Hopefully you aren't surprised to hear that work in Guinea is continuing without us. We recently received an email from our Guinean colleagues with an update: Several thousand dollars worth of renovations have been done to the Center we're helping to develop. Hannah's French tutor travelled to a seminar on evangelizing Muslims.

Our leadership group raised over $170 (on an average salary of $35/month, remember) for Pastor Samuel's church (His Story Here) as well as delivered soap, sugar and other gifts for his family. Very humbling and inspiring to see God's people supporting each other.








Our big garage sale fundraiser has fallen through. We had very high hopes for this event but there was NO interest in the community partially because several local radio stations have recently hosted similar events and they have much better access to advertising.





Brandon has been running the shipping department at Global. He has enjoyed using his organizational talents but with the onset of busy season, is stretched thin.







He's also been working on 3 months worth of maintenance: garage door repair, oil changes, tire replacements, broken car doors, cleaning out ventilation, and adding an outlet to the basement. What do we need a new outlet for?

For what Hannah's been up to. Hannah has started her ZipAfrica business. She's been collecting fabric (some we brought back from Guinea) from old dresses, Goodwill suit coats, fabric stores, etc. The bags are selling out about as quickly as we can get them made, so we're not quite ready to show you how to get one, but within a couple weeks we hope to have a solid inventory. At that point, we'll be depending heavily on YOU to promote our product.





Lastly, we've really enjoyed being back around our friends. Almost every weekend we spend time with our friends at birthday parties, bon
fires, road trips, bike rides, movie parties,

(home made) pizza parties (we still haven't had our fill of pizza since our return) and even a concert. If there's one thing that Guinea reaffirmed to us is the importance of relationships- look how important they were to Jesus!







If you're interested in a more comprehensive photo-story of our trip, it's here.



PS. It took 45 seconds to upload the photos in this blog as opposed to the 2+ hrs in our last Guinea post!

Thank You!

We've been home in Indiana just shy of a month now! It's been the best to be here-- catching up with all of our friends and family and our dog. And just readjusting to life as an American!

Now my real work has begun! That dirty word-- fundraising.

Please, please, please keep me in your prayers as I dedicate my time to partner development. Pray that God would provide people in our lives to make possible this calling He's blessed us with. We would love to get back to Guinea this Fall and finish the remainder of our one year commitment (we have about 9 months left), but we still have roughly $20,000 left to go. Sometimes it seems like a mountain we'll never be able to scale and other times we realize it's not that much in respect to what we've already been blessed with for this project (and what our God is capable of!).

If you are interested in donating to our cause you can do so here.

But we also need your fervent prayers: for provision, for protection, for strength and endurance to do this "not so fun" part of the journey.

Thank you all for the blessing and rock you all have been to us. We're excited to watch God provide for us in ways we aren't expecting and can't anticipate!