Still no word on our visas. It is very strange to just be here, feeling like we are in limbo, and any day we could get the word that we have a couple days to pack up, pass on our responsibilities, and go home. But we have decided to try as best we can to live as if we will be staying. One of our goals for our time here this year is to help develop staff for this base. In particular, we have a great staff team for this Discipleship Training School, but none of us are planning to be involved in DTS after this year. We would like to see some new staff raised up to continue running this school. As a DTS staff team, part of our job is to encourage students to pursue their calling after they leave the school in June. As we have been staffing this DTS over the last few months, we have observed that we have a quality group of students, and many of them feel called to long-term missions. Several of the students have also expressed a desire to staff with YWAM at some point. So with this in mind, we have decided to offer an internship from the end of June until December for former DTS students (particularly from this school) who are interested in staffing a DTS themselves with continued mentorship. Moise has agreed to lead the next school, and Mike and I will be indirectly involved through mentoring the new staff. This is really exciting because it will be an active and structured step in training staff (even if some of them may not stay her in Kigali long term). It is also exciting because it is a chance to continue training some of the students we are training now. It is difficult in YWAM to be always starting new relationships and seeing people you care about leave, but this will be a chance to continue to encourage some of them as they step into leadership themselves. A few students have already expressed excitement at the prospect of being involved in the internship. It helps us to keep our focus here each day when we have this to look forward to.
Thanks for the update Mike and Amanda. I am praying for you and know that whatever God’s plans are for you they are the best.
The mentoring project sounds really interesting. We’ll keep praying that those visas will fall into place!