Training

Warm-up

July 31, 2014

Maybe it’s a sense of urgency or maybe it’s just impatience, but as soon as we recovered from jet lag (three days after arrival) I was ready to dive into language learning. I had to wait. Learning language before arrival may seem like a time saving strategy but it has proven from experience to be […]

Stitching Up

May 27, 2014

What do you do when medical care is needed but there is no doctor? That is the reality in a lot of tribal missions work. Either missionaries or tribal people may be in need of medical attention with no doctor or hospital for hundreds of miles. When you rely on air travel you can’t be […]

On the Bikes

May 1, 2014

Two months ago we learned that our initial visas will be more like a visitor visa than a student visa, making them easier to get but requiring frequent renewal, and limiting privileges. That means we can’t get a national drivers licence until we are done learning the national language (roughly a year). So we were […]

Church Without Walls

March 31, 2013

We enjoyed a weekend in Owen Sound to share the NTM church planting ministry ahead of us with our friends at Church Without Walls. Kendall and Tamara Schmitke, friends from our days in Quesnel, kicked this house church movement into gear when we first arrived in Ontario. Getting involved with the local church is key […]

Tech Tips

January 30, 2013

How do I power my laptop in a tribal location to develop lessons and learn language? How do we cook and get clean drinking water to keep us healthy? For the last two weeks Ernest Jones and Roland Shafer have given us great training and introduced us to amazing technology to answer these questions and […]

Graduation

January 10, 2013

On December 13th Dawn and I walked across the stage in the Hanover Missionary Church auditorium to shake the hands of Darcy Dueck and Vern Dyck and receive our diplomas as graduates from the Missionary Training Center of New Tribes Mission Canada. Graduation, particularly from highschool, carries with it a sense of completion – of […]

A Sweet Education

November 25, 2012

Missions isn’t just for grown-ups, we’re taking our kids with us! As we are training and preparing ourselves to go, are they being prepared for what’s ahead? We are thankful for the MK care and education team that is working with our family to help us all make the adjustments together. They’ve recently given us […]

Fantasy Translation

November 15, 2012

Recently we were introduced first hand to the work of Bible translation. Of course if you’ve had the privilege of reading God’s word in English you’ve already benefited from the faithful effort of others in the past. It’s through their hard work that our ease of reading and understanding is made possible. Because I only […]

Phony English

October 4, 2012

We recently put our creative talents to the test as we prepared a primer for literacy training class. Using the syllable method of literacy (teaching the recognition of syllables rather than individual letters or whole words) we wrote a story to be used as the very first text in our fictional phonenglish language. This exercise […]