More house pictures.

These pictures are our living room, kitchen and bedroom. As well as our kensansa in our yard. Enjoy!

Pictures!

I have many more I want to post but with our internet we will have to start off small. This is Jeremy and I's house and the view from part of our porch.

Mumena Highlights

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Mumena week 1 is over. It was an exciting, exhausting and busy week, and we are happy to feel like we are almost all settled in.  Our mud house is running great. I have not seen any snakes, and not too many bugs.

Life here is simple in the African bush. Simple, but not easy. For the Kaonde tribe, where we are, they wake up with the sun, go out in the field and gather their food and then are usually finished with their duties by mid-afternoon. Then it is time to make dinner under their kensansa and stay by the fire until it is time for bed.

Jeremy and I have gone out in to one of the villages a few times this week and watched this process and enjoyed time talking with friends.

Here are a few things that went on this week:

We got in to our container 1 YEAR after packing it up and shipping it here. It was really neat to pull out all of the items that we had packed away. Our East Brainerd church family really took care of us, and we are very thankful for the things that were sent over. All of the rugs, dressers, book shelves, kitchen utensils, pots/pans, blankets, etc. are being used!

I really want to put up pictures of our house and area, but our internet plan is still being figured out—they will come eventually, but everything with our house is great!

I realized after our visit to town, which Jeremy told you about, that I prefer bush life over city life by a lot.

We have now been to two church plants out of the 13 that have been planted here in Mumena.  This morning, Jeremy and I arrived to our assigned church plant, and Jeremy was asked to give the Bible study to the church 10 minutes before it began. I just laughed to myself, but of course he did a great job!

Jeremy met “baby Jeremy” for the first time! Although, Jeremy is not much of a baby anymore; he is 3 years old. Jeremy’s closest Kaonde friend in Zambia that he met on his first campaign here ended up naming one of his children after Jeremy. Now baby Jeremy runs around saying our names, and we love spending time with his family.

We had our first meeting with our entire team—it lasted from 8am-1:30pm. We had a lot to cover, and we will be leaving this Sunday for a team retreat for 5 days to cover even more ground on our mission and spend quality time with our team. Our team now consists of 5 families, and 3 of those families all arrived January 13th, so we have a lot of learning to do.

Thank you for your prayers. We have needed them and have felt them. We have much to learn and much to pray for, but we feel blessed, called and thankful to be here.

First Week in Mumena

Well, it’s been almost a week since we left the US and we have had little communication since.  The internet is very slow here and emails, pictures, facebook, etc. are going to be more difficult than we expected so please be patient with us as we try to work a good system out.  We will hopefully be updating at least once a week.  After a nervous and stressful departure with all the weather issues in Atlanta, 8 hours later we landed in London.  Then an 8 hour layover in London prepared us for the 10 hour flight to Lusaka, Zambia, the capital city.  Miraculously we made it through immigration and were joyously greeted by all of our luggage!  Once we exited the airport we were greeted with jumping and excited cousins, Noah and Bryson, along with our Uncle Brian and Aunt Sondra.  We loaded up the trucks and after another 9 hour drive we finally arrived in Mumena.

The last several days have been dedicated to nest building.  We are settling into our mud hut with a tin roof, which is amazing a night as we are serenaded by the rainfall.  The rainy season is gorgeous.  Everything is so lush and green.  There are wild flowers everywhere.  The trees are tall and expand widely at the top.  Birds fly around and chirp all day long. 

Living is different here.  The electricity has gone out three times in the few days that we’ve been here. It is very muddy everywhere we walk as it rains almost everyday.  The real blessing has been having family and other teammates here that have helped us get set up.  We’ve already been to the market to get all our foods and necessities for a while.  Let me just say, it is not like BILO.  The road in town is full of people on either side.  Driving can be difficult and dangerous.  The market is dusty and crowded, but is a great cultural experience.  We do have a Shoprite that works as a supermarket, but you never know what they will and will not have.  For instance, there were no eggs in the entire store.  It is also somewhat scary when you check out and the cash register reads 1.5 million kwacha(Zambian currency).  The exchange rate is 4500 to 1 US dollar. 

So far the highlight of us being here is reuniting with old friends and seeing the church that I originally worked with 4 years ago doing very well.  I wanted to show you a short clip of the singing inside of the mud-bricked church.  However, video uploading is not going to work at the moment.  I will post something soon though. There were 89 members there that morning.  It was completely lead by the Zambians, but of course I was informed that I would be leading the communion thoughts shortly before we had communion.  But a phrase that you will learn in living here is TIA- “This is Africa”  Well that’s all for now.  Hopefully we will be writing again soon. 

Blessings and thank you all for all your prayers, we have truly felt God’s presence this week.

Jeremy and Whitney

Next stop: Zambia!

 The past four weeks have been some of the sweetest, hardest, most stressful, emotional and wonderful weeks of my life! Jeremy and I flew to Abilene at the beginning of December to say our good byes to family, friends and mentors that we love. It was a wonderful trip, and it was good to see Texas one more time before our two year African stay.

Something memorable that happened on my last visit to Abilene was sitting next to my best friend (that I have had since I was 14 years old) in the hospital watching her sweet grandfather and the greatest man she ever knew pass away. We had known this was coming for the past few years, and it ended up happening during the week I was there. 

The rest of the month of December was filled with lots of great times with my family. I said good bye to my mom, my step dad and my brother on Christmas Day, which I probably would not recommend to do, but I was thankful for the time. My mom and step dad will be coming to see us this summer!

This week has been very strange for us as we pack up our lives in the U.S. and prepare ourselves for a different way of life. I felt so taken care of this morning and loved as we spent our last Sunday at East Brainerd, our supporting congregation. It was the best decision we made to move here in July and spend time with our supporters and family.

We leave for Zambia this Tuesday, Jan. 11th. I guess our next blog will come from Africa! Please keep us in your prayers and know we feel so blessed to be in the position we are in and are anxious to walk by faith more than ever.