It has been quiet for the past few months, but that does not mean the Nyandengoh! team has been sitting still. The Yoders had to deal with a medical crisis in their family and it has been a challenge to combine family support with the oversight of the work in Sierra Leone. Writing a blog did not make it to the top of the To-Do list, and we apologize for the long delay. However, we are so grateful how God has continued to prove Himself faithful as we started receiving donations even before we could complete the budget for 2022 and start applying for funds. Also, in March we finally could call ourselves land owners, as we purchased a plot of land to build an educational center alongside office facilities. We are excited about this development and hope to share more about this in the near future. Currently we are looking for an architect who would be willing to help us with an initial plan – if you know of someone, please let us know!
Kadi is a young girl attending a Muslim school in the community of the Nyandengoh! office. When she came to our office in August last year, we discovered that she consistently wrote her letters backward/mirrored from the right to the left side of the page. She spelled her name in a similar manner. We realized that Kadi might have dyslexia, a learning disorder which is widely acknowledged in our part of the world, but a condition that will severely affect students in Sierra Leone, who are often accused of being lazy or unwilling to learn. So we sent a WhatsApp message to Kaylynn Swartzendruber, a young lady in the Yoders’ home church, who recently had been studying ways to help students with dyslexia. She immediately made and sent some instruction videos, which were then used to train the Nyandengoh! teachers different methods to help Kadi. For the past few months, Kadi headed every afternoon after school to the Nyandengoh! office to do exercises with our teacher Elizabeth. Also, our team negotiated with the school that Kadi could temporarily skip the Arabic lessons in school, since they seemed to add to the confusion about the direction of her handwriting. You can imagine how excited we were when recently Elizabeth sent us some pictures of Kadi’s school note books: all her lett
ers are now accurately formed and written from the left to the right! How amazing to see connections across the world being formed to bring help to a little girl!
In December, all Nyandengoh! children and parents celebrated Christmas together. We are grateful to Hope Universal, an organization which made it again possible to bless every family with a 25 kg bag of rice and a half-gallon of cooking oil, a big blessing in a country where prices are rising on an almost daily basis…
In February, members of a short-term team that was visiting the UBC Mattru Hospital volunteered several days with the Nyandengoh! daycare, school, and outreach program: Dr. Ron Baker, Dr. & Mrs. Dan Metzger, Rev. & Mrs. Brent Birdsall, and Noah Jarvis. Each one of them blessed the children in their own way with encouragement, medical care, practical tasks, etc. A big thank you to each one of them!
Sadly, we had to say goodbye to Amber McCammon and Dr. Ruth Rivera, who in the seven months they spent in Mattru Jong have been a big blessing to Nyandengoh! Amber helped out with the daycare and school, while Dr. Ruth has blessed several of our children with dental care. When her family is settled, Amber is looking forward to helping out with some of our needs State-side, and the team in Mattru continues some of Dr. Ruth’s work by instructing children and parents in oral health – many of them are not aware of the detrimental effects of sugary drinks and biscuits and the need for dental hygiene.
As our work grows (we are planning on welcoming the 100th child into our ministry this year!), our financial needs grow, and so does the need to keep our accounts in good order. Ms. Sarah Martin, an accountant and friend from Atmore, AL, has graciously offered to help us set up systems that will assist with our planning and reporting needs. Sarah, welcome to the Nyandengoh! team!
Thank you everyone for your interest in our ministry. Please keep us in your prayers, and for other opportunities to support our work (financially or practically), please keep an eye on our website. We will be posting opportunities here: https://www.nyandengoh.org/support-us/
And for more pictures of the precious children we minister to, click here https://www.nyandengoh.org/photos/