Winter

Hi All

Good to be back in Canada where the air is fresh, clean and cold.  We have spent 2 weeks in Scarborough at the SIM guesthouse and then we went to Winnipeg for Christmas.  Now we are back in Scarborough because Orest needs oral surgery.  Oral surgery is December 31 - what a way to spend New Years Eve.  He then needs 4 weeks of follow up for other dental matters related to the surgery so we are in the Toronto area for the month of January.

The Christmas season has been good as we were able to spend a great deal of time seeing family and friends in the areas we visited.

As of today we have started our online TEFL training course.  We hope to get the majority of this completed while we are in the Toronto area.  This is very exciting because there was such a demand for EFL (English as a foreign language) in Galmi.  We look forward to continuing with this program in the future.

We look forward to seeing many of you in the months ahead and we want to wish you all the best for the New Year.

Here is our first snow picture in Canada -  we are at St. Thomas in southern Ontario.

Update

Hello everyone

We are now in Toronto, Canada to start our home assignment.  From the heat of Galmi we come to the somewhat frigid conditions of Canada in Toronto.  Fortunately, the folks at SIM Head Office have taken the chill off and made us feel right at home.

We are here for 2 weeks to have some meetings and take care of medical and dental appointments.  Then we head to Winnipeg to spend time with family for Christmas.  We will definitely have a white Christmas this year from what we have seen and heard from in Winnipeg.

We arrived December 1 and we already miss our family back in Galmi so decided to post some of the family Christmas pictures we took prior to our departure.

Shoe Boxes

We had an exciting opportunity to distribute shoe boxes this year to a village that we chose.  We were able to go the week before to meet the chief of the village and explain what we were doing and to basically get permission.  When we went this week we had 179 boxes but there was over 500 children.  We decided that we would give one box to each family unit.  Unfortunately, there was over 200 family units in the village so not all received a box.  The people were excited and happy with what they received.  There was 9 of us who went to the village 7 km's south of Galmi.  We had a young man who is an evangelist at the hospital, named Douda, who started the day with prayer, song and preaching.  He had a great impact on the non-Christian people.
The whole thing was not the nice neat presentation like you see on most promotional videos but it was great to be right in among the people.  We separated the people into groups of 10 with one parent and one child in each group.   The we let them into the school one group at a time.  We were able to tell people what was in each box which was important.

 

 

 

Samuel

We love our grandson.

 

 

 

Grace gets lots of surprised stares when she carries Samuel in the traditional way.

 

 

A father/son moment.

CEG Update

The new classrooms are being built really fast.

 

 

 

 

Biki Today

Today was the Biki for the sister of Sani, she is married to Rabiou.  They named their son Elkanah, which if you look in the 1 Samuel 1 is the father of Samuel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CEG Update

 

This past Friday we went to see how construction was going on the classrooms.  We learned that the government is no longer building 3 classrooms but 5.  We were super excited about this news.  Grace was so happy she cried.

This guy is making regular trips to ensure the bricks are wet to help the hardening process.

Lot's of hard manual labour involved.  The workers stay the night and sleep on top of the desks.  They do not want to be on the ground because of snakes.

Making sure the mixture has the right consistency.

Digging the wall foundation and making sure it is the right depth.

We are going to have a second toilet built just like this one.  Now there will be one for the boys and one for the girls.  That's a lot for 512 students - right?

Madaoua Trip

 

We recently did the mail pick trip to Madaoua.  Noticed how dry everything is and how there seems to be more and more desert happening.  The roads are narrow and dangerous.  The one truck below did not have a good day.