More About David & Julie

A very incomplete, but hopefully useful biography of David & Julie

Being born and trying to grow up

Julie managed to get born before David, in Coleraine (Northern Ireland), before going back to her roots in Belfast. About 5 years old she took her parents to her birthplace, and to the countryside and the coast. Being involved in Christian Uniformed organisations from an early age, Julie's missions vision was also helped by the Girls' Crusader Union.

Having been lucky enough to be born in Glasgow's Rottenrow Maternity Hospital in 1979 (which was subsequently demolished around 2003) David took his parents to Bristol and then London for further study, before heading out to Uganda for a while 1985-7.

More could be mentioned here, but we'll go on for now...

University

Always keen to get to places well on time (if not years before), Julie managed to get to Trinity College, Cambridge a year before David went to Trinity Hall, next door. (Though actually her parents might have had something to do with that timing.)

Julie spent 3 years reading books and writing about obscure people in obscure places doing obscure things in obscure olden times. She enjoyed that so much, that she decided to stay on to study a Master's in Philosophy looking at an even more specific bit of history. And then she thought about doing a PhD, and was surprisingly relieved not to end up doing that and to be able to escape the event-horizon of Cambridge.

David, on the other hand, arrived a year after Julie and managed to leave again a good while before she did, and all including graduating. He spent 3 years reading books, and lots on computers, and fiddling about with electronics and lots of software and bizarre purish mathematics, before managing to shake himself free into the real world again. Along the way he discovered that some lecturers had make you really excited about something you never thought you'd be interested in, and others can completely destroy your understanding of something you knew quite well.

In case you really wanted to know the details... we'll fill them in some time later.

As it happens there's much more to university than just what you're studying. Both of us were away from home probably for the first time properly, and it was our chance to 'discover ourselves', and hopefully to grow up a bit more. And in doing this it turned out that we shared a good many interests which is why we happened to know each other. We were both into music, both threw ourselves into involvement with the Christian Union, and got increasingly involved with international student ministry.

Of course other interests we didn't have in common. David never played in the Trinity College netball team. Julie didn't row in the 3rd men's boat for a year for Trinity Hall (which sank twice in one term). David didn't visit East Asia in 1997, but did take a bunch of folk to Uganda for 2 months in 1998. Julie didn't work for a robot company between 2nd and 3rd year, but did have a summer job back in Northern Ireland sorting through ancient archives (which David would have hated).

And we didn't share a romantic interest in each other until over 4 years after leaving university.

A year here, and a year there

Then after university David had been offered a job at that robot company (The Automation Partnership), but having put off taking time out between school and university decided to decline the job and take up Wycliffe Bible Translators' Graduate International Programme (GRIP) from mid 2000. After a fairly intense 4 months of training, that took him to northern Nigeria, working on a trilingual dictionary, while a Bible translation was starting up in that language. He worked there for about 11 months with Matthew Earwicker and the Dettweiler family, alongside Peter Nasoma and Bulus Doro Rikoto and quite a few others. "There was a great deal to learn. One was that God really did help me with learning a foreign language - something I have never found easy. That was just one of the many ways God provided for me. I was also freshly amazed at how wonderful it was to have God's word in our language. I was convicted of how much I ignore it and take it for granted rather than being transformed by it." (goes off excitedly to read his Bible now!)

Julie, meanwhile did some temping work before she went to Dorset to teach History and Latin at a remote boarding school called Bryanston. Having started her teaching career, she decided to learn how to do it, and was sucked back to Cambridge for a PGCE. And then since the sensible thing to do next was a year's teaching practice in the UK as a newly-qualified teacher, she went off to a big city in East Asia teaching English. There she discovered that God has members of his family picked out all over the world, that Jesus transforms lives of all kinds of people and that he's very good at looking after his little ones even in difficult environments.

Meanwhile, David returned from Nigeria and having enquired if he could help out in any way at the IFES International Office in Oxford, took a 4 month job that lasted a year and a half, beginning as IT help for the Finance department and ending up somehow managing all the IT for the office. Fun at many times, and great people but he discovered work with computers themselves to be frequently incredibly frustrating and ultimately rather unfulfilling. Almost as soon as he landed in Oxford he got stuck in with international students at St Ebbe's church. He had originally been looking out for African brothers and sisters, but soon discovered the joys of sharing the good news with Asian friends and enquirers who came along. It was great to be involved in a work that was growing rapidly, and it proved helpful experience for the future. A fantastic (and probably much more patient) guy came along to take over IT stuff for IFES, and having been persuaded to put in a bit of time strengthening relationships with his home church, David headed off to study for 2 years at the International Christian College in Glasgow.