Newsletter (August 19, 2010)

Dear all, Things are getting back to normal now. At the moment TCCA is having term break, so the campus is very quiet as most people have gone away. We only need to work half days during this time which is very good as we are busy with other things.

Zara has started visiting the old ladies in the Mitanda Home for the Aged the first week we came back. The sad news was that one of the ladies died while we were away. Before we left she was already not in good health and people told Zara that later on she lost the will to live. There are now three English-speaking ladies left in the home.

Timothy has been very busy installing computers. He has also installed the new library software. There is still some work needing to be done on the server and we are waiting for someone to come to do the remaining work. At the moment a lot of work involve computer networking and Timothy knows very little of this. So please pray that things can be worked out well and smoothly. Eventually TCCA will need to have someone to look after the computer side of its operations. The assistant librarian has left just before we arrived and moved to another theological institution in Lusaka. We will need to find a replacement and hopefully we can find someone who can do both types of work. Humanly speaking the chance of finding such a person is pretty remote as TCCA can’t compete with other institutions in employing skilled professionals. Please pray that God will provide a suitable person for us soon.

A short-term missionary from SIM Canada has been attached to the Chinese Fellowship in Lusaka for the past three months. She is doing her internship here for her seminary training. Like us she is originally from Hong Kong. She came up to stay with us last Friday and will go back to Lusaka this Thursday. She will return to Canada next week. We brought her to see some of the places in Ndola where Chinese people are staying and working.

We then came to notice that quite a number of people whom we know are not around. Some have left Ndola permanently and some are away for business and one doctor died tragically. However, we happened to come across an engineer from Luanshya (a mining town about 40km from Ndola). The Chinese have bought the mine there and have been operating there since early this year. He was with his wife and daughter when we met him. They came to visit him from China. May be we can visit him later on.

The air in Ndola seems to be very polluted at the moment. The sky is very hazy. It is very common to have hazy sky at this time of the year. It will remain like this until the rain comes in late October. However it seems that this year the pollution is worse than previous years. The pollutants are coming from the chimney of the cement works not far from Ndola and the prevailing winds at this time of the year blow them in this direction. Some doctors say with this level of pollution people’s lungs may be permanently damaged after three years.

We went to church in the past two Sundays and noticed some people were not in church. We asked around and people said they all left Ndola and moved on to other places, mainly Lusaka. Some went for further studies, some were transferred by their companies. This, we believe, are the typical problems of an English-speaking middle-class church in Zambia, especially in a place like Ndola. People come and go very quickly. The church leadership finds it hard and the church members also find it difficult. Just at the time they are getting used to the church, they get transferred away. We feel sad to see so many people go. Though there are some people being transferred to Ndola, on the whole there are much more people going than coming. We don’t understand why people are being transferred all the time and this is bad for the family as well. A husband may get a transfer. Should he bring his family here? That may mean the wife will lose her job. So sometimes husband and wife are separated for a long time, until the time the wife also gets a transfer, but this won’t happen very often.

Hope the visit from the Wheat family goes well. It is a pity that we could not meet them but we pray that their visit will be a fruitful and blessed one, to them and to the church. With Christian love.