More Details

Wow. Three posts in three days. I hope you aren't getting tired of hearing from us.

I figured I would fill in some of the details which Kerri didn't mention. Yes, we are going to the Philippines. We are hoping to leave Canada in June of 2011, taking only suitcases, and relocating halfway around the world.

Yes, our kids are coming with us. I know it seems crazy to take them from all the benefits of a childhood in Canada to go to a largely developing country where we know no one and will have to learn a new culture. But what an experience for them.

Kerri will be in classes and the clinic lots. Something like 40-60 hours a week. That will be her life for 2 1/2 years.

I will be Mr. Mom. Due to the visa regulations to enter the country, Kerri and I will both be entering under a missionary visa. That means that I will not be able to have a job. My role will be to stay home with the kids, to homeschool them, and to do all the household stuff that Kerri has done so well for the last 12 years. I will have to learn to grocery shop in a new culture, how to cook with new ingredients, and generally how to adapt to this phase of our lives. I am really looking forward to the challenge.

With that being said, because I will not be working, we will be largely dependent on raising funds before we go and on ongoing support while we are there. The financial requirements are estimated to be between $50,000-75,000 for the 2 1/2 years we will be there. This seems like a huge amount to have to come up with in a short amount of time, but we trust that God will provide as He has in the past. Currently Kerri and I are both working (Kerri having just gotten a new job) to provide for the need, but we will be unable to finance it all ourselves.

That is where we would love for you to partner with us. We are planning several fundraiser events in the next 8 months, the first being a dinner on November 27. We would love to see you come out, not just to support us financially, but to have the opportunity for Kerri and I to be able to share more about this passion and desire which God has placed on our hearts. For more details, feel free to email us at skoishi78@gmail.com, or for those of you we have connected with on Facebook, watch for a Facebook event invitation coming soon.

There will be several more events in the New Year as well. You may have also noticed that we have added a "Donate" button to our blog. This is a Paypal based setup, where should you choose to you can make a donation towards Kerri's training and our living expenses. Currently it is a one-time donation, but I am working on setting up the opportunity for ongoing monthly giving.

(One thing to note: because these donations are being used for Kerri to go to school and for us to live, we are unable to issue income tax receipts. Hopefully in the future we will be able to set up a charitable organization and offer receipts, but for now our situation does not fit the criteria.)

If we are unable to bank a sufficient amount before the spring we may have to postpone our plans to go for one year, during which we will both work and save up as much as we can to go, but we are moving ahead in faith that God will provide for us to go this coming year.

We would also appreciate your prayers. As much as we need the finances in place, we need your prayers even more. This will be a time of huge stress for all of us. We will be leaving behind everything and everyone we know. This will affect all of us, including the kids. There are a lot of unknowns which we will face. It will be exciting, fun, and a wonderful experience, but it will also be sad, hard, and at times downright depressing. There will be many good things which come out of it, and many not-so-good things as well. We will make new friends, but will miss all of our friends and family. We need your prayers.

Thank you in advance for your support, both emotionally, spiritually, and financially. We can't do this without you.

Another answer to prayer

After having no success in the job hunt since August, I had an interview this morning and will be starting a job on Monday as a medical receptionist at the Alpen Medical Clinic here in town.  I will be working Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 9:00-3:00, so I will still be able to pick Julia and Daniel up after school and be home with them when they have professional days at school.

Once again I am thankful for God's provision and faithfulness to us!

Newlife Int'l School of Midwifery

On our way

We received some very exciting news on Saturday night - I have been granted a provisional acceptance to volunteer and train at Mercy Maternity Center in Davao City, Philippines!  The condition is that we need to have all of the finances in place.  Because we are not going with an organization, we have to raise all of our own support, for living costs for the two and a half years that we will be there.

For those of you who have been praying for us, thank you so much and please continue to do so as we move forward with raising the support that we need.

Kerri

Steady On

Slow and steady wins the race, right?  That's what it feels like for us, we have been walking on, slow and steady and now we are coming to the end; the end of school for Steve that is.  He is now in his last semester of classes with midterms behind him and only 8 weeks of classes left.  In some ways it seems to have flown by and in other ways I don't remember what it was like to not be out here with him in school.  The last requirement for his graduation will be for him to do his field education (practicum) in the winter semester.  He was hoping to work with the Arabic Alliance church that meets out of Airdrie Alliance, but unfortunately that didn't work out and now he is trying to figure out how to best meet his field education requirements.  It will be a big change for all of us to have him finished with his classes, but we are excited for what will be in store for us next.

As for my schooling, I am just waiting on a telephone interview for both Steve and I, and then that's the last step on my part. 

We will keep you posted when anything new and exciting happens from this end!

Kerri

Application is complete

Well, my application to Newlife International School of Midwifery is complete and I was ready to email it in, when I realized that I needed to include a recent picture of myself.  When I went to find one I found out that no one has taken any recent pictures of me by myself!  I have tons of pictures of me with the kids doing all kinds of goofy things even some nice ones of me and the kids, and me and Steve, but not one of just me, unless you count a side view of me rock climbing.  Not exactly a good picture to send in with an application form.  So needless to say I now have to wait until Steve comes home and takes a picture of me, which I hopefully will like, and then I can send in my application.  I also have to mail in the application fee and a copy of my high school and college diplomas and transcripts which is turning out to be much more complicated than I thought.  I realize it's been a long time since high school, but it's kind of crazy;  I first had to request my Alberta Education ID number which was fairly easy to get, then I did an online request to have my transcripts mailed to me, however the address that they have on file for me and the one which they would mail the transcript to is one from 14 years ago, not quite current.  So I called them and found out that I needed to fill in a request for change of address form and fax it into them which I did with both my maiden and married name on it, and when I phoned them today to see if I could go ahead with the transcript request, I found out that I now need to fax them a copy of my marriage certificate because somehow they have two different student ID numbers for me, one under Sutton and one under Oishi.  So although I put both last names on the form and although my high school transcripts are under my maiden name and not my married name, they cannot make the changes without proof that I was Kerri Sutton and am now Kerri Oishi!  AHHHHHHH!!!  Needless to say, I am hoping that once I fax this in today, I will be able to request my high school transcript and mail the rest of the paperwork to them early next week.  Then I will have to wait until my references email in their forms and the director will have to look over my application and proceed with an interview.  So it's a lot of hurry up and wait, which seems to be what I have been doing over the last little while anyway.  But at least after this, my part will be done and it will be out of my hands.

For those of you who are going "midwifery school, huh"? let me back up a little.  The medical field has always been a passion of mine although I did move it to the back burner and wondered if it would go away, but it didn't.  Over the last couple of years the desire to be in the medical field has come back stronger and I have been trying to figure out what that looked like for me.  In about December of last year I began to think about midwifery, partly because I was looking into becoming a birth doula, which I did in April, and I found many different schools.  Canada has two midwifery programs in Ontario, through McMaster and Ryerson University, Quebec has one through Laval and BC has a new program through UBC.  I looked at all of these programs and at some offered in the US and none of them really grabbed me.  Then in January I came across the school at which I am applying, Newlife International School of Midwifery, and it simply grabbed my heart.  It is a Christian run school which offers an Associate Degree of Science in Midwifery through a two and a half year program.  The degree is actually awarded through the States and at the end I will be able to write my North American Registry of Midwives exam, enabling me to work as a midwife.  After nine months of praying about it and many conversations around midiwfery, we have decided that I should go ahead and pursue this desire to become a midwife.  We are aware that God could close this door at any time, however we feel that we should walk this path until God says otherwise.

With the calling that Steve and I feel to work overseas in a developing country, this schooling would come in very handy.  So much of the world has a ridiculously high maternal mortality rate, something that thankfully here in Canada we don't have to worry about.  According to the World Health Organization "The number of women dying due to complications during pregnancy and childbirth has decreased by 34% from an estimated 546 000 in 1990 to 358 000 in 2008".  However, "pregnant women still die from four major causes: severe bleeding after childbirth, infections, hypertensive disorders, and unsafe abortion. Every day, about 1000 women died due to these complications in 2008. Out of the 1000, 570 lived in sub-Saharan Africa, 300 in South Asia and five in high-income countries. The risk of a woman in a developing country dying from a pregnancy-related cause during her lifetime is about 36 times higher compared to a woman living in a developed country".  In Afghanistan the lifetime risk of maternal death according to 2008 statistics is 1 in 11; Chad is 1 in 14; Niger is 1 in 16 and Nigeria is 1 in 23.  Now compare that to Canada's rate of maternal mortality which is  1 in 5600 or the United States which is 1 in 2100.  Big difference in numbers.

We would definitely appreciate any prayers as we walk this new journey that God is setting forth before us and we will keep you updated as things move along.

Sorry, it's been too long.

I need to apologize for not updating in quite a while. The problem was that when Google decided to change our blog over to a Google account we no longer had access because the email address we had used was no longer active.

But the problem is now solved, so we will try to update much more frequently!

You may be wondering what has been happening in our lives in the past while. I have begun my last year of school. Hopefully all my classes will done by the end of the semester. Then it will be my Field Education, which I haven't figured out what it will look like.

Over the summer I was working a little bit. I had planned on having two jobs, which should have provided full time hours, but that didn't work out quite the way I had hoped. I was able to work my retail job (Trailblazers) one day a week, but the construction job didn't amount to much. God did provide some work for me in May and June, which gave me a bunch of various construction type work to do.

We then went to Logan, Utah for a family holiday, which was great. We spent two weeks relaxing and sightseeing (and rock climbing!) around Logan and Salt Lake City. It was a lot of fun for all of us.

When we got back I realized that I had some free time, and that the playground up here at the school wasn't getting done, so I volunteered to help out. I didn't realize at the time that I would be overseeing the project and that the playground was a bit more elaborate than I thought! I was expecting a couple days worth of work, but it turned out to be a month and a half (part time), and involved drilling 40+ holes, assembling a massive school-yard quality playground, and pouring 5 1/2 cubic meters of concrete into the holes! Then we backfilled the entire area with 9" of gravel, and let the kids go!

It was quite a challenge and a learning experience, but it turned out great and the kids love it.

Kerri had the opportunity to take some training to become a birth doula, and had the privilege to attend her first birth. She has a couple more lined up for the next few months, and is quite excited about it.

So that's been our summer. As for what's happening now, we have some direction and a lot of unknowns. Kerri is beginning an application to become a midwife at a school located in the Philippines. I'll let her explain more about it as soon as she has a chance, but for now we would appreciate your prayers as she fills out all the paperwork.

I would also appreciate your prayers for me as I am back in school, as well as working more than I have in previous semesters.

-Steve