A belated Happy Christmas and New Year! As I am sure was the case for many of you, we had somewhat paired down celebrations this year. Christmas Day was probably the most 'normal' with a multi-course meal for 26 people. But we did eat outside and tried not to get too cosy! One of the joys of Christmas in Nigeria is that, being slam in the middle of dry season, you can guarantee it won't rain!
Our New Year plans were rather more disrupted as two of our guests from Christmas Day subsequently developed a lack of smell and taste. We spent two and a half hours of our New Year's Eve at the local COVID testing centre. We still don't actually have our results (over three weeks later) as it turned out there is a significant backlog in sample testing. In the absence of results we isolated for 10 days. Thankfully none of us, nor our upstairs neighbours developed symptoms. The main casualty was our New years eve grill out, overnight pig roast and lunch on New Year's day.
Tim was invited to lead worship for the SIM (another large mission organisation based in Jos) annual conference so a few days into the new year, we had a few days helping with that. It was lovely to have a break from cooking and sorting things out, especially as we were cooking and washing up rather in camping mode having had some work done on our kitchen after Christmas that wasn't yet completed. In fact, it wasn't completed until after we returned from the conference, but we are super thankful for how it all came together and God's provisions to help it happen.
Dan has resumed school, purely online for the first week and then the government allowed the reopening of schools in mid January. We are thankful that he is able to go in on a one day and one day at home basis. It makes such a difference to him to be able to have the face to face time with his teachers.
Our new Director (Zach Yoder) is now in Nigeria with his family and getting settled back into life here as well as into his new role. Tim will be working very closely with him so please pray for a really good relationship between them and that they will be a blessing and encouragement to one another. Zach has a lot to get his head around having been out of the country for 15 months, including the whole pandemic, response and covid protocols. We are thankful for many positive interactions so far.
Tim is also working hard to get our part of a new tracking and reporting system, called Rev79, up and running across SIL Nigeria (one of Wycliffe UK's partners in Nigeria). The software is in the process of being tested in a few places before being rolled out across the whole organisation, across 100+ countries. This requires lots of people being trained to use it and assisted with setting appropriate goals and so on. It is exciting to be involved in these sorts of things in the early stages but it does also mean that there are still some bugs to be worked out adn Tim is on the front end of that for our group!
Thank you all for your prayers and support of us! We appreciate them! Please let us know if you have any prayer requests for us to pray for you or if you just want to say Hi! If you can take a few minutes to pray for us now, we would be very grateful!
Praise -- Loving our revamped kitchen
-- All healthy and COVID-19 free!
Prayer -- Dan to continue well back schooling half in and half out of school. -- Rev79 implementation to go well adn meet the deadlines. -- Good working relationship for Tim and the new Director Zach.
