First Two Weeks

Dear Friends,
These first 2 weeks in Sudan have been difficult at times but there have many occasions where we’ve thought: “This is where we belong. We can do this.” I’ve found that I get “charged” by being out with people. God has given me opportunities to get out to be with people and it’s given me a new energy and excitement to be here. On Saturday, the three of us missionary wives went to visit a small village nearby. We stopped and had tea with a sweet couple, Esther and Peter, practiced our Arabic, and answered their many questions: Where are we from? Why did we come? How long will we stay? And on and on. When we got up to leave, Peter asked us to wait and in a few minutes he returned with a gift of a live chicken for each of us. This is a very generous gift since he gave us hens which lay eggs, so we said many thanks and left.
On Sunday we walked almost 2 miles to church. The boys did amazingly well sitting quietly through about half of the service and then I took them out to sit under a huge tree. We attracted quite a crowd of small village children who had probably never seen a white child before! I had given Isaac and Evan a ziplock bag of raisins for a small snack and they started passing them out to all the children (there were almost 20!) It was so much fun to see the children’s smiles and hear their giggles as they tasted these sweet treats for the first time. I was worried they wouldn’t eat it since they look a lot like goat poop!
I think we’ve done really well learning Arabic so far and we’ve picked up A LOT! But we haven’t been very disciplined about sitting down with our language helper every day since there are sooooo many projects and jobs Eli is needed to help with. So hopefully next week we can set up some new priorities. Eli has been a huge help around here. Our teammates daily thank him for all he does. When something’s not working or Chris needs something built or made, Eli does it, even if he doesn’t know how or if he’s never done it before. And he’s had great success so far. I think God has given him a great gift in this area and I’m so proud of him and thankful God is using him in this way. Love, Bethany (and Eli, Isaac, and Evan)

P.S. Just another side note. I don’t know if I mentioned this but we are able to receive packages in Kenya . Our teammates have received close to 30 packages in the past 2 years! So we know it works. The address is: Eli and Bethany Fader, SIM SUDAN
Box 79252 , 00200, City Square, Nairobi, Kenya, East Africa

The things that would be nicest to receive: books for the boys, drink mixes (Koolaid, Crystal Light, Gatorade).