Thanks to many of you who have given generously to the church building effort we are moving fast! At the end of January we are well past 1/3 of the way there, with $115,000 out of $300,000 raised! Keep praying for this assembly to be able to purchase this property as a permanent home! The work of missions is church planting, and we would love to see this church planted permanently in this neighborhood and anchored for generations of ministry.
Pastor’s Book Set app released
Febuary 11- 14 we are expecting over 300 pastors for our Pastor’s Book Set conference. I have been working on an e-reader and audiobook app that will give pastors access to over 30 resources. Just this week I put the Pastor’s Book Set app, Livros, in open testing, and I’m finding some things that need to be worked on…I knew that would be the case once people started using it in the real world – pray for me as I fine-tune aspects of the app for release at the conference in less than two weeks!
We appreciate your continued prayers. Here’s what’s happening with us.
Praise God for his protection as the passenger side tie rod of our vehicle snapped suddenly on Sunday. Thankfully, Corey was in town and only going about 20 mph when it happened – it could have been much worse if they had been moving at a higher speed. He and our son Jacob and two Senegalese teachers from the Kaffrine Christian school were all in the car when it happened and no one was hurt. Pray for our vehicle to be repaired soon and well; we have been without a car since Sunday, making do with just Corey’s motorcycle to take the boys to preschool, etc. which is not ideal.
The community garden project idea that Corey was investigating is not going to happen. Pray for wisdom and God’s leading as we pursue another idea for a project to help in this village.
Praise God that most times when Corey visits the village, he ends up doing a Bible study with someone, often with someone who has never read any of the Bible before! Pray for those he is following up with, that they would want to read more and that the Holy Spirit would open their eyes and give them understanding and faith.
Praise God for several donations to the Kaffrine Scholarship Project. The Scholarship account had gotten down to essentially $0 and school started up again this month so this is a big praise! Pray for God to bless and work in the lives of each of the Scholarship students.
We are still waiting to hear from USCIS – pray for them to give us an appointment for our boys’ citizenship interview before the boys’ visas expire at the end of February.
Pray for wisdom and grace to parent all of our kids well. Pray for our three girls at boarding school, and for the two oldest (Emma and Molly) as they make decisions about college during the next two years. Pray for patience with our boys and good connection with them.
Pray that we will not be discouraged. We’re saying goodbye to our teammates the Gallaghers as they leave Kaffrine next week heading for a new role in the US. Also we were surprised to learn that our Senegalese pastor here in Kaffrine has been relocated by his denomination. He has been a friend to us and an invaluable ministry partner here in Kaffrine for the last nine years so this is a sad loss for us. He and his family moved yesterday. Pray for the new pastor and the new school director who will be sent out by the denomination.
Thanks for praying with us for the Kingdom of Light to advance here!
The meeting that we had tried to schedule for yesterday afternoon did not happen. Katie and the boys and I went to the village in the afternoon and greeted at the village chief’s family’s house. Then Katie and the boys stayed there chatting and I went to try to connect with the six men with whom I was hoping to meet. I was able to see all but one. One man was quite angry and yelled at me a few times. Another of the men told me that an “older brother” among them had come to visit him to get them all in line with his view that no one should even talk about the garden project we were considering. I suspected we would not be able to have any kind of meeting but went and waited at the meeting place anyway from around 5 to 6:30. I had some other good conversations with others who were just hanging out there, but did not get to talk about the project with the group of six men. At this point there is nothing to do but drop the project.
I’m not disappointed we aren’t able to do this project – there are some legitimate reasons not to do it that I can think of – but I am disappointed that we couldn’t talk about it. I had wanted to get together and talk about the issues, and see what solutions they could come up with, but even that was too much.
What I have been thinking about as I’ve been talking with these men is that there are a lot of broken relationships and broken hearts in these villages. They do project a sense of peace and of tranquility, but there’s a lot hiding under the surface. The broken pieces of those hearts can be jagged and hurt others as they get close to them. These folks need a way to be able to forgive each other for past hurts and have a new start. As we continue to visit this village, our prayer is that God will let us help them understand how they can both have and give forgiveness through Jesus.
Well done, little one! Your school career is off to a great start!
On Saturday we went to the end-of-year program at the school that our boys attended this year. After some singing, dancing and a skit, the top ten students in each grade (1st through 6th grades) were called forward to receive a prize. When I heard the name of a certain six-year-old girl called, my heart burst with joy! This first-grader had not been to school before, never having attended preschool or kindergarten. Over the summer we had talked to her father, encouraging him to put his two young daughters in the church school and letting him know that the Kaffrine Scholarship Project could pay the $12 monthly tuition as well as the registration fee and the cost of their uniforms and school supplies.
Our SIM Kaffrine Team began this Scholarship Project in 2007
when some mature Wolof Christian leaders from another region of Senegal
encouraged us to invest in the children and young people in the small Christian
community here. Many families can’t afford to pay for their children to attend
school, particularly a private school where the teachers don’t go on strike and
the students can get a good education. So we launched this project which has
helped over two dozen young people at different points in their education, from
preschool all the way to university or job training programs. We have seen the
short-term impact already, and now that the project has been running for twelve
years, we are beginning to see glimpses of the long-term impact as students
graduate, get jobs, and choose to serve the Lord as adults.
We are so grateful to all of you who have given money towards the Scholarship Project. Our young friend who came in fourth in her class this year thanks you for the opportunity to go to school! I am praying that she will go far!
If you would like to help these young people through the Kaffrine Scholarship Project, you can give here. Your prayers and gifts make a big difference!
We had a big breakthrough this past week on the boys’ paperwork; the US Embassy issued IH3 visas for them, which will grant them citizenship on entry to the US! We have been working towards this for a long time and it is a great relief to have them in hand. We are planning a short trip to the US to finalize the paperwork in spring of 2019. Pray for wisdom as we plan that trip.
Our team celebrating Thanksgiving
Right after we got the boys’ visas we were able to pick up our girls from boarding school and go home together for a big team Thanksgiving. We had a sweet, sweet time with everyone home. We are looking forward to having the girls home for Christmas break soon.
As I write this I am looking forward to picking up Bob Japenga at the airport and heading back to Kaffrine with him. Bob is an elder at our church in Connecticut and a mentor to us. He is coming to do team-building with our Kaffrine team, including doing the Playmaker gifts/motivations assessment and teaching us listening prayer together as a group. We are excited to show him around Senegal a bit, to take time to work on our relationships with God and to get to know each other better. Pray for a productive time together and that God will be in our midst during these days.
We recently completed work on a new Wolof Bible app for iOS. This new app joins the Android app and the web app and broadens our reach on mobile platforms. To check it out go to http://sng.al/appli.
This app, like the other apps, is built with SIL tools and contains the WorldVenture translation of the Bible. It is a great partnership for us, a way that we can connect with other workers and broaden their reach as well as connect with people who would like to read the Bible in the Wolof language.
The Android app was also updated to a new version with the features that that iOS app has, like highlighting, notes, history, and the ability to choose among five different interface languages (including Wolof).
People are finding and using the Wolof Bible apps. For the Android version over the last 30 days, we’ve had over 700 unique users open the app and interact with the Bible, and those users have opened the app an average of over five times each. Five percent of the users in the last 30 days were new, which has been the trend for many months. So people are not just installing the app, they are really using it, and our user base is expanding. We pray that with the new iOS app even more folks will interact with the Holy Scriptures of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
"Please help us by praying for us. Then many people will give thanks for the blessings we receive in answer to all these prayers."
About the Garretts
Corey and Katie Garrett have lived and worked in Senegal since 2000 with SIM, an interdenominational, international evangelical organization. They have three daughters and two sons.
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