Merry Christmas from Niger!

Merry Christmas to you all!  We are spending Christmas in Niger with Jordanne's parents and younger brother, where they serve with the Christian and Missionary Alliance. We have been in the DRC for about 3 months and this is our first R&R. We are very happy to have had this time in Niger with family.

While here we had the opportunity to go to Park W. We took a boat down the Niger River and saw a family of 12 elephants. We were able to get very close to them and decided to leave once they started flapping there ears. A tell tale sign that an elephant is not happy.

We went out on the last night and ran into this girl! A very rare sight for Park W. An extremely intense experience for Travis as he was sitting on the roof of the car with a spot light and the park guide. We got  about 15 feet from the lion and it started to walk towards us and followed us for a bit before laying down. 

No snow but it has been a great African Christmas!  Wishing you all happy holidays, lots of rest, and good times with family!  May you experience the joy of knowing our Savior is with us!! 

A brief overview of our work

Sorry for the delay in posting, we will try to do a better job with this. Above is  map of DRC. Our programs focus on helping people in Province Orientale and North Kivu. We have bases in Bunia, Beni, Faradje, Aba, and Getty. As you can see the work is pretty spread out.

This is our World Food Program School feeding team. As some of you know I was hired on as a procurement manager. This changed right before I left to come out and now I am managing this school feeding program along with doing some other work with the program that Jordanne is working on. This change has been a challenge for me as I have not done work with food programing before but, I finally feel like I'm starting to get the hang of it. The short explanation of the program is that it is designed to feed over 30,000 kids lunch in 67 schools. This involves frequent visits to all 67 schools buy our field staff to record data distribute food for the month and ensure that everything is going smoothly and the kids are getting the food. Most of the schools are in the Orientale province along two axis, Bunia to Komanda and Bunia to Boga. Some of the schools are in insecure areas.

Meet the humongous USAIDizi team!  We really do have a large program team, but this picture also includes a lot of the support staff like the finance, logistics and base management teams.  "Usaidizi" means "assistance" in Swahili and it is a perfect name for our program which aims to assist over 106,000 people in one year.  Our program seems to be getting off to a slow start, but we are looking forward to finally doing our first large Food and NFI distribution in early January.  This distribution is going to take place in the Kamango/Nobili area, which is in North Kivu and right on the border with Uganda.  We will be assisting 3,180 households, most of whom have returned to the DRC with nothing after fleeing into Uganda due to rebel activity.  Please keep these beneficiaries and our Food and NFI teams in your prayers as there have been recent rumors that the rebel group, ADF-Nalu, is moving in that direction.  Our Agriculture/Food Security teams have been busy doing Tool Fairs, as well as agriculture, nutritional gardens and goat raising trainings for beneficiaries who have managed to settle but are still vulnerable.  Our Ag team in Beni especially needs your prayers, with weekly massacres taking place on the outskirts of Beni.  Here is an article explaining more about that conflict.  http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-3015177 7

Thank you for your love, encouragement and prayers!  Every day we realize even more just how essential your prayers are to our work here in the DRC!

Much love,

Travis and Jordanne