Update

The last several weeks have been eventful. We spent the first week housebound because of car trouble, and then following a weekend visit to the Colombian countryside with some friends to visit some in-laws, we returned home and spent last week swapping the flu, fever, vomiting and diarrhea back and forth among the three of us. Thank God we are all feeling better this week although some of us are still not quite back to normal.

Jessie has been super busy here at Tenjo: the week of our car-trouble, she had her hands full dealing with 16 of the girls that were sick with some nasty virus that was circulating, which included two trips to the hospital. Finally today she was able to start moving the medical supplies and equipment into the clinic, which is almost ready. That will be a huge milestone both for the Girls’ Home and for Jessie since it will mean a new level in the organization, standardization and quality of the medical care and supervision that the girls will receive. Till now, even controlling the access to bottles of aspirin or syringes has been difficult because of the lack of dedicated facilities. Please pray for Jessie as she works to put together a clinic and a system that has never existed here before. While exciting, this obviously brings with it growing pains and the inevitable friction of being both a new staff member and initiating new procedures.

I have been busy catching up at the office after being gone for the better part of two weeks and also finally getting into the swing of things in the reporting/communications department. Tomorrow I have a important meeting to clarify and define my role at the office and to address a number of changes that will be taking place. As always, there are various requests for information, reports, interviews and multi-media presentations from various organizations and governments in The Netherlands and North America. I am also coordinating the visits of some other international visitors including a gathering of major donors later in June.

We obviously are in great need of your prayers as we continue our process of adjusting to the culture, learning the language and trying to form relationships. Thank you for all your prayers for our language skills; we are seeing improvement every day and with every gain, the opportunities to share, to minister and to build relationships increases.

We also have a special prayer request for two of the girls here at the Home. Karen and Paola are sisters and over this last weekend, their father was murdered in his home in Bogotá. Their situation was already difficult and complicated, but now even what little concept of family they had has been taken from them. Please pray for God’s grace and peace and comfort to pour out on them, and also pray that CDA will be able to contact the girls’ mother (who left them a long time ago) and figure out a way to keep them here at the Home (because this is not an orphanage, without the involvement and permission of at least one parent, the girls cannot legally stay here).

PS: you’ll have to forgive me, but without regular access to the internet, I’ve had to wait till today to upload all these various posts that I’ve written. If you’d like, you can read just one a day and keep coming back to make it last a little longer.

PSS: or is it PPS? Anyway, there are also some more pictures up if you visit the “Chynoweth Family Pictures” link on the right.