A Village Run

Sunday has been an interesting day. Because of the place that we are this is the first day of the week. There are no churches to speak of; therefore there is no time for Church. We got up this morning and ate breakfast at the hotel. Breakfast consisted of veggies, boiled eggs, bread with honey, and Nescafé that they were passing off as coffee. The BKA guys came and met us for a short business meeting that was very enlightening for me. It was invaluable for me to hear both the positives and the negatives of the meeting.

We then all loaded up in a van and took off toward the villages were the guys spend time with people. We met a man that had recently come to faith. He exposed to the gospel in Chicago and after he came to faith he had a heart for his people and moved back into one of the villages to share what he had learned. He runs a bee hive for a living and makes a pretty good gar of honey. We are hoping to duplicate this business in the villages to generate income. We ended up in one of the villages looking at Syria, and Turkey for our van in Iraq. (If I lived here that would be a tourist spot and I would sell souvenirs. There is so much opportunity for this beautiful country. Most of the people in the villages live under the poverty level. Any help that we can give them is much appreciated by the government here in Duhok.

I had a wonderful opportunity to sit in the office of the Vice Governor of Duhok; He is the one that is in charge of organization like ours that come to help the people of Duhok. He seemed very encouraged by what we are doing in the villages and encouraged us to do more. It was a very warm and friendly visit. We all left with the feeling that a good partnership had been established.

After the meet the people that were in the meeting found a pizza place for lunch. The pizza was just like you would get in the states. The only difference was they served it with French fries and hot ketchup. We ordered and waited for a bit only to be surprised when they brought out a medium size pizza for each one of us. We almost didn’t have enough room on the table for all the food. Somehow we managed to get it all down (there’s much P90X work to do)