Amanda's Musings

I found this a difficult topic to match up but this watercolour of a distant relative (Ivy, can you guess the era she lived in from the haircut?) had nice clean lines so I’m taking that as my interpretation!

This is me at my uni graduation last year. I graduated with a BA Arts (visual arts) majoring in painting. I can’t say that the degree was difficult seeing as there were no exams, one written assignment per semester and only one required book (although there were readers) during the whole degree. It was a lot of fun though and one day I hope to add a Dip.Ed to it so I can teach art.

As I said in my last post, when we arrived in the UK we didn’t really know anyone. We felt God’s leading to go to the UK but we didn’t really know why. We took a guess and decided it must be because work in the IT industry is so good in the UK and that would be how we would raise the funds to go to Niger and live there for a year. Wrong (insert buzzer noise).

The first thing we needed to do was find a place to live. In order to do that we needed money. In order to get money we needed a job. We also needed a bank account to put money into and we couldn’t get a house until we had that. Turns out we couldn’t get a bank account until we had an address. What a viscious circle!

We started looking for both jobs and houses, starting in the Ipswich area. After knowing there are IT jobs in London we were surprised to find out that this didn’t apply outside of that area so much and Michael just couldn’t find a job (or was it the Lord stopping him…..we think so).

We were living in the converted stables at the Manor where SIM UK has their guest house and after two weeks of nothing it was getting a bit expensive for us. We had been praying for work and decided to pray this on our second Tuesday there, ‘Lord, if Michael doesn’t have a job by Monday we’ll go t London’ which would be very expensive. This was our fleece laying.

On Friday we got a phonecall from the SIM International computer guy, Steve Jay offering Michael a position within SIM. As SIM is a missionary organisation he told Steve that at the moment we really needed paid work or else we’d never be able to move out of the stables! What he said next was the first big ‘WOW’ moment in the UK….’oh, it’s a paid positon and it comes with a monthly rent allowance’. What! We couldn’t believe it.

So, Michael went to work in the SIM International office not too far away in a village called Framlingham and it wasn’t long before the Lord provided a house. We had been looking around and as it turns out rentals aren’t cheap in the UK, even in the country. We found a little 1 bedroom terraced house in a little village called Debenham, not far from Framlingham in a street called ‘Great Back Lane’.

Front of the house, the two dark shadows (fences) show the whole width of the house.

Here comes amazing ‘WOW’ moment number two. In the SIM UK office worked another Aussie called Dorothy (pictured below). We were excited to meet her and while in the office one day that week went and told her our news about the job and house. It went like this…

Us: ‘So, we’ve found a place in Debenham, it’s a village not far from here’
D: ‘What village did you say….Debenham?’
Us:’Yes, that’s right’
D: ‘I live in Debenham’
Us: ‘Wow, we can visit all the time!, what street do you live on?’
D: ‘It’s called Great Back Lane’
Us: Jaws drop, momentarily speechless. ‘No way!’

Of course it turned out that Dorothy lived two little houses up from us and there was a third Aussie in our tiny row of houses so we nicknamed our little lane as ‘Out Back Lane’. Dorothy became a very good friend to us, like a Grandmother. Michael fixed her computer problems and she loaned us the use of her washing machine and dryer and vacuum. Isn’t the Lord good, he knew what we needed! We are still great friends with Dorothy and she lives over in Queensland now.

There are of course more adventures in the UK but I really want to get to how we got to Niger so there will probably be only one more post (full of WOW’s) after this focussing on the UK. Thanks for reading!

For those of you who aren’t familiar with what Summer is like in Perth I’ll explain. Think of the heat you would expect in parts of the middle east or Africa, the type thats dry and searing and you’re pretty much there. The temperatures in a Perth Summer (December to February) are usually between 35C (95F) and 45C (113F) and above. It’s ok because we’re used to it and tend to gravitate to shopping centres, libraries, cinemas and anything with an air conditioner or just stick it out and enjoy the fact that it’s summer. Considering this you can expect that our systems were in a bit of shock when we flew from a Perth summer to an English winter in January 2000.

We felt the Lord leading us there but at the time the only people we ‘knew’ were the staff at the SIM headquarters in Wetheringsett, Suffolk. We didn’t actually know them at all but they were SIM so we aimed at starting our journey in Wetheringsett.

The day we arrived we had flown from Singapore to London via Paris and then stayed in a hotel in the city overnight before catching a bus and a train out to Suffolk. What a journey that was with all our luggage and a computer tower to boot.

The people at Wetheringsett Manor (above) where SIM UK/Northern Europe is situated were so welcoming. As soon as we walked (or rather shivered) through the door they greeted us and helped us to settle in.

That was the start of a very long, topsy turvy-full-of-lessons, wonderful six months in the UK. I just can’t explain about our time in Niger without first sharing about the UK, the two are intrinsically linked.

Remember in my last post how I said we were prepared for Niger but asked whether we were ready for the UK? Well, I promise I will get there in explaining the answer to that but you probably can guess already that we weren’t. The weather was a shock to they system as was the fact that it got dark at around 4.30pm in Suffolk during winter but that was just the beginning.

Part 1 – Position Available
Part 2 – The Year was 1999
Part 3 – Red Dirt or Green Grass

So continuing on with the story of our trip to Niger. In 1999 Michael was working at for an internet service provider in the city and I was a primary school secretary. We both had good jobs and enjoyed them very much. I was working at a Christian school and really loved the family atmosphere that was there. In order to go to Niger we had to do a very difficult thing and resign from our jobs. That resignation letter was one of the hardest I’ve had to write.

After the meal Jill asked us what continent we had in mind and we replied ‘Africa’ for no particular reason. She then said ‘what area are you wanting to work in?’ to which we replied ‘teaching in an MK school’. Jill enquired further with SIM about this and two MK schools in Africa replied with a definate yes, Bingham Academy in Ethiopia and Sahel Academy in Niger.

When we got the two brochures for the two schools the differences couldn’t have been bigger. Bingham was in a country with a reasonable climate, spoke English and the school had green grass and nice looking buildings. Sahel was in a country that spoke French, the buildings were not airconditioned (arre now though) and the climate averaged 27C at night and over 40C during the day. I could go on but you get the picture.

Seeing as we wanted to challenge ourselves we chose Sahel Academy in Niger and so the rest of 1999 was spent in sorting out what was needed to get to Sahel for the following school year in mid 2000. More on those preparations next time.

Pic: Top: Part of Niamey, capital city of Niger from the air Bottom: Ethiopia from the air

In 1998 we went on a short-term trip to Belgium with Operation Mobilisation. We did a three week street evangelism type trip in a country that speaks Flemish and learnt a lot about ourselves. The reason we did that was to explore the possibility of missions and our involvement in it. We were waiting for a lightening bolt, an answer to what we were to do with our newly married selves.

Since there was no lightening bolt but we still felt the strong pull towards overseas missions we decided in 1999 to explore some more. I was a secretary in a primary school and Michael was involved in the IT industry specialising in the area of internet service providers. However, I didn’t want to be a secretary in a missions area but to use my love of art with my limited training in that area in some capacity.

We wrote to 10 missions asking whether they could use a person to teach art and a person to teach computers in their MK (missionary kid) schools. We made sure they knew that we were unqualified but were willing to teach these non central subjects which would get overlooked when theres no one to teach them. We thought ‘hey, some of these missions will reply and say yes but hopefully enough say no so as to narrow the field down a bit’. Silly idea. They all said yes and come at once.

Pic: Me learning how to do street evangelism, check out my hair and sunnies! Very 1998