At last.....she is able to update you on happenings here...

My Dad and Sister's visit.....

At the beginning of June as a real answer to many prayers my Dad and Sister came to stay for two weeks..It was awesome.............. to have my family visit me and try to understand quite what life was like here and what exactly i was doing !!!

My Dad was a little worried to begin with but he survived well, no sickness and no incidents... and generally he liked the food :)

It is really quite strange to have someone looking into your life and it was quite an eye opener to me to see just what I have got used to and think is normal now !!! like the fact we don't have much electricity so when we do no matter what time of the day or night we plug everything in for charging and the washing in the machine etc.. The state of the roads is rough i know but my Dad said he felt like all his insides were shaken up by the time he arrived in Gyero !! and its not my driving :) He knew about the pot holes but now he has felt them:) and the heavy African rain is something to be experienced several times we got caught out its hot one minute and drenching rain the next... which makes for great driving along a dirt road, slip slidding all the way...Praise The Lord for my Jeep :)

The congestion and seeming chaos in the town has to be experienced and the pollution smelt...suprisingly I now weave my way through and am sure my driving has deteriorated considerably by British standards !!

I think my living conditions are fine but my Dad found many things which needed fixing...and experienced how long things take to do and what you have to go through to achieve a simple task here :)

He had sooooooo many questions about missionary life and just what is it we do here...hopefully by the end of his time he has a much better understanding of just what i am doing and why there is sooooo much more to do that I have to stay for longer....

I did get them both working of course....to good an opportunity to miss two electricians in a country which has few trained electricians..and we always have things that need doing..

Enjoy the pics below...Still can't believe they were actually here....

Dad trying to pound Yam...Painting the new parlour in the new girls compound...

My Sister up close and personal with some of the new girls.. The older girls joining in ...all hands on deck.

Fixing the electrics...

An Amazing night to remember.....

Last week I travelled to another part of Nigeria 9 hours away south, to Egbe...It was very different climate and terrain than in the Plateau , much more tropical and ohhhhh so hot ! !

This place used to be a big SIM base years ago but at the moment there are no SIM missionaries there, but lots of work going on with the Fulani people.

The Fulani are a large nomadic tribal people whose lives revolve around cows, they are practicaly all Muslim and they move around depending upon the grazing availability for the cows. Well I got to visit a Fulani camp and was shown around and saw the cows coming in and the wives and children and then we were invited to stay the night !!!

Well I was a bit daunted by the prospect as I was with three guys and I was the only woman, and men and women in that culture are very seperate....so I would be on my own with the women who didnt speak English and who were surrounded by children , and from a very different religious and cultural background than my own....BUT well I did it and it was an amazing experiene...

See the pictures of where we stayed....

This is the lady I stayed with, in this hut , with her and three children...It was amazingly comfortable and dry and remarkable to see how resourceful you can be when you live off the land. This entire home was made from branches and palms and grasses, including the bamboo bed I slept on. It was suprisingly spacious and waterproof.

This is the inside, you can see the bamboo beds and here one of the children drinking out of a calabash (a seed pod )

Here the lady is using yesterday's milk to churn into butter. Once again a calabash is used and manually shaken until thick. Above see the decoration they put onto their bowls all grow from the ground.

This is the daughter, helping the mother from an early age, the boys look after the cows and the women look after the home and children, very clear divisions of labour.

What you can see here is breakfast being made, a kind of steamed porridge served with fresh milk from the cows :) all cooked inside the hut as it was raining outside....

The hospitality shown by this family was amazing, How many of you would let a stranger sleep in with your family and be so hospitable ? I was able to communicate using Hausa and sign language a bit and was totally blown away to catch a glimpse of how people can live with no electricity and running water, totally off the land and cows and sharing with their families everything they have.

I hope that I was a little ray of light into this home, one very different from my own but one in which I was made to feel very welcome.

The simple things in life are the best.....

Earlier this week we recieved a gift from Aunty Jamie !!! we all miss her sooooo much and the girls were so excited to see photographs of her and them and most of all to recieve lollipops...

They had great fun looking at the colour of each of their tongues after sucking....it was very funny..

Never underestimate the small things in life, Count your blessings and smile :)

Just look at the colour of the water !!

A few weeks ago while staying over in the village the daily bathing ritual was taking place and we aunties suddenly noticed that our girls towels didnt look too clean !! I guess due to many factors, lack of water, a machine !, and the fact its hard to wash a towel with a bar of soap in a bucket...


So aunties to the rescue we decided we would take them and wash them all :)


Well we had no idea how dirty they were...probably not been washed maybe for a year... until we decided to pre wash them in my bathtub....see for yourself the colour of the water...






This was after two washes and plenty of Ariel....we were amazed at yellow towels once again looking yellow !! and wondered why we had not noticed earlier the dirt !!!
We gave them back to the girls and they were so excited, but now they are reluctant t use them because they keep insisting they are clean and they dont want to get them dirty !!!
Always be thankful for a washing machine.....

Ignorance or Evil ?

Meet Emmanuella aged 8 years...
Her Story :-
She was born in 2000 and has two older brothers. She was living with both parents up until the age of four years when her mother died. She was taken back to her Mother’s family and has not seen her father since. She was living with her grandmother but the grandmother’s family have never really accepted her. During the Jos crisis in 2008 the family home where she was staying was burnt and since then they have been staying with various relatives.
Last week on 5th February her life changed. Her Aunt’s son was accused of being in the secret cult and was taken to a prayer man for deliverance. As part of that he was asked to give names of other children involved in the cult, he gave Emmanuela’s name. So she was taken to the prayer man and was told to confess. She was innocent and had nothing to confess and so the man started to torture her by burning her with a heating coil all over her body. She was in so much pain that she confessed to involvement even though she was innocent. It was at that point then the wider family threatened to kill her and so Grandma brought her to us at Gidan Bege. It is difficult to understand what makes someone do something like this to a child, is it Ignorance or Evil ?
To me it seems a bit of both. The traditional religion here still believes it is necessary to cleanse the evil out of someone and even when people become Christians it is very easy in a crisis that they revert back to old habits like the Native doctor rather than God. This is a classic example of how Satan has twisted things that a “prayer man” can whilst praying inflict harm…imagine how she will feel when people pray over her in the future…
We see many things like this here and partly the discipleship and teaching in the church is at fault too so people do not trust that God is sovereign and is all powerful and has defeated Satan. It is only through his power we can minister here to children who have been treated like this , precious children to whom God has given a chance of a new life of love and care. Praise God that Emmanuella has the chance of healing and many more like her keep coming brought by God to us. Please keep praying for us and our ministry here.

Valentines Day for our girls.....

On Saturday we were priviledged to be invited by a local church to a special Valentines programme for our girls....The girls and I loved it...they all got dressed up in their finery and all looked great and were excitedly waiting since early morning to be picked up. I crammed about 15 of them in my Jeep and the rest in a minibus and off we went.

We had never met these people before but they were great and so hospitable to us all. There was just us and a few of them in their church and they sang and danced and the Pastors wife told stories to the girls..Our girls love to perform too and sang and told memory verses..

There were lots of highlights for me but a few to share...Two of our girls Simi and Rebecca who have been in the ministry two years both stood and gave their testimonies and brought tears to the eyes....But even more special was the fact that then our two new girls who have only been with us a few weeks and days stood and told of the horrific things they had been through and how thankful they were that the ministry had taken them in....it was awesome.

The lady who invited us Comfort sang special songs to us and then gave each girl a big bag of toiletries and sweets and biscuits.. the girls were so excited to recieve their very own sponge and bars of soap.....

A few pics below ....

What a great way to spend Valentines day...surrounded by little girls and Jesus love demonstrated by these new friends of our ministry....awesome

The Old and the New...

During these last couple of weeks we have been re- evaluating the function of our ministry here in Kings Kids, weve been writing policies and looking at a holistic approach from the day children come in to how we should best exit them and all the training we aim to do along the way..
Its great to be able to have an overview and to see all the amazing ways that God is helping to shape and mould us to meet the needs in this society.

At present we have 6 new boys from the street at Gidan Bege and in the last two weeks we have had two new girls brought to us. We are currently visiting some of our older boys families to see who can be reconcilled back this summer after living with us for a number of years , and at the same time weve visited those who left us a year ago and we have heard lots of stories about how well they are doing and what changed people they are :)



These are our two new girls... Blessing on left aged 14 years and Emmanuela aged 8 on right.
Both came to us running for their life as a result of occult involvement. Already in such a short time they have lapped up the love and attention shown to them. Praise The Lord we got a new aunty to live with them the day Blessing arrived...great timing.



This picture shows another cycle to the ministry...the Uncle here Waisu was one of our original boys who came from a M background and lived on the streets until aged 10 he came to us. Now he has finished schol and has recently been to a discipleship training course in Ywam and is now serving as a junior uncle in Gyero. He is doing great at teaching the little ones and an excellent role model with such a lot of experience to share.

The old and the new...God is in control of this ministry and as we continue to welcome new ones in and send old ones out He is glorified.