We are Jan Willem and Marlinde Tamminga. We left Holland in January 2009 to go to Borneo, Indonesia. We live there with our three little children. We live and work in the Rivers of Life Ministries (RLM).

Jan Willem has studied Tropical Forestry in Holland. After this study he worked as a youth worker for two years. He worked for Youth for Christ in the city of Utrecht, the Netherlands. Marlinde was an English teacher in the Netherlands for many years. The last years she taught at a Christian secondary school, De Passie, in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

How it started...

Jan Willem had to do an intern ship in a tropical country for his study. Through friends he heard about a project in Indonesia. It was a ministry where neglected children were taken care of and where the message of Jesus Christ was told in the heart of Borneo. Half way during that internship of four months Marlinde came to the ministry. We both came back to Holland sensing we might return to the Rivers of Life Ministries.

And indeed after a couple of years we came to the conclusion that we had to go back to Indonesia to help for a longer period. In January 2009 we went back to Indonesia with our children, Anna-lynn and Yanoah. After a year at the project , in January 2010 we went to Bandung on the Indonesian island Java to go to IMLAC, a language school. In Bandung we studied ‘bahasa Indonesia', the Indonesian language. We lived in Bandung for six months. After that we went on furlough to the Netherlands. Back in Holland Marlinde gave birth to our third child, Sifra Maranatha on the 17th of September.

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