Thursday, June 18, 2009
Africa Advice?
There are so many details we're working on right now for our move in 2 months, but I also want to take advantage of the wealth of information you have! We have lived internationally before, but not for a year and not in Africa. If you have any tips, advice, stories, anything, we want to know! Help us out by leaving a comment or send an email.
Interested in Supporting Us Financially?
**UPDATED 9/12/09**
Our school KICS exists as a Christian option for the city of Kigali. It also allows families to continue their children's education in an American-style setting. The school also seeks to serve the Rwandan national students and truly provide an international community. Although many families are Christians, we also have the opportunity to daily share Jesus with our students.
We would love your support in prayer and any financial donations you can provide. We deeply value the opportunity to go to another country as full-time workers and share the love of God with the students and families we will be ministering to. However, it has been strongly advised by the school (and assumed in the salary structure) that we supplement our salary from them with donations. We have already received a very generous gift that covers a large portion of our living expenses, but we want to take this opportunity to partner with you to serve the people of Rwanda.
We believe there is much that God is going to teach us in this process of raising financial and prayer support. We have been profoundly blessed in times where we have supported other believers financially and hope that you experience a deeper connection to us, to Rwanda, and to the Lord in this experience. Please think about joining us and let us know if you have any questions. We would also love to hear if you are planning on supporting us through prayer and/or financial means (either one time donation or monthly). Thank you!
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Bridgeway Christian Church has graciously agreed to provide tax-deductible receipts for your records. They will deposit the complete contribution funds in our bank account once a month. Please feel free to contribute either a one time donation or on a more frequent basis, whatever is most convenient for you. If you feel comfortable doing so, we would very much appreciate it if you let us know what your plan is, so that we can confirm that the correct amount has been deposited and to help us estimate our budget. (We don't expect any technical difficulties, but just in case something happens through the mail or the processing. If you feel like making it a secret, we love surprises too.)
So, here are the details:
1) Checks should be made out to "Bridgeway Christian Church" with "Levi and Erin Fletcher" listed in the Memo section.
2) Add in a little slip of paper that says you want the money to be deposited into our account.
3) Please put "Donation for Fletchers - Rwanda" in big letters on the back of the envelope to help it stand out from the various letters that the church receives.
4) Mail to:
Bridgeway Christian Church
3735 Placer Corporate Drive
Rocklin, CA 95765
(If you attend Bridgeway, I think you can put an envelope in the offering basket, but please make the envelope has all the information.)
Whatever we receive over $3000 ($300 x 10 months), we hope to use to directly bless someone we encounter in Kigali. We are not sure what that will look like at this time, so please pray for us to have open eyes and use wise discernment as we see needs. We so look forward to sharing this experience with you and filling you in on what God is doing on the other side of the world.
Joint Email: levianderin@gmail.com
Our school KICS exists as a Christian option for the city of Kigali. It also allows families to continue their children's education in an American-style setting. The school also seeks to serve the Rwandan national students and truly provide an international community. Although many families are Christians, we also have the opportunity to daily share Jesus with our students.
We would love your support in prayer and any financial donations you can provide. We deeply value the opportunity to go to another country as full-time workers and share the love of God with the students and families we will be ministering to. However, it has been strongly advised by the school (and assumed in the salary structure) that we supplement our salary from them with donations. We have already received a very generous gift that covers a large portion of our living expenses, but we want to take this opportunity to partner with you to serve the people of Rwanda.
We believe there is much that God is going to teach us in this process of raising financial and prayer support. We have been profoundly blessed in times where we have supported other believers financially and hope that you experience a deeper connection to us, to Rwanda, and to the Lord in this experience. Please think about joining us and let us know if you have any questions. We would also love to hear if you are planning on supporting us through prayer and/or financial means (either one time donation or monthly). Thank you!
----------
Bridgeway Christian Church has graciously agreed to provide tax-deductible receipts for your records. They will deposit the complete contribution funds in our bank account once a month. Please feel free to contribute either a one time donation or on a more frequent basis, whatever is most convenient for you. If you feel comfortable doing so, we would very much appreciate it if you let us know what your plan is, so that we can confirm that the correct amount has been deposited and to help us estimate our budget. (We don't expect any technical difficulties, but just in case something happens through the mail or the processing. If you feel like making it a secret, we love surprises too.)
So, here are the details:
1) Checks should be made out to "Bridgeway Christian Church" with "Levi and Erin Fletcher" listed in the Memo section.
2) Add in a little slip of paper that says you want the money to be deposited into our account.
3) Please put "Donation for Fletchers - Rwanda" in big letters on the back of the envelope to help it stand out from the various letters that the church receives.
4) Mail to:
Bridgeway Christian Church
3735 Placer Corporate Drive
Rocklin, CA 95765
(If you attend Bridgeway, I think you can put an envelope in the offering basket, but please make the envelope has all the information.)
Whatever we receive over $3000 ($300 x 10 months), we hope to use to directly bless someone we encounter in Kigali. We are not sure what that will look like at this time, so please pray for us to have open eyes and use wise discernment as we see needs. We so look forward to sharing this experience with you and filling you in on what God is doing on the other side of the world.
Joint Email: levianderin@gmail.com
the Mr. and Mrs.
Well, hello there! Thanks again for visiting the blog. We'll try to be good bloggers since it's a great way to keep in touch.
So a little bit about us...
We actually met on a missions trip in Mexico with our high school church youth group in 1999. Our friendship grew over the next year and a half and then officially became a couple on December 30, 2000. Erin went off to UCLA and we made it through a year of long distance, including the four months Levi was in Guatemala, before Levi decided to move to Los Angeles. Through our time in LA, we both began to make our faith in Jesus the most important part of our lives and our relationship. We got engaged in 2005 and married on July 1, 2006. We continued to live in West LA, where Levi finished up his degree at CSUN and Erin got to fulfill a dream job working as a counselor at UCLA. The next year solidified Levi's desire to become a teacher as he worked at Fairburn Elementary and Groza Learning Center. He applied to the teacher credential programs at CSUN and Sac State, letting God show us what part of California to live in. Through the timing of the decisions, we accepted the program at Sac State and moved 400 miles north to Roseville. We found out later that he had been accepted to CSUN as well, but it was clear that we were meant to spend the year up here. Levi had a great time with the program and Erin got experience teaching that she would not have had in LA. And now we're off to Africa!
Information You Never Knew You Cared About:
| Name: | Levi | Erin |
| Birthday: | Apr | May |
| Birth Order: | Complicated. Youngest (Dad's family), Only (biological), Oldest (Mom's family) | Youngest, with Tendencies of Only |
| Siblings: | 4 sisters, 1 brother | 2 sisters, 2 brothers |
| Myers Briggs Personality: | ESTJ (Extrovert Sensing Thinking Judging) | INTJ (Introvert Intuitive Thinking Judging) |
| Method of reading: | Books on Tape | A book a day is my dream |
| Rural Credentials: | Legit - Farm life in Humboldt County, Cranberry bogging on grandparent's farm every vacation | Observer - Cows in the field next door, turkeys roosting on the driveway |
| City Proof: | Street ball with the homies | Red carpet movie premiere |
| Claim to Fame: | Basketball Player #1 in Underclassman (sadly uncredited on imdb) | Spelling Bee champ |
| Sporting activities: | Full contact sports: Rugby, wrestling, basketball | Non-contact sports: Yoga, pilates, volleyball |
| What I miss about TV: | ESPN | Friends reruns, Food Network |
| iPod playlist: | Sermons, books, Pearl Jam, Guns N Roses, Techno (like Moby) | Everything but techno (like Moby) and opera |
| Pandora stations: | Coldplay, Cake, Weezer | Alanis, Feist, Coldplay |
| Movies I will watch more than once: | Braveheart, Boondock Saints, Legends of the Fall. | Every movie I like |
| Authors I'll Read Everything They Scribe: | Tim Keller, Malcolm Gladwell, Theodor Geisel | Madeleine L'Engle, C.S. Lewis, J.K. Rowling, J.R.R. Tolkien |
| Ideal sleep per day: | 7 hours | 10 hours |
| Dessert Philosophy: | Just give me more dinner, unless it's creme brulee. | Dessert is an essential part of every day |
The Land of A Thousand Hills
Well, we don't know much about Rwanda, but what we do, we'll share. It's a very small landlocked country about the size of Maryland in Sub-Saharan eastern Africa that has a very pleasant climate year round. There's a special protected society of gorillas.
That's all for now. Anything else we know is found on either of these sites or general web browsing.
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwanda
CIA World Factbook: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/RW.html
We'll update with more interesting factoids as we learn them.
What's the Plan?
Yes, we're moving to Rwanda! It's going to be a fast summer because we fly out for Africa on August 18! We have decided to join the team at Kigali International Community School (KICS) for the 2009-2010 school year. As you may know, Levi just completed the program for his teaching credential and he will be using all his skills there teaching junior high and high schoool math and possibly science. I (Erin) had a year full of decisions, substitute teaching and teaching for The Princeton Review as I completed prerequisites for grad school. At the end of the semester, I decided not to continue on the graduate school path, which really freed us up to leave the country. I am very excited about my teaching assignment at KICS - High school Bible and English! I went to Christian school for eight years and have been leading Bible studies for the past six years, but most importantly, studying the Bible is a huge joy and passion of mine. KICS is a Christian school for both Rwandan children and children of international workers. They provide the cost of our plane tickets and visas, which is very helpful. We will earn a small salary from the school, but are also praying about raising further funding. The school recommends coming as missionaries and raising additional support. Our hope would be to also bring in donations for opportunities we will encounter to provide for the community we serve, either as school supplies, shoes, or whatever.
Why Rwanda?
Well, numerous factors have come together to bring us to that particular. I've thought it would be neat to live abroad (on a short-term basis) ever since coming back from a wonderful semester abroad in Paris, France. Levi attended language school in Guatemala for a few months and has had a heart for Rwanda ever since becoming friends with a Rwandan missionary. Then, we found out that one of the members of my family will be moving to Kigali (the capitol of Rwanda) and invited us to go with them. We applied to KICS, had a great interview with the Headmaster, and now we're off!
Is it safe?
The genocide you're thinking of happened fifteen years ago. It's currently "safe, clean and well-organized," courtesy of the US Department of State.
How long are you going to be there?
As of right now, we're just taking it one year at a time, so we plan to be back in California in about one year from today.
Are you excited?
Yes. A little overwhelmed with all the details of the logistics in getting us over there, but excited for the opportunity to go and see what God has in store for us in this next year.
Monday, June 15, 2009
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