SPECIAL "K" FAMILY UPDATES

                                       

Rose In Bloom, Pops & Lil' Otter sharing some                                     Rose In Bloom outside her dorm

"Daddy Daughter Time"

 

                                       

Pops & Blessed                                                                               Lil' Otter looking too grown up to suit Pops

 

 

8 September, 2009

Greetings from the Middle East.  My last update here was on 11 May, 2009.  It has been a long, long, loooooooooong time!  Many of you are aware of why it has been such a long time, but here is a quick recap of what has happened:

Many opportunities to share and give away God's word have occurred

Emergency med-evac for Pops to have an emergency neck surgery.  Pops has recovered well and is up to his old tricks!

The girls had to remain in country for two weeks without us before being able to fly home.  Then they weren't able to fly back into country to keep plans made prior to Pops' emergency.  So plans had to be changed and much wrangling had to occur to get refunded for their missed flights.

Rose in Bloom got to go to Canada for a ministry opportunity and was tremendously blessed.

Lil Otter got to attend a favorite camp time with many friends from before.

We returned to our country safely.  We arrived at our house about 9:30 p.m. and had neighbors checking on us at 10:00 p.m.  While this may seem burdensome, we were thankful to be so loved by our people.  This visiting and calling to check on us continues still.

We prepared the girls to go to school and then delivered them to their school.  Now Blessed and I are empty nesters.  This has happened to us a lot earlier than we had planned, so we are having to make adjustments! You can keep up with them on their blogs.  If you don't know their blog addresses, send an email and I will send it to you.

Blessed and I have been rearranging our house and making it into more of a home, also preparing for the arrival of winter which can be a bit brutal.  We are making our house more manageable for receiving guests and trying to make it easier to heat.  The custom of the people here is that the men have a sitting area to visit in while the women have a separate sitting area.  No co-ed visiting here!  Up until this point, our family has used what is now the women's sitting area as our den.  We have now converted one of the girls room into a den (when the house was constructed, Rose in Bloom's room was intended to be a den) and now will not have to share our den as one of the visiting rooms.  Doing this allows us to not have to heat as much space making it easier to stay warm and definitely less costly, but mainly having the visiting areas for guest always ready for the drop by guests.  This is a big part of the culture here, to drop by for a visit on a moments notice.

Now you are caught up and we can begin with the present and future.  We re-begin our language study in October.  Pops is searching for a language helper and not having much luck at the moment.  This is something that you can definitely lift up for us!  We will be having a couple of friends visit with us in October to scout out partnering opportunities with their meeting place.  Also, speaking of partnering, there may be a new work and partnership for Pops in the future.  There has been a lot of activity and changes centering around veterinary medicine work and a new Non-governmental Organization (NGO) may be about to form that Pops may be helping form and operate that involves the welfare of animals and the people that have the animals.  This is a tremendous opportunity to be able to reach out.  We have learned that tuberculosis is transmissible through camels milk and that many of the Bedouin take great pride in the "healing properties" of their camels milk, thus much camel's milk is consumed.  On more than one occasion, Pops has been served fresh from the camel milk.  Brucillosis also is transmissible to humans from camel and goat's milk, also a mainstay of diets here.  This new NGO will help with these and many other issues associated with animal welfare.  More details to follow as it develops.  The greatest thing about this new direction however, is that this will provide the necessary platform work to stay in the country, but the platform work will be such that "The Main Thing" can easily be done simultaneously.  Now that's EXCITING!!!

Now that we are back, we will try to be diligent about updating the site regularly.  We will try to have a new update on every Sunday, so you can be looking for it then.

Grace, Mercy & Peace!

The Special K Family