COREY AND JENNI

OUR GIRLS!

2011-06-07T12:36:00.003-04:00

It is really fun having 2 little girls! Elin is finally coming around to being a big sister and really loves to play with Baby Claire. She wanted to rock Claire in the chair the other day and I got this adorable picture!!!

Claire smiles all day long and is such a happy baby! We just love her and can't even imagine life without her!

Sweet Little Claire

2011-05-05T20:02:00.001-04:00

Our friend gave us these cute little bloomers for Claire and I couldn't wait to put her in them and do a photo shoot!!!!

Baby Claire

2011-04-25T18:53:00.004-04:00

Here is sweet little Claire Lynn! We just love her and think she is so precious! She is such a good baby. More pictures to come soon!

Fun at the Beach

2010-06-03T23:41:00.009-04:00

We are alive! It is hard to believe our last post was Christmas...where does the time go? Here are some pictures of Elin enjoying our break at Myrtle Beach. She had such a fun time walking up and down the beach. She loved the waves, she would point to them and giggle...until one knocked her over. So needless to say her happy relationship with the waves was over for the rest of our trip. Most of our time was spent walking up and down and up and down and up and down the sand. Elin also loved eating the sand and napping in the lazy river at the hotel. It was the only way she would take a nap...she hates to miss out on anything. She has a rough life!

She is so much fun and very full of energy! She makes us laugh everyday. She is walking all over the place and her favorite word to say is OUTSIDE! She puts a special accent on the end of it to make it sound like outsiiiidetttt. It is so cute. She pretty much talks and plays all day long. She has seven little teeth and loves to munch on cheerios. She isn't a picky eater at all...she will eat anything we put in front of her. As you can see from the pictures, she is quite the messy eater too!

Jenni is now on weekend day shifts at the children's hospital and enjoying every minute of it. SO LONG night shift!!! whoohoo!!!!! She seems to have much more energy now! Night shift was rough! Corey just finished another semester of seminary and is taking advantage of summer break and giving his brain much needed rest from all of the reading he has to do in the school year.

Jenni is going to Haiti next week to work in a children's hospital and orphanage! She was able, by the grace of God, to raise her support by selling hair bows! It was so neat to see God provide for her trip through so many people...perfect strangers that wanted to be a part of something greater than themselves! So amazing and encouraging to witness! Please pray for her safety and opportunities to share God's love with her team and Haitian patients. She will be there for 10 days! Also pray for Corey as he will be taking care of Elin while mama is gone.

We hope this post will help satisfy cravings around the world for pictures of Elin...especially for our friends "Lonely in China":) and our friends in Utah. We love you and miss you all!

MERRY CHRISTMAS

2009-12-25T13:42:00.002-05:00

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!!! WE LOVE YOU! LOVE, COREY & JENNI & OUR BEAUTIFUL SANTA BABY!!!

Happy Thanksgiving!

2009-11-26T22:16:00.012-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving!!! We are so grateful for all of our family and friends that show us so much love! We are especially thankful to the Lord for all that He has done for us and continues to do. We serve an amazing and unfathomable God!!

Elin had her first turkey experience and boy did it knock her out. Right after she ate her first Thanksgiving dinner, she fell asleep in her high chair. It was so funny! She loved Thanksgiving though. Jenni's parents and sister Kristi came and spent the holiday with us. Jenni's mom is an amazing cook and does such a great job with Thanksgiving dinner. It was delicious! We had a good time and we are so happy that we could spend Thanksgiving with our family. Does anyone want to come all the way to Kentucky for Christmas?

A Rough November...

2009-11-23T21:31:00.000-05:00

This month has been a rough one to say the least. After Halloween, Elin had a high fever and was struggling to breathe. We took her to the Dr, and sure enough she had croup. Of course she couldn't just have normal croup though....nope she had a croup that wasn't responding to any treatment, which landed us a 3 day stay at the children's hospital. Elin was really sick and our experience was very scary. We want to thank everyone for their prayers. We felt them and we knew that the Lord was taking care of us. We have never felt so helpless. Our little Elin was just sooo sick. It's hard to see your child like that. A couple of things helped Elin get through her difficult time... BABY EINSTEIN. I think we have Baby Einstein memorized. It was on repeat for 3 straight days! Jenni's boss Darla was so sweet...she brought Elin a Teddy Bear while in the hospital and then sent her gourmet cupcakes as a get well present. This teddy bear made Elin smile, which made us smile! Elin's nurses were incredible and they took very good care of her. After leaving the hospital, it took a good week for Elin to return to her normal, happy, full of energy self.

If croup wasn't enough, Jenni caught the SWINE FLU and it took her out for a good 10 days. Even after isolating herself and taking extra precautions, Elin got the swine flu and so did Corey. We all got on Tamiflu and we all felt better. Then once off Tamiflu, Elin got another high fever. The Dr thought that she might have a hidden pnemonia, so Elin had to get another chest x-ray and then she was put on high dose antibiotics. Poor thing!! We are hoping that we had our share of illness all in the month of November. We should be good for a year right?!! We are hopeful:)

Elin's First Halloween

2009-11-02T21:12:00.006-05:00

We endured the cold and went to a trunk or treat for Elin's first Halloween. Elin hung out in her stroller most of the time trying to stay warm in her very insulated lady bug costume....she did have a small resemblence of an obese child!! Super cute! We ended up with a big bag of lady bug treats to take home. It was a fun night and we are glad that we did her first trick or treating at a local church. It was a fun and safe environment. We will return for another round of trunk or treating next year!! By then, Elin will actually get to enjoy her treats instead of her treats being graciously eaten up by her parents:)

OUR LITTLE LADY BUG!

2009-10-31T12:47:00.005-04:00

Happy Halloween! We are so excited to take Elin to a "trunk or treat" tonight at church! She looks so adorable in her lady bug costume! I am sure we will have tons of pictures to post after tonight!

An Unexpected Pumpkin Patch!!

2009-10-12T14:20:00.014-04:00

We went for a walk yesterday and found ourselves in the middle of a pumpkin patch! Elin absolutely loved the pumpkins. She kept trying to lick them! She always makes us laugh!

We love the fall weather here in Louisville. All of the leaves are starting to change colors! It is so beautiful. It makes us miss the mountains in Utah. Utah is so beautiful in the Fall!

Elin is crawling now. She can move so fast. She has retired the head crawl for now. I guess she figured that this new and improved crawling with your knees and arms actually gets you places fast! She also loves to pull herself up to stand. She loves to use OUR legs to balance herself...and she likes to PANTS us at the same time! Very funny as long as you are at home alone! She is so much fun and we just love her more each day. She loves to say Dada all day long...her little voice is so cute!

This last picture shows Elin with her very first cold. She had a cold for 4 days last week and was miserable...look at those eyes. But still looking adorable!

Summer Days

2009-08-25T14:00:00.014-04:00

Surprised...shocked? Did the Duncans really update their blog? Yep! Your eyes aren't playing tricks on you. We thought it might be nice to update our blog since it has been 6 months! Time sure flies, especially when you have a little baby. They are little time suckers that's for sure! We are just loving having our baby girl! She is now 9 months old. She is full of energy, smiles, and giggles. She loves to eat and is really enjoying all Gerber stage II foods! She is on the verge of crawling. It will be any day now that she will just take off. I hope we won't lose her since she gets around so fast. The only thing that is holding her back from crawling is what we call the "head crawl." Everytime she does it we think she is going to break her neck. She puts her hands in the air, brings her back off the floor and balances herself on the top of her head and then crawls/hops backwards. It is hilarious. She is very mobile this way and this has made her not want to crawl the normal way. This is all changing now...she likes switching between the two! She's getting so big.

Elin LOVES the water. She loves her baths, she loved the ocean in CA, and swimming at my Uncle Raymond's house. She is like a little fish and never wants to leave the water. She looks so dang cute in her bikinis. It just makes me smile and giggle all day. I could just eat her up!!!!

This summer has been crazy! We have been all over the US visiting friends and family. It started Memorial Day weekend in California with family pictures and visits to the beach. Elin had her first plane ride and everyone on the plane shared in her experience. She struggled to say the least. It must have been the pressure change and I think her ears were hurtin her. Next trip was with my sweet Dad. We (Dad, Elin,and I) spent a whole week together in Kentucky to find a place to live. We had many memorial moments. We are happy to report that Kentucky has a wonderful icecream place that is right down the street from us!! We taste tested a couple of times and they got the stamp of approval! It is called the Homeade Icecream and Pie Kitchen. My dad is awesome with maps and directions. I was quite impressed and he was the PERFECT person to take with me on this trip. I think we went down every possible street, and it got pretty discouraging. By the end of the trip though, God blessed us with a beautiful cape cod home....I love it!! Thanks Dad for sharing in that experience!!! It was fun:)

We moved to Kentucky in July for Corey to attend Southern Seminary to get and Master's Degree in Divinity with a Missions concentration. School just started last week and he is loving it. The seminary campus is beautiful, which is a good thing since he will be spending so much time there!

Right after we moved, my (Jenni) grandma, we call Momo, went to be with Jesus. It is so hard to say goodbye to loved ones, but so wonderful to know that she is no longer suffering. She is with the Lord for eternity and that helps ease the grief. I miss her terribly already! We were able to go and say goodbye to her a week before we moved. It was such a wonderful time to be with her and celebrate her near arrival of heaven and meeting Jesus face to face. It will be a time that I will never forget. Since she became sick so suddenly, she had to retire from Disneyland. She worked there for 42 years, so we threw her a retirement party at my Uncle Raymond's house. I am so happy we could be apart of the party before we moved!

When she died, our family came together and celebrated her life with a memorial service on the beach where we shared memories of her. It was a beautiful time. Then, we ate dinner while looking out at the ocean. She had put money aside for all of us to come together and do this. So amazing! She always was thinking of us. She was so thoughtful, kind, and expressed unconditional love to all of us. Miss you Momo. The funeral was very emotional, but in a good way. She was very loved. I had the privelege of speaking and sharing the gospel and as I looked out at the audience I was overwhelmed by the amount of people attending to show their love and support. Momo meant the world to so many people. I am grateful that the Lord provided the means for us to go to California to be with my family to grieve and be apart of such special services.

On a lighter note, we are liking Kentucky! The people here are very nice. God has shown his love to us through many people here. We LOVE our new house. We are renting a house in the city, but it feels like we are in the wilderness! We are on a acre of land and it feels so relaxful! I started my job right after we came home from my grandma's funeral. I am working with children with cancer, which I love! Adjusting to a new work environment has been a little stressful, but I am hopeful that it will get better.

One of my favorite things that happened this summer was seeing my sister get baptized! God has really been working in her life and it has been really neat to see God changing her and molding her. She commited her life to Jesus and asked Corey to baptize her in the ocean. It was a beautiful ceremony with our family at Delmar and to top it off, that night we went to a Christian conference/concert Spirit of the West Coast and rocked out to Toby Mac. It was a great day, one I will remember forever!

A GREAT BIG THANKS to Jake for taking a roady with Corey and helping move all of our crap across the country! You are a great best friend, and this was one of his favorite times this summer! While they were crossing the country I was able to spend some wonderful quality time with my BFF Trisha! God knew that this was exactly what I needed. I didn't have a chance to worry about Corey. I had such a wonderful time with Trish. Another favorite thing, we were able to spend some time with our friends that we met up with in St. Louis. God blessed us with a great friendship with a family that is ministering in East Asia. We met them when we lived in Virginia for mission training. They are family to us and we love them. We got to enjoy the St. Louis zoo, and visit the arch. We had so much fun catching up and relaxing.

So that's basically it. We are still working on our southern accent :) and settling into a different culture. We are starting to adapt to the humidity and the "severe thunder storms that have a scary chance of producing tornados...aaaah!" We found a wonderful pediatrician that we love for Elin. We are still battling her ECZEMA issues. Sure wish it would just go away and never go back. Oh well...another important thing to do...we need to find somewhere that resembles Cafe Rio! Cravings are starting to get stronger each day!

We have roommates for the moment and so it really feels like school life around here with everyone studying (but me!). Our friends from Utah, Jared and Amie, moved here with us to go to Seminary as well. They haven't found a house yet, so they are living with us. We are still looking for a church, but haven't found the right one for us yet...

Hope all is well! Thanks for being patient for 6 months! We will update, HOPEFULLY again really soon! I know I promised many of you that would happen and I will try very hard to keep current on the blog:) Until then...enjoy some fun new pics of Elin!

New pictures!

2009-02-08T18:14:00.012-05:00

We know it has been a while since our last post but we have some good excuses. First, our computer was having some serious issues which prohibited us from using it at all. So...no computer no blog post. However, the second excuse could be the most legit and understandable one, especially for those who have ever had a newborn. Let's just say sleep hasn't been in abundance in the Duncan household. Anyway, here are some new pictures of our beautiful daughter.

Back on the blog scene

2008-12-13T10:39:00.005-05:00

We now have something to blog about again...our beautiful baby girl! So enjoy it while it lasts. Here are some photos we took during the last week of her making funny faces, enjoying her first snow storm, and spending some time with her mommy and daddy.

More Pictures of Baby Elin

2008-12-08T18:06:00.002-05:00

Here are a few more pictures that our friend Erika took of our sweet girl...isn't she adorable?!

Praise God from whom all blessings flow!

2008-12-02T19:57:00.008-05:00

On November 30th, 2008 at 3:17am our beautiful baby girl, Elin Rae Duncan, entered this world. She weighs 7 lbs 8 oz and is 20 inches long. We are so grateful that God has given us this precious gift! Thank you so much for all of your prayers and support! Enjoy some pictures while we try and get caught up on some sleep.

Elin Rae Duncan

Leaving for the hospital

Getting ready for the 20 hour labor

Some card playing to pass the time

Stacy came to help and was such a blessing

The "new" Duncan Family

Both Families

Gramps and Nana with their granddaughter

Stacy & Elin

Jenni celebrating the end of her pregancy
and gestational diabetes with a bowl of
Lucky Charms and a donut

Our wonderful friends the Krafts from
Wyoming came to see the birth of our baby

Some more pics

Thanks so much for all of your prayers and support! We can't wait for all you to meet her!

Getting settled...kind of

2008-07-12T20:02:00.008-04:00

Once again…sorry for the delay in posting. We are still trying to get settled into America! We are both working full time at our jobs that we had before we left the US. Corey is working as a legal assistant at a law firm, and Jenni is a RN working at the Children’s Hospital. It is definitely weird not to be together all of the time. Our quality time is car-pooling! We have one car which has presented a challenge as we have different working hours/schedules. We are making it work though! We still haven’t found a place of our own to live yet. We are living with our friends in their basement apartment which has been a great blessing. We do have a 40 minute commute each day, but we just see that now as “time together!” So as you can see, we are still transitioning, even though we’ve been back for 3 months now!

Since our last post, a HUGE milestone occurred! COREY turned 30!!! He’s an old man! He celebrated his birthday by having a basketball party! He missed playing basketball in Mozambique, so he had a blast at his party! Later that evening some of our friends gathered together for a BBQ to eat Corey's favorite food Rib eye steaks. It was delicious! A week later, Jenni turned 27! We went kayaking at Jordanelle and had a picnic! It was a beautiful day and we had so much fun being in the gorgeous scenary of UTAH! It was a little challenging to kayak being pregnant, but I managed! Kayaking is one of my most favorite things to do outdoors, so it was an extra special treat for my birthday! We love celebrating birthdays!

Shortly after our celebrations, God blessed us with a great opportunity of seeing some of our friends from Mozambique! About a year ago, we posted a blog about a missionary child (Caleb) that had to be medically evacuated. Caleb was in critical condition and he almost died in Nampula. He and his family came back to America, and over the last year have witnessed miracles daily! Caleb’s recovery has been slow, but he’s doing incredibly well. We met with Caleb and his family a couple of weeks ago and we saw in front of us a living miracle and testament of how God protects us and heals us! I am so glad God gave me the opportunity to be a nurse to him and his family in Mozambique and then gave me another opportunity to see God restore his life to him!

Well here’s some very much anticipated news….we found out that we are having….A BABY GIRL!!! We are so excited! We really wanted a girl! We were supposed to find out several weeks ago, but she wouldn’t cooperate. Everyone says that she’s modest like her mom!:) We had to get another ultrasound, and then she showed herself! We have this cute picture of her waving at us! She comes in November and we are soooo excited to see her. I have been feeling so much better. I thought everyone was lying to me saying that one day you just feel normal again. This didn’t happen for me until I was 17 weeks. Now life is wonderful….no more nausea!!! Whoohoo!!

Reverse Culture Shockin'

2008-05-12T17:44:00.003-04:00

We have now been back for over a month already and have been able to see a lot of our friends and family…along with some much anticipated snow that we had been missing. It has been a wonderful time reuniting with all of them! We have also been experiencing a bit of reverse culture shock. Before returning to the States we heard a lot about reverse culture shock and how it can be worse than normal culture shock. Up til now we still have to say that our original culture shock going into Mozambique was a lot worse. Maybe once we get more settled and into our daily routine that will change.

So how exactly have we experienced reverse culture shock? Well, besides me (Corey) digging a hole in the back yard for excrement purposes and then using his left hand instead of Charmin, we have experienced a few things. Since coming back we have seen how much we really have as Americans and how pampered we are. Now we’re not saying that life over here is easy because it is anything but that. Sin and Satan affect us no matter where we are and life will always have struggles. But when we look around our world we can see that we have been given a lot. Going back to Wal-Mart after being in Africa is an experience in itself. We had heard of some people getting very emotional after being in a Wal-Mart for the first time upon returning to the States. For us it wasn’t too emotional but it was a bit overwhelming. Those Super Wal-Marts are huge! You can find anything there...it’s incredible! Whatever you want you can find it in about 10 different types to choose from. In Mozambique, you celebrate if they just have something you like. You don’t get to be picky there. Don’t get us wrong…we LOVE Super Wal-Mart and we LOVE America, but there’s so much we don’t need, so much we take for granted, and there’s so much more we can give our lives to besides the materialism that has gripped our country.

Another thing that has been hard to get used to is how busy we are as Americans. We had gotten so used to the laid back attitude and culture of Mozambique that we forgot how busy life can be here. There’s almost always something going on every night and there’s not a whole lot of down time. This is completely the opposite of Mozambique. There’s hardly anything going on there. In fact, there’s probably too much down time there. I guess the struggle is finding that balance but I’m sure most of us don’t ever rest too much as opposed to working too much.

Besides all of that reverse culture shock stuff we have been moving from house to house staying with family and friends which has been fun. We’ve been introduced to Wii at about every house we’ve stayed at and have enjoyed the exercise you can get with this, especially the boxing game. That game is tiring! It’s amazing now kids (and adults) can get some exercise in while playing video games. Thank you Keys, Lees, Krafts, Wolffs, Yorks, and Lathrops for your incredible hospitality! We are so grateful for you! Also, thanks so much to everyone else who has offered their home for us! It has been such a blessing to experience love from the body of Christ.

As for our baby in Jenni’s belly, it seems to be doing well! We had our first doctors appointment last month and so far so good. While we there they did an ultrasound on Jenni and we were able to see the baby’s heart beat. What an experience that was for us! We both were a little emotional when we could see the baby’s heart beat. God is so amazing and unfathomable! When we look at everything that takes place during a pregnancy, we simply stand in complete awe of our God.

With the awe, excitement, and anticipation of having a baby, also comes lots of nausea, hunger, fatigue, and bizarre cravings…at least for Jenni. Corey on the other hand, has it made. His work is done:) Either way, we are both very excited for our baby to enter this world. Approximate time of arrival: Thanksgiving Day! We’ll have one more thing to be thankful for this year…the gift of a baby!

Hope you all are well and hopefully we will see you soon if we haven’t seen you already!

Please pray for 1) God’s providence in our employment and housing situation and that He would give us patience to wait upon Him. 2) Please pray for the health of Jenni and for the baby that is growing inside of her. 3) Please pray for ministry direction here in Utah.

Back Home!

2008-03-30T10:43:00.007-04:00

We are home! After nearly 2 years in Nampula, Mozambique, we are finally back in the USA. We are so excited to be back in our homeland and to be with the friends and family that we have missed so much! We had a wonderful reunion at the Las Vegas airport and appreciate everyone who came to welcome us back to America.
It wasn’t easy though to say our good-byes and then to travel half-way across the world. In fact, it was awful. Our most difficult good-byes were to the orphans at the orphanage and to our great friend Choveque. We dreaded doing this for the last few months and once the time came we shed many tears. We praise God though for these tears as He allowed us to be a part of some wonderful things He is doing at the orphanage and through the life of Choveque. Here is a funny picture of us in our new African outfits that we received as part of our good-bye gifts. It seemed like everyone wanted to give an African outfit before we left.
Besides the sad goodbyes we had to make we also had to deal with Mozambique Airlines one more time. Our plan was to leave Nampula at 10:50am on the 19th of March to arrive that night in Johannesburg. But instead we got to stay in the beautiful Nampula airport for 6 hours as our flight was delayed until 5pm that night. So we never made it to Johannesburg that night but instead stayed the night in Maputo and got up at 5am the next morning only to have our last flight with LAM delayed an hour. Let’s just say we’re happy to say that we don’t have to fly LAM for awhile.

The next day we, and our 8 pieces of luggage, boarded the plane in Johannesburg to make our trip back to the States. This flight was brutal! It took about 19 hours in the air to finally make it to Atlanta and then another 4 ½ to get to Las Vegas. It was 100% exhausting! Now we trying to get over our jet lag from all the lack of sleep we experienced. Plus Jenni has caught a bad virus that has totally wiped her out. We can’t really leave the house for fear that she will infect others….her mom has already received this wonderful illness. Please pray for God to heal her so that she can start feeling herself again. We have been anticipating coming home and sharing our experience with everyone along with enjoying family, friends, food, and shopping! Nothing is worse than having to stay in bed during such an exciting time.

In other news, JENNI IS PREGNANT! Are you surprised? We are! But we are also very excited for this gift that God has given us! We found out the day before we left for the States and we couldn’t believe it. In fact, it is still quite surreal to think that we will have a baby and that we will be parents before the end of the year. Please pray for us!

So now that we have found this out, our plans have changed a bit. For now we plan on staying in Salt Lake for a little while, at least until next year. Then Lord willing, we will move to Kentucky next year to obtain a degree in missiology from Southern Seminary. We’ve got a lot on our plate now, especially with our new little baby on the way. Please pray for us as we seek God’s will for this next chapter of our lives.

Thank you again for all of you that joined us in our journey through Mozambique. We cannot express how much all of your support, prayers, and love have meant to us! Thank you and we love you!!

A Very Busy & Fun Month!

2008-02-29T09:55:00.012-05:00

Sorry for the delay in posting our blog! It’s a good thing February has 29 days, giving us an extra day to get a post done for February! It has been an extremely busy month for us. One of our supervisors had offered to help us out and drive our bags down to Johannesburg. This was to help us save hundreds of dollars in shipping or in overweight/excess baggage on any airline. So in one week we had to pack almost all of our stuff to send with him. It is always a very crazy ordeal to pack and move overseas. It definitely involves some strategy and creativity! He took 6 of our bags down to Johannesburg by car so…now we will only have 2 bags to check when we leave Nampula. It was such a blessing to have him do this for us! We are so grateful! From Joburg we will grab all of our stuff and make our way home with everything but the kitchen sink!

Despite the craziness in packing we have had a really fun time, especially with our kiddos out at the orphanage. Our church from Utah had graciously donated mattresses so that each child could sleep comfortably in their beds. The kids were so surprised and so excited to get these mattresses. It was incredibly fun to here all of their giggles and watch them take their mattresses to their room to try them out! Thanks again Holladay Baptist Church! Another really fun activity we had with our kiddos…an ICE CREAM PARTY!
Nothing could get better than this! We had lots of different flavors so that they could try all of them! It was really fun to see them enjoy a huge plate of ice cream! The room was filled with silence and smiles as each child was very focused on experiencing the new flavors! It was great! Thanks Momo and Popo for throwing this party for them! They loved it so much! Also, thanks Joey for having a birthday so we could have an excuse to eat this much icecream!

We have less than 3 weeks left until we leave Mozambique! It’s crazy! We can’t believe that our time here is just about finished. It has gone by so fast (slow at times, but mostly fast)! We are really excited to come home and see all of our family and friends! However, we are definitely going to have some difficult good-byes in the coming days. God has blessed us with some great friendships and we are not looking forward to these good-byes in a few weeks. It makes us cry when we think about it, so we are in a state of denial when it comes to these goodbyes!

Thank you for your prayers for our friends Joey and Lindsay! They made it here and returned safely to Port Elizabeth. We had a wonderful time with them! They were such an incredible blessing to us and they helped us out tremendously! While they were here we taught them the True Love Waits Program. They will be taking this program back to South Africa and sharing it with the youth in schools and church groups. So, they studied it throughout the week and then had their first opportunity to teach the True Love Waits material in a church out in the bush. We drove about an hour out of Nampula to a bush town called Netia . It was a great experience for everyone involved. Joey and Lindsay did a great job teaching and the people loved learning from them. In fact the church rewarded them with their very own pigeons to take home to eat! There were about 100 people who came to participate in the program…. some walking as far as 30 kilometers, just to hear God’s plan for their lives. This is always humbling to hear of how far people will walk to hear the Word of God. We take God’s Word for granted way to often.

This was probably the first time for most of the people to hear about God’s plan for sex within a marriage covenant. Sex is such a huge part of this culture and to wait until you’re married to have sex is almost unheard of. In Mozambique, both boys and girls start having sex at a disturbingly early age of 7 and have had several partners before they get married. We believe this rally gave them a lot to think about along with many challenges regarding their sexual behavior and their relationship with God.

While Joey and Lindsay were here with us, they had the opportunity to bond with our wonderful kids at the oprhanage and they helped us with a project that took a lot of hard work (which was rewarded with lots of ice cream.) In our down time we did a project with the orphanage compiling every orphan’s story and putting it into writing. The stories were composed of how they became a Christian, how their life was before the orphanage, how it is now, and the difference Christ is making in their life now. It was so amazing to hear the stories of each child (there are 52 kids). All we ever see are the smiles on their faces, but almost all of the children have a heart-wrenching story. We are so grateful to the Lord for giving us the grace and privilege to accomplish this project.Through these biographies, we would like to raise awareness for these orphans when we go home. The director of the orphanage’s vision is “to raise godly leaders for Mozambique for the glory of God;” we want to join him in this God-given vision and create a prayer network for these kiddos. We made prayer cards for each child so that people and churches can “adopt” them by praying and/or supporting them financially. We are so excited and can’t wait to see how God uses this to show His love and faithfulness to these orphans. Thank you so much Joey and Lindsay for coming and for all of your hard work! It was such a blessing for us to have you here! We love you guys and we had so much fun with you!

So we are wrapping things up here in Nampula. We are continuing to teach the discipleship program to the TLW team each week. We have also started to teach the TLW material specifically to a few who have stepped into leadership roles. These leaders are going to teach the program to other churches, schools, and communities. Please pray for this team (Choveque, Daniel, and Augosio) as they venture out in faith to teach their fellow youth God’s plan for sex and marriage. We are really excited for them to be leaders! Through the last couple of months we have seen their desire to follow God in all areas of their lives. It has been so encouraging!

Our prayer requests for next couple of weeks: 1) Our TLW team to be motivated and purposeful to reach their country for Christ, 2) Protection over them so that they will not become easily discouraged by our departure. They can do all things with Christ…not with Corey and Jenni! 3) Guidance as we prepare to return to the States. So many logistical details that are still unknown to us (car, house, $$$) 4) Guidance for our final 3 weeks here in Nampula 5) Our very sad goodbyes to our orphans, friends, and brothers & sisters in Christ.

Thank you for all of your prayers in these last 2 years. We have been so encouraged by them! See you all soon!!

The Garden Route

2008-01-21T03:34:00.000-05:00

We are finally back from our prayer retreat and vacation. Thank you so much for your prayers while we traveled! We left on December 26th and started our trip with a sad goodbye to our Baptist colleague and friend Carol. She is now in the States living it up in the snow with family, friends, and good food. We miss you Carol!

We had a great time at our prayer retreat in Johannesburg. A church from Lyons, Georgia came to help with it and minister to us. They were such a blessing to us all! You never know how much you miss being with other believers until you’re away from it for so long. Worshipping and hearing a message in English is such a wonderful thing! The conference was about “Remembering.” The pastor challenged us to remember God’s character, what He has done, what He is doing, and what He promises to do in the future. It was sooo good and refreshing to hear. It was so fun to look back on our lives and remember God and we are so happy to have had this conference to spur us to do this! A huge highlight of the conference was when the Pastor’s wife talked to the missionary women. She shared from 2 Chronicles where King Jehosaphat hears about several armies coming to invade their land. Then the first thing that he does is drop to his knees and seeks help from the Lord. Then he says “Lord we don’t know what to do but our eyes are on you.” This was such a good passage to hear as we think about how to wrap up our ministry here and as we plan to go home with all of the unknown. We really don’t know what to do, but our eyes need to be on the Lord and seeking Him for help. That is great comfort for us! So as we are facing so many unknowns and decisions in the near future, pray that we follow in the footsteps of Jehosaphat!

After our prayer retreat we took a little break and visited some parts of South Africa, (mainly the Garden Route) that we had never seen before. We started in Port Elizabeth where we stayed with a wonderful family of believers. It was a “mom and dad” with 8 mission kids from various parts of the States. They were so hospitable and gracious to us to let us stay with them. We had such a great time with them all! The fellowship was so sweet and we felt like we were in college again with so many fun, active youth around us!! It was really neat as well because one of them was from Utah. You don’t meet a whole lot of Christians in Africa from Utah so it was pretty cool. Her name is Lindsay and she is coming to visit us along with another missionary, Joey, to learn the True Love Waits program. This is a total God thing for us to meet up with them the way that we did and now to have them coming up to visit us next month is such a blessing! We are excited to see TLW spread to South Africa and be implemented in the school system there.

After Port Elizabeth we made our way to Jeffrey’s Bay and to Knysna. These places are known to have some of the largest waves in the world. This part of the Garden Route is so beautiful. The scenary is all mountains and ocean. The total drive is about 8 hours, but there is so much to do and see along the way that it usually takes days to get through everything. We loved it. Before heading off to Cape Town we stopped in a strawberry field to pick our very own fresh strawberries! It was a very fun and delicious activity! We then drove to Cape Town where we celebrated our third anniversary! It was such a great time as we enjoyed each other, the ocean, the beautiful scenery, a superb train ride, and great seafood. We can’t believe three years have already passed but we thank God for the blessing of bringing us together and for each moment we have had together! It has been an awesome experience to be in Africa every day together at such an early stage of our marriage! We wish everyone could experience this! We wouldn’t trade it for the world!

We stayed a couple more nights in Fish Hoek at the same place where we stayed with Jenni’s parents when they were here. It is such a beautiful place and we totally recommend it if you ever want to travel to South Africa. This time we took the coastal route train and we loved it! We love Cape Town and consider it one of the most beautiful places you could ever visit.

So after relaxing, enjoying God’s creation, being refreshed, being cold, drinking fresh milk, eating fresh fruit and veggies without bleaching them, eating at a variety of yummy restaurants, savoring root beer floats, and frequenting Micky D’s, we packed up and headed back to the extreme heat and humidity of Mozambique. It’s amazing the difference of temperatures there are from two neighboring countries. Once we got back to Nampula, after a 9 hour delay in Maputo with Mozambique Airlines (yeah that was a nice welcome home treat!), we have been extremely busy and constantly on the go. There is so much to do in just a couple of months before we leave that it is becoming a little overwhelming. We think we will be back in the States somewhere between the 21st and the 23rd of March. We will let you all know once we find out. We are so excited to be coming back and to be able to see all of our friends and family again! We have missed you all so much! Speaking of which…thanks to all who thought of us during the holidays! It was really fun to come home to Christmas packages and cards! You made us feel loved, so thanks for the effort and money to send stuff to Africa! It was very special to us!

Please pray for: 1) Wisdom and clarity as to how we should wrap up our TLW ministry. 2) Pray for the two missionaries, Joey and Lindsay, from Port Elizabeth as they plan to come next month for 2 weeks 3) Guidance as we prepare to return to the States. Both of us need to be able to get jobs quickly, buy a car, and get settled in somewhere 4) Guidance for our final 2 months here in Nampula

Christmas in Mozambique

2007-12-25T16:24:00.000-05:00

We have had quite the eventful December here in Nampula. We have been extremely busy with many different things but we have also been very sick. We possibly had our first bout of Malaria this month and it was awful! The worst part about it was that not just one of us had it but we both suffered through it! One morning we both woke up not feeling so good and as the day progressed, we just got worse. We had high fevers that wouldn’t break, chills, headaches, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, the works. We would have these symptoms at the same times too. It was so weird. So after all this stuff we were going through, we decided to take a malaria test. The test was negative but the symptoms still continued. (Many people have “false negatives” here) After trying to figure out what we might have, our nurse friend persuaded us to just treat for Malaria and an amoeba as we had symptoms of both sicknesses. This was such a miserable experience for us as neither of us could serve the other person. We were both stuck in bed being sick and miserable and helpless. This experience did help us to appreciate our health more and appreciate the body of Christ. Many people were praying for us and several other missionaries helped us out a lot by bringing us dinner and being willing to help us out in any way. We really appreciated all that they did and are very grateful for the body of Christ.

In happier news, Jenni had a really good time with some missionary friends throwing a Starbucks/craft party. This was so much fun for Jenni as she is so gifted and creative with these types of things. Her and some other ladies did some Christmas crafts as they drank Starbucks coffee. That’s right, Nampula just opened a Starbucks Coffee! Well close enough…Jenni’s best friend sent some Starbuck’s Christmas blend coffee with some Starbucks cups, lids, and holders. All of the ladies enjoyed the atmosphere of a familiar coffee shop while sipping frozen Gingerbread latte’s! This was such a blessing for everyone as the holidays can be very difficult when you’re away from home. Please pray for missionaries during this time of year as it can be the most difficult time of the year for them as they are away from all of their friends, family…and familiarity.

Another neat thing that we did this month was throw a party for the kids at the orphanage. We did the same thing last year and had so much fun so we wanted to do another one this year. We had such a great time! They made ornaments for the Christmas tree, ornaments with their picture on it, and they decorated some Christmas cookies. We also received many generous donations and so we made them school bags with names on them and stuffed them with brand new school supplies. This was really neat as Victor, the orphanage director, and the kids had prayed that they would receive all these things even being specific as having their names on the bags! It was so great to see the kids’ faces when Victor told them we had a special gift for them. He asked them, “Do you remember what we prayed for a couple months ago, concerning school supplies?” They answered, “Yeah, that God would provide us with new supplies.” Then Victor asked them, “And what did we pray for these supplies to go in?” The kid’s answered, “A school bag!” Victor then asked, “And what did we ask God specifically about these school bags?” Then they answered with full excitement, “School bags with our names on them!” We brought out the bags and Victor explained to them that he didn’t tell us about this prayer request, but God Himself put this special projects on our hearts and in the hearts of people back in the US that gave generously to do this. The kids were amazed and really excited at the answered prayer!! They can truly see the faithfulness of our God in every little aspect of their lives. They can see that He is the father of the fatherless and how much he cares for them. We thank our Lord Jesus so much that He has let us be a part of this great work and that we could witness with our own eyes what He is doing at that orphanage….and in the hearts of so many people.

In our TLW meetings we are still continuing to teach discipleship lessons as we feel like we need to touch on many more issues. This past week was good yet bad. We talked about the issue of corruption here in Mozambique. This is a huge problem in Mozambique. According to our TLW team, one of the greatest temptations for Mozambicans is to give into corruption. This can occur in several different ways but the most common is paying for work and paying for grades. When we say paying for work it means that people will pay someone to get a job. For example, we knew someone who paid about 40 or 50 dollars to get a government type job. Many times here the jobs don’t go to the most qualified or hardest workers but to those who are willing to pay the most. Many of them will say that to get a really good job with the government or other business, it is nearly impossible without bribes. So we confronted that issue and challenged them to suffer even if it means not getting a job or passing to the next class in school. We shared 1 Peter 4:19 with them and how we should suffer for doing good and for doing God’s will and commit ourselves to our faithful Creator. This was very challenging for them as it was the first time for many of them to hear that it’s not right to give bribes.

Christmas Eve was special as we sat around our Christmas tree singing Christmas Carols and sipping some more Gingerbread Lattes! Jenni’s friend Stacy sent her a recipe for some Café Rio pork, so we had some more taste from home and it was great…although we are looking forward to the “real thing!” We had a wonderful Christmas day. Since, there is NOTHING to buy here in Nampula, we decided to wrap up some things from around the house. It surely was creative and funny!

We spent part of the day with the orphans celebrating Jesus’ birth by having a big goat lunch and eating “Happy Birthday Jesus cupcakes.” It was really special, and it was so neat to hear them sing Happy Birthday to Jesus with their sweet voices! They are such a blessing in our lives. Tonight we had a big turkey dinner with some of our good missionary friends. It was very special and delicious! It has been a good day and it kept us smiling in the midst of being sad that we are not with our families. God has really provided us with some great family through our kiddos at the orphanage and through friends!

Well, this will be our last post for 2007 as we will be traveling to South Africa this week. (We are ready for a little break…off and on we’ve had no water, electricity, or phone for a month now…it’s time for a break!) We will be attending our annual prayer retreat and then celebrating our 3rd anniversary of being married. What a blessing it has been to share our lives and to serve our Lord together! Thank you Lord! Then once we return we only have a couple months of our term. Craziness!

Please pray for: 1) Wisdom and clarity as to how we should wrap up our TLW ministry. 2) Guidance as we prepare to return to the States. 3) Traveling mercies to and from South Africa.

We hope that all of you have a wonderful Christmas celebrating our Saviour's birth! FELIZ NATAL!! (HAPPY CHRISTMAS!)

Thankful

2007-11-26T09:25:00.000-05:00

Our Thanksgiving was quite eventful….as always in Africa. Jenni was making little apple turnovers about an hour before we were to go to a missionary Thanksgiving dinner. She put them in the oven right before we left so they would be nice and hot….then the power shut off. We thought, “surely it will just come back on!” WRONG. The power was out the rest of the night. The turkeys weren’t done on time, dinner was 2 hours late, we were dripping wet from it being so hot and of course there were no fans or A/C to cool us down. We thought it would come back on before going to bed….WRONG. It didn’t come back on until 1 am. We had every window in the house open TRYING to get a breeze, which there wasn’t one! When our power is off, our water pump doesn’t work, so we couldn’t even cool off or wash off all of our sweat. So we just laid on the bed miserable, with a wet washcloth on our heads, missing cold, snowy UTAH! We did reminisce in the candlelit room…I guess we could try and look at it as a forced romantic evening! That’s a stretch though. The biggest bummer of all….we couldn’t talk to our family and friends.

Oh well, I guess that’s just how life goes here…but did it have to happen on Thanksgiving? And did it have to be like 150 degrees with 100% humidity that day!? We looked at each other that night and said the thing that we were most thankful for was electricity! Now each time we go in our air-conditioned room we are thanking God!! Actually, it sounds really bad…and it was….but we were able to laugh through it like….”hah! Isn’t this miserable??” The best part of the evening was the dinner…it was so delicious! We took our friend Choveque so he could experience the goodness of a Thanksgiving dinner! He said that it was the best food…he had 4 plates full and he said he has never felt so miserable. He thought he needed to go for a walk to make him feel better! We told him this miserable feeling was normal after Thanksgiving Dinner.

Last year at this time we were in the bush for a month long training called “40/40.” We spent our Thanksgiving in a tent, and had a lantern-lit chicken dinner since there were no turkeys around. We are happy that this year we had the opportunity to eat some turkey and stuffing! As we remember our 40/40 experience, we wanted to share with you some of our favorite memories: One day we met a couple of ladies in town of Petauke and talked to them about why we were there. Then they started talking to us about AIDS and they wanted to know what we thought about it and if there’s a solution to this huge problem. This gave us an open door to share about the cure for our hearts! We had a great conversation with them and talked to them about how Christ is the only solution to our “infected/sinful” hearts. It is more important that the inside of us be cleansed before we even think about our physical bodies. We will all die of something…nothing can cure physical death…but Jesus Christ is the only way to have everlasting life with Him! They thought this was a wonderful idea and solution to the problem of AIDS. We told them it’s not our idea but God’s and that it’s in the Bible. So they really wanted a Bible they could read in their own language, Nyanga. We didn’t have a Bible with us but we told them we would get one for them and bring it to them the next day. During this time we learned how blessed we are to have the Word of the one true God in our country and how much we take it for granted. Getting a Bible in their own language isn’t an easy, inexpensive thing to obtain. The next day we returned and gave one of the ladies a Bible. She was so excited to receive this gift that she invited us into her house for tea and bread. Then after we had eaten, she handed us a live chicken! We couldn’t believe it! We didn’t need a chicken but we were told that it’s offensive to them if you decline the gift they’ve offered to you. So we accepted and took it with us back to camp.

We loved being in Zambia last year. The people were so friendly! Then God blessed us with a great opportunity to see the majestic Victoria Falls. Since our internet wasn’t fast enough, we didn’t post any pictures, but we must say that it was a highlight of our trip! One night we even got to share the gospel with a couple that was there on their honeymoon! We stood in awe of God’s beautiful creation and the wonderful opportunities he always gives us to share His love! If you ever get the opportunity to see Victoria Falls...TAKE IT!! It is one of the most amazing things you will ever see!

On Sunday, Corey was able to preach in church. Choveque translated for him again….they are a good duo! It was a really neat day, as Corey preached about Jesus washing the disciple’s feet and the importance in following Jesus’ example. After the message, he had the whole congregation sit in a circle, and we all washed each other’s feet. It was an amazing time. Everyone broke out into praise songs. We just felt God’s presence there and it was so worshipful. It spoke wonders to the people. Most of the Africans think that if you have white skin, you are the “chosen” and deserve to be served. I think that the people who attended saw that this isn’t true. We are all sinners, we all need Jesus, and we all need to love each other equally, no matter what color your skin is or what position in the church you have. Corey concluded by encouraging them to not just make this a one time “attitude” of humility and love, but to go home and daily serve their wives, kids, neighbors, friends, and relatives as Jesus demonstrated.

We want to thank everyone for praying for Corey to heal quickly. He is 100% better now! Join us in praising God that he has protected us from malaria to this very day! Our prayer requests are almost the same as last post. Please pray this week for: 1) Leaders to emerge from our TLW group. Pray that their walk with the Lord would deepen each week as we meet. 2) Pray for wisdom and clarity for us as we are starting to make some big decisions about coming home in 4 months. 3) Pray for opportunities to share with our friend M. He has been asking a lot of questions about the differences between the Bible and the Koran. Pray that God would give us His words to speak, and give M ears to hear.

We want you all to know we are thankful for more than just our AIR CONDITIONER! We are thankful for each and every one of YOU! We are so blessed to have such wonderful family, friends, and prayer supporters! We love and miss you all! We hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving! We thank God for all of you!

A Great Reminder

2007-11-15T08:58:00.000-05:00

The last two weeks have been full of very different experiences! To start off, Corey preached in a church in the bush and our good friend Choveque translated for him in Makuwa. God has really helped Corey’s language improve daily and he was able to do the whole sermon in Portuguese. Imagine that…the first time he ever preaches, it’s in a different language. He shared with the congregation the importance of sharing the gospel with people. God worked through him and he did an amazing job with God’s strength! It was also the very first sermon Jenni understood completely, from start to finish! It’s much easier to understand the “Americanized” Portuguese! The church we went to was literally out in the middle of nowhere. The people were so friendly there…they gave us a chicken and some peanuts as we left. They also insisted on making us lunch. The people out there are so poor, but they are so generous and giving. We were overwhelmed by their kindness. It was such a blessing to have the opportunity to minister and be ministered to as well.

Over the last month, Jenni has had several opportunities to use her nursing skills to help the nationals we work with, as well as the missionary community. Last week, our guard’s wife, Claudia, became very ill and had so much pain she couldn’t sleep at night. We went to her house to visit her and to see if Jenni could help figure out what was wrong. Every time she would go to the doctor, they would give her a different medicine and tell her to go home, not explaining anything. The first time we saw her, she had a central pain in her belly, but no other symptoms. Then the next day she was in excruciating pain and showed classic signs of appendicitis (her pain moved to the right lower side). We tried very hard to convince her she needed to go to the emergency room, and she finally agreed. Once we arrived, she said NOTHING. Jenni had to speak to all of the doctors for her. Only when she was asked a question did she say yes or no. Patients are so timid and the doctors and nurses have no compassion. When they checked for appendicitis, the pushed so hard on her belly…to which she screamed in pain. This happened 5 different times. They weren’t convinced it was a appendicitis…so what did they do??? Gave her a prescription for diarrhea and sent her home. Not once in the last 6 months has she even had diarrhea. This type of situation shows us the need of powerful prayer since it is only God, our Great Physician, who can heal her.

A couple of nights ago, Choveque called us at 1 am to ask us to pick up him and his 9 month baby Ivan and take them to the hospital. Ivan had severe diarrhea and vomiting which had caused him to be severely dehydrated. We took him to the most ghetto bush hospital…it gave us the creeps. Choveque said to the nurse, “My son has diarrhea,” and that was it. They wrote a prescription to STOP the diarrhea. No more information asked for and no more was given. We told Choveque not to give that medicine as it could kill Ivan, and instead we gave him some oral re-hydration drinks. We took them home and prayed with them. Ivan was better within hours!!! He has totally recuperated, which is a miracle. Dehydration kills most children here. We saw the healing hand of God!

Unfortunately, whatever Ivan had….Corey has. Corey has been vomiting/diarrhea and is really weak. So what are we going to do??? We are going to take him to Nampula Hospital and have the most compassionate people heal him! Yeah right!!! We, as well as our national friends, are calling on our Great Physician to display His healing power. So often we forget that it is God that allows medicine to work in the bodies He has created in the first place. We should always go to Him first, whether we live in a place with excellent health care, or totally incompetent health care. He is the only One able to sustain, heal, protect, and cure! Our experiences this week have really brought us to our knees and humbled us. We can’t trust in anything but our God! We are grateful that God reminds of this truth through trials like these.

Please pray: 1) God would heal Corey and restore his health quickly, 2) Pray for Claudia and that God would continue to take away the pain she has, 3) Pray for leaders to emerge from our TLW group. Pray that their walk with the Lord would deepen each week as we meet. 4) Pray for wisdom and clarity for us as we are starting to make some big decisions about coming home in 4 months.

Two Weeks in Africa

2007-11-02T09:31:00.000-04:00

Wow! It’s already November! The time that we had with my dad went way too fast! It was such a neat time, and as promised…though a little late…here are more pictures of the time that we had together. The last week he was here we had the opportunity to spend time with our kiddos at the orphanage that we love! The last time my parents visited they had brought the kids some fun little card games like Go Fish and Old Maid. Well, before my dad came back, or even thought of coming back, a little girl (Cocas) asked if I could write home and tell my mom and dad how much she loved the card games and that she would love it if every kid could have their very own set, since the cards that they had weren’t being shared with all of the kids. So I sent along her request, and when my dad arrived with a whole backpack full of fun games for each kid, she got the biggest smile on her face! This was the same little girl that I had shared with that my dad was considering to come back, and she said that she would pray that God would help my dad make the decision to come and visit her. She not only got a fulfilled request for Old Maid cards, but also an answered prayer. She was so happy and that happiness was contagious! The kids loved having my dad back again. We all played the games together and the room was filled with laughter and joy filled voices of the kids! It was such a fun time. The second time was a little different: my dad had a meeting with Victor about the future plans of the orphanage and then later spent time with the kids. He handed out Blow-Pops, coloring books, and crayons. Coloring is a very serious project here. Everyone got really quiet and started coloring like their lives depended on it. It’s pretty funny how particular they are with coloring! They are all little perfectionists! The room was silent…only an occasional noise coming from licking their lolli-pops! However, despite the silence, the atmosphere was very cheerful!

We also continued our work @ Choveque’s house. Every morning it was harder and harder for us to wake up and crawl out of bed! Building a house is hard labor and the heat sure did a number on us. However, God gave us the grace and strength to persevere and keep serving Him and Choveque’s family. It was awesome to see the progress each day of the house. Even though it was strange at first for Choveque’s family to let us work, they grew on the idea when they saw that was our true desire to HELP and not watch. If they told us we needed to rest and didn’t give us a task, we would come up with things that we could do. They laughed a lot at our “unskilled” labor, but it made an impression on them. Finally, during the last week, they asked Choveque, “Who are these people and why are they here…WORKING?” “Shouldn’t they be sitting in the shade and watching us work? Why would they want to come and work?” Choveque then had the perfect opportunity to share with his family that we were his brothers and sister in Christ, and that we had come to show God’s love to his family, because God had put this on our hearts. They just shook their heads in disbelief! Why would “rich” Americans want to do such a thing as come and help a poor African that works for them, with hard labor in the hot sun?

I think the best way to explain it is the words from a song from the latest “Caedmon’s Call” cd. The song is ironically called “Two Weeks in Africa,” and it has lyrics that just rang in our heads the whole time we worked with them… “We put the walls up, but Jesus keeps them standing. He doesn’t need us, but He let’s us put our hands, so we can see that His love is bigger than you and me.” We know that this message on our hearts and was sent to Choveque and his family. We are glad that we can experience in our lives that God’s love is bigger than any of us. He doesn’t need us…we need Him and He allows us to be apart of His service to share this LOVE with His people.

The day that my dad left, Choveque came to say goodbye to him. Choveque was very sad, but had a heart full of gratitude and joy for what God had done in the past couple of months. So he told his gratitude from the very beginning, like a story, of how God has worked in his life through us coming to Mozambique, through God leading my parents here, then my dad coming a second time, all the way to the present day. It was awesome to reflect upon the ways God has provided, blessed, and ordained everything to happen as it did. Choveque had shared with us how he prayed for help with building a new home before rainy season….unbeknownst to him, God had been putting this same burden on my dad’s heart in America. How great is our God!! The way Choveque recounted the events reminded us of a couple of verses: Psalm 77:11-12 “I will remember the deeds of the Lord; yes I will remember your miracles of long ago. I will meditate on all your works and consider all your mighty deeds.” Psalm 105:2-4 “Give thanks to the LORD, call on His name; make known among the nations what He has done. Sing to Him, sing praises to Him; tell of all his wonderful acts. Glory in His holy name; let the hearts of those who seek the Lord rejoice. Look to the LORD and His strength; seek His face always. Remember the wonders he has done, his miracles, and judgments He pronounced.” It was a very special time of remembering and a perfect way of ending our time together with dad. To say the least...we were all a bit teary eyed. Choveque kept saying that his heart was weeping inside because my dad was leaving and that he needed to take the day and just meditate on God and persistently pray for God's protection on my dad’s journey home (he now called my dad…his dad). This day made us realize how hard it is going to be for us to say goodbye to our special friend and brother Choveque.

Thanks to everyone who prayed for safety, health, and for God’s blessings upon this project. My dad safely returned to America. The house is not totally finished, but our hopes is to get it done in the next week or so. The rains have already started, so we ask that you pray for the “constructing” to go a bit faster, and that the rains will not damage any of the work that has already been done. Also pray that we would continue to share God’s love with Choveque’s family and that God would stir their hearts to see this love is from Jesus and not from ourselves.

Throughout all of this time, we continued in our TLW ministry. We ask that you would pray for continual guidance for the discipleship program. We are unsure of what the next steps need to be with our team. Please pray for clarity for us to make these decisions. We have 4 ½ months to go and we want to make the most out of every opportunity that we have here. Please pray that we would do this!

Dad…we already miss you greatly! Thanks for stepping out in faith and serving God with us in Mozambique. We built more than a house….we built some incredible memories and we will always treasure the time we had together! We love you and thank God for you!

A Very Special Project

2007-10-19T07:43:00.000-04:00

Our internet is finally working! So now we can share an abundance of pictures of our time with my dad! Here’s a few of the first day that he arrived! My mom sent us a great supply of goodies! We are so grateful God protected all of his suitcases!! Now we are enjoying chips and salsa, candy, corn tortillas, and so much more! Who knew such things would become so precious to us!? Living overseas, we have learned to not take things such as chips and salsa for granted! Even Choveque got a new jacket from my dad! He keeps joking my dad that he wants to work for him so my dad got him a jacket and put his name on it. We have never seen him so happy in our entire lives! He just kept clapping and laughing! It was funny!

A couple of months ago, we found out that our friend Choveque was going to build a new house before the rainy season started. When my parents were here, they built a great relationship with Choveque. When we told my dad Choveque was going to build a new house and that we wanted to help him build it, my dad thought it would be fun to come and help with such a big project! Well after many hoops to jump through, including a huge leap of faith, he followed God’s call to come back and minister to Choveque’s family. It's been a real blessing to see God working in my dad's life! We are so happy he's here!

Choveque was so excited to learn of my dad coming to help build his new home. However, it’s been a hard thing for him. Choveque is used to serving “the foreigners” and it has been really hard for him to be the “boss” and tell us what to do! He keeps telling all of us that we need to rest. Finally, after all of us were frustrated with resting so much, we told Choveque we want to work hard…so that’s what we are doing now. Watching us working hard for them is a huge breakthrough for their culture. They think that the “white man” is better than them and that we shouldn’t be working, but they are experiencing the love of Christ every time we pick up a cement brick or each drop of sweat that we have! It’s very hot here!!! Nonetheless, we want to show them how much we care and how much we love them! Choveque says there aren’t enough words to describe the gratitude he feels in his heart! It’s been a very special time.

Every day we eat African food with them and they love to see us eating their food. I was so proud of my dad…he has done everything without complaining. A perfect example of this: one day we went out to the village where Choveque had grown up. We drove over 4 hours on bad roads. On the way back from the village Choveque had picked up a pigeon. We thought it would be for his dinner. We thought we were off the hook since we have only been eating lunch with them….WRONG!! The next morning we saw a bunch of feathers and a pot with some bloody pigeon. So at 9 am we had pigeon and shima. They of course saved us all the good parts such as the heart, liver, and neck. They just love watching us eat their food. I just love watching my dad making their day…and not even complaining about it, but laughing! It’s been pretty funny! You can see in one picture Choveque holding the pigeon...and then the next picture is the pigeon on our plates. Corey's holding the heart in his hand...it "accidently" slipped out of his hands, and "secretly" covered by my dad's foot...nobody noticed!

Hopefully by the pictures you can see the progress we are making. As of now, the walls are up and we will be putting the roof on soon. We feel like it is WORLD CHANGERS AFRICA style!! We are having a blast! Please keep this project in your prayers. Many of Choveque’s family are from a different religion and we hope that by the end of our time we will have built some great relationships and they can see the love of Jesus through our serving and we would have a great opportunity to share with them the Good News! Also please be praying for safety and stamina to do the work in the hot Africa sun! It can be pretty intense.

We will keep you posted with more pictures next week!

Having some internet issues....

2007-10-16T14:54:00.001-04:00

We have been having some internet issues for over a week now, so we haven't been able to post any updates or write any emails. I guess that just life in Africa! Our internet will hopefully be up working again soon, but we just wanted to let everyone know that my dad and all of his luggage arrived safely on Friday!!!! We have been really enjoying our time with him and we hope to post pictures of our time really soon!

Thanks to everyone who prayed for his safe arrival! Please continue to pray for all of our safety and health...especially while Jenni's dad is here. Pray that we will see God work in new ways to the people we are ministering to, and for us as well! We promise to respond to emails and blog update you as soon as our internet gets fixed!!

A Memorable Mission Trip

2007-09-30T05:30:00.000-04:00

We tried to post more pictures last week before our team left for Johannesburg, but blogger was acting up and wouldn’t let us post, so forgive us for the delay!!! We actually went down to South Africa with them for a week and we are now back in Nampula full of wonderful memories of our HBC team!! We already miss you and it is way to quiet around here! So here’s a trip down memory lane from last week.

Last post we showed you pics of our TLW rally and discipleship time. It was awesome to see God work in the lives of the Mozambican youth! On Sunday, we went to a local Baptist church. Each week, every group (women, children, youth, etc.) prepares a time of “special music” We knew that they would ask our group, so we prepared the night before to sing a song in their heart language. We sang Khavolinkana…which means “There’s No One Like Jesus.” The church loved it and sang along with us. They were also very gracious to all of the words we pronounced wrong!! The team loved it and so did the nationals. After church we went to Bamboo, a yummy place to eat just out of Nampula! Tony smoked us out when he cooked hot peppers with his "beef on a hot rock." Everyone thought it was funny until the peppers took their breath away! We were a table of coughing Americans. It was quite the scene! It's now a funny memory! Then we were off to the Sunday Market to buy Mozambique souvenirs. The market is quite an unique cultural experience. There are so many people selling and buying, it can be a little overwhelming. Everyone learned how to bargain for what they wanted!!! After the market, Tony and Roberta taught our marriage class and the rest of the team went prayer walking around Nampula. During the marriage class, the couples were encouraged to strive for a marriage that reflects Jesus and His church. Towards the end of the class, each couple had to TALK to each other about the ways they could reflect Jesus in their marriage. In the Mozambican culture, couples do not talk to each other, so this was a huge break through for them. It was definitely uncomfortable for them to do this, but we have heard a positive response from them. It was such a great day!

Monday, the team was split into 2 groups and rotated between a hospital ministry and a village ministry. At the hospital, the team was able to see the oppression of the people here. There are 2-3 families to a bed and the children are very ill. They were able to play with some of the children and make them smile during a hard time! In the village, the team shared Bible stories from creation to the time of Jesus. Teaching in the village gave the team, “I can’t believe I am in Africa!” realization! The nationals flocked to the story time and 4 people prayed to receive Jesus in their lives!! The majority of our team said that this was their favorite experience!

Tuesday, we had a time of rest and went to the beach to relax! Mozambique has the most beautiful beaches and so we took them to one of our favorite secluded beaches called Chocas Mar. It took about 2 ½ hours to get there. Initially, we were going to go snorkeling, however it was to windy to take a boat out. So we just played in the waves and slept in the sand. It was really needed!

Wednesday and Thursday we spent at the orphanage. The kids welcomed the team with decorations (see first pic on blog) and some songs. The team prepared the cutest crafts for them to make! The kids just loved our team! They loved playing sports, learning about TLW, making crafts, learning Christian songs in English, and dancing! The kids were full of smiles and laughter! It was Roberta’s birthday on Wednesday and the kids surprised her and baked her a cake and threw her a party. This party started with her having to cut and serve the cake…and then everyone danced! It was pretty hilarious to see a bunch of white people shaking their groove thing…the kids loved it though!
Especially when Tony showed his moves with the sprinkler!! Our team also had the challenge of getting a HUGE plate of rice and goat down. When it is really hot, you don’t feel like eating, especially a bunch of rice, but they did a good job! At the end, our team gave each orphan a “goody bag” and it was like Christmas.
They loved everything in their bags! Before they left, Victor gave us a tour and told us the vision God has given him for the orphanage and Dana gave the leaders some first aid training. The team really bonded with the children and I think they wanted to take some of the cute little orphans home with them! It was such a special time and we are really glad we spent 2 days there!!

Friday, we left for South Africa to go on a safari!! We saw lots of animals! We will have to post another blog later to show you some pictures! A highlight of our time was spending some much needed quality time with Kaitlyn and Karissa. It was such a wonderful time and they always kept us laughing! We are so glad that they stayed with us in our house! It felt like we had never been apart! They are such special, beautiful girls! What a blessing they are! It was so much fun to reconnect with our friends and family from HBC. What a blessing the whole HBC team was to us!!! They were a much needed source of encouragement and laughter! God had our team full of unique spiritual gifts that He put into great use while they ministered for Jesus in Mozambique. It was amazing to watch God work through our team! Thanks so much to each of you for coming and thanks to everyone that contributed to their mission expenses!

Thanks for all of your prayers for health, safety, and for God blessing our time with our HBC team. We all saw God work not only in the lives of the Mozambicans, but in us individually as well. We can all walk away from this incredible experience with a new perspective of God and His awesomeness!!!

HBC Mission Trip

2007-09-16T13:32:00.000-04:00

We are having a wonderful time with our HBC team! We wanted to share some of their experiences and how God is working through them this week. It's been such a blessing to have them all here! We are just loving it! They arrived Friday totally exhausted and excited to finally be here. We were so excited to see all of them. It was such a sweet reunionWe are so happy they are here! We are having a lot of fun laughing together as well as ministering together.

Here is a picture of Trina teaching our TLW discipleship program. We had a great turnout...our entire team showed up! This has never happened before! Trina and Dana taught about sharing our faith and how it should be natural for us to share Christ with people. The youth were really encouraged! Here's Karissa at our TLW discipleship program playing "telephone" with the team. They loved playing it in Makuwa, Portuguese, and English!

Here's a picture of Bev having a good discussion with one of our translators Noma. God has given Bev awesome opportunities to share with the youth and encourage them to not lose heart in times of discouragement. She helped them to see the importance of being bold to share their faith with others and to believe that God's timing is everything.

Our team was able to experience their first African meal. Jenni and Choveque made shima and couve (cabbage in a peanut sauce.) Everyone loved it and it was a sweet time of fellowship with our HBC team and the Nampula TLW team.

In the rally we broke into small groups of boys and girls. Here are some pictures of the discussion groups. It went really well as the Mozambican girls and boys opened up and shared some intimate things about their culture. They really desire to have their relationships please the Lord, but it is hard to go against what they have been taught all of their lives. They had never heard that sex before marriage is wrong and is against God's plan for our lives. We had about 40-50 participants...and now they all know the truth from God's word about sex! Our HBC team did a great job sharing great biblical truths with these guys about God's plan for sex inside a marriage covenant. It was a blessing to watch God work in this rally!

Here is a picture of us with the Wolffies! Corey and Tony are sporting their new Mozambique shirts. Roberta, Kaitlyn, Karissa, and Jenni are wearing their new capalanas. Actually, all of the girls had matching capalanas (african skirts). In the Mozambican culture, when the women have an important event to attend, they show how much they care about it by wearing matching capalanas! So we all had the same capalana, but in different colors, and the Mozambicans loved it! Corey and Tony matched too....how cute!

God has given Roberta a gift when it comes to loving on children. Normally babies scream when they see the "white woman or man" but this beautiful Mozambican baby loved Roberta and really bonded with her. It was so sweet!

We will be posting more pictures soon. Please pray for Bev, Shannon, Dana, Trina, Tony, Roberta, Kaitlyn, and Karissa as they go out to preach the gospel in a local village tomorrow. Pray that they will have boldness to share God's word and that God will open the hearts, eyes, and ears of the Mozambican to His saving grace. Thanks for all of your prayers for our team...we feel them and are blessed by them!

HBC in Nampula!

2007-09-14T17:27:00.001-04:00

HBC has arrived safely in Mozambique...with all of their luggage! Thank you so much for your prayers for them! Please continue to pray for us all as we witness to the people of Nampula together this week. We are so excited and so blessed to have our church here to encourage us and serve God here beside us! We will post pictures and give more details later.

Witnessing the Work of the Great Physician!

2007-09-09T16:51:00.000-04:00

The last few weeks have been pretty intense for the Duncans. Besides being really busy preparing for our HBC team and Jenni’s dad to come, we have been busy being involved in medical emergencies. A couple of weeks ago another missionary family brought their 1 year-old boy (Caleb) to our house for Jenni to evaluate because he wasn’t breathing very well due to what they thought was a case of croup. Jenni then began to treat him using the nebulizer we had received for Corey’s asthma. After trying several different treatments, he still failed to respond to the treatments. From there we decided to take him to world renown Nampula Hospital (see pics) so that he could be on oxygen. So after about 24 hours of terror at Nampula Hospital, and the doctors not thinking he was in “serious condition” until he turned blue, the family decided to have him medically evacuated to Johannesburg. This family didn’t have med-evac insurance so they had to arrange everything themselves, and make full payment before the plane would leave Joburg to come to Nampula. It was $23,000.

This was such a scary thing for us to witness this family almost lose their baby boy, but it was also an amazing display of God’s power as He saved this child’s life. God truly worked a miracle!! Many times we wondered if this boy would make it out of that hospital alive but by the grace of God, The Great Physician, he did. This was also such a touching experience for us as we really saw the body of Christ unite and come together to support this family in probably their darkest hour. It was so awesome to see Christians from America, Brazil, Portugal, and Mozambique rally around this family with love and prayers. It is something we will never forget and something we feel so blessed to have witnessed. Please continue to pray for this baby boy and his family as they are still in Johannesburg waiting for him to come out of the Intensive Care Unit. He is intubated, sedated, and battling some major infections. As we were anxiously waiting for the plane to arrive, God gave us encouragement through His Word. Psalms 41:1-3 says, ..."The Lord will deliver him in a day of trouble. The Lord will protect him and keep him alive. And he shall be called blessed upon the earth...The Lord will sustain him upon his sickbed; in his illness, You restore him to health." These verses spoke and continue to speak to our worrisome hearts!

It was a very long weekend. After 36 hours of no sleep, we went home for some shut eye…and then the phone rang again. Their 2 year old daughter came down with the same symptoms…so Jenni and another nurse set up a clinic in their home and tried to stabilize her as the father frantically tried to get a flight to Johannesburg that night. She responded very well to the treatments that Jenni had given her, and went to Johannesburg and recovered there. She is doing great, praise the Lord! Two days after this happened, we were called for another medical emergency to evacuate a Chinese man that had cerebral malaria. It was pretty stressful, but awesome that God put Jenni’s nursing skills to great use! We stand in awe to see a glimpse of the “bigger” picture. Sometimes we don’t realize how important "little" decisions or circumstances can prepare us for God’s big plans. We have witnessed this a lot in the past weeks and it just makes us amazed. God is so unfathomable and awesome!

In other news we just started a marriage seminar with two other Mozambican couples that we are really excited about. These two couples are good friends of ours and so we are looking forward to getting to know them better and strive together to have more Christ-like marriages. Our main focus and goal for this study is that we would strive to have our marriages reflect the relationship that Christ has with His church. Here is a picture of us taken in front of our house. Please pray that God would transform our marriages through this study. Pray also that God would help us to communicate these biblical principles effectively in Portuguese.

On a sad note and a concern for prayer, we found out today that one of the ladies on our TLW team was abused by her husband for being a part of this team. This past weekend our meeting went a little long and then afterwards she wanted to talk to Jenni about some personal things. Then once she got home he beat her for being so late and ripped up her notebook that we had given her. This notebook contained all of the truths that she has learned from the classes we teach, including her personal reflections on Bible stories and memory verses. She was devastated. We are going to visit her tomorrow and hope to encourage her as well as talk with her husband. We hope to share truth with him and thank him for the time he allows his precious wife to spend with our team. Maybe he will be able to see the good of her participating in this program, and not just the time it takes away from his family. Please pray that this situation would be handled with grace and kindness.

Well we have only 5 days until our team arrives in Nampula! They depart the US in 3 days. Please pray that it will be a great experience for them and that they will have peace of mind, safe travel, little culture shock, little jet lag, good health, protection from Malaria, flexibility, servant’s hearts, and lots of wonderful memories!! They will arrive during a major 4 week holiday for a religion that has a heavy influence here. This holiday has the focus of “searching for God.” Pray that as these M. Mozambicans are searching, they will find the One True God and use our 8 team members as His vessels to share the GOOD NEWS!! We can’t wait til you all get here!!! We are praying for you!

Finally, please be praying for Jenni’s dad. He is having some health issues and will be able to determine what to do this week. He will have an MRI to see if he has a herniated disk in his lower back. He is scheduled to arrive in Nampula in October. Pray that God would heal him before he gets on that plane!

One Bad Boat Ride

2007-08-22T12:17:00.000-04:00

We are definitely back into the swing of things after returning from our training in Malawi. We have been very busy preparing for our church to come here for a mission trip. It has been a lot of work, but we are so excited and so it makes all of the work worth it! We can’t wait for them to come next month! Please pray for us as we plan for the things that we are going to do for that week they are here. Some of the things that we have planned to do are TLW, marriage seminar, sports ministry, orphan ministry, prayer walking, and evangelism in a local village. Please pray that God would glorify Himself during this time and that He would use us to show His mercy and goodness to the Makuwa people of Nampula.

We are still continuing our discipleship program with our TLW team. Although we are encouraged by their commitment to continue to come, the past couple of weeks have been a bit frustrating to us as we have struggled with our different learning styles. We come from a style where you actually have interaction and expression as you are teaching something. But here…we usually get nothing but blank stares and so it makes us think that nothing is getting through. We talked about this with one of our close Mozambican friends and he said that’s normal here and that they are actually listening and learning. We still have our doubts sometimes. We have to constantly remember that God’s Word does not return void and that it will accomplish the purpose for which it was sent. Please pray that we would continue to be faithful in sharing God’s Word with them and that we would trust the Holy Spirit to teach them and give them understanding of His Word.

We had a day off last week so we decided to drive out to Nacala to visit some other missionaries. While we were there everyone decided that it would be really fun to rent one of these old Mozambican sailboats (see 1st pic) and go out for a ride on the sea. What seemed to be a good/fun idea actually turned out to be an awful one as we were completely nauseous from sea sickness. The boat ride was about 5 hours long, and 4 of those hours we were on the verge of sending our breakfast into the sea! Then it got even worse as we ate hotdogs for lunch and were burping it up for about 12 hours straight! Ummmmmmmmmm! Hungry anyone? What were we thinking? Especially the mystery meat called hot dogs? The next few days we suffered with “sea legs,” nausea, and vertigo. Anyways, to say the least it was a miserable experience and one we don’t ever plan on having again!!!

On a happier note, we had a great experience this week. We were able to visit the main hospital here and see a ministry some Brazilians have started. By the grace of God they have been able to obtain a small room in the pediatrics section of the hospital where parents can take their kids and let them play. The room is definitely a “light” in a “dark” place. The ministry is still in the beginning stages, but it is going to really reach the nations in a compassionate way! While we were there we were able to walk around the pediatric ward. We saw so many heart wrenching things. These kids are so sick with diseases that are just eating away their bodies. It was sad to see. It’s also frustrating. Nampula lacks good medical care and they lack medical staff. So many times people are either forgotten or there aren’t enough hospital personnel. There are beds on the floors, and usually 2-3 kids to one bed. People line the halls with crying children. No one washes their hands, so you can only imagine how many other illnesses are spread during a hospital stay. We are very excited to be able to visit this ministry from time to time and help out. We hope to be able to take our church team there as well; it would be a great experience for them. Please pray that the hospital director will approve them to minister there in September.

We had another “girl party” with some of the older girls from the orphanage. We always have so much fun with them! They are such a blessing to be around. We played “SPOONS” with them. It was hilarious watching them fight for a spoon. It was great time of presents, cookies, games, and celebrating life!

And last but not least, we have some wonderful news about a miracle God worked! God is bringing Jenni's dad back to Nampula to do some ministry with us! We are SO EXCITED for this and can't wait for him to come back! This is such a wonderful gift from God and we feel so blessed to have this second opportunity of having Jenni's dad come visit us in Mozambique.

We thank you for all of your prayers, support, and interest in the ministries God has given us. We love you all!

"THE HARVEST IS PLENTIFUL"

2007-08-02T14:48:00.000-04:00

We are back in Nampula after a great time in Malawi! Thank you so much for your prayers as God was definitely merciful to us as we traveled to and from Malawi! After a long road trip in Africa, we are always so grateful to arrive at home safely. We also let out a sigh of relief that we have gone without car troubles. We literally drive through the middle of nowhere; sometimes it scary to think about what we would do if something bad happened like car trouble or health issues. Thanks be to God though that nothing has happened and that was our last big road trip for us!

After driving for 14 hours straight, we stopped for some relaxation. We were able to rest for a couple of days at the tea estates (where we stayed last year) and just soak in the tranquility of this beautiful place. We traveled with some fellow missionaries and just enjoyed taking it easy. We even learned how to play croquet! It was really fun!While we were at the tea estates we were blessed with the opportunity to share the gospel with one of the workers who was a Jehovah’s Witness. This was very exciting (and frustrating at the same time) as we were able to share many truths from the Bible to him. A huge part of our discussion revolved around heaven. He believes that there will only be 144,000 people in heaven. How sad is that?! He gets this idea from the book of Revelation in chapters 7 and 14 where it talks about God sealing 144,000 from the 12 tribes of Israel. We stressed to him the importance of looking at Scripture as a whole and in context. So we showed him the very next verse in chapter 7 that describes exactly what John sees: the 144,000 from the twelve tribes AND a multitude beyond number from every tribe, tongue, nation, and people (this verse takes on a whole new meaning when you live in Africa; Mozambique itself has around 40 different tribes and tongues). We discussed these verses thoroughly, but he continually changed the subject and stuck to his doctrine regarding the 144,000. We ended our conversation agreeing to disagree and we pray that God will open his eyes to see the beauty of Christ’s free gift. It made us so sad to see the bondage that he is in, not being able to see the freedom in Christ’s salvation.
We were able to meet his sweet family and we are grateful that God gave us time to spend with him! Please pray for him and that the truth would penetrate his heart!

As for our training time that we had, it went really well. We learned an evangelizing method called “Creation to Christ” and a training method called “Training for Trainers”. These methods are used quite frequently in the oral cultures of Africa where there is a lot of illiteracy and where the gospel is shared through Bible Storying. After learning these methods we had the opportunity to put into practice what we had learned. So we went out and shared the gospel through these methods in some of the local villages that were nearby to where we were staying. Corey went out with a missionary couple who serve in Malawi where they were able to share with 6 people on separate occasions, 4 of whom prayed to receive Christ!!! Praise the Lord!! Please pray for these 4 new believers and that God would lead them to a solid church that is founded on the word of God. Pray also that the local pastors would follow up with those who prayed to receive Christ.

As for our True Love Waits Team, things have been going really well. We are continuing in our discipleship program with the youth who have committed to coming. We wanted to share something that was really exciting to us that happened in our meeting before we left for Malawi. We had asked the team to write out their personal testimony about how they came to know the Lord and then to have them share with the rest of the team. One of the girls who had shared talked about how she started going to the Baptist Church, which is something very common here as well as America. So after our meeting Jenni talked with her about this and was able to share the gospel with her and how going to church doesn’t make you a Christian nor does all the “good things” that you do. She shared how we can only be made right with God and become Christians through faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus and that by receiving this free gift are we made right with God. This was very exciting as it was the first time for Jenni to share the gospel in Portuguese. It was neat as God really blessed the limited Portuguese she knows and made this girl understand her. We are really looking forward to continue to work with this team and are excited about the commitment they have made thus far to this program.

Other exciting news, our church from Salt Lake City has officially bought their airline tickets and will be coming next month for a week long mission trip! We are so excited for them to come! It is neat to see how God is providing for their needs and paving the way for them to come!

If you look closely, this picture shows the tea plantation workers harvesting the tea. As we looked at miles and miles of tea, we saw a great parallel in our lives... "the harvest is PLENTIFUL!" It is such a privelge to be workers of God's harvest.

Please pray for 1) Our group from HBC will be here in 6 week! Pray that God would prepare them to minister here and that He would provide all their needs for the trip. Pray that He would help us with all of the planning and details this trip involves. 2) Pray for our TLW team and that God Himself would teach these youth the truths of His Word. 3) Praise for the opportunities to share the gospel and for the professions of faith in Malawi! 4) Praise for the mercy God gave to us in our travels!

Celebrating Life!

2007-07-13T15:52:00.000-04:00

We have been having so much fun this month! We were invited to a birthday party for our friend Albano’s children. He has 3 kids and since they don’t have a lot of money, they threw one big birthday party. It was such a special time and so different from any other party we have gone to. This party was really a time of worshipping God. Albano spoke to everyone that came and just gave thanks to God that He blessed him and his wife with 3 wonderful children. Albano also thanked God for sustaining their lives, as they have been very sick with malaria several times. He dedicated these children to God and told everyone that these children were God’s children and that he was blessed to be their father to raise them. It was so sweet! What a neat thing to do at a birthday party! We were pretty touched by the way he chose to celebrate the lives of his children. Next, they broke out into some songs and started dancing for the Lord! It wouldn’t be an African party without endless songs and dancing! It was a great time.

A great highlight of the last couple of weeks was attending a Baptist meeting with all the pastors from the Nampula province. Ok…we are being sarcastic…it was everything but a highlight! The meeting started at 8 am, so we knew that we shouldn’t arrive until 9 since we are living on Africa time (they are always late here!). We were scheduled to talk about our ministry at 10 am. Well 10am comes and goes then 11, 12, 1, then about 2:30 they thought it would be ok to break for some lunch. Hallelujah! We ate some beans and shima and then returned to the meeting at 3. We were impressed because the typical lunch is about a 2 hour break. So as we sat there for a couple more hours, we came to the conclusion that our heads were going to explode with the amount of Portuguese absorbed and that we needed to go. We made a great decision…the meeting lasted until 11pm! We ended up not speaking and we don’t know if they ever got back on their schedule of speakers, but we are glad we didn’t wait around to find out! In America, we will never complain about another Baptist business meeting again, because this had to be the worse ever! A 6 hour meeting turned into 15 hours!

Without sarcasm now, the real highlight of our week was having some of the girls over from the orphanage. We wanted to celebrate their lives and make them feel special…so we threw them a party!! We had so much fun with them. We ate cupcakes, played pin the face on the African girl (knock off of the game “pin the tail on the donkey”) colored pictures, painted our nails, and opened presents. They loved it. We all wore the same capalana (African skirt) and a pink shirt. It was really fun to see their reactions to everything! Some of the girls didn’t know how to open a present and some of them had never had their nails painted. Their smiles and laughter blessed us so much! When we picked them up at the orphanage, they had put on their best clothes and were all nice and clean and ready to go! As soon as we got in the car, one of the girls (Virginia) reminded us that we needed to pray for safety as we travel to the house! After we prayed, the little girls just broke into song, praising God until we got to our house, which is a 20 minute drive. We loved it! It brought to our minds Matthew 21:16, where Jesus quotes the psalm, “From the lips of children and infants, you have ordained praise.” Just listening to these sweet little voices singing songs to the Lord was something we will never forget! Once the party was over we drove them back to the orphanage. The rest of the kids ran and greeted the girls and told them that they were so beautiful. We just heard compliment after compliment and the girls were soaking it all up! We loved seeing them feeling special…that is what we wanted to accomplish from the party! It was a perfect day!

As for our TLW team…we have been surprised each week as more and more youth show up! The last 2 weeks we have had 11-12 people come! It is so exciting! God is doing some great things during our times with them. They are learning more about the Bible and Corey’s doing an amazing job teaching them. God has just taken his tongue and made it speak Portuguese so well. It is becoming more natural to him and we know God has given him the grace to become more comfortable in the language! We are having a lot of fun with our new team. It feels like they are our little Sunday School class and we get to teach them in fun, creative ways. Thanks so much for praying for us through this time of development!

As for this week, please: 1) Praise God…we have had a great turn out in our last 2 TLW meetings! Pray that God will work in their hearts to be committed to Him and TLW and that they will desire to have closer walk with the Lord. 2) Pray that God will continue to help us cross our language barrier to minister effectively to our team and other nationals as well. 3) Pray that God would help us to see the areas of our lives where we are just merely people pleasing…pray that we can change and strive to please only God. 4) Pray that we would have daily guidance on who to give to and how much to give. Pray for patience in this area. 5) Pray that God would help us work out all of the preparation details for our HBC team that is coming. 6) We are traveling to Malawi next week for an annual missionary training meeting. Please pray for traveling mercies as the roads will be quite rough!

Happy Days!

2007-06-28T11:48:00.000-04:00

The last couple of weeks have been amazing! We have been really busy since the last time we posted so we have lots to update you on! On our last post, we referenced the verse 2 Corinthians 2:9 “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.” Last week this verse came to life! Here’s how: Victor, the leader of the orphanage asked us to come over for dinner. We accepted the invitation and when we arrived he told us that he needed to give us some sad news. One of the girls had become pregnant and aborted her baby in the dorm room and all the little girls saw what had happened. It had traumatized them that their friend had fallen into sin and handled it the way that she did. Our hearts were broken when we heard what had happened. The girl had been asked to leave the orphanage and the other girls were very upset. I (Jenni) knew that I needed to talk to these girls about what they saw and how to deal with something so burdensome. The biggest thing I knew needed to be addressed was the cultural aspect of casting out a person that becomes pregnant before marriage.

I went to the orphanage to talk with the little girls, and once I got there I realized I didn’t have my Portuguese/English dictionary. I knew I was in a bind, so I immediately tried a rescue attempt with a translator that lives at the orphanage, but much to my dismay…she had moved! So I took a deep breath and asked God to help my tongue speak the right words to teach and encourage these girls. From my perspective, let’s just say I SLAUGHTERED the language. The message that I tried to get out was that even though people do wrong and sin, we need to love them through it, pray for them, and learn from their mistakes. We can choose for ourselves to wait for the man God has for us and we can choose to love people even when other people tell us to cast them out. After I was done, I just wanted to cry because I knew that the message in my heart wasn’t coming out the way that I had hoped. Then, I was so encouraged. One of the little girls, Coca(girl wearing orange shirt in pic), stood up and said, “Mama Jenni, let’s pray for her right now. We can all take turns and pray for her!” I listened to these little girls praying to God for their friend and asking the Lord to help them love her, wait for their husband, and they thanked God for the words that Mama Jenni had shared with them. I was in awe…they got the message! God somehow transformed my bad tongue and allowed them to understand the things God had put on my heart! I truly felt that “His strength was made perfect in my weakness.”

After this special time, the girls asked if they could look inside our truck. So I let them get in. None of them had been inside a truck before, so they were just as giggly as ever! I drove them around the orphanage like 25 times and they were screaming/singing worship songs in Makuwa (their heart language). I will never forget the smiles on their faces!
Before it ended, I had about 35 kids in the truck; even Corey’s drumming students ditched class and hopped in for the ride! It was hilarious. Who knew that just riding in a truck could be a highlight in a child’s life! Afterwards, the girls wanted to take me to their school. On our way there I mentioned to them that I would like to have them over to our house and bake some cookies…the reaction was the same as if I told a child in America that we would go to Disneyland! They were so excited! Once we got to the school, Coca was so sweet and bought me a piece of bubblegum. It meant a lot to me that she would choose to share her money, since I know that she probably doesn’t have much.

Before we had come to Mozambique I kept envisioning walking down a dirt road, lined with big trees, holding little girls’ hands. As we walked back to the orphanage that day, I realized that I am walking down a dirt road, lined with big trees and holding these sweet girls’ hands. It was really neat. I felt like God was saying that He had prepared this place, time, and precious children for me to work with for His glory! God really touched my heart by allowing me to experience this!

As for our True Love Waits meeting, it went really well! We had no idea how many youth to expect, but we prayed and asked that God would give us at least 4 people to work with…2 girls and 2 boys so that we could train them to be leaders of boys groups and girls groups. Well, we had 4 people show up….2 boys and 2 girls! God is so good! God blessed Corey’s words and he did an amazing job with the language. Corey shared the story of Josiah (in 2 Kings 22). God used Josiah in great ways. He became king when he was 8 years old. The main part of the story that we focused on was that despite that wicked genealogy of Josiah, Josiah put to death the evil things of his father and grandfather, and chose to live for God. Corey really felt this was where our program needed to start. The Makuwa culture is rooted in witchcraft and whether or not people are Christians, people will practice witchcraft because that is what they’ve been taught to do. We also used this story to help them to know that we can start fresh, end our sinful patterns, and choose to live for God, even if our family and friends are doing culturally appropriate evil things! The meeting was great! Thank you everyone for praying for this day!

Prayer Requests: 1) This week we will be sharing the gospel with our team. We have found that many people want a relationship with Christ, and go to church, but in fact have never made the decision to follow Jesus. Pray that God would lead our words and Portuguese and He would open the hearts of our team to receive His Word. 2) Pray for God to give us witnessing opportunities to a Muslim family we have become friends with. 3) Pray for the planning details for our HBC mission team that comes in September. Pray that they will be able to raise the funds that will allow them to come. 4) Pray that God will give us discerning hearts in the areas to give here…it’s so hard to know when to say yes and no!

Thank you so much for being faithful in praying for us! It is fun to be able to share how God is answering your prayers and working in Mozambique! We love you!

Putting Trash to Great Use!

2007-06-10T12:33:00.000-04:00

Jenni is now 26 years old. We celebrated her birthday on the beach and it was really fun. We went to a tourist coastal town in Mozambique called Pemba (see pic) and we were able to kayak in the ocean and go swimming in a swimming pool while looking out at the beautiful ocean. Here’s a picture of Jenni enjoying the hotel’s buffet. The buffet was all you can eat and let’s just say that the hotel lost money on the Duncan’s!

Since we have been in Mozambique, we have seen how creative kids can be. Here are some examples: 1) The first picture is of a used milk carton truck. 2) The next picture is of kids flying kites…but these kites are actually made out of trash. 3) Most of the children that play soccer here make their soccer ball out of used grocery sacks. 4) Kids play checkers in the dirt with bottle caps. Who needs manufactured toys when you can just put trash to good use! We are always impressed to see the new inventions of the kids here.

We have been busy putting our material together for our new True Love Waits team. Our first meeting will be June 23rd. Please be praying for this day and also our Portuguese as we continue to learn a lot of new words every day. The vocabulary that is used in the TLW program is very extensive and includes medical, spiritual, and every day words. We look at the material seeing our weakness in the language and how little we actually know. We know that “His strength is made perfect in our weakness,” so we move forward knowing that it will have to be the Lord helping us to overcome this language barrier. We have been trying to sift through the material and identify all of the words that we don’t know and commit them to memory. As of right now, we have over 100 words that are totally unfamiliar to us, not to mention all the tenses that go with each word and conjugations that go with the verbs! We are also trying to memorize Bible stories in Portuguese for the discipleship part of the program. We are needing much patience through all of this, so please be praying for us!

We got some great news from our home church Holladay Baptist. We will be blessed with a volunteer team of 7 people!! Words cannot even express how excited we are to have them come. Please be in prayer for all of the planning details for our team and that the time they will have here will be a great blessing to the Mozambicans, them, and us!

Prayer Requests: 1) For God to give us the grace to get a better grasp of the language as we prepare to teach True Love Waits Team. 2) For God to help us make the most of every opportunity that we have here. 3) For God to raise up leaders who will want to continue the TLW program when we return to the States. 4) For God to give us witnessing opportunities to a Muslim family we have become friends with.

An Unforgettable Year

2007-05-28T11:16:00.000-04:00

This past Saturday May 26, marked the completion of one year of us being in Mozambique. It’s so crazy to think we have already been here for a year! It has gone by so quickly for us….the days just seem to run together. May 26th was also Corey’s 29th birthday! Can you believe he’s almost 30? Yeah neither can he. We had a fun day celebrating and eating American goodies. All Corey wanted was a Pepperoni Pizza and Betty Crocker fudge brownies! Our friend Choveque also gave him some homemade African cookies (biscottis).This Friday on June 1, Jenni will turn 26. She will be closer to 30 than to 20:). We will probably be spending her birthday at the beach! A big blessing for Corey this past week has been to watch the Utah JAZZ games at another missionary's house. Even though we can’t see the games live, we pretend that it is live and cheer them on regardless! It has been fun to stay connected in this way, as Corey really misses watching US sports.

We have less than 10 months left here in Mozambique (since our organization counts our 2 month training as part of our 2 years of service.) Our plan is to return to the States on March 21, 2008. In our first year here, we have experienced so much and we have been so blessed to see and experience what we have thus far. However, we have definitely been through some trying times as well. We have had to deal with a lot of disappointment, much more than we could have ever expected. However through these trials we still know by God’s Word that all things work together for good for those who love him (Romans 8:28) and that the work of the Lord is never in vain (1 Corinthians 15:58). Even though there has been a lot of disappointment and struggles, God has still blessed us in many ways which we could have never expected. He has given us some wonderful friendships which we believe will continue even when we return to the USA. He has blessed us with many “little things” that can make a big difference in the life of another person. He has allowed us to experience some things where we could see His mighty power (i.e. our near death experience on the airplane). We have grown spiritually and have learned to lean only on God and His Word. He has taught us things that can only be learned through hardships and so we are THANKFUL for this first year in Mozambique. To sum this up we have been living out Romans 5:3-5 “…we exult in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance; perseverance, proven character, and proven character, hope; and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.” It has been a time that we will never forget and a time when we can look back and see the faithfulness of God in our lives and see first hand that His hope doesn’t disappoint; instead this hope helps us to keep our eyes on Him and to continually grow to be more like Christ!

The past couple of Sundays we have been visiting different churches recruiting those who would be interested in being a part of our True Love Waits team. So far we have been getting a lot of interest, but we’re still a little unsure as to how many of those who showed interest will actually come to our meetings. We will start having meetings next month where we will do some discipleship studies so that we can all be grounded in the Word and exhibit a commitment to the program. After a few months of Bible studies, we hope to start teaching the team the True Love Waits program to them so they can start teaching it to their fellow church members. We are really excited about this!

This past week we were able to help out one of our night guards, Elicio, as he went through a very sad and difficult time. His wife had a miscarriage after being 7 months pregnant and had to have an emergency c-section to take out the dead baby. This was so sad to see because he had been praying that God would give him a baby girl for a long time (he has 2 boys). To see him go through this was very sad. After his wife stayed 2 nights in the hospital, we went to pick her up and take her home. It was sad to see her in so much pain. The roads here are not exactly smooth so as we hit every little bump/pothole (which there are a lot of here in Mozambique) it caused her much pain. When we finally got to their house, Jenni was able to teach them some medical things about how to care for someone who has just gone through this type of surgery. Although it was a sad time, it was neat to see God give Jenni an opportunity to care for her and teach Elicio the nursing things he needed to know to properly care for her. Although this was a sad time, we felt blessed to be able to help this family out in their time of need and to pray for them.

We love every opportunity that God gives us to love on the people here…especially at the orphanage. Corey is still teaching drum classes, while Jenni plays with the children. There are some new kiddos at the orphanage that are just adorable. They love to play and smile. They have all started to call Jenni “Mama Jenni” and if they aren’t careful we will make that come true! We want to take them all home with us! The orphanage has definitely been a little haven for us!

Prayer Requests: 1) For God to give us the grace to get a better grasp of the language as we prepare to teach True Love Waits Team. 2) For God to help us make the most of every opportunity that we have here. 3) For God to raise up leaders who will want to continue the TLW program when we return to the States. 4) For God to give us witnessing opportunities to a Muslim family we have become friends with.

Flying Solo

2007-05-08T15:29:00.000-04:00

This past week the Lord had us in different countries experiencing different things and although we really missed each other, this past week was a blessing for us both. As we mentioned in our last blog update Jenni was required to attend a women’s meeting in Nairobi, Kenya for encouragement and refreshment in the Lord (what about us guys…don’t we need encouraging and refreshment?…oh well maybe some other time). Thank you so much for your prayers on her behalf! Although it was a fearful time, God was faithful and got her through it! She had good flights both ways and arrived back in Nampula safely. She actually happened to be at the airport as anxious families were waiting on news of the airplane that had crashed in Cameroon. It was very sad there as you can imagine. Here is a picture of the first snow that we’ve seen in Africa! From the plane, Jenni saw the famous Mount Kilimanjaro.
Also, thank you for your prayers that she would be encouraged! It was so encouraging for her to be with other believers who share some of the same struggles and to hear the word of God preached to her! The conference was focused on being content in the Lord even when things don’t go the way you expect or want them to go. This was something we needed to hear as things here certainly haven’t gone the way we thought they would. Regardless of our circumstances, we should find joy in the God of our salvation who is still worthy of all praise! The key verses in the conference were Philippians 4:11-13. It was a wonderful conference!

Back on the home front, Corey was as bored as ever as he was missing his wife! He kept busy though by catching up on the exciting administrative things that we have to do every month for our mission. In the midst of these things, God gave him an awesome opportunity….He got to help our friend Choveque rush his wife Fatima to the hospital to have a baby! One night Corey received a text message from Choveque saying his wife was in a lot of pain and they needed transportation to the hospital. So Corey quickly drove out to his neighborhood and found his wife lying in the middle of the road in great pain. He rushed them to the hospital and upon arrival the nurse said Fatima was ready to have the baby. Rather than sticking around to see the delivery of his baby and comfort his wife, (you know the things I thought dads do everywhere in the world) Choveque said that he was ready to go home along with his mother-in-law who was with them. It was so strange, but it is such the norm here. Men couldn’t enter the room even if they wanted to. The women don’t have their own rooms and there is no privacy among the other women…not even a curtain. It’s actually kind of sad because the women have to birth their children alone. As you can imagine, it was quite the cultural experience as Corey was able to see the Mozambican traditions in birthing children.

With all that said, everybody went home to sleep and early the next morning Corey returned to the hospital to see the new baby. He found out that Fatima delivered within the hour that he dropped her off at the hospital. After only 12 hours in the hospital, they let Fatima go home with the baby. Corey drove them home and spent time with the family. It was a lot of fun to see Choveque’s other 2 children (Janifa and Todo) welcome their new baby brother. Choveque is our best Mozambican friend so it was a great blessing for Corey to share in this special time of their lives. Here is a picture of Choveque & Fatima from a couple of months ago...we will post pictures of the baby soon.

In other news, we had another meeting with our True Love Waits team where we feel like some progress was finally made. Our supervisor was able to see the difficulties we have been encountering and concluded that if we continue to work with our current team we would remain at a standstill in this ministry. So…we are moving forward and starting fresh! This is both scary and exciting for us. It’s scary because we don’t have a whole lot of time to get the program on track before we leave. However, it’s exciting because we can bring together a group of people that hopefully will just have a passion to reach Nampula for Christ through this program. We are excited to see how this will turn out. At the women’s meeting, Jenni was able to meet other girls that serve in various African countries doing the TLW program. It was great to explore new ideas for a fresh start for our new Nampula team. We are excited to see what God is going to do with this ministry!

1) Please pray for God to raise up strong leaders who will want to take charge of the True Love Waits program and see it thrive for God’s glory as their only motive. Pray that He would bring these leaders to us soon. 2) Please pray for our language to continue to improve as we will have the task of teaching biblical truths to our TLW team. 3) Pray for people from Holladay Baptist Church to be led by God to minister in Mozambique this fall. Pray for the planning and preparation of this mission trip as it is already under way!

Staying Busy

2007-04-21T09:17:00.000-04:00

It has only been a couple of weeks since Jenni’s parents have left, but we miss them! Here is a picture of our good bye at Joburg airport. We still can’t believe that they came and experienced Africa. Here is a picture of when they went on the lion walk in Zimbabwe. Only crazy people would dare to walk with the lions! We have heard recently that there is a possibility of a team coming from our home church (Holladay Baptist Church) this fall, which makes us very excited! This will be such an encouragement to us and the people here as well. We are praying for all of you who are wanting to come and all of the details involved with you getting here! We know that if God wants you here, you will be here!

We had a great Good Friday & Easter! (sorry we didn’t post until now about it) On Good Friday, our church held a special service and watched a little bit of the Jesus film. We were asked to transport the Jesus film to our church from the Bible institute. Well on a normal day it would take about 20 minutes, but for some reason the road was closed and we had to take a very crowded dirt (full of gigantic potholes) road. It took us 1 ½ hours. We arrived to the service 30 minutes late….so we thought! Actually, the service hadn’t even started so we were stressed for no reason! I guess we still haven’t gotten used to Africa time! Anyways, the Good Friday service went well. Watching some of the people’s reactions to the crucifixion was very interesting: some cried, some couldn’t watch it out of sadness, and some just stared at it without much emotion. However Easter Sunday, our church was so lively! It was awesome to see the way they worshiped our living Savior! They were dancing and singing for hours….literally! Our service was 4 ½ hours. It was refreshing to see the joy of these people singing Hosanna in their heart language. After the service we enjoyed a Mexican lunch at our house with some other missionaries. It was a good day!
We have found that ministry comes in lots of different forms. We came to minister in certain ways here, but there are so many more ways to minister that God blesses us with than we could even imagine. This past week we hosted some missionaries in our home. Nate and Jenni just completed their term and have gone home to America. They served in Cuamba, a very little town in Northern Mozambique. They faced many challenges, but also saw the Lord work in so many ways. We were able to encourage them, feed them, and have them in our home. God has really helped us learn to grow in hospitality toward the nationals and missionaries…something that definitely doesn’t come natural to us. We were grateful for the opportunity to minister to them and have their friendship!

On Friday afternoons we have been spending our time with our friends Tomei and Ruthi. Tomei actually is the Pastor of the church that we attend here. Ruthi is one of Jenni’s closest friends here in Nampula. She always picks Jenni fresh flowers and surprises her with them. They always cook us a delicious African meal and then we sit around and TRY really hard to communicate. We have decided to help each other out. They want to learn English and we want to improve our Portuguese. We are going to memorize verses to help our learning, so it should be fun and rewarding at the same time. We really love our time with them. We all make funny mistakes in the language, but it gives us lots of opportunities to laugh! (For example: Jenni asked for the recipe for poop shrimp instead of coconut shrimp. OOPS!)

Last week we went to the basketball courts and watched some of the youth play. They are really good. The girls are teamed up against the guys and they did a great job! In fact, they ruled the court. Now we are trying to figure out the best strategy of a sports ministry with basketball, since b-ball is Corey’s favorite sport. We will be meeting with the coach of the team that was playing just to see what opportunities already exist in Nampula. Please keep this in your prayers as we need continued direction from the Lord and good ideas that can only come from Him!

We have been meeting with our supervisor Eddie and the True Love Waits team to get them on board for sharing the gospel in the schools. They have a lot of fear and we have been struggling with our team for some time now. Not only do they have a lot of fear but they have a lack of motivation/commitment as well. Unfortunately in such a poor country, ministry seems to be contingent on food and transport. We keep hearing, “We can’t do that if we don’t have our lunch provided.” This is an ongoing frustration for us. People only want to be involved in ministry if they can get something out of it, which is so contrary to the Bible. We need patience in all of these issues. We have a heart for this program and we are eager to see it thrive! Please pray for our True Love Waits Team. We have another meeting this week (Tues) and hopefully we can effectively communicate to them the importance of sharing the gospel…food or no food!

Here is a picture of some sweet little girls that go to our church. The one on the left had a pretty dress on with sequins. During the service, a sequin fell off her dress. The other little girls saw her playing with it and so they also wanted a sequin. What she did next surprised me….she ripped off every sequin on her dress and started handing them out so that all the little girls could have one too. I couldn’t believe it. They put the sequins on their faces for decoration. It comes to show you that things don’t matter to them. It’s what you DO with the things that you have…even the little sequins.

Prayer Requests: 1) God would lead a team from HBC to minister and share the gospel with the people of Mozambique 2) Pray that our language skills would improve and that God would help us to memorize scripture in Portuguese. 3) Ideas for Basketball sports ministry 4) Patience and words of wisdom and grace for our True Love Waits team. 5) Our organization requires all of their missionaries to attend the conferences they hold. Jenni will be attending a Ladies Conference in Kenya May 1-May 6 and she will be FLYING there without Corey. Please pray God will give her grace and that He will conquer her fear from the last time she flew a couple of weeks ago. Pray that she will be encouraged at this meeting and she will leave renewed and refreshed in the Lord.

Good Times Minus One

2007-04-04T13:56:00.000-04:00

We apologize for such a long delay in posting. We have had computer trouble which is now resolved and we were away on vacation with Jenni’s parents. We had a wonderful time with them and we are so grateful that they could come. God definitely had His hand on all of their travel. They never lost any luggage, they made all of their flight connections, and the only sickness suffered was a cold…which they gave to us! It was fun to see things through a new set of eyes. Everything was so new to them and so foreign. We have grown so accustom to everything here which is totally a God thing! Their experience here will be one that will always be remembered and definitely leave a permanent imprint on their lives.

Their first week in Nampula was spent adapting to the wonderful heat and humidity along with a new language and culture. The first day they suffered from complete sleep depravation and heat exhaustion! So we let them rest and take it easy. This day was also like Christmas for us….we got to open their suitcases filled with stuff for us! It was so wonderful! We will be enjoying American goodies until our term ends next March! The next day we showed them around the city of Nampula and familiarized them with our every day tasks.

On Tuesday, one of our favorite days with them, we took them to our friend Choveque’s house. Choveque had prepared a wonderful African meal in his hut for them to experience. The food was delicious…ok we are used to the food and we really like it, but my mom and dad did a really great job with trying something so different!We ate nshima, covi (cabbage in a peanut sauce),butter beans, and biscottis (cookies).
This was a humbling and wonderful experience for us all. Everyone lives such simple lives here. People have practically nothing but are willing to give all that they have! My parents had brought gifts for all of Choveque’s family and they were so excited to receive these special things (the kids' sunglasses made us all laugh). All in all, it was a very special day!

The next days we took them to the beautiful beaches of Mozambique. One night we spent in our own personal hut on a private beach and then the next night we made our way to an air conditioned room! We returned Friday afternoon wishing to relax, but instead, we took shifts of making 100 tortillas for our next adventure! Saturday morning we headed to the orphanage, the highlight of the trip, where we played games with the orphans all morning.

My parents had brought tons of games and coloring books from the States for the kids and they absolutely LOVED them! After a fun filled morning of playing game after game, we introduced TACOS to the kids for lunch. They loved them! The director of the orphanage, Victor, had spent 5 years in the US, and he has told the kids about tacos for years. We wanted to give them the opportunity to try them. It was such a fun day. Before we left the kids got on a stage and thanked and prayed for my parents. The orphans have so much love in their hearts for people they hardly know. Even arriving at the orphanage that morning they had decorated with signs welcoming us and saying they loved us. We all learned from their beautiful example of love. This day will always be in our hearts! It blessed us to see how happy the kids were and my parents were.

The next days were a bit trying as we were without water…which meant we were without our relief of a cold shower! Thank goodness we were due for vacation! We were off to South Africa where we went to Kruger National Park and took my parents on a safari. We saw so many animals in the 2 days we were there. Unfortuantely the lions, leopards, and cheetahs were shy and didn’t want to be seen. We did get very close to zebras, giraffes, rhinos, and elephants…in fact it was a bit freaky! After this neat experience, we went to Cape Town where we stayed in a place called Fish Hoek.

It was one of the most beautiful places we have ever visited! We had so much fun. We did most of the main tourist attractions Cape Point, Table Mountain, Boulders Beach (where we got to see penguins on the beach) and VA Waterfront. Corey also had his first encounter with a great white shark. One of my favorite things we did was we surprised my mom with a 50th birthday present.
She has always wanted to go horseback riding on the beach. We actually pulled off surprising her, which is a very hard thing to do if you know my mom. It was a wonderful time!

We absolutely loved our time with my parents. We felt so loved that they would come to a foreign land and overcome such great fears to spend time with us. We treasured our time with them and we are truly grateful for all they did to make us feel so special! Thanks to all who prayed for our trip. It was blessed in so many ways!

This next part might seem out of place from what is written above, but it goes together so bare with us! We want to especially thank those of you who have prayed for us during our travel. During our travel back to Nampula we were in a plane accident. It was raining really hard and the pilot could not see the runway. The pilot ran INTO the runway upon landing and all 4 tires burst which sent us swirving off of the runway and spinning around. The wing drug on the ground and at this point we thought we were going to roll. When the plane finally came to a stop and level ground, everyone on the plane panicked. We had to use the emergency doors to evacuate…which meant we used the slide which you only see in movies. Once off the plane, we had to walk about a mile in the pouring rain down the runway to the airport. We spent the night in the city of Beira and arrived in Nampula the next afternoon. We have never been so scared in our whole lives and at the same time so grateful to be alive. It is truly a miracle that our plane did not blow up. Some people were injured, but we walked away without a scratch…just emotional scarring for the rest of our lives! So we want to thank all of you for prayers on our behalf. God showed us His mercy and kept us alive and we are so grateful! Here’s a picture to show that the Duncans are alive and well!

That’s all for now! Oh and did anyone notice that we had TONS of pictures this time??? We have recently been blessed with a DSL connection so be expecting updates more often with more pictures!!

The Keys are in Mozambique!

2007-03-13T18:14:00.000-04:00

Just wanted to let you know that Jenni's parents have arrived in Mozambique! They made it safely here with all of their luggage. Praise the Lord! Thank you so much for your prayers! We are having a wonderful time with them and are so excited they are here. Please pray for continued health and safety as we show them around the city. They are having some serious culture shock! We will post more pictures of their adventure at the end of this week.

Computer Down, Portuguese Up!

2007-02-27T14:33:00.000-05:00

Our computer is broken and so we can only email from our friend's
house. We are sad because this was our only way of communication to our friends and families. Pray that our computer will be fixed soon! We will probably have to take it to South Africa when we go on vacation with our parents. They will be here soon and we are so excited!

We have had a good week. Our pastor's wife Ruthi had her first baby and she asked Jenni if she could come and stay with us for a couple of days. It has been such a great experience for us to have her in our home. It has been our first real opportunity to speak Portuguese continually day and night. Also Jenni has been able to do newborn care
and postpartum teaching with her IN PORTUGUESE. We have loved it! Before Ruthi came to our house we visited her in the hospital a couple of times. We were impressed with the actual structure and cleanliness. By no means does it compare to an American hospital, but it is pretty good for Mozambique! Unfortunately the nursing care was non-existent, but at least it was clean.

Our supervisors Eddie and Janice will be moving in a couple of weeks and we are very excited to have them come to Nampula. They came for a visit this past week and our meetings with them and the government went well. Now we are in the process of applying for a nursing degree in Mozambique and exploring more ideas of how to use it where it is most needed. Again, we ask for prayer in all of this decision making...as many of you know we are the most indecisive people!

Prayer requests for this week: 1) Pray for safe travel of Jenni's parents as they leave March 9th and return March29th. Pray they will be protected from uneasiness and illness during their preparation and their time here. 2) Decision making to be led by God. 3)Praise that our Portuguese has improved greatly! 4)Discipline in our spiritual and physical lives.

Our new house...and kitten!

2007-02-08T08:21:00.000-05:00

We have a new house! Thank you for your prayers and encouragement for this! We are still unpacking our things, but it is starting to feel like a home! Our house is nice, but a lot of work had to go into it before we moved in. As we hired painters, electricians, phone installers and even a plumber, we found ourselves improving in our language ability as were challenged with many new words. Our house is on a very busy street and in the middle of Nampula which has its good and bad points, but for the most part we are liking it. We are just happy that we can finally get settled again!

Other great news…we have an addition to our family! Yep, we got a new little kitten. His name is Lucky. He is keeping us on our toes. He loves to play, eat, sleep, chew on feet, and poop on Corey’s shoes. He is so cute! We are glad that we have him.

We had dinner with an American doctor/missionary last week and he gave us some great insight on medical ministries here in Mozambique. The government is pretty strict with foreigners practicing medicine so we have a lot of challenges ahead of us. We will be meeting with the Director of Health this week so please be praying for this. We will also be meeting with other organizations to see other possibilities. We are still on the search, but we know that it is not in vain! At our dinner, the doctor reminded us of the story of Hagar. As Hagar was in the desert, she cried because there was no water left for her and her baby Ishmael and she didn’t want to see him die. However, she didn’t see the well of water until God opened her eyes. (Genesis 21:14-19) So it is the same for us. Whether it be ministry or any other situation, our eyes must be opened by God. We tend to always see the problem, but God sees the solutions and we must wait for Him to open our eyes in His timing. So we are learning more patience as we wait on the Lord to see “our well” of ministry opportunities in Mozambique!

We are excited to announce that Jenni’s parents will be coming March 9-29. This is quite a huge step for them to do overseas travel. Please pray that it will be a great experience for them and that they will have peace of mind, safe travel, little culture shock, little jet lag, good health, and lots of wonderful memories. We can hardly wait!!! Thank you again for your prayers for our housing situation, language acquisition, and protection from Malaria. God is so good and He is faithfully answering them! Please continue to pray for us to wait with patient hearts for the Lord’s direction and clarity. Please pray for Corey as he will be starting a sports ministry next week. He will be seeking out places to play basketball and soccer. We are very excited about this! Also, please pray for continued protection against malaria. Thanks again and we love you!!

Some frustrations

2007-01-22T12:47:00.000-05:00

Looking for a house has been a continual source of frustration for us. Every time we get ready to sign a contract, someone beats us to it or something happens that we can’t make the deal. We have noticed so many cultural differences just in looking for a house. The realtors we have had are completely unorganized and unprepared. We spent hours driving around to see the “outside” of the houses and being asked, “would you like to see the inside?” After such a statement, they figure that we are actually wanting to live inside the house and that they now have a dilemma. They will need to contact the owner and track down the keys…wherever they may be. Unfortunately there is no such thing as a simple phone call away. Every thing just works different here. Sometimes it is bearable, but on days that every thing seems to be going wrong, we find ourselves not appreciating our differences. For instance, we went without electricity for 3 days this week. Every thing that we had bought/stocked up on spoiled in our fridge and freezer. Everytime we called the electric company, they said they would be at our house in 15 minutes. Let’s just say that got really old by the first night. The second morning we went to their office to complain that no one had come and we were told to be patient…Corey responded that he thought 28 hours was patient enough! It has been really hot and for some reason, rainy season didn’t help us out for 3 nights we stayed awake sweating. We didn’t even get a breeze or a slight rain shower. We decided that it would be good to sleep downstairs, since it would be cooler. We made a huge mistake…we were eaten alive by mosquitoes! So, we have had quite a stressful week looking for houses, battling the language barrier, battling the electric company, watching hours slowly go by through each night, being covered with mosquito bites, and having the house we liked rented just hours before we could make the deal. AAAAAHHHH!!!

So, needless to say, we are in some serious need of prayer! Despite these frustrations, God has been good to us and He has shown us how blessed we are and how much we take our blessings from Him for granted. Please pray that God would lead us to the right house and that this week we would strive to respond to every situation the way Christ would! Pray that bad circumstances wouldn’t get the best of us and change our attitudes in a negative way. Please pray that we would be patient. Please pray that God would grant us clarity and a vision for our AIDS ministry…there are so many details that are unknown to us right now. Please pray that God would continue to protect us from Malaria!

Christmas in Africa

2007-01-07T08:33:00.000-05:00

We are back again in Nampula. We returned yesterday from our trip to South Africa for a prayer retreat. We have been on the go so much lately. Thank you for your prayers for our safety. God has blessed us with His protection throughout all of our travels. We hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas. On Dec. 22nd we went to the orphanage and decorated a paper Christmas tree and ornaments. Then we decorated sugar cookies…it was the first cookie decoration and tasting for all of the orphans. They loved it. Then Jenni took the girls and taught them how to make them. They are excited to venture on their own and make more of these new delicious treats. We also spent time sharing the true meaning of Christmas with all of them. We challenged them to share this message with at least one of their friends and they all committed to doing it! We were excited. We had such a blessed time with them.

We had a wonderful Christmas, although it was very different than what we are used to. We spent time with our new supervisors Eddie and Janice. It was great! They spoiled us and made us feel like family. Also, we were able to talk to our families in the States and actually see them on the web cam. Thank the Lord for Skype and instant messaging! Eddie and Janice are blessed to have a fast internet connection, so we had a blast and took advantage of seeing our family. It sure made our separation easier. We can’t complain since we were able to actually see and talk to our families. We are so grateful that God has blessed us with Skype and a missionary family that took us in. Being away from family, friends, and pretty Christmas decorations and goodies was hard, but God made the transition wonderful. Whether we have any of those things or not, we still celebrated the most important thing…Christ’s birth. It doesn’t matter where you are in the world, the meaning of Christmas remains the same. It was actually weird to be stripped from the commercialism of Christmas, but it was wonderfully weird. It helped us to focus only on the birth of our Savior!!!

After Christmas, we drove to South Africa. Can you say culture shock??? We had adapted to having nothing, and all of a sudden we felt like we were back in America. We went from a land with huts for homes and bad dirt roads, to a land with beautiful homes, movie theaters, hair salons, real grocery stores and PAVED roads! It was so weird…we felt like we were in America, however we were missing everyone we love so much. Everything felt so familiar, yet it felt so empty without our family and friends. We miss all of you so much!! Here is a picture of the first place we went to in Johannesburg…yep that would be Micky D’s! It was like a party in our mouths!!! Who knew fries, nuggets, and a McFlurry could taste so good!!

The Prayer Retreat was wonderful. There was a team who came from the States and they led us in worship and Bible Study. It was awesome to praise God in English! The days were very full of prayer time and worship time. We enjoyed it very much. At night, we had free time, and we took advantage of it and went to the movies. We highly recommend Charolette’s Web to everyone! Jenni also got her hair cut and styled, which was quite the experience. In the States you can just say I would like a cut/style. In Johannesburg, you have to be very specific and say you want your hair washed, then conditioned, then cut, then blow dried, and then straightened…Why??? Well because you have the privilege of paying for each and everything done to your hair. We know for next time, but it was quite an expensive, frustrating experience. It did turn out good though, so no complaints there!

Upon our arrival to Nampula, we were blessed with several Christmas packages awaiting us! We want to thank all of you for the time and money in postage/package materials that you put out to make us feel so special. We felt so loved and we appreciate the kindness and generosity that you showed us. THANK YOU!!! Now we are refreshed and stocked up on lots of yummy American food that should cure some cravings!

We had a meeting with Samaritan’s Purse when we returned to Mozambique a couple of days ago. We are in the process of looking at a bunch of AIDS ministry materials and making some big decisions on how to do ministry here. We need your prayers as we seek God to lead us in this decision making process. We also need you to pray for us this week as we search for an apartment to live in. We need to move ASAP out of our house, because the house we are living in now is going to be the home of our new supervisors. We had found a great option, but it fell through. Pray God would lead us to a good home and that the move would go smoothly. Also, pray that we would just lean on the Lord and not worry about the details of the move and decisions we need to make! God bless you and we hope that you are all having a wonderful New Year!!

Our 40/40 Adventure

2006-12-14T13:34:00.000-05:00

We are back! 40/40 is over and we have returned to Nampula. Thank you so much for all of your prayer support! We really appreciate it and we know God was faithful to answer them! 40/40 was an excellent experience for us and we are so grateful that God blessed us with the opportunity to go. It was definitely not what we expected, but it turned out to be so much better than our expectations. Bear with us as we try and summarize our 5 week journey!

Our journey began with us traveling from Nampula, Mozambique to Lusaka, Zambia. We stayed in Lusaka at a Baptist seminary dormitory for 13 days where we went out with our Zambian assistants (local pastors and members of the Baptist churches in Zambia) to “engage Africans”. This was a lot of fun as we were able to go out into the local communities and talk to them about several different aspects of their culture. We talked to them about health, medicine, missionaries, church, etc. This was very informative for us as we learned so much about how they live and how they think. It was also really neat for us because many of these encounters led to us being able to share the gospel with them. It was such a wonderful experience to share this Good News and other Bible stories side by side.

After only being there a couple of days, Jenni’s assistant became very ill and was hospitalized. Because he was ill on a weekend, there were no doctors to treat him. Jenni went to visit him and found him being treated for Malaria….but he did not have malaria. Her assistant had a severe stroke. Jenni felt so helpless. She tried so hard to convince the nurse there to reevaluate the patient’s diagnosis and treatment. Then she tried to have the family get him transferred, but that would go against “the culture” and cause further problems with relationships with the medical staff. A day later, Jenni’s assistant died. It was so sad. He left behind an 11 year old daughter. It really made us realize the desperate need for good medical care in this part of the world. We take it for granted in the US, that is for sure. So many people die here, because either they do not have access to a doctor, or they are completely misdiagnosed, or the physician doesn’t work on nights and weekends, or the people care more about what the medical staff would think of them if they got a second opinion than they do about their dying relative, or they simply cannot afford treatment. Whatever the reasons, the situations here break our hearts.

After 13 days in the city of Lusaka we headed out for bush camp for 13 days. We went to a rural town in eastern Zambia called Petauke, so we could experience the rural side of Africa. This was a lot of fun and a good experience as well for us. However, it was a big difference from life in the city to life in the villages. In our bush camp we faced some delightful challenges: we stayed in tents, pumped our own water at the well, used squatty potties, took some bucket baths, washed our clothes by hand, killed some gigantic spiders and scorpions, and listened to the “demon drums”, etc. It was kinda freaky. We were told that these drums were played loudly to worship the evil spirits. Every night we would hear drums and it always seemed like they were getting closer. We had to keep thinking that “greater is He who is in us than he that is in the world,” and pray that one day those same people could be drumming for Jesus and not evil spirits. Our time in the bush was definitely an unforgettable experience.

We didn’t really eat anything too bizarre during our time in Lusaka and the bush camp. We ate nshima every day, with a variety of other things. Nshima is an African staple and is eaten throughout most of Africa. It is a combination of ground corn meal and water and is eaten for nearly every meal, every day except breakfast. It isn’t terrible, but it isn’t exactly wonderful tasting either! There were some termites available in town, but thank goodness they were never offered to us so we didn’t have to partake. The strangest thing we ate was some capenta which are little dried fish with no meat (only bones, scales, and eyeballs!). It tasted like trout, only completely different. We ate these at the end of our time at 40/40 during our homestay. For our homestay, we stayed with a young Zambian couple and their 1 year old daughter (Here is a picture of Corey holding her.) They live in a district town. This was a lot of fun for us as we got to experience how an average Zambian family lives. Jenni learned how to make nshima amongst other African delicacies, while she also taught them how to make some American dishes. She was taught how to cook with only coals, one pan, and no cooking utensils. We realized that people can live so simple. We were humbled and felt guilty for thinking that we “need” so many things to live. This homestay taught us that we don’t need as much as we think that we do.

We did have a funny experience that is just too good not share. While we were at our homestay, we got to experience both bucket baths and squatty potties which in themselves are kind of funny. Anyway, one day as we were taking a bucket bath, Corey set his hat upon the ledge which separates the squatty potty from the bucket bath. Then he accidentally knocked the hat over onto the squatty potty side. He couldn’t see where it landed, but only hoped that it didn’t fall into the 3 meter deep feces hole. Thankfully it had not fallen in, but instead it landed perfectly on the hole which was still pretty disgusting! We gave it a good wash though and Corey continues to wear it and represent the first place Utah Jazz everywhere we go.

When we completed our 3 night homestay, we traveled to a resort for a few days to debrief our experiences. We were so happy to see steak and not nshima! After we finished with 40/40 we were blessed with the opportunity to visit Victoria Falls. If you’re ever in Zambia or Zimbabwe, we highly recommend visiting this magnificent piece of God’s creation. We will post some pictures and thoughts of this a little later. Also, we wanted to share with you all a note of praise and thanksgiving to God. While we were at 40/40 we found out that we will have some new supervisors, Eddie and Janice. This is a big answer to prayer as we have been without leadership for awhile. Eddie and Janice will be moving up to Nampula in February and we are so excited to have them as our new leaders. Now we are back on track planning medical clinics with a sports ministry. God is so amazing!

Here are some prayer requests: Please continue to pray for God’s leading and direction in our ministries. Please pray that God would help us to be disciplined in our walk with Him. Please pray for spiritual refreshment and safety as we travel to South Africa Dec27-Jan3 for a prayer retreat. Praise God that he was merciful to our stomachs during our time in Zambia. Other than a 2 day stomach flu, our stomachs did amazingly well.
God Bless You. We love and miss all of you so much and pray that you have a blessed Christmas!

Off to Zambia

2006-10-22T16:32:00.000-04:00

We want to start this blog off by thanking our wonderful families and friends who have blessed us with many packages. We have realized how much we miss and take for granted the things that we can get so easily in the States. This past week we received several boxes of Lucky Charms (for Jenni) and packages of beef jerky (for Corey) and many other US things which we have enjoyed greatly. We also received the new Chris Tomlin CD which Jenni has worn out already. It is a great CD! We highly recommend it for everyone!

Lately, it has been SO HOT. We think we’re going to burn out our A/C in our room! It has been working overtime for us! It’s very humid here and the sun is so intense. We think we might eventually melt, especially since it is only going to get hotter.

Well, we’re wrapping up our language study this week and that’s kind of scary since we are far from communicating effectively. We had another funny experience with our language class this week. If you remember, we learned how a “castanha” can be a chestnut or donkey poop. This week we discovered a false cognate that we thought was pretty funny. The word we learned was “constipaçao”, which sounds like constipation. So we thought our language teacher was telling us he had constipation, but he really had a cold. Just a little difference!

We have had many interesting experiences here in Nampula. Last week, we had been asked to help a family in one of the churches that needed help with transporting a baby that had just died. A pastor had asked us if we could transport the baby from the city hospital to the family’s house (about 40 kilometers outside of the city). It was a lot different from what we’ve seen in the States. There was no casket, no ceremony, nothing like that. A family member of the baby’s mother just held the baby wrapped up in an African cloth (capalana) until we got to the mother’s house. We were able to witness another huge difference in the way people live here compared to America.

Next Monday we will be going to Zambia for a 5 week training. This training will teach us how to live AFRICAN STYLE. (ie, living in the bush, learning about African culture, how to go to the bathroom in a hole in the ground, how to wash our clothes by hand, etc.) We think that it will be good to actually live how Africans live and gain a heart for them and their way of life. After our training, we are going to visit Victoria Falls and take a much needed break! We are so excited about this! It is one place we definitely wanted to see while living here in Africa. Also, while we are there, we are going to jump from one of the highest bungee jumps in the world! It is about 100 meters and you jump from a bridge that looks over a river. It should be fun. OK… if you know Jenni…this would never happen unless we were the final 3 on the Amazing Race!

So you probably won’t hear from us for about 6 weeks or so. We wish we could have some access to family and friends, but we don’t. That is the way of life for Africans, so we will have to get used to that part as well.

Please Pray For : 1) Our stomachs while living in the bush. We are nervous about it because we have had some “stomach issues” for some time now, and we really don’t want to experience these issues in the bush! Also, the mosquitoes are really bad now that it is hot, so pray that we don’t get malaria! 2) Safety as we travel to and from Zambia. We return Dec. 11th 3) This week we will say goodbye to some missionaries for a little while as they go on furlough. Please pray that God would raise up new leaders for our team. 4) Please pray that we wouldn’t take too many steps back in Portuguese since we will not be immersed in it for 6 weeks. Pray God would protect our memories from losing to many words!

“The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised.” Job 1:21

2006-10-04T14:21:00.000-04:00

In our last blog, we wrote about being able to work at an orphanage. We were so excited about this opportunity we felt God had given us. It just seemed like the perfect fit for us. However, we recently found out that we would not be able to work there as our primary ministry. This was very sad and disappointing for us, because we were really looking forward to working there. However, we will still be able to work there on our day off! We know God is still in control though and His plans cannot be thwarted. Whether or not we understand why He took this away from us, His name is still worthy to be praised and we are excited to see what He has for us!

Last week we were able to see Choveque’s (our house worker and friend) wife get baptized. It was our first time to see a baptism since we’ve been here. It was really cool because it was in a river and it made us feel like we were in Jesus’ time. There were hundreds of people who were there to either watch the baptisms or to be baptized. After every baptism, the people broke into a chorus in Makuwa. It was a great cultural experience for us.

We now have a couple of weeks left of Portuguese classes and needless to say, we are a little nervous about this. It is coming along…just not as fast as we would like. We do have a funny story to share about our language learning. Last week our teacher asked us if we had ever eaten a “castanha”. Neither of us had ever heard this word before and so we looked it up in the dictionary. The word had 2 different meanings. First, it was a type of nut, which is what he was talking about. The other meaning it had was donkey excrement! We had quite the laugh! We told him NO to both definitions! We now know to be very careful when someone offers us “castanhas” because someone could either be giving us chestnuts or donkey poop!

We have another story which is just too good not to share. We have recently been eyewitnesses to the eating of a grasshopper by a native Mozambican who happens to be our language teacher. We both agree that it is the most disgusting thing our eyes have ever witnessed. Last week Luis caught a grasshopper (not just any grasshopper, but a very large one) and said he would eat it. So…we threw it into some water to boil it and put a little bit of salt into it…and 10 minutes later…Bon Appetite! It was thoroughly disgusting!

Here are some prayer requests for this week: 1) Please pray for the meetings we will have this week with the pastors here. Pray that God would give us vision and direction for the ministries we are here to lead. 2) Pray for our last weeks of Portuguese. We need discipline in studying and divine intervention with memorizing 3) We will be leaving in 3 weeks for a training in Zambia that we are nervous to attend. We will give more information in our next blog about it, but please pray for our health and safe travel during the 5 weeks we will be away. 4) Pray for us as the heat of Mozambique has started to “zap” all of our energy!

Nothing is too hard for the LORD!!!!

2006-09-13T14:13:00.000-04:00

God’s promises are as true today as when they were spoken and given to us in His Word, yet why do we fail to proclaim these promises and actually believe them? So often we find ourselves wavering in unbelief. Also, it is so hard sometimes for us to believe in God’s grace. We always think we have to earn it or do something in order to receive it. How is it possible that we are made right with God through the death of His Son? Oh how much higher are God’s ways and thoughts than ours. His love for us is amazing! With that said…we are very excited to share with you this post. We never thought this would be possible, because it just seemed too good to be true.

We were recently victims of unbelief yet God proved to us this past week that nothing is too hard for Him! As we came to Mozambique, many of you know that we have struggled with some of the ministries that awaited us. There had been some miscommunication about us working in an orphanage. We found out that we were not here to do nursing and sports evangelism, but facilitate some other ministries that were here. We thought we would be helping these ministries, but our primary focus would be at the orphanage. So we really struggled with this miscommunication, because we longed to use the gifts and skills that God has gifted us with to share with the people here. So as the months have gone by, we have waited on the Lord with anticipation. However we thought there would be no way for us to work at this orphanage as our primary ministry. By God’s grace, we found out this week that we would be able to work at the orphanage on a regular basis and not just in our spare time! Our focus will be to minister to these orphans on a daily basis! We are so excited about this and we are praising God for this incredible opportunity and for answering our prayers in this way! We believe that He worked a miracle for us! We were encouraged by this verse this past week and it really leaped off the page to us: Ephesians 3:20 “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is in work within us to him be the glory...” God made this happen in His power for His glory and we are so excited that He did!

We feel like it is such a perfect fit for us as we will both be able to use the gifts God has given to us! Jenni will be able to utilize her nursing skills, teach English, and share the love of Christ through her gifts of encouragement and mercy. Corey will be able to play sports with the orphans, teach them how to play the drums, and be a servant to the orphans in many other ways. Our hope is to build relationships through these avenues so that we can share the love of Christ with them and start Bible studies. We are looking forward to seeing how God will continue to work at this orphanage. We have already been able to work there a couple times and Corey has been teaching them some of the basics about drumming.(We tried posting pictures of this, but blogger would not allow us to post more than one.) This has been so much fun and such a blessing as Corey has really missed playing the drums. Jenni also had the opportunity to minister to one of the youth who had some health issues. Please pray with us about this exciting opportunity and that God would receive glory and that He would work out all the details that we are still unsure about.

Here are some prayer requests for this week: 1) Pray that God would work out the details of us working at the orphanage. Please pray for our leaders and the decisions that they need to make regarding our work there. Pray that God would protect us from worry as we wait on these decisions…we want to keep our eyes on Him and keep praising Him for this miracle! 2) Pray for God’s wisdom and direction with our other ministries that we are here to help. 3) Pray for patience in learning the language. We are almost to the end of our formal language learning and we are nervous to have only 4 weeks left. We have so much to learn in such little time!

Memorable experiences

2006-08-29T13:56:00.000-04:00

This past week was very encouraging to us as God put us into complete awe of Him and His works! We had the chance to visit a Christian orphanage where we witnessed the hand of God. It was such a neat experience! God totally has His hand on this orphanage! The director told us many stories of how God has delivered these orphans from the power of Satan. It was so refreshing and encouraging to hear these incredible acts of God. He has blessed this orphanage with a leader (Victor) who is passionate about Christ. Victor wants to see these children know and love God with all of their hearts. It was also so wonderful to talk with him about the opportunities of being able to help there one day a week. It was such a “God thing” as he asked Corey about teaching the kids how to play the drums (they actually had an American style drum set there). Then (without him even knowing Corey is here to start a sports ministry), he asked if he could play sports with the kids as well. He also loved the idea of Jenni helping to be a nurse there and to care for the kids when they are sick. We are so excited to help out at this orphanage (even though it’s only once a week) and we know that God has blessed us with this opportunity! We look forward to sharing more about this in the future.

Recently, we had our first goat eating experience and to our surprise, it was really good! It didn’t “taste like chicken,” but it was a mix between beef and pork. Anyway, one of our night guards (Filipe) invited us to a party celebrating the dedication of their baby to the Lord. It was really cool because Filipe’s wife wasn’t able to bear a child, yet they fervently prayed that God would give them a child. God answered their prayer and gave them a beautiful baby girl, and they named her Precious Grace. After the baby dedication they had a party and this is where we ate the goat. We had a great time at the party and we were so humbled by their hospitality. His family spent over a month’s wages to provide food for us and the 20 or so people that attended. Even afterwards they asked us if we wanted to take home the leftovers. Filipe and his family truly have giving hearts! This is a apicture of the goat before we ate it. Filipe brought it to our house on the back of his bike. It made us laugh so hard! We still shake our heads in unbelief that people put live animals on the back of their bikes, on the handle bars…really any free space will be taken by something alive!

We also had a date night recently which was a lot of fun. We went to a nice restaurant and had a great time (This picture is of us outside of the restaurant). However, we have found out that there really isn’t much to do here in Nampula. You can’t really do dinner/movie here or dinner/bowling or anything like that. We can do dinner and then a movie on the laptop! We’ll take it though. We also have been playing a lot of games. We have found that we are both bad losers! We have really enjoyed all of the time that we get to spend together, and we feel so blessed to be together every day!

Here are some prayer requests for this week: 1) Grace to learn the language. It’s coming along slowly but surely. 2) God’s direction and clarity with the ministries He has placed us in. 3) Wisdom and discernment with our giving. Everyone has “a need” and a request for us to fill that need and we need God’s help to know who to give to and when! 4) We are revising some of the True Love Waits material and we will be meeting with the team next Wednesday to do this. Please pray that God would help us know what to revise so that we can minister more effectively to the school aged children here in Nampula!

“So teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Psalm 90:12

2006-08-17T18:18:00.000-04:00

These past couple of weeks have been very sad and sobering for us, which has led us to write what we are going to write. On August 1, Corey found out that his friend, Chris Mitchell died. It’s hard to describe the feeling you have in your soul after hearing that someone you love has died. So many thoughts and feelings go through your heart after this happens. There is sorrow that hurts to your core, yet there is also a peace and comfort if that person is a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Death is such a sobering reality. Whether we think about it or not, the truth is that we are all ordained to die. This is where the reality sets in: where will we spend our eternity? The purpose of this is not to scare people or to frighten people, but so that we might search our hearts and seek the face of God. Are we reconciled to God? (2 Corinthians 5:20) Are we storing up treasures on earth or are we storing them up in heaven? Are we living as if earth is our home? Are we loving people like we love ourselves? Are we making the most of every opportunity that God gives us? (Ephesians 5:15)

God has burdened our hearts to share with you and the people in Africa of his saving grace. We can know without a doubt where we will spend eternity! (1 John 5:13) Heaven is a wonderful thing to think about and yet God gives us a chance to have a little bit of heaven here on Earth. We can enter into His presence daily through prayer and by reading His Word, and we can be witnesses of His glory through the sunsets, beautiful mountains…everything declares the glory of God! (Psalm 19:1) We can live an abundant life and have freedom in God and no longer live for the things of this world. This abundant and free life can only come from Jesus! (John 10:10) Every person on this Earth is a sinner and has a desperate need for a Savior. Because we all have an appointment with death, we must truly search our hearts. The Bible says in Romans 3:10-12 “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.” Romans 3:23 “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.” Romans 6:23 “for the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord.” Have you received this precious gift in Jesus? Romans 5:8 “But God demonstrated his own love for us in this: While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Romans 10:8-10 “...the word of faith we are proclaiming: That if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.” Ephesians 2:8 “For it is by grace that you are saved, through faith and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast.” Romans 5:20 “But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

These verses are good news (Gospel)! But, they are only good news to those who repent of their sins and trust only in Christ to save them from their sins. For those who do not repent and believe, they will experience the torment of hell for all of eternity. Hell is a very real place. (2 Peter 2:4-10, Revelation 21:8) The fact is that we all deserve hell. Praise the Lord that He loves us so much that He would be gracious and merciful to us by providing His one and only Son to die on the cross for our sins! May we live every day of our life seeing what the Lord has saved us from…our eternal separation from Him.

Our prayer is that any of our friends and family that have not seen their need for a Savior, they will do so now! Our time is short here on Earth and we never know when God will choose to take us, which is why there are warnings given throughout the Bible. “Behold, now is the acceptable time, behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2). These words in Hebrews chapters 3 & 4 are repeated 3 times: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts…”

We will never be able to do enough, say enough, be “a good enough person”, or live forever in happiness in heaven without the saving grace of Jesus to wash us “white as snow.” (Isaiah 1:18) Our sins separate us from God (Isaiah 59:2), but when we receive the gift of His grace in our lives, we can live not only eternally with God, but every minute of everyday! This sweet fellowship (1 John 1:3) is something worth living for! In Jesus you always have a Redeemer, Provider, Friend, Father, Calmer of Storms, Great Physician, Healer, Sustainer, Peace Giver, the list could go on and on and on! Everyday you search for these things in the world and the world will never provide them… “Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life.” (John 14:6) May Jesus be in all of our hearts and the only reason to live for now and for eternity!!!!

Our trip to Malawi

2006-07-29T12:20:00.000-04:00

After 2,375 km (1500 miles) and a total of 31 hours of driving like we were on the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland and 36 mosquito bites (32 on Jenni and 4 on Corey), we are back from Malawi! What a trip! We had a great time in Malawi, but we’re happy to finally be back “home”. Before we made it to the meeting at Lake Malawi, we got to stay at a Tea Estate. It was so wonderful! It was so beautiful and peaceful there. We had a relaxing time there just enjoying the tranquility of the place. Here are a couple of pictures of what it looked like there. It is not your typical Africa scenery!
After 2 days at the tea estates, we headed to the hotel where we would be attending our meeting. The hotel where we stayed was beautiful and we felt so blessed to be able to stay at such a nice hotel. We weren’t roughing it by any means. However, we didn’t really get to enjoy the scenery to much since we were in meetings all day, but it was still nice to stay there. Our meeting was about the persecuted church and it was very meaningful to us (while we were in Virginia we had the same training and this time it was even better). It was a good reminder of what our brothers and sisters in Christ go through around the world. We really loved hearing all the stories about how God is working all over the world. It reminded us of John 3:8 when Jesus compares the Holy Spirit to the wind and how you see its effects but you don’t know where it comes from or where it’s going. We don’t know why or when or even how God works sometimes, but we definitely can see the effects of His working in the world and in His Church. We were so blessed and encouraged to hear story after story about how God is working around the world and in places that seem hopeless. He is so much greater than we can ever imagine!

In the little free time that we had, we got to enjoy some kayaking on the lake. This was so much fun until someone told us about a story of how a hippo tipped over a boat while on a river that flowed from Lake Malawi. After this story, we watched something similar on National Geographic and let’s just say the rest of our kayaking time we were a little tense from thinking there were crocs or hippos under us! Here is a picture of us next to the kayaks.

Overall, we really enjoyed our trip. The end of our week was sad, as we said goodbye to some fellow Mozambican missionaries, Harvey and Jen. They went back home to the USA after serving here for 2 years in a city called Angoche. We were so blessed to spend some time with them while they were here and it was amazing to hear about how God worked in their lives and used them mightily. We miss and love you Harvey and Jen!

Thank you for your prayers while we were gone. God definitely was merciful to us as we drove! Thank you God! Anytime you go on a trip with these types of roads, it’s a miracle that your vehicle is still in one piece.(and us too!)

Here are some prayer requests for this week. Please pray for: 1) Protection against Malaria (since our chance of getting it is increased from all the bites we got in Malawi.) 2) Continued patience and endurance with the language. We realized we took some steps backwards by not using the language for 10 days. 3) Clarity for the ministries that await us!

Why did the chicken cross the road?

2006-07-12T16:25:00.000-04:00

We have learned that chickens, people, and many other living things cross the road not only to get to the other side, but for a pure adrenaline rush! This adrenaline rush comes from running as fast as possible in a last minute decision to get to the other side. It is amazing that we haven’t hit anything! Besides avoiding chickens crossing the road, we are continuing to learn Portuguese every day. It seems like we will never be able to communicate effectively although it’s encouraging to look back a month ago and to see how much we have learned.

One thing we were able to do this past week was attend a 4th of July BBQ with the American missionary community in Nampula. It was so much fun! We got to eat some grilled pork chops that were amazing! Pork is very rare here. Tender, juicy, yummy meat is a very rare thing to come by. We also played volleyball. Basketball would have been better (except for those who would have experienced the Corey Crossover), but volleyball was still a lot of fun.

We also received our first package from the Krafts, which was an awesome blessing! It was so exciting to receive a package! We didn’t even have to pay duty on it and it was in one piece (normally they open the package to see the contents and charge you for it.) Thanks again Kraft Family!!

Another thing that was really cool this past week was that we learned a new song. Our house worker taught us a song in the Makhuwa language. This song is about searching the whole world over and discovering that there is no one like Jesus. We really love this song! Once we got the tune down we tried it out on the guitar and sounded out some chords. We hope to someday sing this song with the Makuwa people at the church we are attending (pictured here). We have been attending Nampula Baptist Church. We like it there and we think we will like it even more when we know what they are saying!!!!

This will be our last post for about a week and a half as we are heading to Malawi to attend an annual meeting with other team members. We are excited to be able to see another country, but the downside is a full 24 hours of driving on awful roads. It will be an adventure!

Here are some prayer requests for this week. Please pray for: 1) Traveling mercies on our trip to and from Malawi, 2) That we will retain everything that we learned so far in Portuguese and that this 10 day trip will not set us back in our learning, 3) Clarity for the ministries that God has called us to in Mozambique.

Fala Portugues?

2006-07-03T11:05:00.000-04:00

“What do the Duncan’s do everyday?”is probably a question most of you ask, right? Well, we are in language 3 hours a day/5 days a week and the other hours are spent cooking meals or still unpacking our bags. We have now realized that learning a language isn’t as easy or fun as we hoped for! It takes soooo much patience and perseverance. We do try to make it as fun as possible by learning numbers with Monopoly money or labeling everything in our house! We have a personal tutor named Luis (he is 4 feet tall and very funny!). He has taken us out to the market to help us learn our fruits and veggies. So it isn’t too bad, but our brains hurt everyday as we are now trying to form real sentences. aka “The book is on the table”…we are really expanding our vocabulary!! However, this past weekend we were also able to sit in on a True Love Waits session. This took place at a local school and involved about 40 youth from different areas of the city. As the youth were asked about cultural practices regarding premarital sex, our hearts were broken with the sad response of “kids start having sex at age 10.” It was good for us to gain a Mozambiquan perspective as we are still forming ideas regarding the True Love Waits program. Our goal is for these children to commit first to a relationship with Jesus Christ and then a commitment to abstinence. Please pray for this ministry as we are taking it into the school system and that we will declare the truth of the gospel boldly at these meetings.

We were also able to go to the coast for some downtime. Here are some pictures of our little weekend getaway we had with the rest of our team. We went to the beach and had so much fun! Our days consisted of snorkeling, eating, and relaxing on the beach. The beaches are beautiful and the water is so clear. The star fishes are gigantic and colorful. It was amazing to see the many different creatures of the sea that the Lord has created! This is definitely a place we plan on visiting again! Also, whenever any of you come and visit, we will take you to this place.

Here are some more prayer requests we have for this week. 1)Pray for the meeting we will have with our True Love Waits team as many changes are needed in this established ministry 2)The hearts of the children we minister to…that God will change their hearts to seek Him through the True Love Waits program. 3) Minds that absorb Portuguese and good memories, 4) Patience and endurance as we study the language 5) Safety as we are now driving in absolute chaos, and 6) Protection against Malaria and all other water/food borne illnesses…we have experienced some pretty bad GI problems lately.

Our first bush experience

2006-06-21T15:18:00.000-04:00

We have been here for almost a month and now we can say that we have had our first “bush” experience! A week ago we had the chance to go out with some of our colleagues to the “bush” to do Bible storying. Bible storying is an awesome tool to use in oral cultures (such as the Makhuwa) because most of them are illiterate and they learn best by listening. Jenni and the other missionaries took turns telling stories chronologically from the Bible. We had a translator who spoke English, Portuguese, and Makhuwa. She did an amazing job translating in 3 languages for 2 straight days! The village that we visited was in the middle of no-where. It took about 2 ½ hours to go 100km to get to the villiage because of the awful roads. The drive alone was exhausting! I guess we can’t complain since some of the ladies that were meeting us there had to walk 6 hours or more in their bare feet without food or water! It was really humbling to see how these people live. Most of them live in mud huts with straw roofs with no electricity or running water. However, they are equipped with the finest squatty potty’s in town (aka hole in the ground)!
We really enjoyed our time with them. Even though we don’t speak any of their language (Makhuwa), we were still able to bond with them. Corey played the African drum with some of the ladies and as he played they danced and sang songs. It was really cool. They kept trying to teach him how to play the African beat (which is VERY different than anything he did in America). The Makhuwa love to dance…so we both danced with them and made fools of ourselves! We were all laughing really hard! We learned through this experience a cultural difference…when they laugh at you, it means they like you. However, in the States when people laugh at you it is usually because they are making fun of you or you’ve said something funny. People here just laugh at random times and sometimes it makes you think you’ve done something but really they just like you and they are happy.

We were able to meet with the AIDS and True Love Waits teams, which are made up of native Mozambicans. It was good to be introduced to them and we look forward to working with them once we get the language down! We will actually get to observe a True Love Waits rally this Saturday as they are hosting one at a local school here in the city. We are very excited for this! Also, last week we were able to meet some of the orphans we will be working with. Most of these orphans have lost their parents due to AIDS. We hope to form close relationships with all of them!

Here are some prayer requests that we have for this week: Please pray for 1) Minds that absorb Portuguese and good memories, 2) Patience and endurance as we study the language and adapt to a new culture, 3) Discipline in every area of our lives, 4) Safety as we are still learning to drive in absolute chaos, and 5) Attitudes that reflect Christ daily.

A Very Sad Day

2006-06-12T16:22:00.000-04:00

Cheyenne Duncan 1/2006-6/12/06
Today was a very sad day in the Duncan household. Our precious puppy Cheyenne died after being hit by a truck tonight. For all of you dog lovers, you know how easy it is to love a dog and to make it part of your family. Even after only having her for a few weeks, we really loved her and she brought us great joy! She had such an awesome personality and was so fun to play with. The thought of not having her around anymore makes us very sad. We will miss our doggy very much. Please pray for us.

Here is a picture of our puppy playing with a ball. Thanks Karissa for buying her some balls! She loved to play with them!

Living in Nampula

2006-06-10T16:17:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the delay in posting…we were not able to get an internet account until now!!! It is hard to know where to begin with this blog post, as we have experienced so many different feelings and emotions since arriving in Mozambique. It didn’t take long to experience some major culture shock. For those of you who have been out of the USA, you will know what we are talking about as driving just isn’t the same as it is back home. Driving is a near death experience every time you get into a vehicle. I think we could go on 60 Minutes or Dateline and tell them of how we “saw the light” every time our driver went into oncoming traffic to pass the car in front of us because they were supposedly going too slow. We use the word slow very loosely here in Mozambique as we do many other words. Also there are thousands of people walking on the side of the road. This probably wouldn’t be so shocking except for the fact that they like to cross the road at random times, usually at the last possible second so they can get as close to being hit by a car without actually getting hit. It has been said that driving in Mozambique is like a video game! Joking aside, it is pretty scary! On our first day here, we witnessed the car in front of us hit a little girl head on. It was awful. Also, we never thought driving on the right side of the car and left side of the road in a manual truck could be so hard! We need your prayers as we learn how to drive in this chaos!!!!

Well we are finally here in Nampula, Mozambique! This is where we will be living for the next 2 years! So far it has been challenging getting used to so many new things. New language, culture, home, food, people, dog (we have a “watch dog” named Cheyenne, she’s really cute), climate, etc. God has been very faithful though in helping us with our culture shock each day! We are very blessed to have such a wonderful team of missionaries that has shown us so much love! We had such a warm welcome from all of them. Many drove hours to spend a week with us to show us around and orient us to this foreign land that has become familiar to them. For Jenni’s birthday (June 1st) the team gave her a party with cake, ice-cream, cookies, and homemade pizza. We spent the evening celebrating by eating and playing card games. They went all out to make it very special. They even gave gifts (an African skirt, basket and some candles…there are some really funky smells here!!!) They truly made us feel so welcomed and loved. So far our team has taken us around the city to get familiar with everything. As you can imagine everything is VERY different than home. We are very overwhelmed with all of the new things we have to take in. Our brains are suffering from information overload.

We are excited to start learning Portuguese. We began our language study this past week with one of the native Mozambicans. So far it has been challenging since he doesn’t speak English. Eventually this will work to our advantage as we will be forced to speak the language and not use English as a crutch. We will be in language study for about 4 months and then hopefully by then we will be able to communicate effectively with the people here. Please pray for patience and for our brains to absorb this quickly!

Besides the driving, eating has been kind of a challenge. We haven’t really eaten anything strange (yet) but what we do eat has to be made from scratch. This is hard because it takes a couple of hours just to prepare a meal. Also, if we want to have salad or vegetables we have to soak them in bleach water for 20 minutes before we eat it, and then rinse with special filter water. There is the option of going out to eat, but that takes just as long because there is no such thing as fast food in Mozambique. One thing we found interesting about the food here (when we eat out) is how they serve french fries with everything. No matter what you order, if it’s steak, shrimp, or chicken, you will get some fries on the side.

As we said before, we do have a dog whose name is Cheyenne.

She is supposed to deter people from breaking in, but if that ever happens, I doubt the intruders will haveany trouble with our dog. The only thing she might do is pee on them. Every time she gets excited, urine flows from her like a river. She is really cute and we are really enjoying having a puppy and loving on her and playing with her.

Even though it has been crazy thus far, we are excited to be in Mozambique. We are looking forward to actually working with the people and ministering God’s grace to them. Some other things to pray for right now would be: 1) pray that we would have the same attitude as Christ Jesus as we adjust to the language and culture. 2) pray that God will glorify Himself through the AIDS/True Love Waits programs that we will work with after language school, 3) a vision and strategy for a sports ministry and 4) previously mentioned patience in language and driving!!!

Most importantly….Pray that we would praise God and place our hope and trust in Him…and in Him alone! This is our prayer for all of you as well. Sorry about the lack of pictures. This 1 picture took about 1 1/2 hours to post. We will try to post some more later. We love you!!!

We are here!!

2006-05-27T08:10:00.001-04:00

Hello from Mozambique AFRICA!!!
We have finally arrived after several days of exhausting travel!!! Right now we are in Southern Mozambique (Maputo) and we are being taken care of by some other missionaries...they said the next few days will be full of rest and relaxation and then a little orientation. As we arrived, we had a huge greeting from the missionary family at the airport. We made it through customs without having to pay any money. (thank you Lord!!) They like to charge foreigners for everything that they bring in, but the missionaries helped us with the language barrier and told them we were poor missionaries and the 8 gigantic bags that we had were for us to live in country for the next 2 years.
It was Corey's birthday yesterday...the big 28!!! We celebrated at a restaurant with the other missionaries...one lady even made him a homemade cake (all from scratch!) Then we took a 4 hour nap, woke up ate dinner and then back to bed for another 12 hours!!!! I think we are caught up now! This time change is a rough one! We are 8 hours ahead of Utah. We will be heading to Nampula on Tuesday morning. Thanks for you prayers. We are so grateful to the Lord for finally arriving safely in Mozambique! We will try and post pictures later.

The time has come

2006-05-24T03:23:00.000-04:00

Yes it is true! We will be on a plane tomorrow heading to Mozambique! We are so excited to finally be leaving! Please keep us in your prayers as we will be traveling for about 36 hours from the time we leave SLC. We will try to update the blog as soon as possible once we arrive in Mozambique. Thank you so much for all of your prayers and support! We can’t wait to share with you what God is doing in Mozambique!

Last week of the MLC

2006-05-07T19:54:00.000-04:00

This week is our last week at MLC! The time has gone by soooo fast! We feel like we just settled down here but now we are getting ready to pack up our bags and head back to the SLC. We have really enjoyed our time here and God has taught us so much! We can’t even imagine not going through this training prior to going to Mozambique. We feel much more prepared to go than we did before coming here. So now it’s on to the SLC and CA to say some PAINFUL goodbyes and then we are off to Mozambique.

This past week here was really neat. On one of the days we went as a group to Washington D. C. with the main purpose of sharing Christ there. This went really well as God provided us a couple of opportunities to share with people. The day started off with us going to the Mozambique embassy to drop off all of our visa stuff. (FYI, we should have them about a couple of days before we leave hopefully, so please still keep this in your prayers!!!) After we did this, we wanted to try out an African restaurant. We had no idea how to get there, but someone pointed us in direction. Well on the way to the restaurant we stumbled across a Krispy Kreme Donut store. “AHHH Krispy Kreme,” said Corey’s belly, so we decided to stop for a little treat.

The man at the counter noticed Corey’s UTAH UTES t-shirt (go UTES!!!) and immediately started conversing with him about basketball. After much small chat, the man asked a very profound leading question. “Isn’t this world so dark?” Jenni answered him, “Yeah it really is, and why do you think that is?” We spent the next 30 minutes sharing with Trenair about the darkness of this world/man and the need for LIGHT, that LIGHT being JESUS CHRIST! He was so receptive to the gospel and was excited about the Good News that we shared with him. We gave him a handout with more information on Jesus and Trenair asked that we pray for strength for him. We are very glad that God led us to talk to this man.

As we left Krispy Kreme, Jenni’s belly was screaming hunger and since we still couldn’t find the African place, we stopped in at an Indian Restaurant. (Ymmmm…Indian Food!) Since we were eating such a late lunch, the place was empty. The waiter (Edwin) that we had was from El Salvador and talked with us the entire time that we ate. As we were leaving, he followed us outside and started sharing about his Christian grandma in El Salvador. He said that he was raised to believe in God but couldn’t pursue that life right now, because that would mean he couldn’t do the things that he loves right now. He did however say that he would want God in his life later. This led into a long conversation outside of the restaurant. We got to share the gospel and the urgency to live for Christ today and not wait for tomorrow! Corey was able to relate to this man as they are the same age. He also shared about the difference that Jesus has made in his life and that he would never want to go back to the life that he had before Christ changed his heart. As were leaving, Edwin said that he was going to take a break and think about all that we had discussed and read the handouts that we had given him about HOPE and LIFE in Jesus.

In summary, we are humbled to be used in such ways by the Lord and are truly grateful that He led us to these 2 men (by using our cravings and hungry bellies!) This is just a taste of what God is doing here. Sharing the gospel side by side….Life could not be better!

For the next 2 weeks we need your prayers as we leave all of our family and friends…it is gonna be rough!!! Also, please keep Trenair and Edwin from D.C. in your prayers.

Here's a picture of us outside the National Archives in Washington D.C. where we were able to see the Constitution.

One month away!!!

2006-04-24T21:38:00.000-04:00

We can’t believe we have been at the MLC for over a month now! The time has just flown by since we’ve been here. And in one month from today we will be on a plane heading towards Mozambique! It’s craziness! We’ve been praying, thinking, and talking about this for so long and it’s amazing to think we are only one month away from leaving!

The MLC has been going good. We are still busy as ever and it doesn’t look like it will be slowing down any time soon. Last week we had security training which was kind of stressful but really good to learn. We’ll have to tell you all (or y’all as some would say) about it sometime. We were also taught how to teach Bible stories chronologically. This was really cool because it requires us to memorize large chunks of Scripture. The reason we have been taught this technique is because some of the people we will be working with are illiterate. So this way they will be able to hear the stories of the Word and hopefully put them to memory. We’re really excited about this! Another thing we learned about this past week was the persecuted church. They told some incredible stories of how God is working around the world! They have encouraged us by showing us from the Bible how normal persecution is. In America, we are not accustomed to persecution to the extent of giving our lives for the gospel or living in fear of the government coming to put us in jail for our faith. It just seems like American Christianity is so different from what the rest of the world faces.

Hopefully, everyone had a good Easter! We had a good time on Easter even though we did miss our families. However, thanks to Jenni’s mom we were still able to do a little Easter egg hunt of our own in our tiny apartment. We also have enjoyed the abundance of yummy Easter candy! We were very much taken care of by friends and family! Thanks! Also we were able to attend a sunrise service here which was really cool. The director of orientation led us in the Word and it was a beautiful morning! We loved it, despite having to get up so early!
Jenni made sugar cookies for everyone here…she really missed her Kitchen Aid, but thank goodness her mom sent a small mixer in the mail. This helped to save some time and muscle. I guess this is one adjustment we are learning early to make since we can’t take our Kitchen Aid to Africa!! Our Easter dinner was not the traditional ham, but we did partake in a wonderful Mexican dinner consisting of tacos, rice, and beans!

Well, we only have 2 ½ weeks left and then we’ll be back in the SLC. Please continue to pray for us as we finish up. Pray for our Visa…we still do not have one. It is a very complicated process to get into the country. Pray that God would work out the details and that we would rest in Him and His perfect timing. Pray that we would walk closely with God and that we would be renewed continuously in our walk with Him. Pray that we would not neglect the disciplines of the Christian faith. Thanks for praying for us! We love you all!

Shot Day at MLC

2006-04-07T17:04:00.000-04:00

A picture of my sweet wife after she's been given a shot.
Our arms hurt so bad. This was our 2nd day of shots with
one more to go. Our arms are bruised and they hurt! Jenni
only had to get 4 today and Corey had 5. Out of our whole
group, Corey has to get the most shots each shot day!

Jenni stickin it to me (aka giving me my shots)
Jenni is a nurse on the medical team here at the MLC
and helps give everyone their shots.

Corey and Jenni at the home of Thomas Jefferson.
(our 3rd president, just in case you didn't know)

The view outside our window. It is beautiful here!

Life from the SLC to the MLC

2006-04-03T16:10:00.000-04:00

We know most of you thought this day would never come….but here it is! We have finally updated our blog!! We know it’s been way too long but we’re going to try to keep it up to date from now on.

So as you can imagine, a lot has happened since we went snowshoeing. Well… here’s a brief description of what has gone on in the last couple of months. We quit our jobs, tried to throw out a bunch of random crap that we had not even seen in a couple of years, packed our house and moved it to San Jorge (what I really mean is Victoria packed our house and we just helped her…Victoria you are a saint!), bought everything for Africa and packed it all away, spent time with our precious family and friends, sold a car( we will always love BIG BLUE), still trying to sell another, visited mi amore, Erin, and Brandy in Dallas where it rained/poured for 3 days straight, and now we’re here at the MLC. It has been a crazy couple of months!

We can’t believe we are actually here at the MLC. It seemed like a distant thought just a few months ago, but now we are here and have been here for about 2 weeks now and so far it has been an extremely busy 2 weeks. So you’re probably wondering what we are actually doing here and what we will be doing for the final 5 weeks of our stay. Well, first let us tell you about our setting. The MLC is located in a remote place in Virginia and it is beautiful!!! It’s a small campus amongst many trees with a small lake beside it. The picture we posted is of the view we have just outside our window in our room.

Now to what we have been doing since we’ve been here. Every morning begins at about 6:30am when we get up to dive into God’s Word and then off to class. Our classes start with a discussion of our assigned readings, which has been the book of Acts. It has been really refreshing to read through Acts because we haven’t read it a long time. We just finished chapter 6 where Stephen is preparing to be stoned(unbeknownst to Stephen). What amazes us in Acts is the boldness of the apostles. They are a great example of what it means to obey God instead of man and to seek His approval instead of man’s.

We have also been learning about discipling new believers and to use God’s Word to do it, not western culture. That is something that they have really emphasized because what we view as church here in the states is not what it is globally. It should be a place where believers gather to glorify God and edify each other, and a lot of the time that has nothing to do with big buildings, choirs, etc.

We have been in classes all day every day. And although it has been busy, it has been a really cool experience so far. One thing we have really enjoyed is hearing how everyone has traveled the same road as us. How they have quit jobs, sold houses, cars, etc. to serve God overseas. We have loved hearing of how God has called each person here. Also, every speaker/teacher has been on the mission field, so the presentations have been so wonderful. We love hearing the perspectives of everyone that has already gone before us!

Our favorite session so far has been on “Spiritual Warfare.” It was a 3 day intense session given by the president of the IMB. It really raised our awareness of the enemy and how he works to deceive us and give us such a self-centered attitude. We were challenged to deny ourselves in every way and to always put others first. We are so glad that this session was at the beginning of our training. We have already been under intense trials through all of our preparations in the last year, but God has been Sovereign and brought us through and will continue to do so. We feel prepared for the battles that lie ahead, as God refines us by fire!

Well that is just a tid-bit of what life is like @ MLC. It’s time to go to bed now…we have to get up early!! Thanks for reading our update and thanks for all of your prayers. We are so blessed to have all of you in our lives!

First time snowshoeing!

2006-01-22T18:53:00.000-05:00

This is a picture of my beautiful wife and I snowshoeing for the first time. If you've never done it, we both highly recommend it. We had a blast. We did this while we were at our small group retreat in Idaho.

We're on the bandwagon!

2006-01-22T18:15:00.000-05:00

So we did it. We finally jumped on the blog bandwagon. We felt left out when others would talk about them and we just felt something was missing in our lives. Just kidding. We just thought this would be a good idea to set up before we leave the stompin grounds of the SLC. Please be patient with us as we are working day and night to get this site up and running. Keep us in your prayers as we are anxiously awaiting the final word on Wednesday on where we are going.