Travis Returns Home
After serving with us for 9 month, Amber’s 18 year old nephew, Travis, returned to the States on the 21st of April. He was a
great help and while he spent a lot of his time under vehicles and covered in grease (helping Jako keep the vehicles in working order during our difficult rainy season), he also helped lead community Bible studies, was also deeply invested in the boys at the children home’s and enjoyed his weekly Bible study with them and tutoring of some of the other children. He was well adored by the locals and as the youngest member of our team was affectionately nicknamed “Madala” (aka old man). While he will be missed we look forward to seeing what God has in store for this young man with a missions heart and thank God for the privilege of being able to serve and live with family for the time he was here. Alyssa’s 2 year commitment finishes
Another BIG change and sadness for us is that Alyssa Bolles, 2 year commitment with us has finished and she will be returning to
the States on May14th. Many of you may remember but Alyssa is the one who came here with the task of starting a community preschool way out here in the rural village bush. When she first arrived there wasn’t even a complete school building and in the time since then she has been involved in every aspect of the school from roofing, overseeing building, painting, building furniture, finding and training teachers, developing a curriculum, teaching styles, teachers manuals, teacher contracts, teaching herself, building the playground, designing art projects, decorating the walls, organizing donations, and impacted over 150 students in the preschool so far. On top of that the community has seen such just how much the children are learning (they say even more than the older children at the community schools) they have begged MOL to help start a
community grade school. Alyssa has been instrumental in working with the community to see the community start building bricks, bringing sand and stones with hopes to start building and possibly open a grade 1 (or 1/2) next January. We held a surprise going away party for her in the village (that was greatly attended) where villager after villager 
shared how much Alyssa had meant to them. She even has 2 village babies here named after her! While she has been a big blessing to the ministry, the preschool, and the children and mothers at the children’s home, she has also been a big blessing to us as a family. Jakob and Jeremiah are going to miss their special friend and while we wish great things for her in the States, she will 
definitely be missed here more than she will ever know. Please pray for Medis (the local villager) and Melanie as they help the preschool transition from the season of Alyssa’s leadership to the season of more indigenous leadership and self sustainability.
Rainy Season Recovery and Hardly a Harvest
On our last two notes of the season the GOOD NEWS is that the roads have finally begun drying up and we can now take our regular road to and from town instead of taking the tricky bush diversions that extended our drive from 2 – almost 3 hours,The BAD NEWS is that due to the heavy rain and our decision not to waste money on fully fertilizing the crops that were most likely going to drown our harvest this year was extremely minimal at best. It was hard to see the total of 3 1/2 bags of unshelled maize that was collected compared to
the approx 200 bags that we had last year however last years harvest was so plentiful that we still have some maize left over to get us through a part of this year. We will have to buy for the remainder. As unfortunate as this is for us, please pray for the many villagers who we fear will suffer from hunger this year because much if not their entire sustenance is based on their yearly crop which was poor all around this year.
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