Hey, friends,
THIS IS LONGGGGGGGGGG….be warned! I had to divide it in three parts to send all the photos on e-mail!
Well, FINALLY I get this update to you! Life can be so fast and furious, I feel like I haul around a wagon full of unfinished business. Well, I'm confident that part of the spiritual struggle we face here in our culture is learning to let go of that wagon for a while to enjoy and be faithful to the blessings before us. Thank you for your patience with me as I've been carting around my very full Radio Flyer, but learning to park it in the driveway to do things like talk to my neighbors, make a vest for my high schooler's homecoming costume, take time to do Ron a favor, and most importantly, spend good time with the Lord in His word. He is good.
I'm sorry for how long it took me to give you the final Africa update. It just took me forever to sift through our photos and upload some of them. I've put more of them on snapfish if you'd like to check those out . You'll find them on
(alayra-africafotos.snapfish.com/snapfish), and we'll be adding more to our photos section on the website soon .
To put our Africa experience in a nutshell…it was awesome. If you read the previous entries on our website, you can hear about the Rwandan half . We continue to hear from people in Rwanda (e-mail is awesome!) about the blessing our ministry was to so many children. One person we've continued to correspond with is our Compassion translator, Briton. What an amazing Christian brother. He and his young wife adopted three grown boys (20, 19, and 17) who were orphaned by the genocide. They have two small children of their own (see photo-Briton is second from the right).
Briton and Frida's hearts are so huge-they were contemplating taking in triplets whose father died of AIDS and mother has decided to roam to Uganda to find the father's relatives for subsistence. Life in Rwanda is unlike anything we could know-so much loss and death, yet the beauty of the Lord sending hope through His word and His people.
Here are a few more pictures that captured our time in Rwanda:
My friend Deb Griffith (organized the Rwanda trip) with school children.
(Woman to her right is wearing traditional Rwandan dress)
Chandy surprised us all with her passion for singing for the children.
Ron working with locals (who spoke mostly French) on gear that came from Europe…somehow they worked together and it sounded great. Brittany helping lead songs to encourage her peers in Kigali, Africa, to keep following Jesus!
Below, our trip to visit the child we sponsor through Compassion International-darling Angelique; Haley with Compassion sponsored children; all of them assembled to greet us with singing.
Brittany and Deb's daughter, Paris blowing bubbles for the kids; Chandy giving stickers to neighborhood kids who showed up,<