Andy this time, in the spare half an hour I have before an hour on the bike, then leaving for work today! Time seems to be even more scarce and precious at the moment, as leaving for Burundi becomes more imminent. To be honest, Hannah and I are absolutely exhausted!! In our hallway, we have a small wooden hanging sign which gives the verse from Phillipians 4:13 which says 'I can do everything through him who gives me strength'. There are a number of verses which keep coming back to me, but this one seems to be the most apt at the moment and seeing it everyday certainly reminds me that we are living by faith and although running on empty He always provides for us beyond our expectations and gives us the energy we need to push on through!
We have had many up's and down's recently, I can't/won't list them all but I would like to share a few which will hopefully be encouraging.
Firstly, on Sunday 16th Feb my amazing wife Hannah did a 'bake sale' at Woodlands church raising £352 towards my 400 mile sponsored cycle around Burundi in aid of Shammah Health Center where Hannah will be working. Hannah stayed up until 4am baking on the Sunday morning (I did not know this at the time) but this is again an amazing sign of provision. Since then, we have raised around £750 in addition to the £1,200 we had already raised bringing us much closer to our £3,000 target. A massive thank you to Woodlands Church for allowing us to do the bake sale, and for the additional funds provided by the church. We now have a page on their website HERE. For any of you who did not see our promotional video made by 'Woodies' it's HERE.
On the way to this cake sale, we were involved in an RTC (Road Traffic Collision) near to our house, which could not have been avoided. A vehicle pulled out of a road to our left, paying no attention to the Give Way sign and caused significant damage to the car Mum was lending me! Fortunately, nobody was injured and luckily the cakes remained in-tact but the car is badly damaged.
This came only a couple of weeks after Hannah's other collision just about 100m away from where this one happened.
My lovely sister in law Bex Stupple also got involved in this, and ran her own cake sale at Southampton Uni where she currently studies, raising around an additional £50!
Secondly, last week I went to SV Lights to collect the Ambulance. The exterior, and the Emergency lighting is now finished, and it looks incredible. We are so grateful to Terry and the team at SV Lights who completed this installation free of charge for us! We have also been donated another livery kit from RVG worth over £400 so that we can build another Ambulance, AMAZING!
Now we just have the interior to finish……
We'll be putting some photos up of the Ambulance conversion on our website once it has been unveiled to Hellen from Lina Medical Services in early March.
We do need some prayer in this area at the moment, as there is little time to finish the Ambulance, and a lot of interior work to do. In addition, we have had a number of issues with the DVLA in changing the body type to 'Ambulance' as the vehicle will not be used in the UK for this purpose. The issue is, that this needs to be changed prior to exportation to ensure we can get it through customs in Kenya duty free - we're learning a lot in this area!
Donation of soft toys for Burundi
My Auntie, Julie Clark runs a children's books and toy shop in Christchurch, Dorset called Carousel and is kindly collecting children's soft toys to send out to us in Burundi for the orphans of Homes of Hope where we will be working. If you would like to donate any, new or old please contact her on her email; thejuliaclark@hotmail.com
She is also trying to raise a small amount of funds to be able to send these items out via Air Mail as we will not have space to take them out when we leave. If you would like to donate anything towards this please contact her too!
Prayer points:
- Provision of the final £1,000 (or more!) of sponsorship for the Tour du Burundi and that Andy will find time to train when there isn't any!
- Energy and strength for Hannah and I as we go through our final preparations before leaving, and our final 2 weeks at work
- Prayer for Shammah Health Center - That the clinic will be able to open soon despite a number of setbacks and prayer for strength and resillience for our new friends and directors of the clinic Josh and Nadine Guenther
- We will finish the Ambulance on time, and have no further issues with the logistics (we also still have £1,000 outstanding from the shipping cost)
No doubt I have missed a lot out, as so much has happened recently. We cannot wait to leave (it's less than a month away now) but needless to say as family and friends you will all be missed.
Thank you all again for your support,
Andy & Hannah x
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