August 1, 2009

Dear Family and Friends,

Warm summer greetings! Since our last newsletter we have found ourselves in a flurry of activity and transition. We wanted to share these changes and bring you up to date as well.

Once our visitors from our sister network of Greater Atlanta departed in the spring we began a series of meetings with our network members to review and brainstorm new possibilities for a winnable campaign to undertake. Unlike sister networks in the Joining Hand program in other parts of the world, the fact that people here live under occupation has always limited the kinds of activities the network could accomplish.

As we tried to strike a balance between the Joining Hands mandate for a campaign and the negative impact our network felt an all-out campaign would produce, we also had to take into account the fact that we were visitors to the region on a tourist visas. Those issues, plus PC(USA)’s continuing financial down-turn, made for a pretty complicated picture! Despite the challenges, our sister network in Atlanta and other supporting churches and organizations were willing to participate in whatever focus the network decided upon.

After discussions with a village outside Hebron (At Tuwani) we all became excited over the possibility of building a coalition to work on village water concerns. But we didn’t know that at the time PC(USA) was deciding to end the network activity and eliminate the companion facilitator position in Palestine, citing cost issues and problems settling on a campaign focus as the reason. We understood PC(USA)’s financial concerns.

We had also been feeling a great deal of concern about the potential for further victimization of our network members. We realized the only solution was to collaborate more closely with the Joining Hands program in Louisville and be more creative in carrying out a hybrid type of campaign.

Leaving our Palestinian friends and social circles, the network, the church, our home, and the country was painful. Yet we also realized that we were also traumatized—an effect of serving a people who live under continual crisis and which produces a defensive kind of passion for one’s work. It takes its toll in the form of secondary trauma.

Our lives are forever changed by what we saw and experienced, and now in the aftermath it has become our objective to reconcile both our hearts and heads and to make sense of it all.

We are looking forward to spending some quality time with our families whom we have only seen in short spurts since the beginning of our mission service in 1987. We feel this time to be a gift from God for which we are thankful!

At the same time, we are looking toward the future, and after much deliberation, we feel God is calling us to remain in the mission field for now. And so we are looking at all the possibilities and praying for guidance regarding our next opportunity to serve! This is an exciting time for us!

We have felt sustained and strengthened by your faithful support over these years, and no words can convey the depth of our thanks.

Our next letter will hopefully share about our future and where the next chapter will open!

Grace and Peace,

Terry and Michele

The 2009 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 349