August 5, 2012

It’s now several weeks since our family returned from a 2 1/2-month furlough in the US and Canada -and these have certainly been some busy times!  We really appreciate the work our colleagues in Karamoja did holding the fort down, especially the Okken family & Leah Hopp, plus some folks who have come over to Uganda specifically to fill in for furloughing missionaries. Nurse Heather Foss from Florida has been running the Clinic, while Jim & Jenny Knox are running around America! - and Pastor/Jack of All Trades Mick Knierim from Michigan kept an eye on Bob’s crew & workshop & the overall Karamoja Mission maintenance while our family were gone.

We really appreciated the fellowship of some visitors when we came back to Karamoja, too - intern David Landow, most recently from Wilmington, DE, going into his last year at Westminster Seminary;  our nephew Jon Rosenbaum from S. Jersey, doing some ‘gap months’ before he considers where to continue college;  Jesse van Gorkom, a recent engineering graduate who grew up in Ethiopia, where his family served with Christian Veterinary Missions;  Monica Rubingh from N. Michigan, who brings a lifetime of farming skills to our work - our workers call her “Monica of the Green Thumb” - she’s already got vegetables springing up in the greenhouse we’ve been meaning to put up for years!  We also enjoyed the company of  Leila Shelburne, an old friend who grew up in Mbale and is now studying linguistics, who came to do her senior research project on language & culture among the Karimojong.

A new couple has joined our mission, too, Christopher & Chloe Verdick from San Diego. Chris has gotten right into the work with Bob, and we hope he’ll use his skills in photography & design to help our mission communicate better with you all.  Chloe is in the process of taking over the accounting for the mission, which is a huge relief to the rest of who don’t enjoy crunching numbers!  Both of them have offered to help with teaching our children - math, art, & even Celtic harp! - so of course we’re delighted to have them here.

It’s always hard to say goodbye to our children - this time we left our eldest, Rachel, in the US, as she’s serving at the Boardwalk Chapel in Wildwood, NJ this summer, and will be starting college at Houghton in NY State this fall.  Please keep her in your prayers, as of course adjusting to a different country can have its challenges, sometimes in ways we wouldn’t expect.  After spending most of their growing-up years in East Africa, our children find America a rather foreign place! 

Our family will change again when we take our next daughter, Anna, to boarding school in Kenya.  She’ll be starting 11th grade at Rift Valley Academy, originally established over 100 years ago to support missionary families like ours who live in remote places.  We’ll still see her about every 6 weeks, and she will have a month off every 3 months, so we hope this will be a good way to transition to college in a couple of years, both for her and for us.

Bobby, Mary, & Kipsy will be staying with us in Karamoja for now - we’re looking forward to our teachers Emily Pihl & Erika Bulthuis rejoining our mission in a few weeks, too.  Bobby is in his senior year of high school and is Bob’s main assistant in the workshop, working on everything from metal fabrication to vehicle repair to well-drilling.  I’m not sure we’d be able to find anything around here without Bobby!  Mary & Kipsy are entering 9th grade and are doing great with their arts, studies, languages, cooking, music - we may be adding mandolin and concertina to the band this year!  You can pray that they will adjust to having their big sisters gone, as they have really enjoyed doing so many things together growing up.

Bob is doing quite a bit of work drilling boreholes (water-wells) and managing the hibiscus crop.  One of the drilling jobs went really great this week, at a small church just outside Namalu, the town nearest our mission.  These are always good opportunities to share the Word with people who gather. One of the biggest challenges these days, though, is the weather - there’s been so much rain that it can be hard to get anywhere, including to sites where they need wells, as the mud is simply unbelievable.  Recently on a simple trip to Mbale to prepare to meet a new missionary family, we spent 7 1/2 hours traveling about 45 miles. Please continue to pray with us that the government will fix our roads!

I’m also continuing to revise & expand the literacy & health education materials that I’ve been working on over the past few years.  We’ve recently had some very encouraging visits to our local primary school, so we hope to try out in the schools some of the alphabet books and basic literacy & numeracy materials we have, as so far there are none like these available in Karimojong.  We hope these will be a big encouragement to people who would like to be able to read the Karimojong Bible.  We have had a lot of requests from people in the community have a small nursery school for their children, but we need to prayerfully consider how that would operate and who could teach.  The Karimojong are very eager to have outsiders provide all kinds of free services;  however, in our diaconal work we want to help enable them to care for themselves in godly ways, rather than offer them handouts like many of the charity organisations.

We thank you so much for your prayers & hospitality while we were on furlough this year, too!  Of course we never have enough time to spend, but it was great to catch up a bit with old friends and get to know some new ones as well.  Please let us know how you are doing & if you got this e-mail OK, too.

Gospel blessings from Karamoja,

Bob & Martha Wright & family