They tell us that this is dry season, but we have had some really heavy rains the past few days. We are not complaining. It has helped to keep our water tanks full and has watered our new plants and grass. Actually, during rainy season, it will rain all day for several days on end, just wave after wave of rain.
We have made good progress again this week. It is just amazing the number of little details that are involved in getting the house finished and the ministry work started in earnest.
 Mr. Lampson is going to start teaching music training with us. He owns a small music store in town and has a realheart for God. He is also starting a ministry downtown for youth that we will support and be involved with.
He started teaching music with the young people at Zion Baptist church about a year ago, as you can see in this picture. Our plan is to select 4-5 young people from Zion Baptist Church and Hopewell Baptist Church who will train up together as a music team.
Mr. Lampson will be teaching the kids two at a time. He is quite talented, as are his kids who also teach music. They all play together at worship events.
 We have almost finished up the training room. We got all the tables cut in half and put new legs on them. We had Cesar make a nice secure bracket for the digital projector so that it does not take up valuable space on the tables. It also keeps the wires out of the way.
This allows us to accomodate 24 students at the tables and six more in the chairs at the back of the room.
We also are having Cesar take all of our extra metal and fabricate a large outdoor oven and grill. A lot of people cook bread in outdoor ovens (old refrigerators turned into outdoor ovens). We are also hoping to be able to cook about six pizzas at a time when we are entertaiing. The labor cost on this is less than $100 and saves us from having to buy a $600 stove. You can see pics in the gallery.
 Kim hosted a dinner for the ladies in her Bible Study group last Saturday. She had about 12 ladies there and they seem to have had a good time.
Our leadership training class this past Tuesday went quite well. We continued studying through Acts and also watched a short video.
My study time takes up probably 20 hours per week since I am preparing a thorough study on the book of Acts. We are through chapter 18.
Once this is complete, we are going to begin a similar study through the book of Luke. This will give us complete study courses through Luke (life of Christ), Acts (the early church) and Romans (basic Christian doctrine). In outlying areas where we cannot teach the full ministry curriculum, if we can just teach these courses, we will have given people a very solid footing.
 We are trying to get our well drilling rig working. We had a problem with the pump and have had an even bigger problem trying to find seals for it. I took the old pump seal all over Dallas and had no success. This week, I looked all over the internet for a mechanical pump seal with these dimensions and nobody knows anything. There are seals for thousands of different pumps, but not for this one.
We have ordered a couple of seals that we will try to make work. If it is even close (and we think it is) we will find a way to make ti work. We are used to doing that here in Nicaragua. It is amazing what you can do with a little old-fashioned "yankee ingenuity". When we get it all working, then we will try to drill a new well for ourselves and then hopefully be able to drill wells for others as a ministry.
Kim continues to personalize the house with all her knick knacks. She took several other pictures that are in the gallery.
I am continuing to work on the cabinets, but Alfred is doing the finishing work, so that I can get it done quicker.
I am hoping to turn more of the wood working over to him because I don't want to spend the entire year doing this, and there are still a lot of cabinets and shelves to build.
The difficulty is that it takes a lot of work to make the lumber usable. You have to plane a straight edge on the board to even be able to cut it, then you cut it and  every board has some warping in it (often severe) which you have to plane out two edges on each board. Then you cut it down to dimensions and plane it again. All that to get one piece.
We are so glad that we brought a jointer/planer with us. We got this almost by accident about 8 years ago when someone offered it to us for $200 dollars. We really never used it until we got here, and now we use it daily. We use the shavings as fertilizer on on the new grass, which is doing well.
Today (Saturday) we will be hosting our workers for pizza. This will be the beginning of an exciting ministry where we invite people in and read a short passage before eating. We will have a gospel of John at each place that they can take home with them to continue reading. I will also be meeting with the youth from both of the Baptist churches to help organize outreach teams and select the young people who will take place in the musical training.
Thank you as always for your prayers.
God bless you,
Tim and Kim |
