indicates. She is 7 weeks old right now. I guess this is a great mix, both are very big dogs, but very friendly and mild mannered. As you can see from the pictures below, she is quite a snuggler. She will be an outdoor dog, but right now we have her inside because the two dogs on the property bully her(even though she is almost double their size already). Today they have gotten along much better, we'll see how they do together. The dogs actually belong to another family, so we aren't sure how much longer they will be here anyway. Since we don't have dog food here, she eats rice mixed with either eggs or dried fish twice a day. It's kind of strange to cook rice for a dog everyday. Thankfully both are relatively cheap here.

A few updates as well...our car is fixed. It is still in Cuamba, so we aren't sure when we'll actually get it, but at least it is fixed for now. There is still one ongoing problem that we will have to fix eventually, but you can at least drive it now. Also Tim has been doing the teaching/training with this young man Oswald for a few weeks now and it is going very well. Tim has enjoyed it and it has really given him insight into the way African's think and how their culture infiltrates their thought processes, even as Christians. Chiyao classes are going well and we are learning slowly how this language works. It is so different from the latin based Portuguese, it's taking us to whole new level of thinking...

A Week Of Firsts...

2009-04-04T23:13:00.000-07:00

This was a week of firsts for me. I hired my first house helper. I actually hired two because I couldn't decide. I had 4 people here begging to be hired for help(somehow the word got out that there was some new rich white family in town that would need help). It was so hard to choose, I felt bad for all of them. I have a young girl, whose father is not in the picture and her mother is home and doesn't work and they have absolutely no income. So I hired her two days a week to do some light cleaning and do my shopping with me. She can help carry and she knows how to pick out good fruits and vegetables. Her name is Regina. You can tell she is starved for attention. She comes almost everyday just to see if I need anything and when she is here to clean she stays all day and just hangs out here. It's hard to know what to do about setting up some boundaries, but yet I want to be here if she needs me.

The other lady I hired is older and is a great worker. I hired her 3 days a week. She works hard and has been so helpful for me. I have started homeschooling with Traeger in the mornings and so while I do school, she does my dishes, laundry, floors, bathrooms, and just about anything else I need.

Another first for me this week was going to the market and buying meat for the first time. I bought a big hunk of goat leg. I had another missionary come with me and help me figure out how to do it. So we find a good sized goat hind end laying on the table and smell it. If it smells good(well not good, but doesn't smell spoiled) we buy it. I cooked it for dinner that night and it was alright...I could only picture the hind end on the table the whole time I was eating...I think it's going to take some getting used to.

I also made my own homemade granola and yogurt for the first time. It was actually pretty good. We have heard that it makes a great breakfast here, so it will probably be a regular part of our diet from now on.

I included a few pictures. The little boy in the pictures is the son of the lady who cleans the guest house. His name is Sufucu. He came over to play with kids while his mom worked one day.

1 night without a mosquito net!

2009-03-26T02:01:00.000-07:00

These are some pictures of Tim's arm and face after spending the night in Muembe without a mosquito net. He literally has hundreds of them, on his fingers, neck, face, arms, and hands. He had a sleeping bag, but got so hot he had to stick his arms out and this is the result. Needless to say he barely slept. We are thankful for mosquito nets and will have to be really careful when living out at Muembe. The mosquitos aren't as bad here. We are praying he doesn't come down with Malaria.

This is a bunch of bananas that is growing in our backyard. We have a bunch of banana trees lining our back fence and we enjoy fresh bananas frequently. The kids enjoy grabbing a banana as a snack right off the tree.

We also have an avocado tree in our yard, so we have avocados galore and have fresh guacamole almost everyday we want it.

Here is one of the many lizards that sun themselves in our yard.

Here is Kallen. One of the dogs on the property couldn't pass up an opportunity to cuddle up with her and jumped up in the chair and curled up.

Here is sunset from our back porch. We have seen many beautiful sunsets. It is really amazing to watch an African lightning storm and gaze at the stars. We have never seen so many stars as you can see here.

Ant Wars!

2009-03-22T03:44:00.000-07:00

We have two kinds of ants living in our house. Big ants and little ants. We found the little ants attacking the big ants today. We think they are fighting over who takes over the house. We cannot get rid of them despite the bottles of insecticide we've been spraying at them. I guess that is life in Africa! Luckily we have not found anymore large spiders or scorpions in the house. Tim went running the other morning and saw a bunch of monkeys in the trees playing. We decided to take the kids and go find them, but after a two hour walk and much crying and complaining and not finding any monkeys, we decided not to do that again! We feel like we are back in our first days of Portugal without a car, except we don't have the option of the bus here, so walking is our only option. It is the rainy season as well, so if it raining and your only mode of transportation is walking, it's almost like a snow day, you can't really go anywhere.

We have begun our language training already. There is a young man who comes to our house and teaches us Chiyao and we in turn teach him English. This way we trade services and are not required to pay him and he is thrilled to be able to learn English. Tim has been spending a lot of time with a Mozambiquian man that is married to an SIM missionary from Romania. He has enjoyed this growing friendship and has already been asked to teach/disciple another young man here in Bible. He will start this on tuesday and the teaching will all be done in Portuguese. We have had great opportunities to practice our Portuguese and we are finding out that Chiyao is going to be more difficult than Portuguese in a lot of ways. It is not latin based, so there is no where to start from. It is going to be a lot of memorization. Please continue to pray for us as we struggle to learn...

Here are some pictures of the inside of our house and the church that we will attend while learning Chiyao and a just a few other things...

This is the church. It is an Anglican church and the service is done in Chiyao and Portuguese.

Here is the kids bathroom. It is really pretty good size.

This is Kallen's bedroom right now. Eventually it will be Traeger and Karis', but for now it is Kallen's. All of the furniture was left here from the previous family who lived here. Once our container arrives, we will move everything out and move our stuff in. They will be coming to collect their stuff the end of this year.

This is our bedroom. We all have to sleep with mosquito nets. The kids thought it was so fun at first. Kind of like sleeping in a tent.

Here is the kitchen. It is really big. Much bigger than my kitchen back in the states!

Here is Traeger and Karis' room. The floors are all cement, except for the kitchen and bathroom, which are tiled. It makes it really hard to keep things clean. Cement just doesn't come clean.

This is a picture of the road out to Muembe where we will be living. As you can see it isn't much of a road and when raining like this, the clay is very slippery.

Here are the kids playing in our yard, the neighbor kids like to climb the trees and watch them. They sometimes try to talk to them, but Traeger refuses to speak Portuguese with them. We are really hoping that he will warm up after a while and start speaking Portuguese again. He seems intimidated right now by everything being so different and unfamiliar.

Here is the scorpion we found in the house.

And here is that very large spider. I can barely look at this picture.

Our Muembe house.

2009-03-15T06:49:00.001-07:00

Here are some pictures of our house in Muembe. It is very small, but they have done a lot of work on it and it is looking pretty good. They put in screens and painted the mud and even built the bamboo fence around it, so we have an area for the kids to play without fear of snakes and other dangers in the tall grass surrounding the area.

This is the well where we will have to get our water. Our house is actually a couple hundred meters from this well, so hopefully we will be able to have some help hauling water every day.

Here is a picture of the front of the house. It is divided into three rooms. The two ends are bedrooms and the middle room is a living area. Here is a picture of the area they fenced in for us. It is big enough to keep our car in as well as have some room for the kids to play. We even have a shade tree! The car in the picture is Janice's, our field director.

This is the kitchen. It is located next to the house. It has a small clay grill and sink we can fill with water from the well for doing dishes or whatever. This is Janice and Pastor Mateus, who is our neighbor and his family will help us with getting adjusted to living out here and he has a short wave radio we can use in case of an emergency.

This is Pastor Mateus' kitchen. The kids thought it was a fun play house, just their size!

This is Pastor Mateus' family. His daughter(with the baby) will help us with laundry and cleaning. We will mostly be learning Chiyao from this family as we live our daily lives with them. Pastor Mateus told us when we were there, that while living in this house, we will be family. Every family(which includes extended family) lives in a group of houses or huts and they work together as a community cleaning, cooking, working, etc. As we live among their family, we will be considered family and will take part in all the family duties.

Here is Traeger and Karis making silly faces. Grandma George's rainboots have been a big hit. The kids wear them everywhere and they really help with all the mud during the rainy season.

We found this turtle in our garden. We have also found 2 geckos, a scorpion, and a very, very large spider in our house while cleaning.

Our Lichinga House

2009-03-08T05:40:00.000-07:00

This is how we have running water into our house. Water is pumped into this big cistern and then gravity brings it into the house through pipes. It really works well, other than there is not much water pressure at all.

Here are the kids all enjoying the beautiful weather here.

Here is the view from the back porch of our Lichinga house. It is a beautiful veiw, but as you can see we are surrounded by mud huts with grass roofs. It really puts things into perspective and makes you realize just how much we have living next to those who really have nothing.

This is the front veiw of the house. It is really pretty cute. We will take pictures of the inside after we move in so everyone can see what the inside looks like.

We made it!

2009-03-07T04:50:00.001-08:00

I just wanted to let everyone know we made it to Lichinga, this afternoon. It is Saturday, March 7th at 2:50pm right now. It has been 4 long days, but overall everything went better than we thought it would. Despite having a rough start at the GR airport(we had to repack all 9 of our bags and pay for 2 overweight bags, as well as drain the battery in our solar power pack before we could take it on the plane), everything else went very smoothly. The kids did great. Karis has had the hardest time with lack of sleep and crazy schedule. Kallen doesn't even seem to have any clue that we have been on and off airplanes for 4 days. She is her same happy self. Traeger has become a master at his Nintendo DS game we bought him for the trip. We spent 2 nights in Maputo with our friends Damian and Nancy McCrink, who we became friends with in Portugal. We had a great time visiting with them and they were great hosts, fed us great and let us get some good rest. Now we are temporarily living in the SIM guest house in Lichinga until we move out to Muembe. It looks like our move there will be pushed back a little, because our car is under repairs right now and it will probably be a month before we get it back. We were disappointed to not have it waiting for us like expected, but they wanted to make sure everything was in great working condition before we took it over and moved out to Muembe. We will be visiting Muembe on wednesday and be able to have a look at our house and figure out what supplies we will need to bring out with us. So hopefully we will be able to post some pictures of the house after our visit on Wednesday. Thanks so much for all the prayers. We are relieved to have the travelling done and are now trying to let it sink in that this is where we will now be living....

Mozambique, here we come!!!

2009-03-03T05:33:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to write one last update before our huge trek across the world. We are only hours away from the first leg of our journey. We are full of emotions at this time. Excitement that we are finally to this point and relief that the packing and planning is done. Nervous about this forever long plane ride. Anxious of the unknown that awaits us. I listen to my kids running around and playing and laughing and I think they have no idea what is happening. Their lives are about to change....again. I am so thankful they are young and seem to rebound so well and that God knows better than I do. I thought I would include our itinerary, so you will know where we are at the next few days. I put everything in EST so you don't have to convert anything. We will make sure we let everyone know when we have arrived. Thanks for everything the past three months and thanks for praying.

#1
Tues. Mar 3, 1:31 PM Grand Rapids
Tues. Mar 3, 2:32 PM Chic Ohare (United 7208W)

#2
Tues. Mar 3, 4:45 PM Chic Ohare
Wed. Mar 4, 2:10 AM Frankfurt (Lufth. 431W)

#3
Wed. Mar 4, 5:35 PM Frankfurt
Thur. Mar 5, 3:00 AM Johannesburg (Lufth. 572W)

#4
Thur. Mar 5, 6:50 AM Johannesburg
Thur. Mar 5, 7:55 AM Maputo, Moz. (So African 144L)

#5
Fri. Mar 6 11:40 PM Maputo, Moz.
Arrive ??? Sat. around 5:00 AM in Lichinga, Moz. (LAM)

VISA UPDATE

2009-02-11T07:07:00.000-08:00

We just wanted to let everyone know that we received our VISAS for entry into Mozambique. We have now purchased our plane tickets and will be leaving on March 3rd at about 1:30 in the afternoon. Thanks to everyone who was praying for them. We still have to apply for actual residence VISAS once we arrive in Lichinga, so still be praying that that process goes smoothly. Also be praying about our long flight. We have 2 ten hour flights a 15 hour layover, three shorter flights and an overnight in Maputo, before we actually arrive in Lichinga. It's total of a 4 day process and with 3 little kids, we are not looking forward to it!

Busy...busy...busy...

2009-01-17T09:11:00.000-08:00

Sorry we have not updated this blog lately. We have been so busy, but have also been having lots of fun. We have applied for our visas for Mozambique and are awaiting their approval, so keep praying for that. After we receive the visas, we will be able to purchase our plane tickets(hopefully in the next couple weeks). We have gotten our first round of shots and will be getting more the first week of February. We have visited one of our supporting churches and two small groups and have 5 more churches and 3 more small groups to go...here's some pictures of the last month and what we've been doing...enjoy!

This past weekend we visited one of our supporting churches, The Chapel, in Akron OH. This is the family we stayed with in Akron. Their small group has adopted us as their missionaries. We were able to meet with the small group while we were there. We had a great weekend with the Andersons, they definitely have the gift of hospitality. One of the privileges of being a missionary is meeting people like them!

Of course, we had to include this picture. It is of LeBron James home right outside of Akron Oh. We also saw his girlfriend pulling out of the driveway in one of his cars. It was pretty cool:)
Here are all the George grandkids in their Portugal t-shirts they got from Grandma for Christmas.

We had a slumber party at the Wymas over new years. Here is Olivia and Traeger in their bed.

Karis wanted to sleep in the baby bed, but didn't quite fit!

Here is Dan and Traeger.

And Lesley and Karis....

And Tim and Claire...

Icrecream for Bryant's birthday.

"The Girls"

Papa and Kallen

All the George grandkids again...

My sister's youngest Noah, who was born 3 weeks after Kallen.

Karis favorite Christmas present, a new bicycle!

Here is Kristi and I with Noah and Kallen. It was so nice to have her here for a few weeks. We had so much fun!

Traeger and Ethan(Kristi's oldest).

Karis and Aunt Aubrey! Karis LOOOOVES Aunt Aubrey!

After a long day of sledding, this is what happens....

Traeger and Uncle Stephen sledding.

Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!

2008-12-19T08:13:00.001-08:00

Well we returned home from Portugal on wednesday, Dec. 10 and I don't think it has stopped snowing since! We are loving the snow, but the cold has been quite a shock from the 60's in Portugal before we left.

We said our goodbyes to friends in Portugal, it was a bitter-sweet time for us. There is a lot we are going to miss about Portugal. One of our highlights was Traeger's school. We are going to miss his teachers, who became our friends while we were there, and Traeger is of course going to miss his school buddies. We are also going to miss many people from our church that we attended while there. We are going to miss the almost perfect weather, watching the sheep go by our apartment every morning and the beautiful beaches, but of course we are thrilled to be home, snow and all!

It was a very long plane ride, but we arrived safely. We had a flight cancelled in Chicago and didn't arrive home until 1:30am, when we were scheduled to arrive at 9:00pm. Michele was sick with a cold on the flight, so was pretty miserable, but our kids were so good. We can tell a lot of people were praying, because they were very well behaved and Kallen was a little angel the whole 10 1/2 hour flight.

We have been enjoying seeing family and friends and shopping at Meijer with sales and coupons! The kids have loved being close to both grandmas and grandpas. A very generous couple from our church has lent us their house to live in while we are home and it has been such a blessing. It has been so nice to have a place to retreat to after busy days and have space to sort and pack our stuff as well as enough room for the kids to sleep in their own rooms and not with us!

Tim's mom had major back surgery on the 4th of Dec. and then his grandpa broke his leg and had surgery on his leg a few days ago, so the George household has been a little crazy between caring for mom George and grandpa Dejong. Thankfully both are doing really well and are recovering more quickly than expected.

Here are a couple of pictures of our last days in Portugal and our first days back in the states.

Traeger has loved the snow, unfortunately, as you can see, Karis has hated it and cries when it starts snowing.

This was pure torture for her, but I had to have a picture of her in the snow!

Traeger could just play all day. He loves it.

Especially eating it!

Karis and a friend from church in Portugal.

This is Graziela, the mother of the guy we rented our apartment from. She was wonderful to us there in Portugal.

Kallen all smiles!

Saying goodbye to downtown Lisbon. We had a last drive through the city to say goodbye.

Traeger and his best buddie, Andre.

Traeger's school goodbye party or festa de despedido.

Our little genius!

2008-11-21T14:16:00.000-08:00

Maybe all babies do this, but Traeger and Karis never did at this age, so we like to think she is "gifted". She is just so interactive. It has been a lot of fun.

A birthday party/Halloween

2008-11-01T03:34:00.000-07:00

The kids were invited to a birthday party for another missionary's kid on Halloween. Since the Portuguese don't really celebrate Halloween, they had a costume party for their son's birthday. It was fun to be able to dress the kids up. Although they don't sell costumes here, so we had to make our own. Karis is a cat and Traeger is Lightning McQueen in case the pictures aren't obvious enough.

This was at the end and Traeger is saying do I have to take one more picture!

Here is Lightning McQueen.

Here's the little kitty crawling around and meowing!

Traeger had "dia das Bruxas" or witches day at school, so all the kids had to wear a mask, hat, broom, or something that had to do with witch. Kind of strange, but witches here are a kids thing, they aren't seen as scarey.

Sometimes they love eachother.

October Update...

2008-10-23T02:00:00.000-07:00

I can't believe it is already the end of October. We only have a month and a half left of our time here in Portugal. I thought I would give everyone an update as we are almost finished with our year and a half of language school. We have been very busy since Kallen's birth, with keeping up a full time class schedule as well as having my mom here for two weeks and Tim's parents here for a month. It has been so nice to have all the help and we have been able to keep up our classes. We have a new tutor who is coming to our house now, so we don't have to travel back and forth during the day with Kallen. He comes three days a week and then we still attend our regular classes on tuesdays and thursdays. In order to cram in as much Portuguese as possible this last month of November, he will be coming 4 days a week to the house as well as us still going to classes on tuesdays and thursdays. Pray for us as we try to soak in as much as possible. Tim also preaches this sunday, so please pray for him as he continues to prepare in the next couple of days.

Traeger's Portuguese is better than ours as far as pronunciation goes and the idioms of the language. He is still enjoying school and will be continuing until we leave Dec. 9. Please pray for him as he will have to say goodbye to some good friends and move again to a whole new culture.

Karis hasn't really been able to develop much of her portuguese unfortunately. She is too young to attend Traeger's school and she just hasn't had the same opportunities as him. She is doing great in her English though and sounds more and more grown up everyday. She is also now potty trained. It all happened in one day! She is doing great with it and it has been the easiest process ever for mommy and daddy! Thank you God! Pray for her with the adjustment to a new culture and that she would be able to pick up Portuguese in Mozambique quickly.

Kallen is growing like crazy and at her 1 month appointment weighed 7lbs 90z and grew 2 centimeters. She is no longer in the sleep all day mode and has started to have fussy times, but overall still better than Traeger or Karis ever were. She has already traveled all over Portugal, and has been to Spain and within the next 4 months will have been to the United States and Africa! We have already received her passport and birth abroad certificate and we are just waiting on the ssn now. Please pray for her continued health and that she would be a flexible baby with all the traveling we have ahead.

Although we have been continuing with classes and spending a lot of time on our Portuguese, it hasn't been all work. We have been showing off Portugal to Tim's parents and have seen some new places, even for us. Here are some pictures of our time with them and some updated pictures of the kids.

Here's a picture of Kallen smiling. It's the only one we've been able to photograph. She has been smiling a ton the past week or so.

This is at a beach called Odeceixe. The coast of Portugal is so diverse and every beach so different.

Karis, Grandma, and Kallen

Kallen almost smiling...

Here's all three of them.

I love this picture!

Here's another one of Kallen.

Kallen and Grandma

We took mom and dad George out for an authentic Portuguese meal. I of course did not even try it.

The "torre de Belem" or Tower of Belem

Pena Palace

This is how Kallen spent her beach days.

Here's the kids with Grandma and Grandpa. Traeger wouldn't look because the sun was in his eyes.

The kids love to hold hands while they are walking for some reason and even when they are riding on daddy and papa's shoulders.

These are cork trees. An interesting fact about Portugal: they are the world's leading exporter of cork. The cork trees are everywhere. These ones have just been harvested. The bark is the cork and every 6 or 7 years they trim off the bark and then it grows back.

Traeger found many crabs at the beach. This was the biggest he caught.

Having fun at the beach.

This is in the Algarve. The beaches are some of the prettiest beaches we've ever seen.

This is at "tres irmaos" beach or three brothers beach

More beach time. The weather has been fabulous this October and we've been able to spend quite a bit of time at the beach.

More pictures of Kallen...

2008-09-22T11:51:00.000-07:00

A lot of people have asked me about the delivery, so here is a brief description of our experience.

I went in at 8:00 a.m. to be induced...but it took almost 2 hours to get called into the room. By that time I was already having contractions so they didn't induce me. My water broke by 11:00 and I had an epideral by noon. Because of my history of fast deliveries my doctor stayed with me pretty much the whole time. By 1:45 I was ready to push but had to be transferred to the delivery room. So they had to run me through the halls to the delivery room and then I had to crawl onto the delivery table before I could push. Tim had to get scrubs and a mask on and almost missed the birth. By the time he arrived the head was already delivered and 30 seconds later Kallen Beatriz was here.

A couple of other things that were unique with this Portugal experience are...they do not give the baby a bath for the first 24 hours. They dress her with clothes that I provide right after birth with the blood and mess that they are born in. After the delivery I had to stay in a recovery room for two hours before being transferred to my hospital room. Then after I was brought into my room the nurses or docter did not check on me until the next day. We were pretty much on our own. Overall it was a good experience and went much better than expected.

Kallen is a great baby and sleeps and eats well. Much better than Traeger and Karis. Hopefully it continues.

Here are some new pictures.

Life in the Country...

2008-09-22T11:28:00.000-07:00

This is where we are living now. It is up in the hills and out in the "country". It is very different from the city life we have been living. The kids are loving it because they get to play outside and enjoy the outdoors once again. The following pictures are everyday sites for us around here.

This is our neighbor. He is a shepherd and walks his sheep by our apartment several times a day. The kids love this of course.

Here are some of the sheep.

Here they are crossing in front of our apartment. We also have a beautiful veiw of the river from our varanda.

These guys are everywhere. Traeger even found one in the house the other day and somehow managed to catch it and remove his tail before I could save it and release back outdoors.

Kallen Beatriz is here!

2008-09-12T12:44:00.000-07:00

Kallen was born on September 5, 2008 at 1:58pm(Portugal time). She weighed 2.640kilos or 5lbs. 13oz and was 47cm. or 18.5 inches long. Everything went well with the delivery and everyone went home on Sunday, Sept. 7th. We are sorry about the delay in adding these pictures, but both our computers crashed on us within a few days of each other.

Speaking in Tongues?

2008-07-27T15:48:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: Tim successfully completed his mission. Sunday morning at 11:30 Tim preached his first sermon in Portuguese. Everything ran well and Tim was understood by all. Here is a short clip, sorry the audio is not the best. And guess what? He gets to do it again next week (5 pm Sunday) b/c another church is down one pastor due to a family emergency. So you can just keep on praying. At least he can preach the same sermon since this is a different church. Thank you so much for praying. Your prayers were definitely felt.

Snail Tale

2008-07-27T15:13:00.000-07:00

Part of learning the culture is eating what the people eat. Well, that sometimes involves a thick stomach lining. We recently went with our language teacher and some other friends to the town's local festival where we gobbled down three large plates of SNAILS! Yummy. They are cooked with oregano, garlic, and olive oil and you can pull them out with toothpicks, but if you are really good you can just suck them out of the shell. The biggest shocker was Karis. She loved them and in the end was an expert at pulling these little guys out of their shells. However, when we now find snails crawling around she just wants to eat 'em up.

Warning: the video is rated "Y" for the yuck factor.

Visit to Northern Portugal.

2008-07-21T03:00:00.000-07:00

As our time gets closer to leaving Portugal, we were wanting to take advantage of the time we have left and see parts of Portugal that we haven't seen yet. Our language tutor took some time off, so we decided to visit Northern Portugal. We had a nice time and saw "o berco de Portugal"(the birthplace of Portugal), the castle where the first king, Afonso Henrique, of Portugal was born. We also saw the mountains in the center of the country and Porto. We had some great language opportunities as everything in Portugal is hard to find and we had to stop and ask directions many times. We were quite proud of ourselves as we understood the directions and never really got lost(which is highly unusual on a trip like this). Here are some pictures of the trip.

This is a waterfall we hiked to in the Serra De Estrela mountain range in northern central Portugal.

That's Traeger standing on the rocks in case you can't quite see him!

Here is a picture of the sunset in the mountains, where we stayed.

This is a francesinha. Porto and Northern Portugal are known for them. It is made with slices of meat and two slices of bread with melted cheese and sauce on top. They are actually pretty good.

Here is a view of Porto and the river running along the edge of the city.

Porto is also known for it's many bridges. We took a short boat tour along the river to view the city and bridges from that perspective.

The houses along the river are very colorful and beautiful.

The kids taking a break from all our walking on a door stoop.

This is a picture of the housing in the city of Guimaraes. It is a very beautiful city--very well kept and clean.

This is a statue of King Afonso Henrique, first king of Portugal. Tim and the kids are showing off their muscles.

This is the Paco dos Duques(the palace of the Dukes). It is the palace that King Afonso had built and lived in.

This is a picture of the Castle where King Afonso was born and lived until he built the palace in the previous picture.

This is a picture of the Northern coast of Portugal. It was very beautiful.

The kids collecting rocks and shells at the beach.

Our hotel had a pool and the kids spent hours swimming. They had a children's pool and an adult's pool. Traeger is really becoming quite the swimmer! They love the water.

Karis also gained a lot of confidence in the water and isn't near as timid as Traeger about going all the way under!

This is the "Bom Jesus" in Braga. It is an old Catholic Parish.

*Just a reminder to continue to pray for Tim this week as he is preparing to preach on Sunday. We'll make sure to post an update after he is done.*

A Happy Ride

2008-07-19T07:25:00.000-07:00

The kids enjoyed a little ride up to see some horses and a lake (pond really), but they always get excited with the little Portuguese ditty's that play on the loudspeakers.

2008-07-11T08:01:00.000-07:00

One thing we try to do here in Portugal is to experience and learn about the culture. We went to a concert of folk singer and dancers. Needless to say, Karis was more than excited. Have a look!

Monthly Update and Prayer Requests...

2008-07-06T11:59:00.000-07:00

July 4th marked our 1 year anniversary here in Portugal. We have been reflecting on last July, our first month here and remembering...riding the bus with the kids to get groceries. Many times riding for hours because we didn't know where to get off or how to ask where to get off. Or waiting for hours because we didn't know which bus to take or how to ask which bus to take. We remember feeling lost on our walk to school as people would stop and ask us for directions or for the time and we would have no idea what they said. It has been a year full of adjustments and yet thanks to the grace of God, a year full of accomplishment. We have come a long way from our first months here. We are definitely functional in our Portuguese now. Telling time is now a no-brainer. Although we still struggle with giving directions, at least we know when people are asking for them. We can have conversations with people and are finally able to start building relationships. We can actually understand about 75% of a sermon. We have also learned to adjust to life without heat, airconditioning, a clothes dryer, Target and Taco Bell. It has really given us a taste of what life as a missionary is like--as far as being flexible goes and not having a set schedule. We are learning to live amidst constant change knowing that we will once again be transitioning to a new life and culture in Africa. Because of this it has been difficult for us to feel settled or at home here. We are learning how to live with eachother 24/7 and without our traditional roles as housemaker and breadwinner. Not that all these accomplishments have come without difficulty or pain. One thing we have learned this year is that all these adjustments are a process and a process that we are continuing to adjust to. We are trusting God as he continues to lead us to Africa and use this process of adjustment to make us into the people and family he wants us to be and to prepare us for our future in Mozambique.

Here are some updated prayer requests:
* Tim is going to be preaching for the first time IN PORTUGUESE on July 27th, so please, please pray for him as he prepares.*
*Prayer for continued health of Michele and the baby in these last couple months of pregnancy. She is struggling with the added difficulties and uncomfort as a result of the heat.
*Pray that we would stay disciplined in our studies, despite the summer vacation fever we are feeling (It just feels wrong to be going to school in the summer).
*Pray for the kids as we have only about 5 more months here and then we will be heading home for a couple months and then on to Africa. Especially for Traeger as he gets older and has really made some good friends here, but for both of the kids as we will make another transition. One thing we have noticed as a result of moving here, is that Traeger is able to make friends with just about anyone. No matter where we go, if he sees a kid, he will go right up to him and just start playing. He doesn't need to know their name or anything. In fact one time we were at a restaurant and he went up to kid and started playing with him and talking to him in Portuguese and it ended up that the kid was British and spoke English and had no idea what Traeger was saying!

Parabens Traeger!

2008-07-06T11:21:00.000-07:00

Traeger turns 4 years old on Wednesday, July 9th. We celebrated on Saturday with a party at McDonalds with all his friends from school. We had 12 kids come and it was a little crazy, but Traeger had a great time. It was great practice for our Portuguese as we tried to control and listen to 12 very energetic 4 and 5 year olds! Here's some pictures of the party.

They did face painting at the party and Traeger chose to be "homem aranha" (spiderman).

Traeger and his good friend Beatriz. She is a year and a half older than Traeger, but they are best buds at school.

Everyone had fun playing in the play area. The girls faces are painted like butterflies (in case you couldn't tell).

Traeger had a little help with opening his presents. I think he actually opened one or two. The rest were opened for him:)

We finally got a smile from Traeger. He was very embarrassed when everyone sang "Parabens" (Happy Birthday in Portuguese) to him and he refused to blow out the candles, but we finally got him to smile!

We managed to get everyone sitting down for the food and there was actually a few minutes of silence while they all ate.

Karis enjoyed the party as well. Well the french fries anyway!

Traeger Being Silly!

2008-06-11T11:43:00.001-07:00

Traeger wanted me to take his picture doing a bunch of "tricks", so I thought I would share them with everyone. He is very talented as you can see.

Dia de Africa (Africa Day)!

2008-06-01T13:27:00.000-07:00

At the church we attend in the mornings, we celebrated Africa day, because so many of the congregation are from Africa. Tim and I were asked to do a presentation. Our choices were to sing(yah we weren't about to do that), or perform an African dance(yah...that either), or write a poem and read it. We chose the poem, however, writing a poem in English is hard enough, let alone in Portuguese with our limited knowledge of the language. So we took the easy way out and found an African poem on the internet, which we translated into Portuguese! The service was a lot of fun, but very long. It began at 11:30 and didn't end until 2:30 and then we had a potluck lunch provided by the many African's and we didn't leave the church until after 5:30pm. It was good for us to get an idea of what church will be like for us in Mozambique--time really doesn't mean anything!

Pictures of the kids...

2008-06-01T13:12:00.000-07:00

Just some new pictures of the kids. These were taken in front of a very old Church in Belem.

Here's a picture of all of us (my pregnant belly quite obvious by now) in front of a Roman temple from the first century A.D. in Evora, which is in central southern region of Portugal.