When Things Fall Apart
Sometimes, even in ministry, everything just falls apart. The foundation has crumbled, the walls have collapsed, the seed has rotted, and the sprouts are choked by weeds and burnt by the sun. Sometimes by the end, there’s nothing to show for our years of efforts.
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Working for a Harvest
Like our friends in the fields we must always be alert and ready, mud sticks in hand, for what might devour what we’ve sown. We must always keep watch and reinforce any weak parts of the fence. And like them, we must fight this battle together…
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A Light In the Darkness
Our headlady told us about the time the spirits which possess her forced her to run halfway across the island on swollen knees, running so fast that no one could catch her, then made her crawl around on all fours and start acting like a cow.
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Our Double Lives
Where we are now is about as close as we can come to being on the exact opposite side of the world from where we were just a month ago. Sometimes that’s what it can feel like, going from one side of the planet to the other – like we’re standing upside down…
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Treasure
How could I take a 9-month-old, and a 2 ½-year-old and a 4-year-old to a place where they could get sick or hurt and be days away from medical care? A place with no schools, where my wife and I would have to struggle to educate them, where they would be exposed to demonic activity and where child trafficking happens? I was ashamed of myself that I was not strong enough to pay that price.
Read MoreAUDIO: He Who Promised Is Faithful
Listen to Adam and Lora share a message about working among the Antakarana tribe in Madagascar, and about pursuing the work of God and the dreams he’s placed on your heart, even when fruitfulness seems far away.
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VIDEO: On Distant Shores
This video is about our ongoing mission to reach the Antakarana people of Madagascar. It showcases the lifestyle of the Antakarana on Nosy Mitsio, their religious beliefs and rituals, and our team’s efforts at church-planting among them.
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Visiting the US Next Year!
That’s what our last few years have been like here on Nosy Mitsio: exciting! Challenging! Full of promise, hope, struggles, loss, and gain. In it all we see God at work. He’s maintained us, given us strength and perseverance when we’ve needed it most, and he’s opened our eyes to see…
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Firm Foundations
As I was guiding our boat to shore, the passengers started pointing towards our village and shouting out, “what’s that?” “What happened!?” “Something looks wrong!” Rising from the ground next to our house was the peak of a roof…
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Latest News
This has been my first full day and night alone with our boys, and it was certainly eventful! I woke up to the sound of Matimu scolding David for raiding the banana stash before breakfast. Then one of the boys' favorite toys was stolen and we spent time searching for it. (One girl said a smaller boy took it and his mom was pretty upset about it; in the afternoon we found out the girl herself took it and her mom made her give it back.) Then, while trying to do Matimu's science project for the week (dyeing a piece of cloth with natural dyes) I accidentally knocked over a pot of boiling vinegar water and as I jumped away it splashed all over one of my legs. So now I've got second-degree burns over quite a bit of my leg. (But thankfully Matimu and David weren't in the room when it happened, because that could've been *bad*!) Unfortunately we couldn't finish the project because that was the last of our vinegar.
But we ended well. We boys ate a LOT of pancakes for dinner! Then we watched a couple fun shows together before I put them to bed. All's well that ends well!
Lora's gone because she took a quick overnight trip to Diego to go to the post office there. We'll all be happy to have her back tomorrow morning! (But please pray for my leg, that it would stay free from infection during the process of healing - that's the main concern with wide-area burns like that.)
1 day ago
Haha, this picture keeps making its rounds on Malagasy Facebook groups - this is probably the third or fourth time that we know of. This time it was on a page with about 75,000 followers, and this picture has nearly 3,000 responses! I don't know if that's enough to count as viral or not, haha!
This picture is from back in 2012 when we were working in the rural areas near Tamatave (east coast Madagascar). We were learning a process of rice transplanting called "manetsa" that many Malagasy people feel is a cultural practice at the core of their identity as Malagasy. Being our first time to learn, we weren't doing it perfectly and some Malagasy people can see that in the photo.
So the comments are often many and varied but follow a standard pattern: many are very happy to know that foreigners are trying to learn their ways; quite a few comment about how urban Malagasy no longer know the traditional ways but here are foreigners doing it and it should encourage their countrymen to take the lead in maintaining the traditional ways; but some just comment (probably with some ethnocentric pride) that clearly we're doing it the wrong way and tourists shouldn't bother; a few commenters even appear offended that we would take a picture of ourselves trying. Not that those commenters realize we're not tourists and this was just the beginning of many years spent adapting to Malagasy life and culture. It all makes for an interesting consideration of what our lives here (particularly the photos we take) look like through the eyes of the local people here - though of course, only through the eyes of that minority of the population that has access to Facebook!
Anyway, it seems that every year or two this picture pops up somewhere and one of our Malagasy friends sends us a message asking if we knew it was being posted (and we never do). It's funny to me how the comments about it always stay about the same. And it makes me wonder how many times this picture has been passed around and we didn't have a friend to tell us about it! Who knew that in coming to Madagascar Lora and Matimu would become a local viral sensation! ;-)Ataon ny vahiny indray...
6 days ago
Wow, this is a funny memory looking back on it now! We struggled so much with having reliable transport to/from Nosy Mitsio back then and we thought we finally found a good solution with that rental boat and we were really looking forward to it. What makes it funny is that it turned out to be the single worst trip we'd ever taken! We wound up drifting at sea all night long, and only made it back to the mainland the next day (not to Nosy Mitsio like we were attempting). It was a very trying, but also meaningful experience for me. I often shared that story when we shared with different churches and groups when we were in the US last year. You can listen to a fuller version of the story (and what it meant to us) here:
madmissions.com/2017/03/audio-he-who-promised-is-faithful/
We're heading back to Nosy Mitsio early tomorrow morning. We're starting to sort out the issue with getting our flooring and most recent news is that our house may actually be finished within a few we...
1 week ago
This is an important issue that we've frequently seen in our time in Madagascar. (More details in the comments.)
We stand for #landrightsnow
Hungry for change? ✅
This World Food Day, from 15 - 26 October, we are calling on governments around the world to respect Indigenous and community land rights and defend our food from land grabs. Join us: www.landrightsnow.org/wfd2018
1 week ago
Most people in developing countries who've inherited land from their ancestors, and who've cultivated it for centuries, don't actually have legal paperwork declaring them the owners. So when rich outsiders or foreign corporations decide they want the land for themselves (for example, the beautiful beaches of Nosy Mitsio) there's often little to stand in the way of them bribing some government officials and taking the land for themselves. Just recently, Madagascar's former President signed an agreement with China, just days before he resigned as President (in order to run for re-election), that gave China very large fishing rights to the already overfished seas around Madagascar. Not only would this further damage the ecology of the local oceans, it also would likely provide ZERO jobs or income to local people. But this sort of practice happens all the time in Africa - foreign governments or foreign corporations gain the rights to own the land or exploit the natural resources and it rarely benefits the local people in even the smallest ways, yet it often destroys the environment the local people rely on for subsistence agriculture. So, this is a very important issue to be aware of throughout the world. It's a very different and foreign idea for most of us Americans (since most Americans aren't involved in farming, and most food Americans eat comes from the largest corporate-owned food producers). But the small-scale agricultural methods and land ownership status of most of the world is something we should be aware of and we need to do whatever we can to support local people's ownership of the land that's theirs.
😢😬 Tena hainao mihitsy ny zavatra mampalahelo izay mitranga matetika eto Madagasikara...Mampalahelo be mihitsy izany sady mahasosotra! 😣 Indraindray tena te hiteny mihisy hoe hoe aleo tsy manana filoha ny Malagasy. 😢