Newsletter (July 16, 2009)Dear all, Dr Fan on Sunday received a sudden transfer to Kitwe and he needed to be there within two days. So in a rush he called us on Monday and said goodbye. We had visitor staying with us so we could not go to see him. We feel very sad to see him go, as his faith is still very young. We just pray that he will maintain his faith to our Lord and will read the Bible and have prayer everyday. We will go to visit him this Saturday and see how he is getting on. We trust that our sovereign Lord knows best and perhaps this may turn out to be a springboard for us to make contact with some Chinese people in Kitwe. The visitor mentioned above is TCCA’s visiting lecturer from the States. He came to teach a course on Revelation and has been here seven weeks. He stays with another TCCA lecturer, but he came to stay with us for several days as his host was out of town. We brought him to Kitwe on Saturday and this was the first time we visited its city centre. It has more shops (and people) than Ndola and we had lunch in a Chinese restaurant. This is also the first time that we had a meal in a Chinese restaurant since we came to Zambia and we all enjoyed the food very much. Our guest is very considerate and appreciative and really has a heart for Africa. He thinks the quality of TCCA students are very good. One of the reasons is that they are generally more mature and supported by sponsors, so they value their time that they have in TCCA and have to work hard to be accountable to their sponsors. We had a very good time together and learnt a lot from him. The underground cable that supplied electricity to the house was burnt 7–8 years ago. Zesco (the power company) made a temporary overhead cable to the neighbour’s house and ever since then the house gets its electricity supply this way. Zesco was supposed to replace the underground cable but they never did. We suspected that because of this the power that we get is very unstable, so the lights sometimes are bright, and then after a while will become very dim. We called Zesco several times but they still did not come to do the work. Several weeks ago, Zesco people suddenly turned up and announced that they were going to replace the cable. It seems that our neighbour made a big fuss, thinking that we contributed to his high power bill (not true). Thanks to his complaint, Zesco finally decided to do something. They started work for half a day and then disappeared for several days. Then they turned up and dug for another half day and again disappeared for several days. Finally they came the third time and this time they managed to complete the job. They created a big mess in our backyard, and in the process they broke our sewerage pipe, water pipe and part of the concrete pavement has to be dug out. Of course they won’t repair or compensate you and we don’t bother to ask for compensation, as we may wait for another 7–8 years before we get something back! The good thing is that we finally got the underground cable replaced and the power supply seems to have improved. The tangerines we talked about last time are ripe now and we have already picked more than 50 of them. There are still plenty of them on the trees. They are very juicy and taste good. As usual we can’t finish all of them so we gave some away. Timothy continues to have Bible study with Dr Niu. He is still very keen to know the Bible more, so please continue to pray for him. Young Fan is very busy recently and seldom stays in Ndola. He will be going to Lusaka in August and then goes back to his home town to get married. He won’t come back to Ndola till the end of November. We are not sure if we have time to see him much before he goes. With Christian love. |