Newsletter (February 18, 2010)

Dear all, We are experiencing quite frequent load shedding (power cuts) lately.  Unfortunately they are quite random but they are mainly in the evenings for about 2� to 3 hours.  It seems that two units of the main hydroelectric power station are down and people say this will be continuing for another month or two before things will get back to normal.  This evening power was off once the home group started.  Our inverter was fully charged, so we could have a light on.  At this moment, when we are writing this newsletter, power has still not resumed but it won’t be too far off now.

Last Sunday was Chinese New Year Day and there was not much celebration in Ndola.  The Chinese doctors have a week off, so most of them went to see the Victoria Falls.  Otherwise most Chinese people just work as normal.  The Lord is gracious and listens to our prayers.  We had plans to visit some of the Chinese people which we have not seen for a long time.  In the end we did manage to visit a number of them and even met some new acquaintances.  Just several days before Chinese New Year we met a Chinese couple in the supermarket.  We greeted them and they said they had a farm near Luanshya (a small town about 40km from Ndola).  Then on New Year’s Eve the husband called and asked us to come to get some Chinese vegetables for the New Year.  So we went and it is a very big farm, growing all sorts of Chinese vegetables and melons which we have seldom had the chance to eat for the past 15 years.  We were of course excited to have them and he insisted on giving them to us.  We are very grateful for his generosity and we will definitely go back to buy some more in future.

We went to Kitwe to see Dr Fan.  He seems to be well settled there and he said he went to the nurses’ Christian fellowship very often.  We hope that he will be able to maintain his faith.  We also visited the Cantonese speaking family which we visited several months ago.  This time the eldest brother and his wife went back to China to visit their family and only the younger brother and his wife were around.  It was good as we have not spoken to them before and so we could come to know them a little bit more.  They invited us to stay back for a meal, and three other Cantonese speaking friends from Kitwe came as well, so we could meet them too.  Apart from these people we also visited a woman who owns a fashion shop in Ndola and she is planning to open a Chinese restaurant in June.  We had quite a good chat with her.  We also visited a Chinese doctor who lives very close to us and we always go there to have blood tests for malaria.  So we were quite busy visiting people in the past few days and still plan to visit several more in the next few days.  We hope we can keep up the contact and visit them more often in future.

We finally managed to stop the dog jumping into our property.  So at least we could have some good sleeps at night.  Thank you for your prayers.  With Christian love.