Ninas Family Missional Life

Due to difficulties in Zambia with Blogspot, I have moved my mission blog to Wordpress at : https://polarpandasite.wordpress.com/ I apologize for the inconvenience.  Locals have told me that the Zambian government is messing with Blogspot blogs to monitor posts.

It is Sunday in Dar es Salaam .  As part of the Seconded conference, we have praise and worship every morning from 8:45-9.  Our youth learned the Navigator's  Lynne with Kara and Ella. ABC Bible study  method and seemed very interested in learning it.  Feedback from the parents is that the students are loving the Bible study instruction and practice we are giving them.  We started with 8 students, but one of the students (12-year-old) preferred to work in the nursery.  Her home church is here to care for the children, and she wants to spend time with them. Our transportation. After finishing the teaching day early we had the opportunity to take a boat ride to the tropical island of Mbudya (Lat 6.66 o   South, Long 39.24 o    East).  It is a 2.3-mile boat ride in a motor-powered dhow with about 20 other people in what was today pretty rough seas.  We had sporadic rain, winds with gusts to 25 MPH, and 1-2 foot wa...

*************************************************************************************************************** (Please note that blue text is a hyperlink in case you want more information about something in my blog.) *************************************************************************************************************** The end of our second full day in Dar es Salaam (pronounced Dars-Slom) has Tanzania Sunrise arrived.  It is game night here at the Seconded Conference.  In case you missed my first blog post, the Seconded are Bible translators who are part of Wycliffe that work for SIL .  We have Texas Hold 'em, Spades, Scrabble, or early to bed.  Some of the parents of small children opted for the latter.  So many experiences and conversations the first two days, I will try to summarize. We are staying at Landmark Resort in Dar es Salaam.  The room is very nice.  The food is good, what there is of it.  The pool is not functional ...

This seemed like an eventuality that would be a long time coming but we landed in Zanzibar, Tanzania, around 3 PM on Thursday, July 28th. It has been a long three days, but God has really blessed to get us here. We kept running into two ladies going to work at an orphanage in Malawi who were on the same flights as Lynne and me. Praying they arrived safely sometime today. When we checked in with the United Courtesy Desk yesterday, we found no courtesy. They basically said, “Not our fault. Suck it up buttercup!” However, the person on duty gave us one sound piece of advice that paid dividends when we checked in at the Ethiopian Air ticket counter. Our flight was scheduled to board at 10 am and depart at 11 am. So back up three hours from boarding and you would think getting there by 7 would be a good idea. The dude from United said he had seen the cattle call at the Ethiopian Air counter, and suggested we get there by 6 (our plan but that is the next paragraph). So we got to the c...

To say the least, it has been a long and stressful day.  We are still in America.  On the way to ATL yesterday evening we encountered a horrendous storm.  We didn't think anything of it until we arrived at the airport at 3:30 am for our 5:40 am flight.  United finally admits that our flight is delayed by three hours and we will not make our connection at Dulles International to Addis  Ababa and thus miss our flight to Dar-es-Salaam.  After three hours we had a flight to Dulles at 9 am, and plans to spend the night in Chantilly, Virginia, to catch our Ethiopian Airlines flight to Addis Ababa and then (surprise) a flight to Zanzibar, off the coast of Dar-es-Salaam.  So we arrived in Dulles to be told by the United agent that we would not put up for the night as promised, and we should have stayed in Atlanta and caught the flight to Dulles the next morning.  Needless to say, we were stressed. So we paid a visit to the Dulles International ...

We are a little over 24 hours before our flight to Dulles International departs Atlanta.  We will layover there for 3 hours before boarding Ethiopian Airlines for our 13.5-hour flight to Addis Ababa.  I am going to share some snippets of information with you that will be a mix of praise and prayer request you can sort out. Lynne checked off a tandem parachute jump from her bucket list yesterday.  The freefall made her queasy, and she said it was very loud with the wind rushing by at 120 MPH.  No, she will not be doing this again. Called the gastroenterologist at the Atlanta VA Medical Center today to schedule simultaneous an endoscopy and a colonoscopy.  Thank goodness you are unconscious when they do it.  The nurse said they would schedule with a nearby civilian surgeon and give me a call.  I told her I would be out of the country for the month of July and would not be available even by phone.  She asked where we were going and ...

Mbugwe receiving books of Ruth & Jonah 2016 "When are you leaving for Tanzania?"   We will drive to Atlanta June 25th to spend the night and depart Atlanta airport early on the morning of June 26th.  We will arrive in Dar-es-Salaam on June 27th. What books of the Bible do the three groups we will be teaching have in their mother tongue? Burunge  (we have the entire NT and Ruth, Jonah, Genesis, and Exodus)   Rangi  ( NT books, Luke, Mark, 1-3 John, Philippians, Colossians, Acts, Revelation, OT Ruth, Jonah, and Genesis.)  Mbugwe   Mark, Ruth, Jonah, and maybe Luke( by July). If you are interested where in Tanzania those language groups are located, and how far they will travel to Dodoma, here is a  language map for Tanzania.   Numbers 36, 37 and 42 are the locations for the groups we are teaching.  We are expecting about 20 people per language group (coed).  Does Tanzania have a national language?   S...

We are 18 days out from our departure.  I wish we were more prepared at this point but we are not.  We are still going to be leading youth VBS for Seconded* youth in Dar-es-Salaam.  There will be families from Tanzania, Uganda (pronounced ooo-ganda), and Kenya. I wanted to share with you the information we have for the groups to whom we will be sharing strategies for studying the Bible.  Josh Chance, Wycliffe Bible Translations coordinator in Tanzania, sent us information on the three groups.  We will have three days with each group and will teach the women and men separately.  It is not required but we (Lynne, Larry, Josh, and locals) feel the women will be more open to listening, talking and learning if the teaching is separate.  Lynne and I are trying to write scripts to provide the translators ahead of time so that they can work on any vocabulary problems.  Here are the groups and the books of the bible they have: Burunge ...

Eastern Phoebe It seems early to have a new group of fledgling Easter Phoebes on the downspout outside my office window.  It was a year ago in May that I stepped out my back door into the carport and scared a group of fledglings out of their nest over one of the carport windows.  Mom continued to bring food for a few hours, wondering where all of those hungry mouths went.   It is April, and 4 fledglings are fluttering their wings on the edge of the nest on the downspout, and I have begun to look back over the year and wonder what I have learned over the last year.  If I learn something (REALLY learn something) it becomes part of who I am and effects my thoughts and actions.  So here is what stands out for me over the last year. INAM      I have these initials written on my left index finger most days.  Most people don't notice (they aren't supposed to notice it) so there aren't questions about what it means.  These three let...

Victoria Falls 2013 Lynne and I have been working on plans to work with Wycliffe Bible Translator missionaries Josh and Susan Chance in Dodoma, Tanzania, since last summer.  As of this writing, we have confirmed tickets leaving on June 26th and returning July 27th.  Details? Josh and Susan came to one of our mission conferences a few years ago.  Josh and Lynne grew up together in Auburn.  We were able to have dinner with them last year when they were home on furlough, and I was captivated by the work they are doing to develop a written language and translate the Bible for the people of Tanzania.   According to Ethnologue, there are a total of  126  languages spoken in Tanzania. Two are institutional, 18 are developing, 58 are vigorous, 40 are endangered, and 8 are dying. There are also three languages that recently became extinct.  Wycliffe and SIL International  just recently published the books of Ruth and Mark in the Burung...