Exciting things are happening!

Hello from Taiwan!

This is far overdue, but we will recap the last several months.

Jan/Feb
We had a DTS outreach team here for two months. It was the longest amount of time that we have ever hosted an outreach team and they were a huge blessing to our ministry. Because they were here longer, they were able to build deeper relationships with the same people. They had a huge heart for evangelism and because of this, they led 7 people to the Lord! Since they have left we have been plugging these people into Taiwanese churches and getting to do discipleship with them.

March- June
We hosted 3 more teams during this time. They spent the majority of their time doing evangelism out in the city and going into high schools to do English activities. Because of this, many new students are coming to our Rock Cafe to hang out.We've been able to share the gospel with a lot of new people.

In May we attended our yearly YWAM national staff conference.  It was a much needed time of renewal and reconnecting with our mother base that sent us out two years ago.  Unfortunately, on our way home, our van broke down on the highway, due to a tire blowout.  It caused a few extra problems with the van and it was in the shop for two weeks.  We stayed overnight in the city where we broke down and rode the train home the next day.  We were thankful for God's protection during the incident.

As far as our team, one of our members, Biggie from Zambia, returned home to get married. We are excited for him and this new chapter in his life, but we are also sad to see a good friend and co-worker leave. Another member of our team, Erin from New Zealand, also left for home. She grew up in missions because her parents are missionaries and now she is going back to university.  She is excited but the uncertainty of this transition is also hard for her. We are also sad to see her go. Right now we still don't have any hope of new staff joining our team, so that means the responsibility will be falling on Angwar and us. We pray that more help will be coming.

Family
Elliot will graduate kindergarten next week! It's been a challenge learning how the school system works in another country, but we really like his school.  When he started, he didn't know any Chinese at all and it was a tough transition for him. He is now speaking Chinese all the time and loves going to school!  Ezra will start in the same kindergarten in the fall.  He is very excited and wants to start right away.  Maelynn is 19 months old and is mostly very sweet, but she is entering the stage of throwing tantrums when things don't go her way.  She understands almost everything we say to her, although she isn't speaking much.  She uses baby sign language well to communicate.  In May, we celebrated the boys' birthdays with a scooby doo party. They turned 4 and 6.

Easter Sunday

riding the train when our van broke down

special mother's day ceremony at Elliot's school

Elliot and his friend Abigail at the birthday party

Maelynn and her baby doll

Keith took this picture while hiking with an outreach team

Hanging out at the Rock Cafe

What has happened since our return home from our furlough

Tinkerbell, Peter Pan, and Captain Hook enjoying the holidays

For Taiwan, this summer/fall has been an eventful one.   Around June- October is typhoon season.  This year has been especially bad because they had experienced multiple storms that were some of the worst in its history.  After we returned, we experienced a few typhoons, but none hit our city directly and as badly, as the storm that hit while we were on furlough in the US this past summer. Our city had a lot of damage.  Not long after we returned late August, we found out our landlord had put our house up for sale and 3 days after learning that, it was sold.  So we started packing up our house and looking for a new place.  We had started packing in September and in the beginning of October we had another tropical storm (It is a tropical storm  just before it becomes a typhoon, the weakest typhoon being a category 1).  During this storm, it had rained a LOT.  That day, Elliot was in school, Maelynn was taking a nap, and Magan and I had just gotten off of skype.  Ezra was running around the house playing when suddenly Ezra says, "There's water!".  Magan and I assumed he had spilled a cup of water and had gotten up to see what kind of mess he had made.  We quickly realized that water was rushing in from outside.  Our house sat just below street level and since the drains had gotten blocked, the water on the streets had no where to go.  So the water came into our place and all of our neighbor's houses.  The water just kept coming and coming in and there was no way to stop it.

Cleaning after the flood in our home 

 Since we were in the middle of moving we had boxes stacked all over our house so we quickly grabbed boxes and rushed them up to the second floor.  The water got as high as 7 inches, and around an hour later, it all started to drain back out of the house (Praise God!).  Since we had so much water in our house Ezra thought it was a great time to practice his back stroke and freestyle swimming.  He had so much fun while mom and dad were stressed out and trying to move things as quickly as possible.  Someone unplugged the drains and plus the rain had finally slowed down (after 2 days of pouring down rain) so the water started to subside.  Some of our friends in the city came to help us dry the floor and clean it so that it wouldn't mould as quickly. We lost some cheap book cases, the legs to our dining table are pealing, and we spent a lot of time repacking boxes and drying out the books we wanted to save.

Everything that was lost (not too bad)

 Overall we felt rather blessed it wasn't worse. Since all of that happened, we were eager to move into our new house, but we had to wait another week for it to be ready for us to move in.  We luckily had an outreach team here during our move and were able to move the majority of our stuff within 2 days.  So now we have mostly settled into our new place. We have been in the new house for almost two months.  In our next post we hope to put pictures of our new place.

In the month of November we celebrated Maelynn's first birthday and she started walking about a week before she turned one!  She's growing too fast.  :)

Playing Candy Land with their toys

Maelynn having some breakfast amidst the move

We returned back home

Thanks for lending a hand

Since our last post we saw a lot of you back in the US while we were on furlough.  We were really blessed and enjoyed spending time with everybody.  We wish we could have been there longer to see even more people and spend more time with you guys, but unfortunately time just wasn't enough :(.

We returned back to Taiwan a few weeks ago and while we were on our drive home from Taipei Elliot's school called us.  They said, "Did you know that Elliot first day of school is tomorrow?".  Haha, poor Elliot, but I guess school was a good way to help him stay awake and get over jetlag.  Last year Elliot only went to school for half the day, but this year we decided to send him for the whole day.  So now he goes Monday-Friday 7:50-4:00.  He seems to be enjoying school even better than last year.  When we pick him up, he is usually in a really good mood and seems to have had a good day.  We decided to send him the whole day for a couple reasons: We wanted to allow him to get used to going all day. He will get more exposure to Chinese.  We hope he will feel better prepared for 1st grade next year.

Elliot's first day of school

While we were in the US, Taitung had the biggest typhoon hit it directly in the last 100 years!  There was a lot of damage and the Taiwan government even sent in the army to help with cleanup and rescue.  Just recently another super typhoon barely missed the southern tip of Taiwan.  The eye was a few miles off the coast, but we still experienced very strong wind and heavy rain.  Everything was okay, very little rain found its way into our house.

Soon after returning home, we discovered that our landlord put our house on the market.  Within days of finding that out, it was sold.  So now, we will need to move out of our house by December.  We are a little disappointed and overwhelmed about the upcoming move, but we trust God that He has something else prepared for us.  We are now searching for a new house to rent.

On a ministry side of things we started preparations for the September 2017 DTS here in Taitung!  We are very excited to be starting this process.  We can't wait to see everything God is going to do.  We are excited to watch Him bring more staff for the school and we can't wait to meet the students that he will bring here to learn more about Him while blessing our city with evangelism in the process!

Thats it for now. We love and miss you all.

A lot to update on

Hey everybody,

It has been a while.  Just wanted to let you know we are still here :-).  There has been a lot that has happened since our last post 7 months ago (Wow, really 7 months? How is that possible?).  Well here is a video that we made to show what all has happened this past year.  We hope you enjoy!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLAvrKinZzE

Busy Summer

Hello everyone,

Our summer here has been very busy.  We have had 3 YWAM outreach teams come here to help back to back in the month of July.  Thanks to the help of the outreach teams, we were able to run 2 different kids camps for 2 different churches.  The outreach teams also helped a lot by advertising for our Rock Cafe.  They would go around to different parts of the city and hand out flyers advertising for us.

Here is a link that a friend from one of the churches made from the English camp.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDA1ZvbMr7Y

English camp the Kona team ran

Outreach teams help draw a lot of people to our Rock Cafe

We had all the kids come to the Rock Cafe for the afternoon

Down to the last two in musical chairs

This is how the outreach teams get around the city

Nap time for the kids :)

It is really nice having somebody lead worship for us

Family News:
Next time we update this blog, we will be able to share with you about Elliot's first day of school!  It seems so crazy that he will be starting school on August 31.  He still seems too little :) Please pray for his transition, since he doesn't speak Chinese yet.  Also, it has been confirmed by our doctor that the baby inside Magan's belly is in fact a girl :) YAY!  We are very excited and can't wait till she gets here in November!

The Rock Cafe is open!!!!

These last couple months have been really busy here!  If you haven't seen our updates on Facebook, we have found a location for our Rock Cafe!!  The first floor will be our cafe.  The second floor will be used for English classes.  The third floor will have our office.  We feel so blessed to have finally found a place where we can do the ministry that we feel like God has called us here to do.  We spent around 4-6 weeks getting it ready.  We were working on it up until a few hours before opening :).  The word is slowly getting out about our cafe.  Mainly friends are passing it on to other friends and even bringing people in. Here are some pictures of the whole process.

Street view - it is 4 floors

A DTS team painted some free desks and chairs

We hand sanded all the free wood that we used to make our tables

Prepping the walls for paint

Everything but the chairs were made from recycled pallet wood

Our first night!

     

     A Friend painted this tree for us

Overall getting the Rock ready was a lot of work but we feel blessed to finally be up and running.  We had some much needed help from  two YWAM staff from Montana that helped us for an entire month.  Also a DTS team from Taipei came and helped for a week.  These groups of people had committed to coming to help us, but for a long time we'd been unable to find a place.  We signed the contract within a week of the DTS team's arrival. God had perfect timing!

A Cool story:

 Magan and one of our fellow staff members are involved in teaching a baking class for our church staff.  They run a coffee shop for evangelism and wanted to start selling baked goods there. Recently, they decided to start using the baking class as an opportunity to invite nonbelievers to learn how to bake with the hopes of sharing the gospel. Two weeks ago we had 2 high school senior girls join the class.  The next day, our church members invited the girls to their coffee shop and they shared the gospel with them there.  Our pastor sent Keith a text that day saying that the girls decided to follow Jesus that day!  This is so exciting for us because we were hoping to be able to partner with local churches in this way.  On Sunday the pastor was thanking us for having the baking class, but we said "No thank you for sharing the gospel!" God is so good!

Family News:

Many of you probably have heard that Magan is pregnant.  Here in Taiwan, they go for a doctor visit every month (it only costs us 3 USD every time).  So at our last visit the doctor informed us that we are having a........GIRL!!!  We are very excited, but at the same time we are kind of waiting till our next visit to hear a confirmation, because they said Ezra was a girl too, haha!

Few things that have been happening

Since we have arrived here in our new city we have been spending a lot of time walking around and getting to know our knew location.  It has been interesting to observe the differences from Taipei, and we have also used the opportunity to look for a location for our future English ministry.  We have not found a location yet, but we feel like we may be getting close.  It has proved to be more difficult then we had originally hoped because rent here is much more expensive then we had been told. Also, some of the buildings were in such poor condition that it would have cost way too much money to get it functional.

If you look closely you can see his scars from getting firecrackers thrown at him

Something interesting happened while we were walking around the city.  The night before this particular day, Biggie (team member from Zambia), and Keith went to check out a local festival.  They knew beforehand that it would be very loud and very crowded.  This festival is considered one of three most important Chinese New Year festivals and many locals and foreigners will show up to watch the spectacle.  The main event is when a man stands on a big chair-like thing with long handles and people carry him around.  He is chosen to represent a god named Master Han Dan and they then throw firecrackers at him. This god is thought to be the god of wealth and is afraid of the cold, so they throw the firecrackers to keep him warm while praying for good wealth in the coming year. Well, the day after we attended this event we were walking around a different part of the city and met the man that was representing Master Han Dan.  So we took advantage of this opportunity and talked to the man for a little while.

Picture courtesy of Google images

                                              Video of the bombing of Master Han Dan

We have just recently had a team from the Montana YWAM base come here and help us by building bunk beds in our outreach house.  This was a huge blessing for us because now we will have a place for outreach teams to sleep.  They also fixed our tile floor that was busted from a previous tenant.  They worked very hard and finished so quickly that we were able to take them around to see our beautiful city.

Beds are Awesome!

Family News:  Elliot has recently started going to a English evening school every Wednesday night.  It is only for an hour.  The family who runs the school are friends of ours and Elliot is good friends with their daughter.  The purpose of the school is to teach English but we thought it would be good for Elliot to be around other kids in a school environment and also get used to hearing Chinese.  He is the only boy in a class of 5.

Elliot working his magic :-)