Hey! We have a new blog

Hey Everyone!

We noticed that some people still come to this blog. We have a new blog for our new adventures in life. It is www.lewansingabon.blogspot.com

Please follow us!

Alicia and Dan

Trip Winding Down

Hello All! (Alicia typing)

Today I went to work at one of the mobile medical clinics. There weren't many people there, but we had an awesome time with the core team that works with the clinic. We had an awesome time of praying and singing (and dancing!) Dan went with some people to put a roof on an addition at a church. One of the little girls fell asleep on him at lunch time and the Gabonese mamas cooked the team a huge meal!

Well...tonight is officially our last night in Gabon. This has been the fastest 40 days ever. We are sad to leave here, but at the same time we are really excited to get back home. Please pray for safe travels. See you soon.

Love,
Alicia and Dan

Operation Christmas Child Testimony

(Dan Typing)

Many of you may have heard of Operation Christmas Child, for those of you who have not basically what happens is people across the U.S pack shoe boxes with toys, toiletries, a card, etc. to send off to places around the world as Christmas presents for poor children. I have been able to see with my own eyes the impact that those little shoe boxes can make.

There is a village about 30 minutes outside of Libreville that unlike the rest of the country has been very skeptical of Christians. The Church being planted there attracted some kids but really no adults at all. this village was a distribution site for Operation Christmas Child last year, because of the simple shoe bokes many kids got to receive their first Christmas presents and as a result the amount of kids attending church soon ballooned to over 100 and the church has also attracted a few adults from the village as well...including the chief! He was very skeptical of Christians, but when he saw how we loved their children his skepticism turned to trust. A villager recently donated a piece of land for a church to be built on...

And that is where the teams and I enter this story, a few weeks ago we broke ground on the donated property, we have cleared the land and on Friday should be finishing the foundation. soon after that a wood structure will be in place and the people of the village will have their own church building!

All of this was made possible because some people in the states spent $20 and put together a shoe box of goodies to give a kid the gift of Christmas, and a chance to hear about the greatest gift of all.

Love Wins.

-Dan

Jesus Film Update

So we showed the Jesus film to a village about 2 hours east of the hospital. For those of you who don't know, the Jesus film is a movie made in the late 70's with the script taken from the book of Luke in the Bible. Since the 70's the film has been translated into hundreds of languages and dialects. The movie showing set up is pretty cool, since the electricity was completely unreliable we brought a small Honda generator with us which powered a DVD player and projector as well as a speaker with a built in amp with microphone. everything is super portable, the DVD player and projector are a kit that fits nicely in a suitcase.

We walked around the village with the local pastor inviting everyone to come see the film, but when 7pm came around and we were supposed to start nobody was there! We were a bit concerned but remembered that we are in Africa and everyone is always late. Tim (The Bongolo short term missions director) decided to put in some Donald Duck cartoons to get the bugs out of the system and we prayed that people would come to see the film. When we prayed we were the only people in the church, at the end of the cartoon we turned around and the place was full!!! everyone was so quiet coming in we never heard them! in total we were able to show 120 people the story of Christ in french...pretty cool.

love,

Dan and Alicia

Fire at the Hospital!

On Saturday night while we were out at the village the warehouse at the hospital caught on fire! The fire seems to have originated from a refrigerator that held insulin and HIV/AIDS tests that was surrounded by unopened boxed from thier last shipment of supplies. The fire was put out, but about 20% of the warehouse was consumed. A portion of the the roof was melted as well as the wiring near the fire.

From what a doctor told us the biggest thing lost was the new shipment of IV fluids. We were unable to hear the extent of supplies lost because we left before they were able to review their stock.

For more information and also if you want to help go to the hospital web page at http://www.bongolohospital.org/.

p.s. a praise from this ordeal; there were 3 barrels of 100% ethanol no more than ten yards away from where the fire stopped...had they exploded the warehouse would have been a total loss and people could have been injured/killed by the explosion...praise God!!

Hello From Bongolo Evangelical Hospital!!

(Dan Typing)

Hello! we safely arrived at Bongolo Hospital on Thursday after a grueling 10 hour car ride over bumpy winding roads. On Friday, we were given a tour of the hospital compound. This morning I jumped in on a soccer game between the hospital staff and the kids from the local village, it was a blast! In about an hour we will be heading out to a remote village with no running water or electricity. We are putting on a showing of the Jesus Film with the local church for the community. We will be back at the hospital tommorow afternoon.

To give you an update about what we were up to last week we were laying concrete for a new church building in Libreville. The church is about 500 strong and it has been meeting in a single room that can hardly hold all of them, the new building will be a huge improvememt, will seat many more people and will have offices for the pastors, and other rooms important for their church to continue growing. The work site was an amazing clash of followers of christ from two sides of the world working towards a common goal, there was music, dancing, fellowship, food, and of course plenty of hard work mixing concrete by hand, and moving literally tons of concrete, gravel and sand. Thankfully we had many hands, both American and Gaboneese to share the load, what an amazing experience!

(Alicia Typing...)

It has been an awesome week so far for me. It has been good to finally do some physical labor, but God had some different plans for me when I got two huge blisters on both the palms of my hands from tamping the dirt to make it level and compact for concrete. I was able to sit down and have some conversations with some of the Gabonese people. I had an 1 1/2 converstion with a man in Spanish. We were able to understand each other because we both had poor grammar and conjucation abilities. haha. As lunch time ended, I was really nervous for what God wanted me to do, when I was led to a room full of worship dancers for the church. I ended up dancing with them for a good 3 hours, and I was sweating just as much as the volunteers working outside with the concrete. It was good to use the international language of dance to praise God together.

Bongolo has has been really awesome so far. Yesterday, I was able to watch a surgery. The man had broken his jaw in several places and they were wiring his jaw shut. It was definitely an intense and vigorous surgery. Dan came in to watch the surgery for a few minutes, but had to leave because it was grossing him out. haha. Today, I went on a round with one of the Internal Medicine doctors here, Dr. Renee. It was very.......interesting (I am not quite sure how to describe it). A lot of patients here have tuberculosis and two of the babies we treated this morning had HIV. The medical staff here is quite amazing! They are truly doing God's work. They not only see the people as patients, but children of God that need caring for. It is great to see!

Please continue to keep us in your prayers. Pray especially for the village we are visiting tonight and showing the Jesus Film to.

Love,

Alicia and Dan

Internet Down

Hey All!!!

The internet is down in our section of town so we have been unable to update the blog and will be unable to for a few days. We are still doing great!!

We will be heading south into the interior of the country on Thursday to spend a few days at the Bongolo Evangelical Jungle Hospital. We will be back on Monday, hopefully with lots of awesome stories to share with you all!

Peace and Love,
Dan and Alicia