Not an ADA certified procedure.

You may not have heard from us for a while – this is due at least in part to service interruptions from our rural cell tower… if you ask us, its amazing that we can send anything at all…

Nate and some friends… are they contemplating life or just wiping their chins?

Variety is the spice of life…or just the name of the game.

Many of you may have some idea of what kinds of things that we do here in Pal but, no matter how closely you have followed our life and work over the last few years, it would be difficult for you to really understand its daily ebb and flow or the situations we find ourselves in.

In a perfect world, our Pal friends would have good access to education, health care, and have already heard the gospel in their heart language. We’d be able to refer them to experts in the realms of hygiene, nutrition, and relationships. Too bad then that they have us, bumbling along, doing the best we can and trusting in God’s grace to get us through.

They tell us all the time that we are the best source of knowledge that they have, but often we can’t help but feel very inadequate. For instance – a friend who has been helping us with translation checking came to us with a swollen jaw this morning. The tooth that he had been complaining about was really infected and had become loose.

So what to do – give him a few pills of amoxicillin to break open and pack into the hole(as he suggested), assist him in pulling the tooth, or just hope it falls out on its own.

We ended up pulling the tooth in the safest, cleanest way we could.*  From there we went directly into working with another translation helper on Genesis 21 and 22. Just so you know, we try to be diligent and make good progress on translation, literacy, and lesson development, along with caring for the ever present needs of our friends.

Please pray for us – we are often out of our depth as we try to do the best we can here.

Elias taking pictures for our Pray for Pal Families work. More information below.

Here are a few things that came up since Sunday:

- the still-birth of a child and subsequent death of the mother. Elizabeth and Maggie did all that they could there.

- Trying to carefully respond to requests for assistance (Help us buy a car for when we are out in town… or  bring in a helicopter load of machetes and clothes…)

- Pregnant women asking for help with pain during childbirth

- Community pigs making their home underneath our partner’s house.

- A baby with pneumonia.

- How to translate –

• ‘swear’ as in promise before the Lord.
• ‘circumcision’ – an embarrassing topic for mixed company –don’t want to translate it so it can’t be read in church.
• ‘heir’  and others.

Uno, the universal game. Here Nate and Noah teach it to some of our Pal friends.

Pray for a Pal family

We are in the process of taking photos of every Pal family who are likely to come to the teaching of our first evangelistic lessons this year. Would you consider adopting a family to pray for? We’d send you a photo, names, some other info, and try to keep up with some prayer requests. We believe that the Lord is the one who will use His Word to change the hearts and minds of our friends. This would be a great  benefit to us in the work here. We’ll be looking at ways of making some of this information easy to access, but right now will only respond to personal email requests for photos (we want to greatly respect the privacy and dignity of our friends here).

Thanks so much for standing with us,

The Claasens

 

* Removing a rotten tooth in the bush: Procedure:

1. Pray.

2. Call a doctor. Get advice and dosage for medicines.

3. Inject the patient (yes in the bum) with penicillin. (In the bush you always have an audience – make sure that the mixed company audience gives the patient a little privacy)

4. Give a Tylenol-3. Wait 20 minutes.

5. Get out the needle-nose vice grips and sterilize.

6. Lay the patient down on your porch, open his mouth, lock on and pull the tooth carefully out. Make sure it’s the right tooth.

7. Help the patient rinse with salt water a number of times. Help with other pain medicine.

8. Dream about the experience all night. (This step is optional and not necessarily recommended.)