The New Year is Keeping Us Busy!

Happy February Everyone! We are excited to start the New Year with all the plans, dreams and vision we have for ministry among our refugees friends here in Boise. In early January, we met with a group of people who are working with LEAP Charities, the organization who we are partnering with to transform our double garage into a "Welcome House". What is Welcome Housing, you may ask? "Because of the affordable housing shortage in Boise, and the tight rental market, approximately 70% of newly arrived refugees get “stuck” in extended-stay hotels for up to 4 to 6 weeks. This is expensive and can drain a family’s resettlement fund before it is used for essentials (like a deposit on an apartment). These hotels also make for a difficult transition, as space is confining and the experience isolating.

Welcome Housing can provide a “soft landing” for Boise’s newest residents through hosted transitional housing at half the cost of hotels. The heart of Welcome Housing is hospitality. What does hospitality really mean? In the Bible it means loving the stranger and the foreigner, and is placed right up there with loving the widow and the orphan. This kind of hospitality can make an impact for a moment, a season, or forever in the lives of refugees resettling in Boise."

Learn more at: www.leapcharities.org

We have meet with a contractor who has volunteered his time to help us put together a budget and, like everything else, we are standing in faith for the finances to cover this project. (We are planning a fundraiser - we'll update you on that soon!) Tim is currently working on the permits with the City, which can be complicated and time consuming work for first timers and also represents the largest portion of our budget. Please pray for favor with our applications and that the cost would be lower than some of the numbers we have heard. Tim has already begun some of the tear down work, as we plan to reconfigure some of the walls in there. (If you are in the Boise area and have construction experience and want to donate your time and/or materials, let us know!) The ESL class took a break over the Christmas season, but in mid-January the volunteers met up to review the last semester of class, make plans and pray for the new year ahead. We are excited to see more women join our class and continue to build friendships throughout the year. For many women, Eliza included, this is a highlight of the week, and as volunteers we prayed that God would provide more opportunities to share His love in deeper ways.

We also wanted to share a short testimony with you about another way the local church is reaching out to refugees in the Boise area. It also features the family of one of the women in our ESL class from Syria. The ministry is called Glocal Community Partners and they pair up refugee families and individuals with small groups of believers from various churches who provide friendship and community as these families settle in the area. YWAM partners with Glocal and they help us with training our DTS in refugee ministry.

YWAM Boise's second ever DTS started also started in January with a special focus on Refugees and Human Trafficking. Although we are not full time staff on this school, we are helping with mentoring and praying for students and staff, teaching on the school and joining them for weekly prayer and worship times. It's great to see a new group of students eager to learn and ready to reach out in our community and abroad. As you can see, we are keeping ourselves busy and really feel we've found a place where God can use our gifts and our passions to reach out to a community dear to His heart, and our own. We are regaining a greater perspective of the nations and how God is working among them and we are looking forward with eager anticipation to who God will bring into our Welcome House and how He is going to use this opportunity to build His kingdom. Thanks for building the Kingdom with us! Love and peace,

Tim, Eliza & Eva