Current Plans

Where were you when the January 12, 2010 earthquake hit?
Our family was in the Dominican Republic. Ned and Jesse were at the mechanic’s helping our new host get the YWAM Santiago van fixed. Debbie, Sammi and Hannah were in La Sirena, the Dominican grocery, shopping for food for the week. We all felt the earthquake quite strongly!
What a welcome to the island of Hispaniola for the Walker Family! The Dominican Republic and Haiti share the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean Sea, just off the coast of Florida. The earthquake hit strongly in Port au Prince, Haiti. Within 24 hours of the earthquake, Ned was meeting with 60 plus leaders of local mission’s organizations and churches to see how we could all best mobilize to get aide into Haiti. Within 48 hours, our family was able to help purchase, package and send supplies directly into Port au Prince, Haiti. What a life changing experience for our family. We know that God had prepared a task for us to do and we just had to be willing to do it.
God has prepared a task for all of us. Our family’s task is to serve in missions wherever and however God leads. We are currently on staff with YWAM (Youth with A Mission) Orlando. We are working towards setting up a facility long term in the Dominican Republic, where families and individuals can come and serve God through serving others.
Ned and I are finishing up the Basic Leadership School. This school has really taught us to be intentional about leading others. It has been a really hard school but we are learning a TON!!
This summer, we will put these newly learned skills into action as we take our family to the island of Hispaniola once again. We will start out leading an Epic Quest trip of 23 participants aged 9 to 18 to Barahona, Dom. Rep. We will be helping build an orphanage alongside a local church there. We will also be doing local evangelism outreaches in the Haitian and Dominican villages. We will be working in Barahona from June 24th to July 19th. On July 20th, our family along with the YWAM Orlando interns and Outreach students will be going into Port au Prince, Haiti to help build homes.
Won’t you please join us by praying with us for protection and health for our team and to see God move in the lives of Dominicans and Haitians as our family ministers to them in very practical ways?

Walker Family Update

WOW! What an adventure it has been! We are currently doing our third school here at YWAM Orlando. It is a Basic Leadership School (BLS) where we are learning to be servant leaders like Jesus. It is quite intense and there is a lot of work to do. We are enjoying this class a lot and loving being in Orlando. YWAM Orlando has very much become home to our family.

Our BLS studies have kept us quite busy these past few weeks and I have not slowed down in order to do a much needed newsletter. I do apologize for not keeping everyone up to date. We will be here in Orlando for lecture phase until June 4th. After that we will do our Outreach working with the youth department here and leading a team back to the DR. Dates and information are still being finalized.

Long-term, we are working towards setting up a family-oriented facility where families and individuals can come and serve others and in doing so, realize that God has called us all to share His Salvation Story with others. A place where each and everyone that is a part has an opportunity to realize that God has created each of us with a purpose and a destiny in His Hands. We are looking at the Dominican Republic due to location,safety and other factors.

Starting this week, we will be doing a weekly post about some of our adventures while we were in the DR. This will be easier for Debbie to post with limited internet access and will make for shorter reads. Hope and pray that you enjoy them.

Thanks for following our family and for your support. A prayer request right now would be for financial support as it is down a bit from what we need and also we have had truck issues.

Please let us know how we can be praying for you!
Email or call at 772-360-9393!
Blessings~
the Walker Family

Updated schedule

Hello All~

 

Just thought we would send a quick update for the next few days. 

 

We have served this past week here in Santiago with the DTS team from Orlando.  We've been doing children's ministry and some Outreach church services.  It has been great fun and very productive ministry time.  It has also helped us learn how to "view" and "handle" from a host position a team's internal workings.  So it has been very good.  The children have reallly enjoyed getting to serve in the children's ministry opportunities.  We have not had much time to post pictures but will next week.

 

Our schedule for the next 8 days or so will be quite busy and we are not sure when we will have any time to use internet.

 

We leave tomorrow morning on Wed to travel to the northwest border at Dajabon where we will walk into Haiti and visit an orphanage there.  We will then be coming back into the DR for a Wed night youth service at Loma de Cabrera.  Then on Thursday we will be touring the World Vision ministry that works with a goat project along the Haiti/DR border.  Friday, we will be coming back here to Santiago for a few hours before heading to Nagua in the northeast.  There we will be visiting Everydayministries.com.  They do ministry in quite a few towns in the area and have a large service planned for Friday night and Saturday.  Also two church services on Sunday where Ned will be preaching possibly in at least one of them.  This will be stretching for him.  Then Monday we will head to Santo Domingo to visit the YWAM Carribean leader Kent Norell.  On Tuesday or possibly Wednesday, we will travel to San Pedro de Marcoris where Dan Gower and his family serve.  They are from our church in Vero and who Samantha and Debbie ministered with in 2006 when we were here.  We are really looking forward to seeing them.  Then traveling back here to Santiago.

 

Sooo.... it will be quite  the busy next few days.  We really appreciate your prayers.  Especially for strength for the family as it is tiring doing all of this travel.  We are being able to minister in so many different ways and have been learning so much about this country that we look forward to ministering in in the future.  We are loving it here and getting to know the people.  God is really using us and we are definitely being stretched.

 

Thanks so much for your prayers and support!

Blessings~

Ned and Debbie Walker and family