Evenki partnership developing

Not all of our Evenki plans have come to pass this year. 

- We have met a new lady who can help us with learning language, but she lives so far across the city. (We still hope to commence with her once buying a car.) 

- I was hoping to make a trip to the reindeer festival in Surinda in March, but that fell through. (At the last minute Yura could not go as his vehicle broke and we did not have a reasonable way of getting there.)

- I was hoping to get a translation of the "Evenki Heroic Folk Tales" disc by now. I think I will have to try some different leads. My current requests have been ignored, or at least unanswered.

But, there are many positive too.

- Discipleship with Sergei is going well. He is likely to go back north in June. It will be hard to say goodbye to him. I hope we can keep in touch in the future.

- We have met new Evenki students in the city. One of them is a fluent speaker. I hope to get to know him. The other has appeared to be open to the gospel so far.

- We will be able to commence language learning again, timing and distance are just the issue here.

- We have made connection with others in Siberia working amongst Evenki people.

It was already part of our plans to head east this year to visit the northern Baikal region. We will continue to maintain our contacts in the Evenkiya region to the north. Truth be told though, when we consider the idea of living immersed among Evenki further down the track, living in a fly in community sounds pretty tough to me. (Think much harder than a fly in community in Alaska or Canada.) I have always thought that it would be better to live where a train line is. This makes it possible to travel what ever the weather is.

In September last year we met a girl from Irkutsk. She told us of a family living on the Baikal Amur train line. We knew that we had to visit them. We pencilled it in for May this year, after Abigail finished the bulk of her schooling. In true Siberian style, we managed to organise this trip at a few days notice. What was even more special was that another family came at a few days notice. Sixteen years ago in South Africa I first made contact with some young guys, Riko and Theunis, who were just starting out in Siberia. I have kept in touch with Riko over the years. I hadn't heard from him in a few years though (but he does get our newsletters). So it was such a special bonus to meet Riko after 16 years!

Fred and Riko and their families have already gotten together a couple of times. It seems our Evenki partnership is starting to take off the ground. (There is already a partnership network of people working among various Siberian people groups.) Over the five days that we were together we found that we had so much to talk about that we had no hope of covering everything. Essentially we had years worth of stories to tell.

Fred and his family live in a stunningly beautiful part of Siberia. They are surrounded by snow capped peaks. If it were Canada their village would be an expensive place to live. As it is, a house there costs under $1000.

Our Evenki partnership: Fred, Riko and me.

With our wives: Melody and Marianna.

Meeting with an Evenki lady who was really keen to hear about our Evenki language learning methods.

Polina hopes to revive her language.

Perhaps we can help.