Furlough!

We made it to the USA! After 30 hours of flying, layovering, and more flying we made it to Colorado. We have been taking it easy this first week, and we will be spending rhe rest of May in CO, we plan on being in MO for the month of June and then back to CO for July.
Give us a call if you want to hang out, meet Reese, or hear about what God is doing in Namibia!!

Tour d’ Afrique

Imagine riding your bike from Cairo to Cape Town in a race that takes four months!
This is exactly what Alaric Britz is doing. The race is 11,800 km long, goes through ten countries, and takes a hundred and twenty days to complete!
He is doing the race to raise support for CHS. Right now the race is passing through Namibia.
So the school set up a little ceremony to welcome and thank Alaric.  It was on Wednesday night. Hundreds of people came out for the night, including the national news crew.
It was a great night.
Alaric seems to be a quiet, shy guy. When he walked into the hall the people cheered with abandon.He smiled sheepishly as he was herded to the front of the hall. I heard one of his team mates say that she was getting goose bumps! Four of the kids had written an essay for him, so they got up and recited it to him.
 The man who wrote the Namibian national anthem was there, and he played the piano while the school sang the anthem. The kids had it rehearsed so only a few sang the first part, and then the rest of the school jumped in half way through. It was a powerful moment. I was overcome with so much love for the people that we have come out to serve. Hearing a while hall full of people sing out with such pride was just amazing, I wish you all could have experienced it.
The night ended with the school choir singing a song about hope and of course a lot more thanks and cheers to Alaric.
If you want more info on what he is doing you can check out his blog here.

At four months…

It is about time I get around to posting this!

At four months Reese is being a little ham. He loves to laugh, smile, giggle, snort and just have fun. Every day he learns something new. He now blows raspberries when we do, and a time or two he has tried to wave when someone waves at him. He i a very social little guy and loves to smile at anyone who will give him attention 🙂
 At four months Reese weighs 14.5 pounds and 63cm long. He is in 3-6 clothes, but there are some 0-3 outfits that still fit him, and there is a newborn out fit that still fits him. It just depends on the brand.
At four months he is slowly catching up to other babies his age, he is now starting to want to sit up, and has rolled over a couple of times.
The dr. thinks he is doing great and will have no lasting issues from being born seven weeks early!
I have been waiting to write this, the jaundice is out of his system completely! And his umbilical hernia has healed. He is our little rockstar!
He still takes at least three naps a day, if he does not get his naps he gets cranky. It seems the only times he really cries is when he is tired or over stimulated. When he gets all his naps he will wake up happy and smiling from them. At night his bed time is at 7:30. He will then sleep for six hours and then wake up one to three times after that. Last night he only woke up at 2:15 and then again at 5:30. So we got a lot more sleep than we have been getting!
He still loves to take a bath, and now will cry or fuss when we take him out. We have to make getting out of the bath fun too. So we both cheer and sing as we take him out. Most days we can trick him into having fun when his bath is done, but he would prefer to just bath and bath and bath.
He still is exclusively breast fed. Our LC wanted us to start on solids a few weeks ago, but our dr. would rather we wait until he is 5 and a half months old. I think he is ready for it, but I think waiting until we are in America will make it easier on us, since there are going to be a lot of changes in the next few weeks.
We are a bit nervous about the trip to the USA. We will be taking two ten hour flights with a seven hour layover in Germany. Please pray for easy uneventful travels for us, and that Reese will enjoy the flights too.
We are terribly excited about him finally getting to spend some time with his family around the world!

2 Timothy 1:7

God has not given you a spirit of fear but a spirit of love, power and a sound mind.

The kids at school sing a song about this verse. It has cheesy little moves and a catchy tune, but really the message is an important one.
As humans so many thing we do or don’t do is motivated by fear. Fear of rejection, fear of getting hurt, fear of humiliation. This should not be how we live our lives. We should be motivated by a love for God and a love for people, we should fearlessly do what God has for us!
 Step out today and do something that scares you! Maybe repeat this verse to yourself a couple of times, and then do it!

Walking Stick!

One of the most interesting critters out here in the bush is the walking stick. I remember seeing one in a zoo when I was a kid. But a couple of days ago there was one crawling around on the outside of our house!
You can read more on them here.

What happened with the truck.

So if we are facebook friends you may have heard about our truck being impounded by the government. Here is the whole story.
We bought our truck in South Africa in 2010 before coming up to Namibia, we bought in SA because cars are much cheaper down there. But we before buying it we looked into what it would take to have a foreign car in Namibia. According to the officials we spoke to we had two choices, we could import the car to Nam, but it would cost 16.5% of the value of the car, or we could just pay a $30 fee every three months to keep it on the road. We opted for the second choice as we were not sure about importing it.
So for the last two years we have been getting a road permit every three months, or sometimes a little bit more if we forgot to renew it.
When the CCCB team was visiting we took them out to Hero’s acre to look out at the city and to pray for the city of Windhoek. It was on Easter weekend. To get to hero’s acre one has to leave the city, and there are police stops at all the entrances to Windhoek.
David, the two professors, Reese, and I were in the front and the five students were on the back. As we were coming back into the city we were pulled off by the police. Apparently they were pulling all cars with foreign license plates off to check their papers. They only do this on Easter and Christmas weekend.
David confidently pulled out the permit and he was told, “um, no, get out and come with me.” While he went off to explain what was going on we stayed in the car. We have been pulled over at the police stop several times before and it had never been a big deal. After a while Mr. Williams looked back at me and said “They are not buying what he is trying to sell.” After a few more minutes David came to the window and said that they were going to impound the car, and we needed to find taxi’s to get home. This would have been impossible since it was a holiday weekend, and we were way out of the city. Plus if we were lucky enough to find a taxi the driver may be drunk, as it is a holiday weekend. There was no way we were going to put Reese in a taxi. At this point he woke up from a nap and he started crying really loudly. So I got out of the car and stood next to the police officer. They felt sorry for us, and said that they would follow us back to the house and then take he car from there.
They said that we were supposed to pay the import tax, even if we were not importing the car. And then if we ever left Namibia we could request to get it back. We also needed to pay a fine for not paying the tax sooner. I guess the different offices of government do not have the same rules. The rules we were following were set out by the roads authority, and the import tax rule is set by the ministry of finance. So we made the mistake of only asking one office what the rules are…
They followed us to our house and then David drove the truck to the impound lot. When they got to the lot they had impounded so many cars that they had run out of the forms that they needed so David had to drive with them to Okahandja to get the forms and then back to the impound lot. During this long drive David was able to strike up a good conversation with the officers and they decided to give him a lift back home, so no one needed a taxi! David also now has made some contacts with people in the government, and we have an agreement that they will come to our house for coffee some time in the future 🙂

In the following week we had to do a lot of running around and scrambling to get everything done that needed to be done and to get the money together. We needed to get three quotes on the value, the government then used that to calculate the tax. Then we had to hire a clearing agent to file the paper work. And we had to get the cash together. It ended up costing us $1400 to get our Hasselhof out of jail. This money came out of our furlough fund, we hope to make up some of that when we are back home.

It was really stressful and all that, but in the end we were able to make friends with the police officers, and we learned a lesson about trusting in God.

An old post.

I wrote this post a little over a month ago. When we found out that a house was available for us on the YWAM base. I never got around to finishing it and posting it. So here you go!

Some exciting news for us…
We are moving!

We have been living in a house in town for the last two years, but in the last few weeks an opportunity to move onto the YWAM base has come to light. After much prayer and consideration it seems like the best option for us right now.
The YWAM base is 20km outside of town, and it is a farm on a huge piece of land. Currently there are about 6 families living on the base and several singles. There are people from America, South Africa, Holland, Zambia, and Namibia. 
The biggest reason we want to move out there is to be part of the community of people that we will be working with. David and I have always felt that we should be part of a team, and work in a team setting so this is a way for us to work more closely with the team of people who are already working in Katutura.
The house is a fixer upper, so we will spend a few weeks before moving on replacing ceilings and painting. It should be fun though.
The house has three bedrooms so it is bigger than any place we have stayed in.
These are some pictures I took while the people on the base were still getting some of their furniture out.

Keep your eyes on this space for updates on the home improvements.

What is going on?

We moved out to the YWAM base a few weeks ago, it is out in the gramadullas, so there is limited internet access out here. We are still alive, and very very busy! I am working on some blog posts that I hope to be able to post this week. We are doing great, planning for furlough, looking for plane tickets, and finishing off at CHS.
Reese is doing great also, he is growing and thriving! Look out for a four month post soon too!

SO MUCH NEWS!

So much has happened in the last few weeks! We moved, we are renovating the new (old) place, and we are hosting a team from CCCB.
We took the plunge a about 4 weeks ago and asked Brian if there was any houseing available on the YWAM base, he said that there was, and that he would love to have us move out here. So before we knew it we were throwing things in boxes and making the 20km drive to our new home. Before we could move in though we had to tear the ceilings out of three of the rooms since they were so full of bat poop the smell made my eyes water. We have been in the new place for 13 days now and we are still slowly unpacking. I think I should do a separate post explaining why we felt we should move out here.

The more exciting news for right now is that we have been playing hosts to a CCCB missions team this last week. When we were students at Central we used to lead mission trips once a year to different African countries, we always hoped that we would be able to be on the receiving end of such a team, and now we are! The team has two professors and five students. We have had so much fun with them here, and we have been able to share our lives here in Namibia with them. They have been amazing, ready to jump in and help with anything and we have stayed up way too late on most nights talking and laughing. I have been intending to do a daily blog of what they have been up to, and I still hope to do that. There has been too many great things to try and squish into one blog!

In not so fun news, the government detained our car yesterday. We seem to have been given incorrect information on how to keep a vehicle that is registered in South Africa here in Namibia. We will have to wait for the long weekend to end, and then we will have to try and figure out how to get it back. It looks like it is going to cost a lot of money.

Please pray for the team as their visit here is drawing to a close, and today they will be doing children’s ministry with over 50 kids. Also pray for us as we get settled into the new place, and of course for the whole car situation.

Reese is doing great too!

A thousand gifts.

It has been a while since I last did a thousand gifts post, I am only up to number 72, oops! I guess things have been kind of hectic the last few months 🙂
If you don’t remember what these posts are about, it is listing a thousand things that God has given you that you are thankful for.  You can click on the link on the left for more info.

73. Reese.
74. Skype
75. Facebook
76. The rain, there needs to be some more of it though!
77. The few hours of sleep that we do get 😉
78. I am thankful for the next chapter in our lives. It is going to be an exciting year!