Newsletter (May 2, 2013)

Dear all, We arrived home safely on Tuesday afternoon and in total we spent more than 36 hours travelling! We had long transit times in Perth and Johannesburg. We managed to sleep a little on the plane, but are still very tired. The plane from Perth to Johannesburg was quite empty, so everyone on board had some space to stretch out and sleep. As we had a long transit time in Johannesburg, which is very notorious for luggage tampering, we had our luggage wrapped with plastic sheets in Auckland Airport and prayed that our luggage would be safe. In the end they did arrive safely without any tampering and we are very thankful.

It is now the dry season in Ndola, so the ground is a bit brown. The temperature is very comfortable right now, up to the mid-twenties during the day and quite cool in the evening and morning.

There was a sense of coming home as the plane touched down in Ndola. Everything looked very familiar and our good friend Ba John met us at the airport and took us home. Our worker was so pleased to see us, but then the sad thing was that he just received a call that his wife’s close relative has died, so she has to travel back home to attend the funeral, which is a very costly thing to do, as it is in a place very far from Ndola at the north-western corner of Zambia. He asked us for leave to spend the rest of this week in his rented farm harvesting. He needs to live there these few days as some thieves have come and stolen some of the produce, so he has to harvest everything quickly.

Our house is fine but since it has been vacant for quite a while, we discovered termites have invaded our storeroom, and there were some cockroaches around. We do have a recipe for poisoning the cockroaches, and our friends using it say it is quite effective. So we have made some and laid them around the house and hopefully we will be able to get rid of the unwelcome visitors. Petrol prices have gone up 20 per cent from yesterday, which came as a big surprise. This will affect the livelihood of most people as prices will go up for most things. The crime rate may be affected too.

Our director of SIM Zambia is coming today and we will have discussions of what we will do in Lusaka. Tomorrow we will go with him to Chingola, a town about two hours’ drive from Ndola, to have discussions with the Christian school there regarding the future placements of one of our missionary couples.

We had a very good and enjoyable time back home in New Zealand this time. We are so pleased to be able to meet all of you and we would like to thank you for everything that the Church has done for us during the time of our home assignment. We are so blessed to have you as our support in so many ways. Without your prayers there is no way we can be of any use here. God willing, our next home assignment will be January 2016 and we hope we will stay longer in New Zealand. With Christian love.