Blog from Adam

Hi everyone,  Jess told me that she hasn’t written a blog for a long time and since she has been throwing up and having morning sickness for the last couple of months I said I would write one. 

So the biggest news is that we are going to have another baby!  I’m a little scared cause now we are going to be outnumbered, but I’m actually getting excited about having another little baby around and Sophia is very excited about it.  We went to the doctor the other day and we were able to see it on the sonogram, but we aren’t sure if it’s a girl or a boy yet.  

On another note, I’ve been working out in a village that is a 3 hour car ride and a 2-6 hour boat ride (depending on what boat you ride in) LOL. 

James, another missionary friend of mine, and I got it in our heads that we could make our own boat and motor by welding sheet metal together…and while doing that we went ahead and made our own out-board motor using a Briggs & Stratton 18 horse motor.   

We actually made it, borrowed a trailer from a friend and last week we spent an entire day pulling it up to the river cause the road is really bad…  all our straps and ropes and boards that we were using to hold it down on the trailer kept breaking. 

Once we got to the river it looked like it was a little high but we didn’t know what normal height was so we went ahead and put in and tried going up. (The river was 8 foot higher than normal and rising, but we found out that is pretty normal which is why most everyone that runs that part of the river has great big 60 HP outboards on there boats…)   

We went around the first bend and hit some white water and barely made it through it. The next bend we attempted felt like we were in a sardine can going white water rafting …. needless to say instead of going up when we hit the main current we found ourselves going backwards and bounced off of some rocks and about sunk our new boat.  We somehow got to the side and the back current caught us and sucked us back up river (which was an accident) I was actually trying to just get to shore and grab a tree thinking I would just let the boat go when some how we kinda just went up through the rapids and made it to the other side where there was a back eddy. 

Now we had made it so far that we couldn’t turn around because if we tried going back down through the rapids I don’t think we would have made it.   Six hours later we made it to our destination.  We have since decided that we need a different boat and at least a 40 HP out board motor.   However, we can’t afford those so we are currently just trying to redesign what we have to make it work better. 

The community that we are working in is called Shakay and they are Shuar Indians. There is one family that has accepted Christ and invited us to work there.  

Most of the Shuar people are pretty closed off to us and it’s a big deal to have been invited in to share the Bible in a community.   We are in the process of building a house out there so that we can stay a few weeks at a time as a family and share life with them and teach Bible stories. 

My dad came down and helped me build the foundation to the house.  Which was the hardest part of the building I believe.  We had to carry buckets of sand up a big muddy hill to make cement, so that we could build stilts to put the house on because the termites are so bad that the house wouldn’t last long if we didn’t.  

Do you have any idea how many buckets of sand it takes to make 12 cement stilts?  About 128 and that is a lot of trips hauling sand up a muddy river bank and up a small hill!   After doing that a few days my dad said he realized why he had retired from missions, lol.  

So now we have a foundation built and today we have a group of guys getting here to help finish building the house.  Tomorrow I’m heading back up to Shakay for another week, poor Jess has hardly seen me this month but hopefully after this trip we will have a house that is mostly done and we can go up and stay as a family.   

 

Anyway that’s a small glimpse of what has been going on around here from my eyes.  Thank you all for your prayers and support we need it so much!