Bwanabob

Dear Friends,

We hope you all are well, we’ve heard on the news how the weather has been crazy in the US this summer, but for us it’s been the best year for rain here in Turkana since moving here in 1999. The rains have flooded other parts of Kenya and East Africa, but the Turkana have truly benefited from these rains. Granted the increased rains have washed away some of our roads and made conditions difficult when traveling. This last week I visited one of our churches, Lokwee, the trip was only 170 Kilometers, about 100 miles, but it took me 5 hours to get there. If you hear anyone complaining about global warming you might mention that it’s not all bad, at least for the Turkana of Kenya.

Our family has been well and we are very thankful for that. Edward may have started to come down with malaria a couple of weeks ago, but we treated him right away and the next day he bounced back to normal. Pray for Ericka’s Mom, she isn’t recovering so well from recent surgery.

The shipment we sent of Gospel Tracts and the illustrated book of Romans has arrived in Kenya, cleared customs and should be on it’s way to Eldoret! I believe that we won’t be charged any customs on the shipment, so pray that will be the case. I want to send a big thank you to Sweet Springs Baptist Church for giving us the Gospel literature and also a thank you to my home church for helping with the shipping expenses.

The trip I took this last week to the church in Lokwee was a real blessing to me. The drive was pretty hard, but the Church showed real maturity and a desire to serve the Lord. The Church had planned a four day seminar/crusade, so when I arrived I half expected to be asked to help pay to feed everyone. I had brought a little sugar and oil to help with the cooking, but knew someone would need to buy corn meal, vegetables, meat, milk and tea. I was pleasantly surprised that Pastor Kevin Lokwang didn’t ever ask me for anything once I had given him the sugar and oil. The church on their own had gathered enough food and offerings to take care of the needs. This may not seem like such a big deal to most of you, but rest assured that any missionary who has ever visited or served in Turkana will tell you that this is not the usual case when a missionary visits a small church in the bush of Turkana. I have visited other churches where before we are even given a cup of water to drink I was presented with a list of items and cash that would be needed to entertain us, right down to salt and money needed to send someone to bring water. Visiting Lokwee was truly an encouragement to me as a missionary and proof of the fact that the Turkana Churches have means to serve the Lord, they need only to be taught and given the opportunity. The seminar/lesson time was good and the young church seemed to soak up the teaching with willing hearts. In the evenings we set up our video projector and tied the screen onto the side of the Land Cruiser. The first night we had about 500 people come to see the videos and hear the preaching, the second night about 1000 and the third night I guessed there were between 1500 and 2000 people attending. In all there were about 25 professions of faith in Christ and on Sunday morning I baptized 18 new converts, some were as young as 12 and the oldest looked to be close to 70. After services on Sunday morning, the church took time to allow Donald, the former preacher at the church, to confess how he had mistreated the church and done things counterproductive to work of the Lord. The church openly forgave him and prayed for him, then gave their blessing for Donald to be under the leadership of Pastor William in Juluk. Pray for Donald’s continued restoration and discipleship. Pray for Pastor Kevin in Lokwee that he would continue to be a very useful vessel of the Lord.

I would ask you all to pray with me on the issue of the Bible Institute here in odwar. We believe the Lord is showing us that we must make some pretty serious hanges to the way the Bible Institute is operated in order for it to continue to train up local church leaders after the Lord moves us on one day. It’s very clear to me that if I were to leave Turkana next week the Bible Institute as we know it would cease to exist. So, we are preparing to make some serious changes to our program and funding for the Bible Institute to try and help prepare the churches of Turkana to continue training future church leaders once we are gone from the picture. Those who have worked anywhere in Africa can understand the seriousness of what we will be attempting to do. Here in Kenya, once you start some kind of program that benefits anyone in any way the local culture views it as an entitlement for eternity, written in stone. We have already seen several instances of missionaries trying to turn over a ministry to the locals, withdrawing from the leadership and withdrawing funding only to be accused of being Satan incarnate and eventually the entire ministry collapsing and being pillaged by those who were to be the future leaders. I know I’m painting a pretty bleak picture for the future of the Bible Institute, but we believe that there are enough strong Churches and Pastors among our number to successfully continue to train future church leaders in one form or another without outside assistance of any kind. We would like to help make the transition of the Bible Institute from being OUR ministry to being that of the LOCAL Churches. Please pray for this as we plan next month to begin discussing with the local Pastors how they can begin taking on this training themselves.

For those of you emailing us we now have a new gmail account, bwanabobclan@gmail.com and clarks@bwanabob.org our old account is no longer active and I believe that old server is completly defunct.

Our efforts to help the some of the pastors with small irrigation wells has had at least one successful outcome. Pastor Areng of Lorogumu has been given a contract by a local school to supply all of the vegetables for the rest of the school year. This is will be a huge boost to his income and also a great example to his community and other Pastors we work with. I am still attempting to work with two other pastors to get their wells up and running, the difficulty lies in our expectations of each other. The two other pastors would like for me to hand them “turn-key” irrigation schemes, I am asking them to invest “sweat equity” so that leaves us in a bit of a holding pattern. I am planning to build some culvert forms so that when we work to dig wells in the future we will be able to supply our own well, “casing.”

My plans to have a cattlemens video are on hold while I wait for another missionary to help me edit the video and put it on one cassette. A big thanks to those who sent video this summer. If you still plan to send me any video footage please contact me.

I had thought my camera had been stolen while we waited one night for a river to go down so we could drive across and get home. Thankfully, I found the camera under the seat of the Land Rover. I’m sure I’m not the only one who forgets what he’s done when half asleep. Anyway, I have pictures of the church that was built with funds given by the kids of Maranatha Bible Camp in 2006. I’ll work to get those pictures posted on bwanabob.org

Note: Photos are available here.

Thank you all for partnering with us, whether in prayer or any other means. We would like to say that in all things we have found the Lords provision to be sufficient and beyond our expectations.

In Christ, Bob, Ericka, Vance, Edward and Riley.

Friends,

This next week starts up this month’s Bible Institute.  Please be praying for the teachers, Bob and Pastor William Eregai, as the two of them will be teaching all of the classes between first and second year.  There will be very little time for a breather or to let the brain have a break from all the Swahili.  I will be teaching Paulina, our only female student,  but my time teaching is minor compared to theirs.

The main reason I am writing is for a meeting that should take place this week.  Pastor Sammy found that a relative of his is married to a powerful witchdoctor in the Kerio area.  The name of the witchdoctor is Namwour.  Other missionaries and Christians have been praying for him.  The prayers have been so powerful that there was a time he was running through the district saying that the Lion of Judah is chasing him.  So this week Pastor Sammy is planning to talk with him.  Please pray for protection around Pastor Sammy and the Holy Spirit to guide his every word.  Then for Namwour that the Holy Spirit is working on him even now and that he will be ready to accept Jesus and give up the evil work that he is doing.  Pastor Sammy started preaching in Kerio about four weeks ago, he goes there during the week and returns to Lodwar to be in his church on Sunday.  Namwour and a cult group called “the legion of mary” have scared away everyone from trying to plant a church in Kerio.  Please pray for Pastor Sammy’s mission work in Kerio and for Namwour to believe on Jesus.

Another prayer request is for Pastor Aremon, he is Pastor at Nabuin.  The Christians there have been slow to help finish the building that our group helped start this summer.  We always try to work with the local churches to do things together, such as buildings.  Please pray that Pastor Aremon will be able to encourage the congregation to work together to finish their building.

Thank you,

Ericka