Dear Friends and Family,
How di bodi? Krio greetings from Freetown, West Africa. We hope this finds you enjoying the warm spring weather and blooming tulips! Sierra Leone doesn't have seasons like we've been familiar with, spring, summer, fall, and winter. Here, there are three seasons, dry, wet, and windy. As for us, we're just entering the rainy season. Come July and August, both months average about 28 days of rain and about 36 inches of rainfall. For ourselves, we can pass the rain on the third floor of our sturdy concrete house. However, for our friends in Kroo Bay, this is a painfully difficult time. Freetown is built on the side of a hill and the only drainage is street-side ditches which quickly overflow during the heavy rains. City streets quickly turn into channels of flowing water. Kroo Bay, home to 7,000 Sierra Leoneans and 3,500 children, is built along the main city drainage canal where the city runoff flows out into the ocean. Over time, the plastic bags and bottles littered on the streets, have washed down to Kroo Bay and clogged the drainage canal there. So when rain comes, the swirling flood waters from the city streets overrun the canal channel and flow through the entire Kroo Bay community as they make their way out to the ocean. Houses are flooded waist deep or more and families are displaced. With the frequency and volume of rain that comes during the rainy season, parts of Kroo Bay become unlivable. When the waters do subside, the muck and mire remaining provide a swampy breeding ground for mosquitos and disease. Please remember our Kroo Bay children and their families in prayer in these coming months.
As for news from Freetown, we've just come out of a week-long conference that Word Made Flesh hosted. It was for our Lighthouse youths' caregivers on working with children in crisis. About 50 caregivers and fellow NGO workers joined us for the week and we learned about moving children in crisis toward being children in Christ. We covered basic principles of how to discipline a child and how to develop healthy boundaries. We also delved deeper into art therapy and ways we can help children safely express the trauma and pain they've experienced, in a safe environment.
Mentoring our youth is still an up and down, step forward and step backward adventure. I am learning the balance between being a friend but also being an authority figure, and how that type of relationship works. At times it is challenging to feel that friendship when your youth is skipping meetings or ignoring your instructions. Please continue to pray for our Lighthouse youth that they will rise up to their responsibilities of school and their apprenticeships.
We are grateful to see the developments in our Sierra Leone staff. These past two weeks we've had a couple of conversations where they themselves have shared dreams about what the future of WMF Sierra Leone could look like. One shared a dream of having a home for boys from the streets and another shared a dream of an orphanage to care for children who don't have proper parents. A big part of what we're involved with here is discipling and reproducing this sense of calling to serve in Christian community to our Sierra Leonean counterparts. I believe there comes a point where this sense of ownership is caught, going from simply a good job or work to instead a sense of future possibilities and calling. We're just here to plant the community and to pass on Kingdom principles and values. In our upcoming staff retreat in July, I'm looking toward facilitating more opportunities for us to dream together as a community. You can be praying for our community that God would continue to cast vision for the future in our hearts. Pray that he will lead the right Sierra Leoneans into our community that we can share with and dream with. Pray for our Sierra Leonean friends that God would give them dreams for the future of what he has for us as a community here in Sierra Leone.
Erin has been going once a week to do physical therapy in the clinic at Kroo Bay. We're grateful for the door God has opened there and the foot we've been able to put inside. Please continue to pray that God would bring together a medical team that could minister in greater capacity here in the slum. Erin's experience in physical therapy is useful, but there is so much more need here than just therapy. Just this past Tuesday Erin was walking through Kroo Bay doing therapy visits. Suddenly a mother came up to her with a small baby boy in her hands. The mother held out the sickly child to Erin as she begged her to help in some way. Erin could see the child's skin had a greyish tinge and he was very sick. The mother told Erin the baby had been diagnosed with a couple of diseases but he had not gotten any better. The hospital told her that there was a waiting list of one month to admit the child for treatment. Erin felt the frustration and limitations of her medical knowledge and not knowing how to help this mother or child. Please pray that God would bring together a team with diverse medical experience and knowledge to help develop this dream of a fully functioning medical clinic in Kroo Bay. We have a dream of a place where mothers could bring their sick infants and they could be treated for little or no charge. There are so many possibilities and so many needs. We know God is here and he cares for such as these.
Erin and I have recently begun the process of looking for our own place here in Freetown. The house we're in has been great, but doubles as the community office and we're realizing that the congestion, with people in and out many days of the week, leaves us with little reliable space to rest and relax. Please be praying for us as we search, as it can be a long process to secure housing here in Freetown. It would be nice to find a bit quieter place but still within walking distance of town so Chris' boys could meet at our place for small group. We'll keep you updated as time goes on.
Thank you again for all of your prayers and support. We could not be doing this without you. We've been blessed by continued good health even after three full months here. Please pray for us as we find ways to deal with the daily stresses of life here in the city.
With Hope and Love,
Chris and Erin