Digging Up The Old Road

We woke up this morning to loud sounds on the road and were surprised to find that the road right in front of our house was being ripped up! I had just been noticing a couple days before that this past week’s rains were washing out a section of road, but I didn’t expect to see such quick action to repair it!

Digging up road by our house

 

Lots of island roads are not in great shape. Weather and wear lead to potholes and eroded edges. Nice roads stay nice for a year or two, but they will eventually become a bad road again. People will try to stop or slow the deterioration or at least ease travel by doing patch jobs, by filling in holes with rocks, dirt or maybe cement. But these are very temporary fixes because if you really want a nice road again, if you want to get things moving then you need to tear it all up and start again.

Some of the books we have been reading lately have been reminding and challenging us that a good leader needs to recognize when it is time for things to stop. They need to be able to see when it is time for one chapter to end and another to begin.

Stopping something can be hard, especially when what you have is still functional. It works. It’s familiar. You can admit that over time it might no longer be the best, and by now there might be a better way, but the work of getting rid of the functional and starting afresh is daunting. We are tempted to make do for a little bit longer. To pull us into the road analogy, do we tear up the road while it is still functional or do we wait until it gets really bad? Do we wait for accidents, for movement to stall and for people to be going nowhere before we initiate the rebuild?

Celebrating 1wk & 1yr on island!

As we look over our time as leaders and we can see times when we continued to hobble along with a certain way of doing things, or with a certain role, or with a certain colleague, when we should have been bringing things to an end and starting a new chapter. Those times stand out partially because when the end did eventually come, it came with a sense of relief and the thought: ’We should have changed that earlier!’

The winds of change are blowing for us this year. Our oldest will be starting high school in mainland Africa. Our older son will finish at local island school and will only do homeschool. And we are going to step into a new leadership position over not just our team, but all the islands’ teams. We know that we won’t be able to continue as we have before both as parents and team leaders. We’ve started to reflect and think about what needs to end for these new things to begin.  We’ve looked at our old ways of doing things and our current teammates and have been struck.  Our teammates are wonderfully capable women and leaders in their own right!

This past week we oriented our new teammate. Orientation can be an intense week with lots of sessions and training, but compared to other orientation weeks, this time we did very little. Our teammates were the ones organizing, facilitating and leading many of the things that we might have done in the past. Why didn’t we hand off more of this before!? Honestly, I’m not sure if we were ready before, but we are now.  

We continue to survey for “bad roads”, for those ways of doing things that don’t make as much sense moving forward. We’ve dug up some of the old but there is probably more that we need to let go of and say goodbye to. There are parts that will be hard, but overall, we are excited for the new roads to be built. We’re excited to see our teammates move into new roles. We’re excited to see the work on the islands grow. We’re excited for all the new things God has in store!

Our kids getting big!

PRAYERS ANSWERED
Tom tested negative for COVID on Monday, got a plane to the big island on Tuesday and a plane to Clove Island on Wednesday! He was able to be here for the second half of our new teammate’s orientation. She seems to be doing well. The orientation went smoothly and our new teammate has begun her homestay with an island family— the family is really excited to have her! Pray that the week would be fun and educational and that the beginning of those relationships would start strong. The consultant meetings for the small island translation project went well. Continue to pray for the projects progressing on all three islands.

PRAYERS REQUESTED
Two toddlers of our colleagues on the small island have fallen sick, one with measles, the other with chicken pox! It was a rough week for them, but hopefully the worst is over. Pray for fast and full recoveries and that no more children would get sick! There has been lots of inflation on the islands and this past week a big taxi/taxi-bus strike shut down most commerce. Pray for the island economy and for a stop to the inflation where even small increases can have a big impact on poor families. Pray for our friend and colleague on the French Island who will be visiting this week as part of an official medical delegation— pray for a good visit and for positive improvements in healthcare. Pray also that his visit could help get work approval for our medical team moving— as he will have visits with some of the top health officials on whose approval we have been waiting. We will be applying for the annual renewal of our visas this week for our family and several teammates— pray that we would get the needed letter to process our visas easily.