2015
Brian
Sorry for the lack of blog posts over the past two months. Things have been pretty busy. In December we were all able to take breaks and go back to our home countries for Christmas. January has been busy getting readjusted to life in Asia and also waiting to have our new website up for this post. After you read this, please take a moment and poke around on the site. Hopefully you'll like the shine and polish we've applied.
2014 was a great year for us here at Underground Coffee International. In May we were able to send a family overseas to work alongside Luv-Luv. It is great to have a team in place instead of only one person trying to do it alone. Everyone overseas has been making big strides with learning language, building relationships and figuring out life in a foreign country. Toward the end of the year we started supporting a local pastor who travels up to the mountains on weekends to help teach underground house church pastors. These house churches are made-up of coffee farmers. Most of these farmers would be considered members of unreached people groups. Also, as an organization, we managed to finish the year with more money in the bank than when we started (which is pretty amazing since we are still short on reaching monthly support goals). This past year was great and if we were going to try and list every way that God showed up and blessed us in 2014, we wouldn't have room for it in this post.
We are all very excited about the possibilities of 2015. Language learning continues for everyone, which isn't glamorous or fun but it is necessary. Relationships continue to deepen with our local friends and being able to do things like starting bible studies with people who aren't yet believers. There are also some big, daunting goals that we honestly won't be able to accomplish unless God shows up (which we're confident that He will). One of those is trying to get the coffee business established overseas so that we can start buying coffee from farmers to send back to everyone in the US. The government overseas doesn't make it easy for foreigners to start businesses, but we are continually working on getting that up and going. We also hope to buy a small plot of land later this year so that we can establish a coffee training center and start bringing farmers in for trainings. The hope is that the farm can be used to educate the farmers both in coffee and also provide a venue for Christian trainings and maybe even some seminary type classes for village pastors. All those things are a little ways off, but we hope to start paving the way for it in 2015.
Once again, thanks to everyone who has bought coffee, given donations and spread the word about Underground Coffee over the past few years. We all feel truly blessed to be doing what we're doing, and also expectant for great things to happen in 2015!