Our Church Missionaries

Craig and Amanda Cunningham in CANADA !

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Craig and Amanda are a young Christian couple, members of Shettleston New Church, who were living and working in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia with their young son, Sam.

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After many years and adventures serving the Lord in Bolivia they have now moved to Canada.  Continue to follow them with the link below.  Meanwhile here is a clip from their Summer 2024 Newsletter.

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Over to Craig;

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We are now based in the city of London, Ontario, which sits about two hours west of Toronto (though often much more than that depending on the traffic!). Like most of Canada, we live relatively close to the US border. Our nearest crossing is just 50 minutes’ drive away, and Detroit is just another hour or so from there. We are currently living in the basement of the home belonging to Amanda’s sister and her husband. It is a spacious property and it is fair to say we have a pretty comfortable living arrangement for the time being. Not least for our dog, Napoleon, who is having the time of his life in his ever-futile pursuits of squirrels. Aaron and Joanne (and our three-year-old niece, Saoirse) have been incredibly accommodating hosts.

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Like most missionaries, the longer we lived overseas, the less appealing our furloughs became. Still, I always enjoyed our visits to Canada and, as a foreigner myself, there was always a bit of a novelty factor. But this is different. We are now setting down as two citizens and a (pending) permanent resident in the country where we will spend our foreseeable future. So there have been more logistics and plenty more paperwork. Seeking to live as independently as possible, we are discovering just how expensive things are here. Within a few weeks we faced the music and bought a second-hand car. While also expensive to run, it has been a huge help as we get ourselves established here.

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And in our efforts to try to get to grips with this significant readjustment, we took our car (and ourselves) down the road in late July to a five-day residential conference called Re-View. This annual event is run by an organisation called Mission Prep, who specialise both in preparing new overseas workers for the field, and coming alongside returning missionaries as they re-acquaint themselves with Canada while processing what they have left. Our gathering of 18 missionaries and 15 children was focused more on returnees, with morning plenary sessions addressing different elements of transition, and the afternoons mostly given over to small-group and individual de-briefing, in the company of trained counsellors. Meanwhile, a children’s programme was run in parallel, and this was a great help to Sam in working through his own feelings of leaving ‘home’ and starting over again, with the Lord as his Shepherd. The three of us came away having made some new friends and hopefully some key connections for the future. We are exceedingly grateful to have received such input, as well as the monthly Zoom sessions Latin Link are running for ourselves and other missionaries in transition.

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link to full newsletter list:

https://us21.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=86e635eb47b66b946c44c27d1&id=2d3d07c9c1

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For more on their experiences, follow them on their blog at http://cramandaham.blogspot.com

For more information on Latin Link visit https://www.latinlink.org.uk/appeal/craig-and-amanda-cunningham