Thank you so much to everyone who prayed and e-mailed us after we sent out the quick e-mail about the cyclone heading toward Vanuatu. We feel very loved.

Cyclone Donna is now a Category 4 and still northwest of our island of Santo. She has been doing figure eights and strengthening for the past 2 days. We are watching the updates from the Vanuatu Meteorology webpage every 3 hours to see the always-changing track they expect the cyclone to take. Everyone is doing their best to predict which direction she will head next, but so far she has not followed any sort of expected path.

There are reports of houses destroyed, crops affected, and families displaced from the Banks and Torres islands in far north Vanuatu. So far on Santo, Pentecost, and Ambae (where our team and translators live) the damage has been minimal. Fruit blown off the trees, some roofs blown off, trees down, and lots of standing water everywhere.

This week is turning out to be very memorable for Matt’s parents, but for all the wrong reasons. Almost all of our plans have been cancelled – no ladies tea on a nearby island for us girls, no watching Lauren ride a horse, no trip to snorkel at Million Dollar Point. We did try to go swimming at Pelekula Bay yesterday. An hour after we got there, it started raining…and then poured. We couldn’t get our fire going enough to grill the sausages, so we finally called the taxi driver and waited 20 minutes in the rain for him to pick us up. At least we tried!

As you remember our family, please pray:
~ for our family, the other 2 PBT families in country, and our translators. This cyclone has been very hard to predict. It looks like we will be spared the brunt of it, but it’s really still too early to tell.
~ for Matt’s parents to be able to safely fly to Brisbane tomorrow (Monday) as they begin their journey home.
~ our family is supposed to go to Port Vila in 3 days to represent our team at the Church of Christ’s Annual General Meeting. They will decide tomorrow whether to go ahead with it or cancel. We have a lead on housing, but it will be very utilitarian (transit housing with shared bathrooms, kitchen, etc). The first few days of this trip were supposed to be our family’s first vacation since coming to Vanuatu 19 months ago. Honestly, it just feels like a big mess right now to figure out if they will have the meetings, where we will stay, whether the cyclone will follow us south to Port Vila, and if we can then safely take the 20 hour ferry ride home from Vila with the 15 computers for the next VISTA module.

Thank you for your love and prayers!! We especially appreciate them when we are going through uncertain times like this.

~ Angie (for Matt and the kids too)

*As a reminder, please don’t share this information on social media. Feel free to share personally with anyone who might like to pray for us.