Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving. We have been spending this week thanking God for so many things with our boys.We all have so much to be thankful for and love adopting the thanksgiving holiday thanks to our American friends and family!

This year we are especially thankful for the gifts of Lily and our little neice Isabelle who we look forward to meeting next year. It has been such a special year with Lily in our family and seeing how our boys love her and how she loves them so much.

John Piper came to visit...

John Piper has spent the last week or so here in Ethiopia. He wrote a great blog post about some of his experiences here. It includes the following:

"Most of the peoples left to reach are hard to reach. What is needed is the commitment of a life, not just a year. A language to learn, a culture to know, a people to love, a gospel to speak, a church to plant, leaders to train — this is the pouring out of a life. May God give many of you this high and holy and hard calling."

I would echo his plea for long term missionaries. I would especially love to see more teachers devote their career to International Christian schools that support the work of frontier missions around the world as well as having a 7 hours-a-day, 5 days-a-week, 40 weeks-a-year for 13 years opportunity to point hundreds of children and young people to Christ.

ziplocks growing on trees?

Things you see in Africa are just different to elsewhere - in Ethiopia this might be donkeys crossing over pedestrian bridges, blue and white mini-bus taxis crammed full of people or such like. Well here is a new sight - ziplock bags hanging on trees.

We re-use everything wherever possible here so ziplock bags hanging drying is a fairly common sight, ours hang in our kitchen window, others have been spotted on clothes lines and it would seem some are drying on a tree :-)

Guy Fawkes bonfire at Bingham

 Our Guy Fawkes celebrations starting with the creation of the guy

 Tom helping Mrs J stuff hay into the guy

 The finished guy on the bonfire -  thanks to all our 'honourary Brits' for helping get that ready

And then the guy was no more! We had fun hanging out around the bonfire with a pot luck meal (and sadly no fireworks as no one could find any in the shops this year!)

someone getting a head start?

While yesterday saw the elementary school races, today the middle and high school students race. However, someone seems to have started early..

House cross country races

 KG-Grade 2 boys starting off