I thought I would give just a little update on what is going on in my little corner of the mission field. I came back down to the school a bit discouraged after visiting my parents place. Things just weren’t going as they should have been at the school before I left. But when I got there I was surprised to see trees and bamboo falling this way and that way in the area where I wanted the dorm to be built! There was five or six villagers out there clearing the place! Also I had to open the gate to even get into the school! A new fence around the school to keep the buffalo and cows out? The villagers haven’t hardly helped at all, now what’s all this about? Well….they told me too that the rice was ready and we needed to get it from the other village. The next few days we got all sixty  100 pound bags of rice stashed away in the barn. But that wasn’t all yet. About the time I was dumping the last of the rice into the barn two teams of cows rounded the corner of the trail with piles of lumber in tow. I had noticed that they had drug the post for the dorm down off the mountain, but I didn’t think there were any boards out there too. All that evening and the next few days those teams of cows kept busy until there was quite a pile. Over a hundred and fifty boards! I guess they must be cutting when I’m not there!

The head man came and talked to me and told me that they were ready to build the dorm and that I needed to show them where and how! So…last Thursday and Friday the villagers came and flattened the area. Now it sounds pretty easy with a lot of help to just flatten a nice pad and be ready to build but here it is a little different. We don’t have any shovels, buckets or wheel barrows….so to move dirt from one place to another we made a plow! Yes, a nice plow with a rope attached to the front of it to tow the dirt from one place to another. The villagers and I worked for two days digging with our hoes and towing the plow until we had a huge flat pad for the dorm.

That’s when they informed me that I had until Tuesday to get ready because the whole village was coming to put up the dorm. Now wait a minute….I started counting the boards that we had and found that we would be short about ten 2″x 6″ boards! So I told Mallmeat to get busy and cut the boards so that we would be ready when the villagers came. And I got busy digging the post holes. Post holes are pretty easy until that is all you do for two days strait! As I was finishing up the last of the holes toward evening on Monday the head man came hurrying by with his team of cows. I asked him where he was going? He said that Mallmeat had finished cutting more than forty boards for me and he was going to tow them off the mountain so that we’d be ready in the morning. Forty!!! I only needed ten. I guess the more the better! So this morning it all began. Carrying hard wood post and standing them in place. Squaring things up and putting the floors on….sometimes I wish I had better tools but I guess you just have to make do with what you have. We leveled the sixty-four foot building with a two foot level and a string! God was good and people worked together and got it done. And last I saw of it they were putting on the joist in the center section of the dorm! I had to leave in the afternoon to head home. I guess that’s what’s you do when you run low on money! 

Hope every thing is going good at each one of your places of service. Even when thing seem dim and you don’t know where to turn, turn to God and He will make those dim places bright with his glory.