Hello hello!
Hope you remember us, your fave missionary fam in Kigali! I’m not sure how it’s been so long since our last update, but thanks for your patience with us. Please settle in for a catch up on Kigali life - there’s been a lot going on since March!

John has continued to explore opportunities for ministry here, and has prayerfully leaned into the Presbyterian church we have been worshipping at. He preaches there once or twice a month, and is slowly building relationships with some of the young men in the church. One of his biggest joys is teaching a theology / english class with the bible college students when they are not at our sister campus in Uganda; they always come back from their classes there full of the most controversial theological inquiries, which leads to a lot of debate and John being somewhat scandalous as he calmly explains truths that are often radically different from what they have been previously taught. He also continues to labor on with both language learning and relational discipling; we have come to realize that one-on-one discipleship is possibly the best inroad to sharing the gospel and growing the church here, and so he hopes to continue to prioritize discipleship of young men in the future.

For Rachel, all of life has kind of been on pause as the kids have been on summer break (their school follows an American schedule), and while she optimistically planned to continue in her ministry avenues, that was not to be the case. Between the kids being home, the internship, moving house, and helping run a massive fitness competition, her time was spread pretty thin! She is excited to get back into supporting the staff at Word Made Flesh, where she will continue to help create curriculum for the kids program, as well as help run their social media, among other things.
​
But that brings us to what is ALWAYS a huge highlight for us; our summer internship! This year was a little different, as the Ebola crisis in our neighboring countries put the possibility of the internship into question almost up to the moment our interns got on the plane! The plan for them changed several times, and they ended up only being here for about 2 weeks, before flying to Kenya to spend the remainder of the internship there. To be honest, it was really a bummer having them for such a short time, but we were so grateful they got to come at all and that they withstood the many changes and communications that happened before they got on a plane!

We had the joy of hosting 5 young women and 1 young man (who was also named Jackson!), and it felt like our third internship we finally (kind of) had things figured out! We did sessions on resilience and ambiguity in missions, took them out in the city to learn about Rwanda’s history and present times, did multiple VBS’s, had them join in preaching and singing at our church, spent a lot of time sharing testimonies, and so much more. This group was an enthusiastic team who was ready to learn and explore, and always had so many questions about culture and missions…they definitely kept us on our toes. Thankfully everything ran really smoothly this year, and we even felt brave enough to bring our kids along to the VBS we run every year at a school close to Volcano National Park.

It has been a challenge to balance how much to push our kids into cross-cultural experiences; we have dipped our toes in the water a bit, but this was definitely sending them into the deep end. Our kids don’t love being the center of attention, and walking into a remote village school, they definitely were! They helped lead some songs, but for the most part chose to stay in the background. When it was time to hand out the porridge and bread for a post-VBS snack, they really found their feet, and made it their mission to make sure every child was served, often with a silly face or dance. It made our hearts happy to integrate them into a bit of ministry, and to see them slowly learning how to make connections despite a language barrier.

After the internship ended far too soon, we turned our energies into packing our house up! Our house has been surrounded by construction for the past few months, and this has proved to be a big source of stress. Having an apartment complex on not one but two sides of our compound made our existence a bit like living in a fishbowl. They are building on higher ground behind us, and in addition to constantly raining down debris and staring at our kids, they accidentally knocked down our brick wall, which in turn knocked down our water tower and flooded our yard. We were so grateful this happened while the kids were at school, as this could have ended very badly if they were home, but that incident especially prompted us to start house hunting! We found a house in a different neighborhood but still close to school, with a much bigger yard, a beautiful view, and a peaceful garden run by nuns as one of our neighbors! After much prayer, we committed to moving here, and have been in the new house for about a week. There’s always quirks to figure out in a new home, especially here in Rwanda, but we are settling in well, just in time for the kids to go back to school!

As we enter our third year living here, we would appreciate your prayers. We spent some time reflecting on our first couple years here, and shockingly realized we came out the gate pretty strong, and tried to do a lot of things early on without taking time to really learn the language or the culture…and unsurprisingly, a lot of those endeavors didn’t go very well! We are continually realizing how little we still know, even after being here for two years, and so we are re-committing to language study, building relationships, and asking lots of questions. We deeply feel the lack of a team, as any momentum we have in ministry must always be self-generated, and so we are praying for more missionaries to join us! We have some inklings of directions we would like to go in, and are asking the Lord to give us joy and strength as we continue what feels like a very ordinary and mundane missionary life, where much of our ministry is conducted in the everyday moments.

Thank you all for your continued prayers and support, we are so grateful for each one of you and how you enable us to continue here!
​
John & Rachel + crew