Gonna stay a while

Well everyone,
We have a big announcement to make! After much thought, prayer, discussing, more thinking, discussing and months of waiting to hear from Peace Corps …we decided to extend our Peace Corps Service a third year! Peace Corps accepted our application to work with the water NGO, By Provision, that we have worked with a few times during our two years here. This means that we get to spend a month or more at home in December with family and friends, and then we will back to Namibia in January for one more year. We are very excited for the much needed break and time at home with family, friends, hot showers, washing machines, dish washers, and delicious, convenient food made for us by someone other than ourselves!! (ok, with that said, if we’re lucky, maybe we won’t even have to use the wonderful invention of a dishwasher!)

By Provision is located Tsumeb, a bigger town about 4 hours south of Nkurenkuru so we will be moving there in January. We will miss living in Nkurenkuru, our friends and community, the beautiful river and slow paced village life. But it will also be nice to be in a bigger town with two restaurants and Etosha National Park less than an hour away!! We will be working with By Provision drilling boreholes in villages without potable water all around Namibia. Caleb will be learning the drilling process, drill and well maintenance and the inner-workings of an NGO. I will be helping with the administrative and financial side of the NGO as well as providing hygiene/sanitation education and HIV education at the drill sites. We are very thankful to our generous hosts at By Provision, Gary and Elizabeth Wilkins, who have allowed us this wonderful opportunity to work with their NGO, learn from them and help those in need in Namibia.

We are really looking forward to the opportunity to work hands on with an NGO, provide such a basic need to people and share God’s love in a tangible way. It was a very tough decision to make because we really miss home, friends and family and it will be hard to put our “lives” on hold for another year, but we think this is a great opportunity that will be well worth it! Though it was a difficult choice, we are choosing to take life one step at a time and not let future worries, plans and timelines hold us back from doing something so meaningful to us and to God – maybe a lesson we need to learn is that this actually is “life”, and not all plans and timelines we feel pressure to set for ourselves! We’ll let you know how that turns out in about 5 years when we are another year behind in our timeline! ;)

Thank you for your support during the first two years of our Peace Corps service, and we hope we can continue to solicit your prayers and support during our third year extension! Pray for us as we finish our last term teaching and are quite tired out. Pray for the continued success of our secondary projects; that these income generating projects will continue in our absence and provide a source of income for the hard working women involved. Lastly, pray for safety working with the drill equipment next year, and most of all that God’s love and care will be experienced in a real way as we seek to provide for a physical need of people in a way we know God would desire.

We look forward to seeing many of you when we come home in December!

Love,

Caleb and Rachel