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Heather Reports In

Well, adjusting to life here has been easier than I expected.  After one week, I have become accustomed to using a latrine with a local cockroach audience and showering with a flashlight as my only light.  The Kaya family is so hospitable and warm and have gone out of their way to make the Americans staying with them feel comfortable and welcomed.  The bathroom and shower are what I would call a combination of Western and African accommodations.  We also have internet access and electricity at night from a generator.  So, I’m very grateful for the conveniences we have been blessed with. Emily and I are getting along great and everyday it seems that God reveals another reason why he has put us together on this journey.

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On the Field

Heather

Emily

Stephen

Tomorrow, Emily (red) and Heather depart for Sudan. Heather is interning with e3 for college credit. She’ll be in Sudan until the first of November. She and Emily will be training women and children in basic healthcare and sanitation. They’ll also begin a .... Click below to read more.

Mega Conference

Last year David Kaya told me he wanted to hold a pastor’s conference. We talked about how these guys were slugging it out day after day. They were preaching, supporting their families (Sudan churches rarely tithe), counseling and shepherding their flocks. They were tired and needed a time of refreshment. In November, we put on a conference for them. We put them up, fed them, and a few leaders preached both words of encouragement as well as the reminder to preach and teach sound doctrine in their churches. We had about 80 pastors show up. It was from this conference that our missionaries self-selected to leave their hometowns to plant new churches.

Now we’re doing it again, and we need your prayer to undergird the event. Boy do we need your prayers, why? Well, word got out.

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Francis From Sudan

So here’s a crazy, God story for ya. Bob calls me a week or so ago. Bob is a retired oilman who had spent one assignment in Egypt. While in Egypt, he hired a Sudanese refugee to help him out. That refugee’s name is Francis. Bob and Francis really hit it off, and Bob’s looked in on him over the years. The same years that brought Francis, along with his wife and son (now he has three), to America. Once here, Francis worked hard, became a citizen. Heck, he’s even bought a house. The American dream. All with a disfigured hand that was broken badly in Sudan and not repaired very well.

On Their Own

Today is special for e3 in Sudan.

Today, David Kaya, Samuel Malish, Kato Everest and a host of other Sudanese are in Yei. (Sounds like the word “yeah.”) Today, they kicked off a church-planting trip, and they are asking for us to join them in prayer. They are asking the Lord to establish three new churches.

There is no American team with them.

Kaya Family - May 2008

The Kaya Family.
From left to right: Taylor, Cathy, Ruth, David, Mike, Nancy, Gloria

Angela and Drunkard

When I take Americans to Sudan, those who skew younger are typically a bit skeptical about how we “do evangelism.” We see things through our context in the States. The idea of going home to home, door to door, is … unsettling. Isn’t that what the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses do? They imagine someone coming to their home, and how they’d feel, think, and react.

Fortunately, it works a bit differently in Southern Sudan.

Angela worked in Pomoju. This was an area where an e3 team planted a church a year or so ago. She and Kasey worked in the area to strengthen the new(er) church plant. One day, as she was walking along a road, she and her translators came across a man. After sharing Christ, using the Evangecube, the man immediately said,

Grace Gets Grace

Our team is back from Sudan. And what a great team it was. The folks from Trinity Chapel Bible Church were fantastic, and their pastor knocked it out of the park teaching our guys in the bible school all week. We bookended the trip by whitewater rafting the Nile and petting, and grabbing the horn of, a White Rhino! Yes, she was very much alive and well.

Shockingly, we did not have Internet access the entire time, so my updates are only coming now. I want to share with you one story today, another tomorrow, then a brief overall report in a few days. Here’s the first.

Our team split into four areas. The mission was to strengthen churches that had been planted in the past 18 months. I went to a village called Kiri. Kiri is semi-unique in Kajo Keji because there are 13 Muslim families there. On Tuesday, I sat down in front of a Tukel (mud and thatch hut) when a woman named Mary crawled out of the door and over to me to shake my hand. Mary crawled because she had polio and her legs were deformed. To add insult to injury, the disease left her incapable of bearing children. Two men had married and abandoned her because she couldn’t bring them children. When we shared the Gospel with Mary, she prayed to receive Christ. Each day after, we’d return to her home to tell her more stories about how to follow Jesus. 

e3’s Story in Sudan via a Slideshow

Here is the story of e3 in Sudan up ‘til now:

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Follow Up in Torit

After we packed the team into a 12-seat Caravan and watched them taxi and depart on the red, dirt airstrip for Kenya, David Kaya, Joe Keil, Mullai, and I jumped into the Landcruiser and drove three hours to Torit, Sudan. We crashed in a little motel on the edge of town. It was the same place, our team had stayed last June when we partnered with the local African Inland Church to plant two new churches. On the one hand, the motel had expanded and added a few nice tables outside where we ate dinner. But the positivity of that was squeezed out when we learned that the female staff not only served food, cleaned the rooms, and did laundry, but they worked as prostitutes there at night. These weren’t local girls either. They brought them in from Uganda mostly. Terribly sad.

The next morning, David and I took a drive over to neighborhood in town where half our team had worked last June to plant a church. I had left that trip with low confidence on the follow up plan. The pastor we worked with seemed not just busy with work and life, but he wanted to switch denominations. With the plant being born out of a AIC mother church in town, I figured that might cause problems. I was both right and wrong. 

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