We have blinked and the calendar has moved three months.
We have been very busy the past three months setting up our home and getting settled. A very important thing we were told by other missionaries when we first moved on the mission field 5 years ago was to make your house a home so that no matter how foreign or unfamiliar everything was outside of your home, you could come back to it and feel at home. We have worked hard to make this happen for our family.
It was a long, exhausting journey but we finally found a school for Zeke and he started on November 1st. We are still hoping to get him into one of the two schools next year that he is on a waiting list for but in the mean time, we are very grateful for this school and I think it’s going to be a great fit for him this year, especially as he transitions to life here with all the changes around him. This school is great for this year as the teachers are trained and equipped to know how to teach and talk to kids with emotional/behavorial challenges. He also has occupational/physical therapy type things at school along with the regular school work.
April and the older two boys are doing really well in their 10th year of homeschooling. They are part of a great homeschool group here in Santiago that do weekly art classes, monthly field trips and other things together as a group. We also found a beautiful multi-cultural church we love, that overflows with the love of Jesus and is a mixture of Haitian, Dominican, American & other believers from many nationalities.
The older two boys have joined a missionary youth group as well that meets weekly. They love it there and we have really enjoyed getting to know the other parents in the group as well. We are grateful for all the community we have found! God has answered so many specific prayers for us!
We are working hard on our Spanish studies. We have a teacher who comes to our home twice a week, we have online live video classes with Spanish instructors and other students and we are doing a lot of comprehensible input videos as well. We are trying to study 2-3 hours each week day. We would love prayer for us to continue learning well, understanding Dominicans as they speak and finding the time between ministry, homeschool and taking care of four children to get our language studies in. We have heard from so many people including other native Spanish speakers from other countries who live here, that Dominicans speak super fast, slang or drop off the ends of everything and kind of speak their own way of Spanish.
We had our first team come a few weeks ago, which was really exciting. Teams will look different sometimes depending on what they come down here to do but this team came down to specifically help us reach out to several Haitian & Dominican churches, start making connections, seeing the needs where RMI & teams can help and seeking the Holy Spirits guidance on where He wants us to serve & love. We will be doing a whole update on this trip soon, so keep an eye out for it. To sum it up though, we saw a lot of hard things, a lot of needs. We were greatly encouraged by the local Dominican churches we are working with and their heart for helping their Haitian brothers & sisters in Christ. We saw things that hit us hard and we made wonderful connections with some pastors, churches, & a doctor. We cannot wait to share it about it all with you soon. Our hearts are stirred, there is so much to be done here and we are needing teams to come help us do it. Please connect with us soon, if you have a church, family, friend or work group that wants to come help us serve & love the people here. We are looking for a few more teams to come down sometime between January and May 2025!
Thank you for praying for our family! Thank you for believing in what God has called our family to do here in the DR. Thank you for your support. Pray for continued safety, good health, & for us to be able to learn the language well. Connect with us if you’d like to bring a team down January-May to help us with all we see that needs to be done and all who need help! Pray that we stay aware of the Holy Spirit’s leading in everything we do. We love you all!
Love, The Starkeys
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