Ulric and Annabel Gerry - Nigeria |
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Prayer Letter February 2008
Greetings from Nigeria. We are doing well. Here is our latest news:
'Abuja Ark International Community Church' is going well. We had some really well attended Christmas services, although I suspect that Easter will not be so popular among the expat community here. We prayed for, and now have a fantastic Jesus-loving keyboard/guitar worship leader - thank you Lord. It really makes all the difference, but we have enjoyed experimenting with 'ipod' and 'karaoke' worship!
This is a picture of our church (the children have just gone out, hence the empty seats!) Sooner or later we need to move location as this is being turned into gym. Please pray that we find somewhere suitable to go to.
More importantly we are running Alpha. We have a group of mainly young professionals & a good mix of Nigerians, Kenyans and Brits. Most of them, even the non-Christians have a deep awareness of spiritual life and Christianity, which makes the discussion very focused. I am really aware that Alpha so depends on prayer - please pray for us, the organisation, the food, that everyone keeps coming & the weekend (or Saturday) away.
As a Church it has been a learning experience working with the orphanages. A lot of the stuff we take (clothes/books/toys) tends to get sold or locked away for safe keeping. I know it sounds crazy, but there is no culture here of children playing with toys constructively. Even for more wealthy children, MTV seems to be a dominant form of entertainment. Our members have been banned from another orphanage as we had complained about the way they were treating a 6 year old boy. He had been labelled a witch by a pastor and accused of being responsible for the death of a baby the previous year. Now he is sleeping on cardboard separate from the other children and is generally mistreated. The result of this is that we are actually finding it quite hard to find good causes to give money to. Please pray for this little boy and that we can identify some good causes for our giving.
Please pray for Annabel and DFID they are doing really good things in health, education, governance etc. Please pray that they can get more dynamic people in the office here to help make a difference.
This is a picture of dawn over Aso rock from our house in the Harmattan (the dust blowing over from the Sahara). Sometimes you can’t even see the rock as it is so dusty. Everyone gets a cold for about three months until the rains come and the air & our noses clears again!
Ulric, Annabel and Caitlin, Iona and Meriel.