Category: Uncategorized

Thanks for your prayers!  Rachida’s second surgery (to remove her second eye) is scheduled for this Thursday, December 21.  Please keep her and her mom in your prayers!

Thank you, everyone, for your continued prayers for little Rachida. In the picture, you’ll see her with her mom the evening of her first eye-removal surgery. Since then, she’s had another round of chemo (a prerequisite for the second eye-removal surgery) and received an artificial eye (which some of you, through giving to my ministry, […]

I have some picture books here that I often let the village kids read when they come over. They love them, and I figure it’s a way to start to get them interested in literacy. Anyway, it’s kind of funny the different things they see in the pictures. For example, when they look at the […]

My host family here in the village has done so much for me.  Before my house was finished, I lived with my host mom and she cooked and cleaned and washed my clothes and heated my shower water and got my water at the pump and so much more, and then slowly started teaching me […]

Thanks so much for your prayers for Rachida’s eye surgery yesterday! She did have the surgery, but only one eye was removed. It sounds like they’ll send that in for a biopsy before removing the other. It also sounds like she’ll be continuing chemo in the meantime. But in talking to a missionary doctor this […]

  For those of you who have been following my blog for a while, you’ve also been following the story of little Rachida, the girl with hereditary retinoblastoma (eye cancer). Yesterday I got a call from her mom who’s with her at the doctor in Bamako, Mali, and she said that the report is that […]

  (I wrote this post on Saturday evening.) Good news!  I’m heading out tomorrow for a trip to Israel with a bunch of people I know from my church in the US!  I can’t wait! More good news!  Our houses in the village are finally finished!  (Or at least they’re close enough to being finished […]

    When I say “act like a teenage girl,” what picture comes to mind? I know that all teenage girls aren’t the same, but when you say that here (and it’s all one word in Jula – sunguruyake), it conveys the image of a girl dressing up all fancy, putting on makeup, flirting, trying […]

    On Thursday I got back to the city from 9 days in the village. And no, our houses aren’t done yet. But there is, like usual, a little bit of visible progress. First of all, our solar panels are installed on our roofs (sorry I don’t have a picture) and some of the […]

    It’s been a long time since I’ve posted about Rachida and her hereditary retinoblastoma (eye cancer), but that’s because there hasn’t been any news. But now Rachida and her mom Awa and little brother Rachid (see the second picture) came back to town from the capital with plans to head back to Mali […]