Prayers and Praises

Praise God:

• For rain in Gasmata! Colemans let us know on the radio that our tank is just over half full, with the possibility for still more rain today. This is wonderful news, and we thank you all for joining with us in prayer for the rain. Prayer makes a difference!



• For a refreshing break here at Hoskins. A few days away from the stress of building was just what Adam and I needed, and we're feeling very ready to get back in and continue on.



• For Nicki's parents who are visiting from Canada. Their presence with us and their help in working on the houses is greatly encouraging.



• For our email that is now set up in the bush. We are grateful for the ability to now stay in much better contact with each of you while in Gasmata.

Please Pray:

• For Adam and myself to get back into Gasmata. We were to fly in today (Wednesday) with that unreliable commercial airline that so many of you have heard such colorful stories about. We showed up today to check in and....the plane is broken (this is easily the case 50% of the time). While there is a chance that we will get on a different flight tomorrow, we would truly appreciate your prayers that we are able to return soon.



• For continued wisdom in building relationships with the Akolet people.



• For strength, energy and patience as we seek to make continued progress on house building.

Clarification

Dear Friends,

We got such a tremendous response from our last email explaining that we had email set up in the bush that we thought we should clarify something.

I wrote that email when we thought we were seconds away from having email successfully set up. Such was not the case, unfortunately, but once I click "send" on a message, there is no way to retrieve it.

We mentioned that Adam and I would be coming to Hoskins for a short break - that is where we are now and that is how the email got sent out. We apologize for the miscommunication. We hope to have our email up and running in the bush by Christmas. In the meantime, we will email from Hoskins for the next few days and work to get lots of photos put onto our website.

Thanks for staying in touch with us and what God's doing among the Akolet of Papua New Guinea!

julie

p.s.  Still no rain in Gasmata - please continue to pray!

A few prayer requests:

• Please pray for rain. Our 2000 gallon water barrel currently has no water and Coleman's tank that we're all using is quickly dwindling. With no fresh water source here on the island, we don't want to think of the ramifications of running out of water completely!



• Please pray for encouragement for us. These are incredibly trying circumstances here between the heat (one day it was 110 degrees in the shade), the roughness of the living conditions while building our houses, the constant stream of Akolet people coming and going for various reasons, and the lack of normalcy on any level. Anyone who was here to visit can relate to what we're talking about! Adam and I will be taking a break out to Hoskins before Christmas just to have a little getaway from it all and get a little perspective on everything again.



• Please pray for speedy progress on the houses. We didn't come here build houses, we came here to reach souls! We know this is a stage that will help get us there, but we are all ready to be done with it and move onto language study some time in the coming months.

A shot in the dark

Well family and friends,

If this email makes it to you, you know that we have successfully set up email in the bush!

We arrived here one month ago to the day, and so much has happened that it is impossible to detail in any sort of succinct manner. So we will settle for a good summarization.

We flew in November 8th with our first building team which included Julie's dad. It was amazing having him and the others from our home church here. They worked so hard and by the time they left, both houses had floors, four walls, and Coleman's house had siding and a roof.

By the time the second building team (also an incredible blessing to us) left on December 6th, we both had the outer structures of our houses nearly complete, plus interior walls (for the most part) and electricity and plumbing. (Praise the Lord for saying goodbye to the outhouse!) We still have a long haul ahead of us - probably a few months of full time working on the house which is longer than we anticipated at the start of everything. But we know it will get done, and we daily see more progress made.