Sannu da aiki to our church family at Living Hope,

Over the past two weeks we have once again been involved in a diverse range of activities.

We started a new rotation in the labour & delivery ward of the hospital and learned how to access labouring women by resting our hands on their stomachs and timing the contractions based on what we felt. Women are monitored completely manually here since they don’t have any of the technology we have at home (ie: fetal heart rate monitors). Then on Friday, we helped in the delivery of two beautiful and healthy baby boys to two women, one after another. Two days of no babies born and then we get two babies within 10 minutes.
We helped out at women’s clinic at Gidan Bege and Blind town as normal but also attended an afternoon of spiritual conference held at Gidan Bege. There we were privileged to hear several worship songs in Hausa by a small choir of women. Also at Gidan Bege our dear friend Lucky continues to do well following his surgery. He is healing nicely and up running around despite our encouragement that he take it easy…you just can’t reason with an energetic 10-year-old boy.
We got our hair braided African style – as you probably saw in our pictures. It was an all day affair that took an amazing 7 hours to complete. Despite the experience being rather painful because they pull hard and really dig-in to separate the hair, we are both enjoying not having to do our hair in the morning and our Nigerian friends love our braided styles. Several have said we now look like real Nigerians with our Nigerian clothes and braided hair.
And we had dinner with one of the mission families here, the Strydhorsts, who like Lisa are originally from Alberta (Yeehaw!) and Gary Bekker the director of Christian Reformed World Missions for Canada and the USA who is out here visiting and surveying the status of the mission’s work here in Nigeria. He’s an amiable chap and we had a good time.

Well that wraps up the smaller things, now to the main events.

Theological Education in Africa (TEA) Conference 2009
The TEA conference is a weeklong conference where Pastors, Christian post-secondary lectures and ministry personnel from around Africa come for a week of education and fellowship. The conferences included several addresses by prominent teachers in the area of Christian Theology as well as multiple workshops on missions, apologetics, systematic theology, biblical studies, current issues, pastoral formation, Islam, ethics and women’s issues. Phil asked us to assist with registration and always eager to help out, we gladly agreed. This meant that on Monday morning we spent a couple hours stapling booklets and putting conference packages together…Rachel got a paper cut for her efforts. Then in the afternoon we moved over to the conference centre and spent several hours registering about 100 participants and slotting them into the various workshops as per their interests. On Tuesday we continued to register latecomers, about another 30, helped direct people to their various workshops and were assigned to toilet patrol. Since none of the toilets had running water it was our job to make sure there were a couple buckets of water in each bathroom for flushing and that the toilets were stocked with toilet paper. This meant we had to collect water from rainwater bins and then haul it to the bathrooms. We have a whole new level of respect for Nigerian women carrying those huge buckets of water on their heads now that we’ve struggled to carry just medium sized buckets of water. Man was it heavy! Fortunately we teamed up and each put a hand on the bucket to carry it together since we are still novices at the head-carrying thing…much to the amusement of the Nigerians.
Our participation in the conference allowed us to met a whole new group of people within the mission field including the future director for East African CRWM missions who we must have made a positive impression upon because he insisted that we swap contact info so we might be involved in future Ethiopian missions. Haha don’t worry mom and dad, aunty and uncle, we are stilling planning to come home first. The conference then wrapped up nicely with a Friday night thank you meal for the speakers and conference planning committee to which we were graciously invited.

Gidan Bege at Makurdi and Lafia
Last weekend we joined Nikki from City Ministries and travelled three hours to Lafia and then another hour onto Makurdi where we spent the night. Both Lafia and Makurdi have Gidan Beges (Houses of Hope) that operate as orphanages for street boys just like the one in Jos. We went to both Gidan Beges to do health check-ups on the orphan boys, give immunizations and get updates from the orphanage managers on the status of the ministry. In Lafia we vaccinated about 15 boys and in Makurdi about 25. To our surprise and relief only one little boy cried…although he did go and hide under his bed afterwards. Poor little guy. But he brightened up when we pulled out the candy, jump ropes and balloon volleyball. J The weather in Makurdi was…..almost unbearable. Imagine the hottest, stickiest and sweatiest you have ever been, multiply it a couple of times and that was Makurdi. Now we were warned that it is the hottest place in Nigeria, but we still were not prepared for what it felt like to be so sticky and sweaty that dust cakes on you. It was impossible to sleep that night. Thank goodness for the relative ‘coolness’ of Jos since it’s on the Plateau.
Well that’s about all for now. We’d like to thank everyone for the cards they sent. Despite the woes of mailing things to Nigeria, we did eventually get them and we appreciate your encouraging words, love and your birthday wishes for Rachel. We also want to thank Aunty Cathy for the package she sent. We loved the droppies and Wilemmenia peppermints!

Until next time, we love you all!
Rachel and Lisa

PS: Today we rode in a taxi with 7 adults, one child and a CHICKEN!! It was our secret hope that we might get to take a taxi ride with a chicken since we’ve seen them in other people’s taxis. The lady told us the chicken was a wedding present. We were pretty excited and she even let us take a picture.