"Miracle" update

For those of you who have been following my blog, I am going to share some recent photo's of the little girl Miracle that our manager adopted after she was found abandoned covered in dirt by dogs chewing the umbilical cord....she is now 10 months old and has started to walk !!! she didn't bother crawling just got up and walked...she is such a beautiful little girl it is so hard to imagine why someone should want to abandon her, but God had other plans for her life....and she is a walking Miracle........

Parcels.....

I just want to share with you a glimpse of what my life is like here by telling you about my experience today at the Post Office...
Just think how difficult can it be to post a parcel ??? simple you would think huh ? NO today the process took me an hour......
I love recieving parcels :) and have recieved two this week ( am a happy girl ) and so I thought it was about time i caught up with a few people's birthdays i had missed.... so i packaged and labelled three parcels and stuck them well with tape so they would not come undone and went to the post office. I was directed to a window round the back of the building for parcels. I met a friendly man who tried to help.....a very unfriendly lady came and told me i had to undo my parcels for immigration purposes, despite me telling them exactly what was inside....so having asked if they were sure they had tape to do them up i reluctantly complied!!! trying very hard to be patient and tolerant....
She then went away and the man proceeded to try and squash them into a box, he folded one of them in half!!! right in front of me....I couldnt believe it and then when he worked out how much it would be .....It was a horendous price...so i asked whether there was a cheaper way of doing things and was directed inside now...
I went to one lady and she told me it was impossible to do !!! and then another one called me over and said they could do it!!! she then proceeded to weigh them and it was slightly cheaper and so proceeded to give me stamps. Well she gave me so many stamps they had to be stuck all over the parcel....( no big stamps it seems) and the gum on the back is not very sticky and so they would not stick very well to the parcel....we tried and tried....
She directed me out of the building and round the other side to post them, well when i found where to go the people freaked out at the way i had tried to stick the stamps and insisted i got some glue and stuck them. So when i asked for glue they all said sorry you will have to go to a shop and buy some !!! ( by this time my stress levels were rising....i was wondering how hard it was to try and post a parcel here !!!)
So i went out carrying my parcels covered in stamps and bought some glue, one nice lady could see i was a bit stressed and folowed me to help me stick !!! while sticking she asked me about myself and what i was doing and told me how much she liked the British !!! and laughed at my frustration with trying to post my parcels.
She then offered to take them back to the place where we had previously been and as i thanked her i gave her the pot of glue, she laughed as i said to her that her their need was greater than mine.... It wasn't until she walked away with my parcels that i thought i hope she was honest and did put them in the post and didn't keep them herself !!!
So if you recieve a parcel from me soon....it will be a miracle , and know it has come with a lot of feeling.....and stress......

Girl's Camp

We have just completed our first week long girl's camp :) we had nineteen girls including staff children and we took over an the SIM guest house for the week.

We decided to take the theme of "The King and I " thinking of ourselves as Daughter's of the king and therefore as Princesses.

We wanted all of these precious girls to really feel loved and special as so many of them have had such traumatic backgrounds and I think we succeded. We chose as our theme verse -

and everyday we looked at a diferent aspect of the verse building up to an invitation to a banquet on our last evening.

The girl's experienced many new things including :-

sitting at a table to eat their food , with knives and forks and table cloths...trying new foods like pancakes and pizza and french toast...

jumping on a trampolinemaking jewellrymaking cookieslearning how to tie and dye fabric going in a swimming pool jumping in off the side

standing on their hands and climbing trees as a part of a treasure hunt...

and we even had singing round a campfire and toasting marshmellows...
The highlight of the week came on the last day as the speaker issued them all with an invitation to accept Jesus's offer to be a Child of God personally and ten of them made commitments:)

That evening we had a Princess banquet and they all dressed up and we were able to find tiarras and shawls and even had a three tier Princess cake!! we decorated the room with candles and fairy lights and had live music playing....they were so amazed, we ate a nice meal and then they were taught Irish dancing much to their delight.... our Ka Ka so enjoyed herself she said she thought she had gone to Heaven ! see her all dolled up...
Truly it was a great Princess camp, all of our girls felt loved and special by their Heavenly father who loves them as they are and longs to heal their hurts and restore them to the people he created them to be. It was such a priviledge to share this week with them and see them blossom under the love and experiences they had, I pray they will remember it for a long time to come.

1st anniversary and new beginnings....

As i write this blog I am celebrating my first year here in Nigeria as a Missionary !! how the time has flown, It seems not that long ago since I arrived in Jos and yet so many things have also happened in that time . I am thankful to God that he has provided all that I have needed for this year, financially, emotionally, physically and spiritually. He has protected me throughout and has kept me well :) no small thing here I can assure you.

I am amazed at all the things that i just accept as normal now and don't even notice. We had some new girls arrive this week and as I was orientating them i was reminded of some of the unusual things I don't even notice anymore...the way that Ladies carry large quantities of things on their heads and babies on their backs , the amount of people fitting into a taxi, the goat being carried on a motorbike, the constant tooting of horns,the fact we wash every food in bleach before we eat it, the fact that nothing is priced and everything is battered for, and you have to go many places to find what you need, no one shop sells everything, the way the people arrange their pyramids of tomatoes for sale by the side of the road, that we drink bottled water, that we have security guards 24 hours, that we are constantly wearing skirts, that we have to make all food from scratch nothing is ready made and so cooking takes a lot longer, that we all have househelp to cook and clean and shop for us...

There are definitely some things that i will never get used to....the driving, the roads full of potholes, the crazy motorbikes which weave in and out of traffic and come on both sides, it is so hard to not hit them....constantly being stared at for being white, the noise and lack of open spaces to relax in, the corruption, the way things always break down in and around your home and the way nobody ever finishes a job completely !!!

But I am praising God that I have enjoyed my year, have done many things and have gone in many new directions I would not have dreamed possible a year ago as he has lead me in to many new areas of ministry. In many ways i know i am a changed person and it is difficult to imagine my life back in England this all seems so normal to me now.

The last few days I have been involved in co leading a leadership orientation for our new leader in Gyero. Rev Ayuba is joining us and it is so important that we all as a team put all the difficulties behind us and strive to look to the year ahead, learning the lessons and moving on.

on the left is Rev Ayuba being officially welcomed by our Manager Rev Haruna this weekend. Please pray for him as he leads this new phase at Gyero.

Tomorrow we begin another new thing a week of camp for our girls...we are all very excited as the preparatons are complete and we can begin. Jamie and Corrine (below) and Anna and myself will be leading, please pray we have a great time loving on our girls...

I look forward to the next year ahead and am excited to see all that God will do through the ministry to impact the lives of the children he puts into our care.