Lorna Brule April 27 at 7:47am Reply

Hello and greetings to all our wonderful prayer team!

We finally made it to Sierra Leone on Saturday after good travel through Canada and the US. Dubai gave us a 2 hour delay and Nairobi a further four and a half hours. We had to stay overnight in Accra since Freetown's airport will only take daytime flights from Air Kenya. The local team filled in nicely for us and Joseph met us after we arrived at the water taxi terminal. He made sure that we were taken care of at the airport so that we would run into no problems.

After a brief change at our lovely guesthouse on top of Leister Peak, we were put into action, with Tony and I singing, and Tony giving talks for the last day of the first GAT conference in Kissy - east Freetown. On Sunday I was the speaker at the Goderich church where the second GAT conference is being held and the people were warm and welcoming.

There have been wonderful things happening - with the people having such open hearts and giving us such honour. Joseph is like a spiritual giant, very knowledgeable, gifted and humble all at once. He is amazing at contextualization the gift of being able to weave different cultural stuff and what people say into a bridge to the gospel.

Here are our new prayer requests

1. I became sick again - on food eaten in Kenya and am only now recovering.
I had heat exhaustion on Saturday in Kissy and Richard was hit on Monday in Goderich. It must be at least 35 degrees and even our summer clothes are simply too hot. No a/c anywhere except the van. Please pray that the temperature is brought down by at least 15 degrees C. It is even too hot for the locals.

2.Tony has lost his hotmail account - it was hacked into and shut down and now he is using my account for the trip. He also lost a guitar tuner to thieves going into our luggage. These were only two of the techie difficulties other than dealing with broken guitars, wonky computers, bad internet connections, generators that only run at certain times, no music stands, sometimes no mike stands etc. Please pray for extra grace and engineering skills to get beyond this. Tony is good in this area, but it is trying on patience.

3. Endurance and refreshing for the local team. Joseph and those under him have been working extremely hard and he is also driving us since it will save money. He wanted to honour our sacrifice of the extra airfare costs by cutting expenses in other ways.

4. Our move from the guesthouse into a host home on Wednesday - my busy day of three talks.

5. Effectiveness of our team and local team for the next three days.

6. For our prison ministry in Makeni prison on Friday

7. For other ministry - Tony connecting with local GDOP leaders, visit with Emma -Scripture Union,etc.

We have had many wonderful things happen - too many to mention here but I can say that working with Joseph is an incredible privilege - I could sit at his feet and learn... :) We have been blessed.

Thank you for praying - and thank you Lorna for passing this on for us.

We love you all

Laurie-Ann Copple
GAT Sierra Leone prayer leader,team member