Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Email update: 6 June 2007
Dear Friends and Family,
We flew back to Ukarumpa on June 4th, and now we are slowly getting unpacked and settled in again. We had a lot of emails to work through when we came back (we didn't have email access in the village).
The village time went very well, and we felt like we made good progress on language learning, relationship building, gathering data for the anthropology and grammar papers we will be writing, and sharing the Gospel. We also were so happy to see the three children begin to make friends in the village. They each have someone they like to be with, and they have activities they like to do with them! That is a real answer to prayer! In the beginning we were worried and sad for our kids because they wanted to play but they didn't know what games the kids play or the language, and we could see that they were really discouraged. Now they enjoy learning new Sam words and spending time with their friends. God is faithful and He worked it out wonderfully! Thank you too for your prayers for that situation.
We all stayed reasonably healthy, including "Herbie" inside of Sarah's tummy. Joanna had two different kinds of rashes, and one that spread all over her body, but that faded after a week or so. All of our kids ran around with bare feet, like the village children, so there were various wounds associated with that behavior, but we tried to stay on top of putting antibiotic ointment on the sores every night, and the sores didn't get nasty.
Sarah's grandmother died while we were in the village, so that was sad for us. Her death made it possible for us to talk with some of our friends about where they would go if they died, and one man, a good friend and sort of a grandfather for our kids who attends a church in the village, said he didn't think there is anything after death. He said most of the Sam people thought the same. So when their family and friends die, they don't think they will ever see them again! That opened up a wonderful time of sharing what the Bible says, and how to be saved. In the Sam area, there is a very strong tendency toward legalism, and we faced a bit of a challenge dealing with that. Another man is dying of cancer, and he had been consulting sorcery practitioners to find the cause of the illness, so Dave went to share the Gospel with him, but we don't know what he will decide. Please pray for him. His name is Pang, and he used to be a leader of a church, but now has really fallen away.
We will leave it at that for now, since it's very hard to put 8 weeks into a short page update! :) Stay tuned for our prayer letter, which we hope to write in the next few weeks.
Love,
Dave and Sarah Troolin
