Over the next year, Steve and Elaine Conrad are filling an urgent need at the Starehe Children’s home. Starehe is an orphanage that has been run under the direction of PAOC missionaries, Ron and LouDell Posein, since 1997 when the government of Tanzania asked them to take over the orphanage near the city of Mwanza. In 2005 Trent and Rhonda Lipinski joined Ron and LouDell Posein as Directors of the Starehe Children’s Home. For health reasons, the Lipinski’s returned to Canada in 2008 and are currently on extended leave. There is now a requirement to recruit new missionary workers for Starehe; however, this will take time. Steve and Elaine will be interim Directors over the next year, working alongside and supporting Ron and LouDell in meeting the physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of the children at Starehe.

November 30, 2009

(The Conrads were recently victims of road-side theft, and they have heard that the thieves now know where they live and plan to make a ‘visit.’ Here is an update on the situation):

We are all still alive!! 

Thought I would update you all on how things are going. We are all fine. I was reading in my devotions today (A very wise man suggested the book of Nehemiah) and today’s passage  was  chapter 4 where they are now entering some ridicule as the people begin to rebuild the walls. They are now under threat of attack and so Nehemiah turns to God once again and asks for wisdom. He then begins to post guards and uses strategies to keep his people safe as they go about this monumental task. 

These past few days that too is what we have done. Steve went out and got some very large knives (as long as your arm) called pangas (sp?) and some very large pointy things that would certainly cause pain if they came into contact with a human. We are unable to purchase a gun for our protection as the cost is just too high but we feel with these other weapons we can fight off anyone who may try to enter our home. We leave the orphanage early enough that we are home well before dark so there will be no more road side thefts and our guard has the other guards in the area aware of our predicament. We also have security whistles for everyone in the family that will bring help if needed and Mike and Steve each stay up half of the night to assist our guard so that there are always two people keeping an eye on things. We’ve purchased extra outdoor lighting and Steve will install that as soon as he can catch up on a little sleep. We realized that we have been relatively safe so far with just a few minor scares. Perhaps we haven’t taken things seriously enough and God is trying to wake us up a bit. Now we’re awake.

 As I was reading my study notes that go along with the verses this morning  it said this “Obstacles and foes make can make us work smarter and live wiser or they can make us give up on our purpose and our way of living. If they accomplish the latter, they have won, even if they haven’t attacked us.” 

We feel more prepared and of course with everyone praying for us we feel God’s protection around us as well. The first night I have to admit I was terrified and I did not sleep one wink. Even though Steve and Mike were keeping watch in shifts, I was listening for every little noise. Katie slept like a baby. She said the next day. “I’m not one bit worried, God’s got our back.” This kid has it right!  Last night I asked God to send an army of angels to protect our home. I mean who can protect us better than an army of angels?  Anyway, last night I slept like a baby. I didn’t get up once to make sure that the guys were taking turns on keeping watch or that the guard was still awake.  And if my kids at home are reading this they’ll know that is quite something for control freak mamma lol. 

All that to say this. God’s got our backs! Thanks for your prayers. Keep them coming. We can’t do this without the prayers of you all and we hope this all blows over soon. We are safe and alive and charging on to do what God has sent us here to do.

 

 

 

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I thought I’d send a quick update and let you know how things have been going these past few weeks. On one hand it seems hard to believe we’ve been here a month already, and yet on the other, it feels as though we’ve only been here a few days.

Life is still very busy for us in the absence of the other missionary couple but we are beginning to get the hang of how things work around here. The emergencies that seemed to pop up daily are finally beginning to settle. Many of the things that were broken are now fixed and running properly again and we only have one or two things that break down weekly now. I am so thankful that Steve is a ‘jack of all trades.’  It has done him well here or as Mike has said, “maybe not so much” because he runs around constantly fixing things.  His knack with knowing how to fix just about everything is good but it does mean that he knows more than most of the ‘skilled’ tradesmen here. For that matter so do I.

Steve and Mike spend a lot of time mentoring the teen boys. They love talking with them and a few are already starting to almost fight over who gets to be Baba Steve’s sidekick for his work projects, so they can be with him as he fixes things. Because of course if you know Steve you know he loves to talk and that means they get to have a long chat with a ‘father figure’. These young men desperately need father figures. It’s so amazing to see them warm up so quickly to us in that area. In such a short time they have risen to the challenge of now mentoring the younger boys in the dorm. We can only pray it continues after we leave.

The girls are a bit more of a challenge than the boys. There are only a few older girls on site, a number are at boarding school so the opportunity to build relationships with them is limited. The younger ones stick to us like glue however and their smiles would melt the Arctic ice cap. They are slowly warming up but some have attitudes a mile long. The teen boys are more willing to open up to me than the teen girls are but we’re still working on it. I made some in roads when we had our purity talk on Sunday, when I saw one young girl wiping tears from her eyes as I talked about second chances and God’s plan for their lives. I expect she’ll come around in time but they are certainly a tough crowd. We’ve only been here a month and with the backgrounds these kids have come from we can’t expect trust to be built in a day. It will happen however and we’ll continue to pray that God will use us in that area.

Some funny little things we’ve learned since arriving is that the children find it odd that the adults let the kids eat first in Canada. We found that out when we ate with the children last week in an attempt to figure out how to make the supper hour go smoother. They also thought it strange that we wanted to make sure they had enough food before we had our food. They were so concerned that we didn’t eat enough and wanted to give us extra food. Let me tell you these kids can pack away food. I had read that Tanzanians eat a lot of food but had no idea exactly what that meant. An estimation of the amount of rice on their plate would be about 3-4 cups minimum. Katie and I share a serving and then we still have to give some away. It’s crazy. I honestly don’t know where they put it. They’re not big kids.

They are quite amazed that Katie wants to be a “pasta” – translation, a pastor. When we tell them that we have two female pastors at our church they laugh at us and ask Mike or Steve if it is true.  They often ask Mike to pray for them since he’s going to be a pastor and many of them call him ‘Pasta’ already.

Last week we visited the farm and of course when you honour someone enough to visit them, they feed you. This is where the “eat what is put before you” comes into play. They cooked us a chicken which was delicious. Probably the best chicken I’ve ever had. They also served rice on very basic plates but they did have forks, and of course they brought around a bowl of water for us to wash our hands. We were also treated to a bottle of Coke each. It was very touching. The most touching part was the fact that the meal cost them about 1/8 of their month’s salary. I found this out because I asked where he bought his chicken, because we bought chicken at the grocery store and it cost $17 and it only did one meal and was very poor quality and so little meat that I wouldn’t buy it again. When he told me how much he paid for his chicken and then I added up the cost of the coke, I knew how much the meal had cost him. It brought me to tears. Can you imagine having someone to your home and it costing you 1/8 of your salary? What could you possibly serve in Canada that would amount to that amount? It’s pretty humbling, let me tell you.

We have spent much of our time building relationships with the children these past few weeks. They are wonderful children. That said, we have faced many challenges with them as well. As you can well imagine it would be unimaginable to expect anything less, with over 45 teens living in one area. It seems we are constantly having to deal with discipline and respect issues as well as the schooling problems that come up daily. All said it is much more work than we expected, but we’re slowly learning which thing work and which don’t.

I must say that our own children have been such an inspiration to us over the past few weeks. We received such a wonderful note of encouragement from one of our daughters. It was on a particularly stressful day and so many negative things had happened with a number of the older teens. We spent over 4 hours that evening dealing with one episode after another, and some pretty intense one on one time was necessary with a number of the children. We came home utterly spent and wondered if we made any difference. God must have known we really needed encouragement that day because when I opened my email this is what I found, “I know we all feel selfish not wanting you to go, but we also want all of those kids without parents to get to experience how great it is to have parents like you guys. That’s like going from being homeless to someone giving you a mansion, everything paid for, fully stocked with appliances and food! ”  

Up until that point I had been moping around, whining about how much I missed my kids at home-quite honestly I still do some days, I’m very close to my kids – but after reading that, how could I deny these kids the love that our kids felt? We love our own children so much, it’s a huge reason why being here is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, but after reading those words I realized that our kids will do just fine without us for a year.  We have a chance to give these kids a year of the craziness that is ‘Steve, Elaine, Kate and Mike’ and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

We don’t expect all the stress to magically disappear. We know that challenges will still arise and we expect that kids will still rebel. Ours did, and they had advantages of growing up in a country that these kids can’t even begin to imagine.  We know that eventually we’ll make friends and we’ll figure out how to find our way around town better and where to buy the things we need and one day, before we know it the time will come to return home to our own family. Somehow, I think when that day rolls around there will be as many tears in my eyes then are there were in my first week here, but for different reasons.

It’s amazing the difference a few weeks make.

Thank you all for continuing to pray for us, we appreciate it so much. Please pray for our health, as Steve and I are both ill with Malaria right now. Pray that Katie and Mike stay healthy. Pray for the hearts of the children as we continue to build relationships with each one. Pray that the staff will be receptive as we encourage them to take a more active role in the children’s lives. Pray for the new directors who will replace us, that God has the exact right people who are willing to build nurturing relationships with these children. Pray for financial provision for us and for Starehe. Finally pray for our family and extended family at home. We miss them so much and I know they miss us too. This is a difficult time for us as a family and your continued prayers mean so much to Jenn, David, Steph, Jared, and Tim. We love them and miss them so very, very much as well as the rest of our family and friends in Canada.

God Bless you all and we’ll talk again soon.