PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Thank you for your prayers throughout another week.  

Pray on for Eunice in our Nairobi office.  She had a fall recently and was injured; though not seriously.  She is doing well now, but appreciates you continuing to remember her.   Pray for her as she begins to use some new record sheets.  Pray that she will be able to adjust to the new system.  Joyce has been using this system for a while now and finds it helpful.  

After discussion with our team regarding our Nairobi office, it was decided that we would produce a flyer/leaflet which included a small map of the location of the office.  Addresses in Kenya are different to here in Northern Ireland.  We have a post box for our mail; but then people will use landmarks and road names to guide visitors to the physical location.  So, in order for us to produce such a leaflet; a friend of ours took a motorcycle on Monday and traced the route; marking down roads and landmarks etc.  We hope this will be available in the near future. 

We have quite a lot of items being designed and updated at the minute which will need printing as soon as possible in Kenya.  We thank God for gifts received in recent days, but do please pray that funds will be available to process all of these very necessary projects.  They include application forms for our lessons, certificates and other items.   We are thankful for help in compiling everything for the printer and look forward to receiving the proofs and being in a position to have them put into circulation. 

Technology makes communication with Africa so easy these days.  Website, email, texts, calls, facebook....they all help.  What's app is especially good as it allows a number of us to communicate between here and Africa and discuss things together.  Of course we also have our email course, which currently focuses on Child Protection.  However, whilst the email course has been very straightforward with people in Kenya and indeed in other countries; it has often been slightly more complicated with Ugandan people.  For some reason they seem to have trouble receiving the assignments.  We can't seem to get to the bottom of whether our mails are going into spam for some reason, but it has happened again a few times of late so we thought it was best to look at another option. 

So, we have worked on our website and have managed to create a private members section.  Students will be able to access their own private page.  On this page they will be able to download and upload assignments and view those which have already been marked.  We are also able to communicate with students via the web page and give them feedback on their assignments.  

This is very much in the trial stages at the moment.  All tests have been successful and today we have just sent it out to one student to try.  We are waiting patiently on some feedback.  Although the set up involves some extra work each time a new student begins the course, we hope it will make for a better system in the long run.  We are also thinking of other ways in which this system could be used and appreciate prayer for this. 

Two years ago today William and I were in Kenya.  It was a day of mixed emotions.  We remembered how my dad had passed away exactly one year before; we looked back and remembered his part in the work of FML.  We really needed God's help on that first trip without him.  But, we also celebrated our marriage with our dear friends in Kenya and we looked forward to continuing to serve God together.  Today, 3 years since Dad died and 2 years since our Kenyan wedding celebration, we are again filled with mixed emotions as we remember.  We thank God for memories and past blessings; but we continue to look ahead, to service for God and a special reunion one day with dad, and; for William; to meet my mum for the first time...something he has said to me many times.