Dear Friends,
Joyce and I are once again heading out for some overseas ministries opportunities and do appreciate your prayers on our behalf as we travel. We will be going different directions as has occasionally happened before.
Last year, Joyce and I helped to write a curriculum for part of the Samaritan’s Purse HIV/AIDS intervention effort. The course has several parts, oriented toward the primary instrument of social change in the developing world, the Church. The students, who are being trained to become the teachers, will then train primarily pastors, youth workers, and women’s leaders. The initial section dealt with sexual purity and abstinence before marriage - the rationale, benefits, and tools needed to accomplish this. Joyce went to Kenya a couple of years ago to help with the initial training of trainers for this part of the course.
On Thursday, she will be leaving for Ethiopia to assist with the initial training of trainers for the second part of the course, the one which we helped to write last year. This part deals with marital fidelity - faithfulness. She and Dr. Patrick from Kenya will teach a group of teachers who will begin the spread of information and behavior change through the country. She will be gone from February 21 to March 3.
Joyce has also been developing the third module of the course, which deals with the practical aspects of behavior change, over the past several weeks. Several more months of work will go into this before it is completed. She has also developed applicable sermon outlines or Bible studies for pastors to use in conjunction with all of the lessons which they will teach. She is a very talented lady!
Meanwhile, I am planning to go to Mongolia for a short administrative trip. Samaritan’s Purse has recently hired a new country director to live in Ulaan Bator, and I will be helping her to get established there. This will involve helping to locate secure home and office space and making contacts with government offices and other helping organizations. Samaritan’s Purse’s primary work in Mongolia over the past several years has been CHP, the Children’s Heart Project. In that program, children with correctable heart defects who live in parts of the world where appropriate surgical facilities and surgeons are not available, are brought to North America for repair. A network of hospitals and surgeons in the US and Canada donate their time and facilities to the children. Samaritan’s Purse does the initial screening for diagnosis and appropriateness of intervention and then flies the child, a parent, and a translator to the appropriate host city. There, the child is sponsored by a local church and lives with a Christian host family for the pre and post operative periods. The program has been wonderfully successful in saving the lives of hundreds of children while introducing their families to Christ in action.
Up to this point, the CHP in Mongolia has been operated by some wonderful volunteers from other mission organizations working there. However, the program has now grown to the point that we need to have our own staff present. As you can imagine, paperwork and logistics can be extremely difficult when one wishes to bring a child from a remote village in an underdeveloped area to the United States. Also, having our own office in the country will make it much more easy for SP to expand into other areas of need in Mongolia. The new director will need a great deal of wisdom as she sorts out the multiple opportunities which will come to her attention. She did an internship with us in Mongolia last year, so she knows what she is getting into, but will still be challenged! Currently the high temperature is about -3 f, and the low is about -20. Please pray for Beth as she starts this exciting assignment.
I will be leaving on February 22, the day after Joyce, and returning on March 9, well rounded after living on yak butter for two weeks! ;o) Did I say -20? Pray for me too!