Nepal News

Golden Retriever with Newspaper in Its Mouth

This month has been full of “exciting” events here in Nepal. I've had several people ask about some of these happenings and so I will try to update you here.

First of all, on May 4^th, the Maoist Prime Minister suddenly stepped down from office; upset with how negotiations had been going about integrating his former rebel fighters into the Nepali army. This brought a lot of tension and uncertainty as to what this would trigger. As you may know, Nepal has gone through a long period of civil war and political upheavals. They have enjoyed only a year of peace and now it seemed as if that was going to end quickly. We are praising the Lord though that things have remained relatively calm and businesses have resumed as usual.

Just this week a new Prime Minister was elected into office and he is from the Marxist-Lenin Communist party. This sounds pretty extreme but they are actually a more benign group than the former. We are not sure what this means but they are pretty set on getting the new constitution written with a year’s time, which is a very important step for this country.

This past Saturday, at 9:30am, a bomb went off at a local Catholic church while they were having services. A 15 year old school girl from India and a 30 year old Nepali woman were killed and dozens others injured. This church is not too far from where we live and because of that, it was decided that our church would move the congregation to another location for services the next day. We met on the lawn of our pastor’s house and it was quite pleasant. We really didn’t expect too many people to show up, but we still had around 200 people there. It has been said that a Hindu extremist group is responsible for the bombing.

So as you can see, there are quite a number of ways that you can pray for us and for our family.

• Pray for Nepal and the political situation. So far things have been peaceful but we live in a constant “just wait and see” mode.
• Pray for our safety. We are unsure if this extremist group was just trying to make a point or were angered by this particular church or if they are going to continue with their bombings.
• Pray also as we live in and maneuver around in this city. This is a daily prayer that we lift up to the Lord as the roads can be very dangerous here. I’ve been knicked by motorcyclists twice while walking and Ben has been pushed off the road by a car while riding his bike back from the store. Just minor incidents but frequent occurrences that could become serious.
• Pray for our licensing process. It has been a long haul for us, but God has been good. We've not come up against any "walls" per say, but it has just been dragged on for a long time. In the meantime, we continue to learn the language and Stan and Tim continue to visit the various offices making relationships.