30 November 2005

Dear Friends and Family,

Happy Thanksgiving, Advent, and Christmas!

As a clinical instructor for the nursing school, Jodi was supervising the second-year nursing students during their school health rotation. The resourcefulness of the nursing students, primary school teachers, and pupils was remarkable. One of the primary schools the student nurses visited had 1,200 students in six classrooms, each class with one teacher, and no functioning water supply. To accommodate the children, the school devised a rotating schedule with first and second graders attending three hours in the morning so third and fourth graders could have their classrooms later in the morning. The older grades stayed in school the standard amount of time. Since most families could not afford book bags, children devised ingenious ways to carry their school supplies and some water to drink. One girl fashioned a book bag out of a plastic sugar bag. The water bottle she uses is sold by people who scavenge them from the garbage, then clean them and sell them. The student nurses did a wonderful job of organizing themselves and the primary school students for the health screening of the children.

There has been much news about the famine in Malawi, the situation in the prison system, and the politically motivated impeachment proceedings of the president. We are grateful for your prayers and ask that you continue to pray for the relief effort, for those who are imprisoned, and for the political problems of the country. We thank those that have been able to respond to the famine by giving financial support to provide food in the short-term and to provide long-term nutritional changes to prevent famine again.

The protected water and sanitation programs of the Synod of Livingstonia continue to provide challenges for Jim in his role as coordinator. The Marion Medical Mission (MMM) maintains its extraordinary support in the provision of clean water through hand-dug or shallow wells and also supports the sustainability of those wells through improved management systems. Three-way partnerships between the MMM and the Synod, with the Synods of Nkhoma and Zambia and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania, have significantly increased the coverage area as well as the logistical hurdles of installing and maintaining the wells.

The program is also exploring how to improve sanitation and hygiene in the communities using a marketing approach. Harvesting of composted human manure provides a safe and inexpensive alternative to chemical fertilizer and promotes hygiene by increasing the use of latrines. Two of several composting latrines are the “arborloo,” which is used for tree planting directly into a full latrine, and the “skyloo,” which provides composted human manure which can be used on crops.

Laxsony Ndhlovu, one of the program’s field officers, was involved in a motorcycle accident while on duty which resulted in the amputation of his lower right leg.

He is recovering well and is fitted for a temporary prosthesis, however he and his family need your continued prayers as he and they learn to cope with the changes the accident has brought.

We were fortunate this year to have a visit by Jim’s mom, his cousin, by Dr. Becky Loomis and her nephew Nicholas, as well as by several old and new church family members.

Many thanks to Harold and Barbara Riley for adopting Michael and Jim for six weeks over the summer, and to the Lynchburg, Virginia, community for welcoming and supporting them during their surgeries at the University of Virginia. Both surgeries were fully successful. Thank you for your prayers and support for them while in the States and for the family in Malawi during the medical leave.

Thank you all for your prayers, thoughts, emails, letters, packages, and support throughout this year and we pray that you will have a blessed holiday as we celebrate the birth of Jesus.

Jodi, Jim, Michael, Jason, Selina, and Salome

The 2006 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 337