This content is over a year old now. Please, read this page keeping its age in your mind and realise that not all the links will work. I'm happy to hear from you if you find anything that is broken or dysfunctional, but I may or may not be able to do anything about it!
Greetings from dry, bright, sunny and slightly chilly Jos.
Our thoughts are starting to head towards Christmas. The decorations are up and the plans for Christmas lunch are being worked on (with 5 courses and 16 people expected you have to start early!). The middle school Christmas concert is coming up and Dan is practising for it by performing drum rolls on any available surface in the house with his drumsticks.
A couple of weekends ago Dan’s class managed to pull off a fabulous pancake breakfast. They sold tickets to the school and mission community, around 300 tickets in total! Then the class (with significant parental and teacher assistance) bought the ingredients and cooked thousands of pancakes which were served on a Saturday morning along with fruit and syrup. What impressed me most was the comments from the Middle School Principal afterwards, she said that the whole class really worked hard and there was no-one attempting to slack off behind the bike sheds (as it were). Quite impressive for a class of 13-14 year olds working from 7am till 10.30am without a break or a breakfast while those around them are stuffing their faces!
Tim was also busy that weekend and left straight from the pancake breakfast to head off to a language community near Abuja. The Agbari are quite a large language group that SIL has been working with for a good many years. They really value their language and have an annual gathering to celebrate it. Tim found it encouraging to see the hundreds of people gathered and to hear all the presentations being given in Gbari. You might think that this is no big deal but with over 500 languages in Nigeria there can be a lot of pressure on minority languages. If you have to learn another language in order to speak to someone from outside your area you might end up deciding that it is just not worth it to teach your language to your children, but this is how languages die.
The reason Tim was visiting the Gbari project is that he is taking on a new role (in addition to his current responsibilities) which will allow him to be more directly involved with Language Projects in order to help them plan more effectively and find the support they need to implement to a high standard. More on that next time!
Thank you so much for your prayers and your financial support, we really need them! Here are some specific things that you could pray about for us.
Praise:
Dan and his class pulled off a successful Pancake Breakfast for the community
Tim had a safe, successful trip to the Gbari area
Prayer:
For Tim settling into his new role and taking time to visit more language projects
For rest and peace in the midst of the pre-Christmas busyness
