Thursday, December 9, 2010

Dear friends,

It's nearly Christmas again. Sure feels like it too. The skies are nearly continually blue, temps are warm in the day and cool at night. The roads are beginning to get dusty. All the signs of early dry season.

Carol, Jessica, and Kimberly have one more week of school before Christmas break. Perhaps they are more excited about the break than the kids are!

Jess and Kim are planning a guided expedition to visit some of the beautiful and interesting areas of Cameroon. The schedule is not firm, but will keep you posted. It may include a trip to the capitol city of Yaounde, then a train ride toward the Northeast to see a game park where elephants roam.
Then to the coast and Mt. Cameroon. Sounds nice. I'll stay home and eat pineapple with Carol.

Lesson 12 of the 'New Beginnings' Bible studies is done. It was finished in record time; Sunday evening recording, Monday sound editing, Monday evening recording completed, Tuesday the video was completed. I continue to learn about the recording and video editing software that makes the process more efficient. This is an amazing lesson. I can hardly wait to begin showing it. Keep keeping us in your prayers.

Speaking of prayers, it is probably time to mention a big need here.

Carol and I came to Cameroon to pursue the dual goal of 'mission pilot', and 'mission school'. Well, it became apparent last year that 'mission pilot'
was not going to be realized here. The roads are very exciting, but are functional. A plane is not required here. It is so expensive to purchase, transport, register, and operate a plane here; the cost / benefit ratio is disproportionate. On the other hand, the school idea was great. The school has grown from one class to four, grades 1 to 5. After trying to keep the kind folks at the local office of Basic Education happy, it is apparent that some school operations savvy is also required.

After spending one year here, I gave a one year notice of resignation to this project. We are spending the second year here to continue to develop the program in anticipation of handing it over to new leadership. So far, there have not been any volunteers to take the project. If you can help locate someone or be that someone, we would appreciate it. The potential is fantastic.

We would love to hear from you regarding this need. Use Iridium.com, 'free text message' feature (top center of home page), and send to our phone 881631672129; note 8816 is already entered for you.

Steve & Carol Rose

Monday, December 6, 2010

The weeks are going by so quickly. We are making progress at the school and with the Bible Study translations. We are actually right on track; thanks to God's help and a wonderful translator. Naphtali is also very excited about the progress and is happy to be a part of both the school and the translation.

Now that dry season is here, we are making steps to begin the work on the concrete floors at the school. Special thanks to a very sweet lady in Porterville! It just dawned on us that once we have the new floors, we won't have to pour water on the floors every week or so! (That's how you keep a dirt floor under control.) It will be so nice to have concrete floors especially at the end of the dry season when everything is so very dusty.
Gregory is our main man for the floor project. He is still studying with Steve about twice a week and is planning to leave his Baptist church pulpit at the end of this year and join our church! What amazing things God has done!

Today and yesterday all of us teachers attended a Teacher Workshop in Nkor, a small town about 30 min. drive away. Nkor is the headquarters of the Noni subdivision. The District Officer (otherwise known as the D.O. or the "Dew") and the IBE (Inspector of Basic Education) have offices there. It was a change of pace for us as we had to close school for the two days. The point of the seminar was to teach teachers how to write test questions. It sounds like the IBE will be asking us to submit test questions to accumulate in a test question bank at the national level in order to formulate standardized tests. It was mostly interesting. We were "invited" (required) to be in Nkor yesterday by "8 am (prompt)." I was a bit nervous as we arrived at
8:35 am. Anyway, the meeting did not begin until 12:45 pm! We heard that the administrators/teachers who were giving the workshop did not arrive until about noon, instead of the previous day as planned. Oh, well! Delays can and do happen. We actually had a nice time hanging out at the Nkor Literacy Center (similar to a library) and reading books for hours! It was quite funny-all of us Americans must be starving for books, because within a few minutes all five of us were deep into one book or another! One really neat thing at the workshop was when the teachers sang the national anthem-it was really beautiful! There was some wonderful bass harmony, etc. I wish I had a recording of it!

Well, bye for now. Love to all. We are missing you!
Carol (and Steve)