GLOBAL MISSIONS
As a church we support Jeremy and Ally who run Sparrow International.
Sparrow International is an Australian based charity, deploying health, education and livelihood projects in partnership with communities affected by extreme poverty, conflict, isolation and crisis.
ACCI MISSIONS
Middle East
Jereme and Ally began their first education centre in North India in 2012. Since then they have started over 20 education centres amongst some of the most desperate communities in India. Focusing on communities that have been affected by extreme poverty, conflict or displacement they work alongside a team of national teachers, health professionals and social workers to deploy priority education and health services.
As the Sparrow team in India has grown Jereme and Ally have looked to respond beyond India and into the Middle East. As of late 2017 Jereme, Ally and their 3 children relocated to the Middle East to continue their work deploying small scale, provisional health and education services. Their dream is to continue to build national teams of educators, health professionals and social workers that can demonstrate our message of hope to people that need it most.
We are now leading a small team of volunteers that work across the Kurdish region supplying medication, school supplies, material relief, medical assistance. We’re building clinics, providing medical training, delivering community health education and maternal health services. We're thankful for your support so that we can continue to serve here for the long haul.
GLOBAL PARTNER
Meet Jeremy, Ally and their family of 3 children and see a part of their lives and what they do.
Dispatch #100 April 2024
Sparrow International
Greetings friends & family!
Hello to all our fantastic friends, family, prayer partners, financial supporters and secret government agents! The year has been flying by (along with the odd cruise missile) and we’re excited to update you on what we’ve been up to here in Iraq! Read on…
In January, after several rounds of increasingly belligerent negotiations with the land-lord of our headquarters in Duhok, we were not able to renew our lease agreement. At the time, this was quite sad, and ridiculously frustrating. This building housed our whole team, our NGO office, a chapel, training space and all our medical storage right in the center of the city. Being that the negotiations took so long, by the time we knew it wouldn’t be renewed we only had one month to find houses for the whole team and move out. For our family, this makes it the 6th time we’ve moved in six years of living here. Needless to say… no one was excited… but we were able to find everyone a place and get everyone shifted out by the end of February. We found an old house in an area we like, we moved in and have been slowly repairing it over the last few weeks. We had a lot of vision for the things we wanted to do with our HQ, so it was disappointing to lose it like this. What we didn’t know at the time was that everything was about to change anyway.
At some point towards the end of this move, while eating at a friends house I had some tuna. I found out later that this fish was caught down in the Arabian gulf, then bought out of the back of a car in Mosul. Local culture finds it extremely rude to refuse to eat what the host provides and this family was so proud of the fact that they were able to provide a fish from the ocean, so I couldn’t refuse. The result of this was a week of severe suffering from the effects of its poisoning and the subsequent bacterial infection left in my intestines. I was lucky enough to have a team of doctors to keep me from graduating to eternity but I was sick and recovering for most of the month.
Our clinical work has been going well and it continues to open doors for us to live and minister in-country without too much suspicion. In the midst of so much regional uncertainty and instability we consider it a privilege to support families in this practical way. We pray that we would be known by our good works and that our selfless service would be the foundation of message of the gospel here. Sometimes we have the freedom to share this and other times we work under very real restrictions. Please continue to pray for and support our medical work, it really is a beautiful endeavor.
Regionally, things have been tense since October last year. Last week we witnessed this first hand when Iran launched hundreds of missiles and drones over our region towards Israel. The flight time of these munitions varies anywhere from 4 to 9 hours so we were able to watch many of them pass over us. This is a pic of a cruise missile flying over us… As always we appreciate your prayers for safety and wisdom when it comes to living and working here!
Aside from all this, one of the most significant events from the last month is the conclusion of our partnership with something called the Mobilization Initiative. This project enabled Christian medical practitioners from Latin America to serve alongside us in Iraq by covering all their expenses. This funding meant they could be rapidly deployed as volunteers without raising funds or making long-term commitments. We’ve loved our time working with these wonderful friends and we’re sad to come to the end of this season. The conclusion of this partnership (due to funding) means that our team of international doctors will finish their time with us by June. This won’t affect our medical projects immediately as we have a whole team of wonderful local doctors that work in the clinics. From June, our family will be continuing here without any international team members for the foreseeable future. Please pray for our family as we say goodbye to all of these friends at the end of this season.
Finally, we’re happy to announce that we’ll be coming home to Australia for most of July. We need to renew our passports and sort out some other highly stimulating administrative tasks. We also just want to step out of all this chaos for a moment to be in church, among friends, to swim in the beach and drink (1000) flat whites before we launch into this new (slightly unstable) season of ministry in the Middle East. Thanks everyone for your continued prayer and support, we hope to hangout with as many people as possible in July and share the things we can’t share here!
Love, Jeremy, Alana and kids…