The Abegg Love Letters

To those who have been called, who are loved by God the Father and kept by Jesus Christ; mercy, peace and love be yours in abundance. -Jude 1:1


As Regional Leaders with United World Mission, we serve in Latin America to provide support & training to missionaries on the field. We work with Latin Partner Ministries that focus on everything from theological education to medical care, from children’s homes to retirement homes. Our goal is to come along side organizations & amplify their impact for good and the Gospel.

Friday, August 14, 2009

LESSONS WE'VE LEARNED FROM OUR KIDS #13

  • Benefit to having a 4 year old: you don't need to purchase a paper shredder. Drawback: he's self serving.
  • It's a blessing to see that the boys want to serve by washing my car. It's also a blessing when it rains that evening to re-wash what they washed.
    Jeremy: "If God is everywhere at once, wouldn't we bump into Him any time we move?"
  • Jeremy: "Can I pour my own juice when I'm older, like 50 years old?"
    Exaggeration happens -Nico to a friend: "Daddy says that if you shake a soda can and then open it, it will blow up the whole house!"
  • Note to self: the next time you have Jeremy and Nico help with gardening, be VERY specific as to which plants are weeds to be pulled out, and which plants should stay in the ground. P.S. buy Claudia some new flowers.
  • 23 story apartment buildings are for throwing paper airplanes or water balloons off of. (OK, Daddy already knew that one).
    Jeremy: “Worms live in dirt so that's what they eat. We live in air so that's what we eat… Wait, that's not right!"
  • Faith of a child -Jeremy: "I can't wait to die." Daddy: "Why would you say that? Don't you know how much we would miss you?" Jeremy: "Yeah, I’d miss you too but then I get to be with God!" (See Phil 1:12-26)

While at Disney for Nico & Grandpa’s Birthday, Jeremy got to take part in "Jedi Training" and is now convinced he can use the force on Mommy and Daddy: “You don’t want to discipline me”. So here’s some for you Star Wars fans:


  • Nico: "If knights had to fight dragons today, they'd use light sabers!"
  • Nico: Ham Solo is captain of the Mañana Falcon.
  • Jeremy: "If I feed a worm a lot, would he get as big as Jabba the Hut?"
  • Nico: "If a bad guy came to our house I'd spin around and around with my light saber and he'd just run away!"
  • Jeremy: "Chewbacca needs to shave like daddy."
For Previous “Lessons” installments, please visit our “Lesson Plan”.

Waiting On the Lord

Many are the plans in a man's heart, but it is the LORD's purpose that prevails. Prov 19:21

I first got my missions feet wet 22 years ago. Over the past two decades, my passion and labor for foreign ministry has not changed but literally multiplied as the Lord provided me a wonderful missions minded wife in Claudia and the chance to teach Jeremy and Nico about being “strangers in a strange land” no matter where we are (Heb. 11:13-16). We anticipate always being focused on fulfilling the great commission and foreign missions in particular, yet for over a year now we’ve sensed the Lord stirring our hearts toward a new path. We believe strongly that the Church, and specifically “local churches”, are the means by which the Lord has given us to “Make disciples of all nations” (Mat. 28). For that reason we have made a point of being intimately involved in a local church wherever God has planted us (California, Chile, Florida and Cuba by extension), and sought to use our gifts and abilities in these churches while receiving the benefit of being under the direct spiritual authority and guidance of pastoral leadership.

Lately we have found ourselves hungering to be more intimately involved in missions work from the ground floor, or “grass roots” level of the local church as they partner with other local churches in various parts of our own countries (U.S. & Chile) and around the world. This may sound strange from someone who has been involved with the parachurch ministry of Latin America Mission for many years now, so I want to carefully emphasize that we have the utmost admiration and love for LAM as a whole. We actually joined LAM because we saw in them a respect for Latin leadership, and a desire to work alongside of churches in Latin America, so please understand that as we consider what steps the Lord would have us take next, it is not due to any difficulties with LAM. Instead, any future changes will be as a result of a God given burden for the local church on both the sending and receiving ends of mission and a continued desire to see the fulfillment of the great commission.
We recognize that this is big news, and as one dear friend told me when we first started considering a change: “It seems like the death of your dream of foreign ministry”. I explained to him that at this point we don't know what the change will be, but it is in reality the exact opposite from a "dream death". The very heart of what we are doing now, and wherever we will be working & serving in the future, doesn’t vary in any way from what we’ve been doing throughout our years of missionary work: following our Lord wherever He leads us. If our hope and desire is to Glorify God and make Him known, instead of seeking our own temporal “dreams”, we have nothing to lose, since the very one we want to Glorify is the one guiding our steps! “In his heart a man plans his course, but the LORD determines his steps.” (Prov. 16:9).

So where do we go from here? Frankly…I’m not sure at this point. So until the Lord opens the next door, we will continue where He has us now, including the various Cuba and other projects at LAM, Kevin working one day a week in home repair, Claudia as a Lia Sophia jewelry advisor and serving in our local church. We are hoping that by the end of summer we will be able to see God’s leading and provision clearly, but as always, we wait on His timing. My purpose in writing this is to ask you to pray for wisdom and guidance for our immediate ministerial work as well as these future decisions. Thank you for your continuing the wonderful encouragement and financial support we have been so blessed to receive over the years. When the time to step into a new job/ministry comes, we will let you, our faithful prayer supporters, our financial partners and our dear friends know with anticipation.

Thank you for your amazing faithfulness which has allowed us to do the things the Lord has called us to over these years.

If you are interested in following my thoughts in a more extensive format, please log on to: http://missionunderstandings.blogspot.com or simply send us an e-mail or give us a call.

In His Hands;
Kevin, for the family.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Cuban economy feels heat of world downturn

By JUAN O. TAMAYO
jtamayo@MiamiHerald.com
2009 Miami Herald Media Company.

Fernando used to have a cushy job in Havana as a teller in a government bank office with air-conditioning, a nice computer and a bank-provided lunch.

Not anymore.

Amid Cuba's deepest economic crisis in nearly two decades, his office has shut off the AC and his computer constantly crashes because of the heat, exasperating him and his customers. His lunch, Fernando said, has ``shrunk to a snack.''

Driving the bulk of the crisis has been the world recession, which slashed demand and prices for Cuba's few exports, like nickel, and choked off new credits to a government already deeply in debt. Add the island's internal woes, and Raúl Castro's recent description of the problems as ``a matter of national security'' seems like no exaggeration.

After Castro replaced brother Fidel, ``most Cubans hoped for some improvements in the medium term. But now everyone is preparing for worse and worse,'' said one Miamian who recently returned from a visit and asked for anonymity to protect her relatives there.

Castro has adopted Draconian measures to survive the storm in the short term.

To cut electricity consumption by 12 percent -- Cuba imports half its oil needs -- the government has shut down many factories and ordered state office buildings, theaters and other facilities to shut off their ACs. Inspectors also are cracking down on Cubans who steal electricity through illegal hookups with $23 fines -- about five weeks' worth of the average salary.

``Banks are built to keep out robbers, not to let in a breeze,'' said Fernando, who asked that his surname not be published because of fear of government reprisals. ``Without [air conditioning] . . . my office is two bus stops past hell.''

Some hospitals also are shutting down their emergency rooms for two hours a day, and elective surgeries are being postponed until electricity services become more dependable, said Elaine Scheye, a Chicago consultant who has studied Cuba's health system.

LESS FOOD

Portions for many rationed foodstuffs have been cut -- red beans and chickpeas from 30 to 20 ounces a month, salt by half to about four ounces per month -- while food deliveries to factory, office and school cafeterias have been trimmed, according to official announcements.

Harsh police crackdowns on the food black market -- apparently an attempt to ensure that more items reach the legal outlets -- have driven up prices yet left many of the legitimate sales points with shelves oddly bare, Havana residents say.

Even foreign businesses are suffering, with the government tightly controlling withdrawals from their accounts. Castro also replaced his entire economic Cabinet in March, and just last week the legislature created a comptroller's office to attack official corruption.

Yet many analysts in and out of Cuba argue that those belt-tightening moves are far from what's needed to address the crisis.

``Mercurochrome and Band-Aids for deep wounds with heavy bleeding,'' Miami activist Juan Antonio Blanco wrote in his blog, Cambio de Epoca (Epochal Change). Even the official Granma newspaper called the situation ``grave.''

EARLIER TROUBLE

Cuba was already in deep trouble by the fall of 2008, after four hurricanes caused $10 billion in damage -- equivalent to a whopping 10 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) for 2007. Imports for 2008 spiked 41 percent to $14.2 billion from the previous year while exports remained flat at $3.7 billion, meaning the island's already huge trade deficit mushroomed by 65 percent.

Food imports alone rose from $1.5 billion in 2007 to $2.2 billion last year as the government tried to replace hurricane-damaged harvests, according to official Cuban figures.

And then the world economy plunged into recession, drying up lending markets. Foreign commercial lending to Cuba fell by $1 billion in 2008, according to the Bank for International Settlements, a crippling blow to a government that for the past decade had been taking on ever larger debts to pay for imports and older debts -- ``financing by arrears,'' as one economist put it.

Russian auditors reported last month that Cuba had failed on three dates to make payments due on a $355 million loan signed in 2006. And some 80 Cuban government enterprises postponed payments to foreign creditors this year, according to Carmelo Mesa Lago, a University of Pittsburgh expert on the Cuban economy.

GRIM OUTLOOK

With remittances and tourism expected to be flat this year and the price of nickel -- 41 percent of Cuban exports -- at about 25 percent of its 2008 levels, the outlook for 2009 remains grim. Over the past month Havana cut its predictions of 2009 GDP growth from 6 percent to 2.5 percent and then 1.7 percent -- though some Cuba economists are privately predicting a .5 percent drop.

``The country is again facing a situation as adverse'' as the early 1990s, the U.N.'s Economic Commission for Latin America wrote earlier this year. Cuba's economy shrank by 35 percent after the Soviet Union collapsed and cut off its $4 billion-$6 billion annual subsidies to Havana.

LONGER-TERM REFORMS

Since Raúl Castro officially assumed power in early 2008, he has also been putting in place several longer-term reforms that he hopes will give Cuba a more productive, streamlined and less centralized economy.

In his government's most ambitious effort, it has loaned 1.7 million acres of fallow state lands to 82,000 Cubans, hoping to increase food production and slash costly imports. It also shifted Acopio, the notoriously inefficient agency that gathers and distributes farmers' products, from the Agriculture to the Domestic Commerce Ministry.

The government also has increased some salaries as incentives to productivity, allowed Cubans to hold more than one job at a time and let retirees to return to work. Castro last week predicted cuts in government spending on health and education, and said imports would be cut back this year.

Havana also has hinted that it is studying opening the doors wider to foreign investors and abandoning the costly food rationing system. One leading Havana economic analyst, Ariel Terrero, even suggested recently that the government put more of the economy ``in the hands of producers'' -- for example, allowing state grocery or clothing shop workers to run their own enterprises.

`RATIONAL SOCIALISM'

Despite early speculation that the reputedly pragmatic Castro would move Cuba toward a Chinese-like ``market socialism system,'' his reforms have remained relatively moderate.

Brother Fidel remains a powerful opponent of more profound changes even three years after he was last seen in public, analysts say, and Raúl Castro must know that opening Cuba to more market forces could fuel a potentially destabilizing increase in the island's social and economic inequalities.

In a keynote speech to the legislature last month, he prescribed a move toward a kind of ``rational socialism'' that will preserve Cuba's political system while cutting back the bureaucracy, state subsidies and waste, and increasing productivity and efficiency.

``It's a matter of defining, with the broadest popular participation, the socialist society to which we aspire and can build, given Cuba's current and future conditions -- the economic model that will rule the life of the nation in benefit of our people,'' Castro said.

Lest anyone get the wrong impression, Castro added a caution.

``I was not elected president to restore capitalism in Cuba or surrender the revolution,'' he said. ``I was elected to defend, maintain and continue perfecting socialism, not to destroy it.''

Monday, August 10, 2009

In all my trips there, I've always had to bring my own.

Reuters

Cash-strapped Cuba says toilet paper running short
Mon Aug 10 13:32:23 UTC 2009

HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuba, in the grip of a serious economic crisis, is running short of toilet paper and may not get sufficient supplies until the end of the year, officials with state-run companies said Friday.

Officials said they were lowering the prices of 24 basic goods to help Cubans get through the difficulties provoked in part by the global financial crisis and three destructive hurricanes that struck the island last year.

Cuba's financial reserves have been depleted by increased spending for imports and reduced export income, which has forced the communist-led government to take extraordinary measures to keep the economy afloat.

"The corporation has taken all the steps so that at the end of the year there will be an important importation of toilet paper," an official with state conglomerate Cimex said on state-run Radio Rebelde.

The shipment will enable the state-run company "to supply this demand that today is presenting problems," he said.

Cuba both imports toilet paper and produces its own, but does not currently have enough raw materials to make it, he said.

One of the measures taken to address the cash crunch is a 20 percent cut in imports, which in recent days has become evident in the reduction of goods in state-run stores.

Cuba imports about 60 percent of its food.

Despite the shortages, prices will be cut between 5 percent and 27 percent for some food, drugs and personal hygiene products, officials said.

A visit to a store in Havana's Vedado neighborhood on Friday found that prices had dropped for mayonnaise, barbecue sauce and canned squid.

One customer, who gave his name only as Pedro, complained that "it doesn't look like prices have been lowered for the fundamental products" such as cooking oil.

Ana Maria Ortega, deputy director for military-run retail conglomerate TRD Caribe, said there will be no shortage of basic goods.

"The conditions are in place to maintain the supply of essential products," she said on the same radio program.

Cubans receive a subsidized food ration from the government each month that they say meets their needs for about two weeks.

President Raul Castro told the National Assembly last week that the government had cut its spending budget for the second time this year and has been renegotiating its debt and payments with foreign providers.

Cuba has long blamed the 47-year-old U.S. trade embargo against the island for many of its economic problems. It also said that last year's hurricanes did $10 billion worth of damage that forced the government to spend heavily on imports of food and reconstruction products.

Castro, who replaced his ailing older brother Fidel Castro as president last year, also has complained that Cuba's productivity is too low.

He has taken various steps to boost output, including putting more state-owned land in private hands and pushing for salaries to be based on productivity.

(Reporting by Nelson Acosta and Esteban Israel; Editing by Jeff Franks and Will Dunham)

 

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