A Week

So I have been in South Sudan for just over a week now. 9 days to be exact. My main job right now is to just get used to everything, which is not simple!

Last Sunday there were two really good groups at church under the trees! Thank you to those who prayed about that. We went to Namamninyok (literally translated "there are no dogs" and good luck trying to pronounce it) in the morning and sang some songs about Jesus in Toposa, then listened to the parable of the sower from Luke on the proclaimer in the Turkana language (a sister language to Toposa). The Toposa are such a small, isolated tribe that there are no portions translated on the proclaimer yet so we listen to Bible stories in Turkana. Sunday night we had a similar gathering under the big tree down the road from where we live. We sang Jesus songs in Toposa, listened to John 3 on the proclaimer in Turkana and then Alyssa asked some questions to generate some discussion about the story. Overall there were about 50 people there that night.

In the mornings I was going to language lessons with Shannon and Carrie but that only lasted until Wednesday because it poured all morning on Thursday and no one gets out in the rain! I used the extra time that morning to make tortillas and read. The pace of life in Africa as a whole is much slower than in the US, and out here in South Sudan is slows down even more than that! The slow pace has been one more thing to get used to, although I'm currently grateful for the slowness because this new life is easier to handle when I have time to process everything. My team is awesome so I am thankful that I have such a great group of friends here to hang out with and immediate help/explanations when I need it!

We drove to Kapoeta this morning (about 8 kilometers away) to pick up a medical team from Beaumont, TX. These six people will be here all week to do clinics in nearby villages. This is the first time a medical team has come here so over this week please pray for each clinic! Our plan is to do one clinic per day from about 9am-3pm, which would be about 1am-7am CST. As you are going to bed each night you could pray for that next clinic! One specific thing you could pray for is accurate diagnosing and medicine dispensing. Malaria has been a big problem lately, so we are thinking that a lot of what we will be doing is malaria testing/treating.

And weird, not many Toposa seem to care that the Rangers are in the World Series...