DEAF CONNECTIONS

A ministry of Arua Youth With A Mission base

encouraging deaf & hearing people to value each other more

Coordinated by: Adam & Helen Fielder

c/o YWAM Arua, PO Box 442 Arua, Uganda, E.Africa

42 Tintern Way, Bedworth, Warks. CV12 9SS

E-mail: fielder34@hotmail.co.uk 

Facebook: Helen Adam Fielder

www.deafconnections.blogspot.com

Please email us if you’d like to receive our prayer

September- December 2012

Mission Update                                                                                                  

Dear friends and partners.

       We  pray you all have a Happy Christmas and exciting plans for 2013. In the last three months Helen and I spent two of them apart. Whilst Helen was leading the first half of the YWAM Arua discipleship training school outreach in S Sudan operating out of YWAM Labone, I was in the UK to see Maria and Jerome, to visit some sixth form colleges with  Laurence and to update our supporters.

      Four weeks later we re-united in Labone before travelling back into Kitgum, N. Uganda where I took over leading the team with John, a Ugandan YWAMer. Meanwhile, Helen returned to Arua to  be with Laurence. This up date focusses on events, insights and personal growth we experienced over the past three months.

       The photo left shows the YWAM deaf/hearing outreach team working alongside members of Issingli, a remote mountain-side community. Together they are constructing a multi-purpose building that will serve as a school/clinic/ community hall. YWAM staff members, Bosco, hearing and Philliam, deaf are circled.

  We look forward to seeing family/friends in the UK soon. Ad

In This Update..

DTS Outreach Phase 1 Labone, S. Sudan; Kitgum, N Uganda

Signs & Wonders: – Baptisms…   …and weird reptiles

In the Refinery: Looking back on our outreach in Kitgum

News from the family

Looking ahead to the new year -– see next newsletter  points

Deaf/hearing YWAM Team Support

 f        Lucy, above left,  educated to only P7 demonstrated such a wonderful gift to teach. I pray that by God’s grace she will be able to continue her education and make it. 

         Our deaf team-members, above right, collecting clothes to clothe the four naked deaf children that Philliam had come across. This was a wonderful blessing commented upon by members in the three local churches we attended the following Sunday. We are supporting one deaf six year old girl, Janet, from Labone to enrol at Glory Special Needs School in Kitgum next February.

         Should C/DTS outreaches return to Labone? The answer is yes. The Jesuits have been a great help in setting up the schools and numerous other programmes but they left Labone whilst we were there and the local community is struggling in the aftermath of war. Since the new country Southern Sudan has come into  being the people in remote Labone have seen few benefits. They still need to be discipled and encouraged. Students on outreach there can see positive results from their efforts in a relatively short space of time. I think this really helps them to be inspired and grow in faith. Helen

Living in Labone’s community.

Our mixed hearing/deaf team of 11 students and 5 of their dependents was here for five weeks.
YWAM Arua has local contacts here.

Malaria forced me to travel to Laboni a week later than the rest of the team, by public transport. The journey took 36 hours instead of 12 in a 4WD.

One part of our route was the most dangerous in all Uganda, in the years of conflict. Many of the camps for internally displaced people (IDPs) are still there.

Our team began and ended each day with time together to get to know God more and ask for God’s specific guidance for the day’s needs/opportunities and challenges. No drainage and a wet season made me very grateful to the person who advised me to bring gum boots.

To make a phone-call I needed to walk ¾ mile to get even an intermittent signal (front page photo).Our shower room (right) is shown just after one of our deaf students gave it a make-over, adding a bamboo shelf and mat.

Learning from/working with Labone’s deaf.

The speed with which our deaf students (circled) found and persuaded local deaf and a hearing friend/relative to learn sign-language was breath-taking.

They were a magnet for local hearing kids and youth too, who loved the races to grab the object signed from a topic.

Learning from/working with Labone’s deaf.

The speed with which our deaf students (circled) found and persuaded local deaf and a hearing friend/relative to learn sign-language was breath-taking.

They were a magnet for local hearing kids and youth too, who loved the races to grab the object signed from a topic.

At the Refinery - Learning about ourselves on outreach in Labone, S. Sudan (Adam):

It never ceases to amaze me how many different ways my Lord God speaks to me, often repeatedly on the same topic, until I act on the message. He used people’s comments, a vision, a voice in my mind, animals, problems and sicknesses. No method was too. Heavy language I know , but I am constantly reminded of His desire to teach me if I am receptive am expectant, responsive and faithful.

Three passages were really impressed upon me whilst in Sudan. The first was about continuing to ask from Luke 11. I realised even more, now, how God answers me through my ‘neighbour’, and how greater neighbour-liness may well have prevented the death of a mother and a two year old whist we were in Laboni.

Then, I was struck afresh how the steps and lessons our DTS teams were going through were very similar to the account about Jesus beginning his work in Galilee in Matthew chapters 4 & 5. I also understood, more starkly and precisely, the needs, vision , mission and goals Jesus’ saw. Like the team accounting (above left),he wants nothing wasted

Then the parables of the sower and the wise and foolish builders were miraculously acted out - twice each, by the local villagers, and then the local weather system on two of our tents! Laboni peoples’ minds, and ours are very much like the different types of soil in the story about the sower. Laboni peoples’ lives and ours are also not built on totally firm foundations, but over the years the Lord has strengthened mine. May He do so for you too.

One of the local delicacies, bush-rat, (left), was a real mind battle for me, because of their distant cousin’s lifestyle in the UK! But, it was so tasty!

Being a multi-cultural team meant accepting different attitudes to stray dogs who needed care, discipline & work, but who carried disease and wanted our food. Using scripture we slowly learnt to see the truth in other’s views, the flaws in our own,change & forgive! Do feedback. Lets israel - wrestle with God!. CU. Ad

Laboni, south of Torit, S Sudan,

Adam is co-leading a mixed hearing/deaf team team of 11 students and 5 of their dependents here for four weeks, where YWAM Arua has local contacts.

The following extract from a previous YWAM team visit report shows the felt needs: “In Pamaikongo the tone was no different, speaker after speaker echoed the need for intervention and change. Mark Odwar spoke with a lot of bitterness as he recount how they have suffered in the hands of the lords resistant army of Kony, and the Dinkas, he seems to believe that even God might have forgotten them since the government has also neglected them. He cried for Blanket as the place is very cold at night, health centre, schools and teachers, and cooking utensils.

Peter Maksoda who is the chief of the place recounted the effects of war upon them and said “we were destined for extinction then through the war but we are still destined now through natural calamities as diseases, famine and ignorance”.

One particular young man from Lakulo ayweri said ‘ we are so divided because we don’t have anything that brings us together, we therefore kindly request you to come and build us a church so that we can learn to live in unity.”