Summer 2013 Project Update
Hello everybody! It's been a long time since we posted an update
here on Jubilink (like over 2 years-yikes!)
As a reminder: we do send out a monthly newsletter, which we
don't post online for sensitivity reasons. If you would like to
get our monthly updates, please send an email to Carolyn
(cklejmentlavin@fh.org) or Ryan (rklejmentlavin@fh.org) and we
will happily add you to the mailing list!
Here is our May 2013 update:
At the beginning of the month, a great deal of my (Carolyn) time
was taking up by registering children from our newest community,
Gunung Rintih, for sponsorship. The process is quite admin-heavy,
inputting children's information from registration forms,
assigning them ID numbers and filing all their information. While
work like this is definitely not what I envisioned doing before
we came to Indonesia, I also know my hyper-organized personality
is a good fit for this and I love the sponsor relations team that
I lead. My team is 2 girls who recently graduated college and I
feel that I have a really special opportunity to invest in and
disciple them as we work together on the day to day tasks of
child sponsorship.
We are preparing for a lot of summer trips right now, with
several short term missions trips in June and one in August. We
are personally looking forward the most to Jubilee's visit in
August. We will be spending a week doing ministry in two
villages, Teluk Meku and Sendayan. There will be soap making
classes for adults and VBS-style activities for children. We are
also planning to do a building project with the community in
Sendayan, but as with most things in Indonesia, that is a long
process! We initially wanted to build a public latrine for the 28
families in the village that don't have access to a latrine, but
there is no public land in the community so land would need to be
donated for the latrine. However, after a meeting with community,
it was revealed that no one would donate their land for the
latrine because for the local tribe's culture, to poop on someone
else's land would be an incredibly insulting thing to do, even in
a latrine. So, after many meetings with the community, we are
planning on building a community center next to the health
clinic. The community center would be used to hold meetings,
classes, and be a place to do child immunizations and vitamin A
distribution (right now the clinic is so small that the center
doesn't carry out these needed health activities). Please join us
in praying for the building project! We want to this to be an
opportunity for the community and the team to work side by side
and for this village to be truly blessed. You can also see how
hard it is to get projects off the ground here!
When Ryan went to Sendayan to survey the community for the
building project, he and some other staff heard that a woman in
the community tried to commit suicide a few days earlier by
drinking poison. She was despondent because of her husband's
continuous cheating and other several broken relationships she
had. Ryan and FH local staff, Irma and Iwan, visited the woman
and prayed with her. Ryan had the opportunity to share with her
his own past struggles with depression and testimonies of how God
has healed broken relationships in his own life. While it was a
difficult experience, it was also a blessing that God made
'beauty from ashes' from Ryan's experience to speak truth and
life to this woman. We would ask that you please keep this woman,
Ibu Riski, in your prayers and pray for the whole community of
Sendayan, which despite it's majority Christian population,
heavily practices the occult and is rife with interpersonal
conflict. We want to see Sendayan transformed physically and
spiritually and are praying the upcoming summer missions trip can
have a huge impact on this community.
Ryan went to Cambodia from May 19-25th for a monitoring and
evaluation training. The training was very statistics-heavy as
monitoring and evaluation (at the end of the day) involves doing
a whole lot of math! During the training, the devotions were
about how even though monitoring and evaluation is focused on
numbers and statistics, each one of those numbers represents a
person; someone created in the image of God. It can seem really
impersonal to read a statistic like "40% of children in a certain
community are malnourished", but recognizing that 40% means
(potentially) hundreds of children who were made in the image of
God (Imago Dei), who are not being properly cared for. By
measuring the physical, spiritual, and social strength of a
community we are able to better allocate resources for the most
needed areas in each particular community. The way we measure
these areas is through surveys (asking questions about spiritual
health /beliefs, health practices, etc.), physical data
(children's growth charts), and by asking pastors and leaders to
fill out self-evaluations. Ryan came back with a renewed sense of
the importance of scientifically measuring the status of our
communities to better direct our programs in the future.
As we kick off the month of June, we would also ask for your
prayers for all of us on the FH Indonesia team. As I mentioned
earlier, we have 3 teams coming out in the month of June and this
month is going to be jam packed with visits, logistics and
balancing our regular responsibilities with the short-term ones.
Ramadan also begins in the beginning of July and much of our
programming work slows down for the fasting month, which also
means we have until July 8th to "get stuff done." It kinda feels
like a whole month of finals week!
We want to share another prayer request with all of you, about
our personal financial support. In the past few months, our
personal support has dropped by about $400 a month. Drops in
support are normal and can happen as supporters are unable to
continue their donations for various reasons; we have just had a
more concentrated drop since the new year. We are not in
emergency financial mode yet (many of our gifts come on a
quarterly or annual basis, so we aren't seeing an exact $400
shortfall every month) however, at the current rate of support we
would only be funded through March 2014. However, we also
witnessed a wonderful testimony of God's provision this month!
Right after we received the information about our finances and we
were feeling anxious about the future and our finances, we
received an email from a friend who is about to make a major
international move. This friend sold off her excess clothing and
raised a significant amount of money, which she donated to us!
This financial gift was an INCREDIBLE blessing to us and came
just at the right time and reminded us that God will always
provide!!
We also want to say a big thank you to our supporters who have
faithfully supported us for years now! When we met with a FH
staff member to discuss our finances this week, they mentioned
how impressed they were with our support team because of how
faithful they are in their monthly giving. That made us so happy!
We were like "Yeah! We have the best supporters ever!"
Supporters, you are incredibly appreciated and we're sorry if we
don't say it enough! Your gifts put food on our table, gas in our
motorbike and pay for all our daily needs here. Your gifts enable
us to spend our time discipling, training, and equipping the
local staff here, and to work in the communities to help meet
spiritual and physical hungers. We truly couldn't do this without
your sacrificial giving and we are so thankful for your
faithfulness to give! And for those of you who aren't regular
supporters, if you have ever considered giving to our ministry-
now would be a wonderful time to start! Monthly gifts, one-time
gifts, pledges to pray for God's provision of finances- we could
use it all right now!
Much love to you all and thank you for all you do! We pray you
are blessed!
Carolyn and Ryan