From Murphy -

As a special treat, we were able to meet with Randy Barlow, our Home Study provider and immigration consultant for our China Adoption. It was great to catch up with him and get more advice concerning the months ahead and completing our adoption. Pray that the wait time will drop so we can bring our daughter home sooner! More info about our adoption can be found on our blog @ http://audienceofone.cc .

My heart really goes out to the village of Didokpo. Another woman has died due to severe dysentery. I also found out that all of this began at a Witch Doctor's house. Now, he's dishing out physical as well as spiritual sickness! Pray that the Lord would have mercy on this region and stop the chronic dysentery from spreading.

Pray especially for Nukunu's wife who came down with the sickness Saturday night (pictured left). Pray that the Lord will heal her and protect the rest of her family from getting sick! Emily and Amy will tell you more about our Sunday with the church in Gbagu Kope (close to Didokpo where the sickness began).

This past Wednesday I admonished a leader concerning his participation in a questable activity. He was truthful about what he was planning to do on Wednesday. I prayed hard Wednesday and Thursday that he would change his mind. Praise be to God, when I arrived at our leader's meeting on Friday he was there. He took at financial loss of 10 days wages in order to seek the Kingdom first. I praise God for his faith and pray that the Lord would fulfill His promise that if we seek the Kingdom first He will provide all that we need. Pray that God will show His special grace to Mawuko this week and bless him for choosing the path of faith instead of wealth.

Please continue to pray that Simon (our mechanic) can successfully put our engine back together. As you can see from the picture, it's quite a sight! When I went to check on my vehicle Saturday this is what I found. The engine was in 100's of pieces! It's like a huge lego set for men! I hope that he still has the instructions:)

This week Marty and I are traveling to Accra, Ghana to purchase plane tickets for our family survey trip to Rwanda this May. God has graciously provided the funds for these tickets so that our families can 'scout out the land' where He is calling us to minister in 2009 and beyond! Thank you Lord. Pray that the Lord would watch over us as we travel and protect and take care of our wives and children while we are gone.

From Christine - This has been a very fun week. Murphy took me to eat lunch in Lome on Tuesday for my birthday. That evening Louise cooked a meal for the team and we celebrated together. It is wonderful to have family here to help share these special memories.

On Thursday I went to Kpotonou for my ladies' meeting. When I arrived there was only one woman, Massa (pictured left with Gillaume), there. She told me that one of the ladies, Atukpe, had just had a baby that morning. Atukpe had gone to a small clinic in Tsekpo (Chekpo) in the night to have thebaby. Since no other women had come to the meeting, I suggested to Massa that we go to Tsekpo and see the baby and mother. Before we left, another woman had arrived for the meeting. We started on our way and met up withtwo other women on their way to the meeting and another lady running to catch-up. The other women also wanted to go to Tsekpo and piled in the vehicle. There was lots of laughter on the way. The women werevery excited to get to ride in a car to Tsekpo. They walk this 5 km trip to go to the market once a week. In Tsekpo, we found the mother and baby girl doing very well (pictured right with her new baby girl). The dad (Kokuvito) was also there and had a huge grin when we walked in. He was very excited to see so many visitors.

This was such a fun experience for me. I loved watching the women laughing and chattering with one another (pictured left). I also loved watching Massa, who is older with some of her children already teenagers, helping and teaching Atukpe how to wrap her stomach. Kokuvito asked me if I could take his wife and the new baby back to Kpotonou. So we all got back into the car with two additional women and the newborn baby. I was so happy to take this woman and her new baby home. If I had not come she would have made the 5 km trip home on the back of her husband's bike while carrying her baby. When we got to her house we all stayed a while to pray for her and the baby. One of the women led a couple of songs. The woman who went with Atukpe to the clinic to assist with the delivery stood and testified that God had blessed them with safety and the mother and baby with good health. Then a couple of women prayed blessings for Atukpe and her new baby daughter. I feel so blessed to have been with these Kpotonou women for such a joyful occasion. It was a time of rejoicing and thanksgiving. I praise God that this baby has been born into a Christian home.

We have had a week full of parties and special occasions. Christine's Birthday party was Tuesdsay night. We all decorated the Koonces house to suprise her when she and Murphy arrived for dinner. We had a great burrito dinner and cupcakes. I love being a part of the family bond these families share. Wedesday was Valentines Day. Christine and Louise are so great! We had three kinds of cookies at school on Wednesday! We took an hour in the afternoon for the boys to make cards for their mothers and each other. Friday we celebrated Chinese New Year and Tanner's birthday. The boys had so many great memories to share of Chinese New Years celebrated with Jeremy and the whole Parker family. We made paper lanterns and dragons on Friday afternoon as our celebration. Then Friday night it was pizza and x-box to celebrate Tanner's birthday. The pizza was a wonderful treat and I had a great time playing outburst while the boys were playing Star Wars on the X-boxes.

Sunday was the best adventure I have had in many months. We went to worship in the WAY out village of Gbagu Kope this morning with a trunk full of coconuts and bananas. When we stopped in Didikpo to greet people on our way one of the men told Murphy that cholera had continued to spread and the wife of one of the christian men in Gbagu Kope was sick. We went out to pray over her and then walked back to the place where they have church. I was so excited when they sang "He Arose" in Eve! After worship services Murphy gave a talk about Cholera emphasizing hand washing and other things (I didn't understand the rest, but I have figured out the words for hand washing thanks to Murphy's hand motions). Then while Murphy continued talking with them Chrisitne, Amy, the boys, and I all walked out to the town water source. It was awful! During rainy season I am sure it is great but now during the dry season it is nothing more than a pit with a muddy puddle at the bottom! We did meet some really cute kids while we were there. By the time we got back to church Murphy had talked with the men and agreed transport clean water from Didikpo. Two teenage girls came with us and we pilled 8 empty containers on the roof of our little car. We drove the five kilometers back to Didikpo and then hiked down a path (with one of the christian women chatting away in Eve to Amy and I). When Togolese tell you it is "not far" they don't mean an American "not far". Now it was time to pump water into all eight contianers. Matthew and Stephen were already pumping away by the time I arrived. Then the girls and a couple of christians from Didikpo carried the containers back to the car on their heads and these contianers are so heavy it takes two people just to lift them up! I can not imagine having to do that kind of work and walk that far for each contianer of water. Then back to Gbagu Kope to deliver the water, and then finally now that it was around 2:30 we were headed back towards Tabligbo. When we got home I was so happy and appreciative to watch water come out of the faucet! And that first glass of clean cold water was wonderful! Christine made a yummy Chinese dinner tonight so we could celebrate Chinese New Year together.

From Marty - It was back to more "business as usual" for us this past week. I had good leadership meetings in all of my villages with the only changes being more time in prayer and the making of plans for carrying out the committments from the men's conference. Most of the churches have realized that we are about to go on furlough and then will return for a "mini" term prior to our work in Rwanda. Two wonderful things have developed from this. First of all, by God's grace they have accepted ownership for God's work here as we are hearing more and more "independant" verbage from them. Many times while at the conference there were groups of men meeting and having various discussions, feeling the freedom not to include Murphy and I. This did not offend us at all as they have come to realize their responsibility to work in God's fields beyond our residential presence here. Secondly, they are assuming the role of senders, as in sending us to Rwanda. Not with physical support but with loving prayer. It has been amazing to receive the blessings of their prayers and it has been encouraging to them that we are going to continue working in Africa. As I write about this I am prompted to ask for prayers on these two topics. Please pray for the Christians here to be equipped by God's Spirit to do his work. Pray that God will give them his gifts and that they will have faith in Christ. Pray also that they will long for God deeply. Please pray as well for our future transition to Rwanda and upcoming furlough. This is our tenth year in Togo and even though our transition will be within Africa, Rwanda is truly half (or at least 20%) of a world away. It will be a much different and more complex work. So please pray for us as we begin to disengage from Togo (physically) and begin our transition to Rwanda. Thank you for your prayers and love.

From Louise - The first rain did, in fact, come earlier than we would have liked, when just two days after it harmatan came back. So we have been battling the dust and the allergic reactions that come with it. Tanner and Tucker have both been victim of a stomach virus. Taylor, Trevor, Marty and I have been spared thus far. Marty treated me to a Valentine's Day breakfast brunch after the boys were off to school. He showed off his culinary skills and table setting etiquette, complete with flowers. Tanner's birthday party was a great success on Friday evening. Following the popular X-Box theme, he and his friends ate pizza and played X-Box on the wall via the projector. His 8th birthday is actually the 19th.

The younger boys have this fascination at school with strange books. I usually expect that when I tell them to pick out a book for me to read out loud they are going to pick something like "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" or "The Day Jimmy's Boa Ate the Wash." But Trevor and Matthew and even Tanner have other ideas. Some of their current book choices are: "All About Rattlesnakes" and "All About Turkeys" two books that I would recomend for their very detailed illustrations and large volume of information, but I would recomend them to a science class and not for an easy to read story book. They also like "Butterfly" and "All About Birds." The titles say it all. Again, great pictures but dull storylines. And finally my favorite "The Mouse Who Stole a Zoo." This story follows one mouse who frees the entire population of a zoo one by one and takes them all to live together in a big house in the woods. They run into trouble when the alligator starts eying the other animals but in the end everyone has a job to do and they live as one happy family. After the third or fourth reading in a week of any of these books I start picking our stories myself. Is it a bad thing when the teacher would rather read a story than an informative book? :)

We just had a very fun Sunday. I think Emily is talking about some of the day, but I get to tell about the coconuts that filled the back of the car. It's more the Crowson's story about how the coconuts got there, but when we were in the village today we all got to carry some of the coconut to a hut. None of us could actually carry them on our heads (the Africans didn't even try), but Stephen and I had fun trying anyway. The coconuts left in the back of the car were taken to another village where they got to open the back door and watch all the coconuts spill out. It was great entertainment.