Newsletter (May 23, 2013)

Dear all, We had quite a busy time in Ndola before we moved to Lusaka on Wednesday 15 May. Our internet was down for a week, so it was very difficult to send and receive email and use internet.

Our new home in Lusaka is very close to the SIM Zambia office. We can walk to the office from home and it takes about 15 to 20 minutes. It is situated within a compound and the rental covers power, water, security, rubbish disposal and a generator. It is fully furnished so we need not bring down lots of our bigger furniture. The good thing is that we do not need to worry about maintaining the yard, but then we do not have the space to grow vegetables. Next to the house is an avocado tree and the avocadoes are good and we have been enjoying them.

We asked our good friend Ba John to come to Lusaka with us as we will need his help to fix and add things in the house. He has since done quite a lot of work for us. We are still trying to get used to living in the new house and in Lusaka, which is not too easy. Lusaka is big and the traffic is very heavy and there are lots of traffic jams. We also need to ask our friends where to buy things, etc. We have been busy unpacking and hopefully we will be able to find space to store all our belongings.

The good days of no power cuts have gone. Lusaka is much worse than Ndola in terms of power supply and so far we have power cuts in the evenings of Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. We still can’t get the generator to go, and the owner will replace it tomorrow.

We went to the Chinese Fellowship on Sunday and we are pleased to see that there are more people attending the Fellowship now. They are still trying to find a pastor and that will not be easy. We will visit other churches in the coming weeks before deciding which church to attend.

We have started going to the office since Monday. It was a busy day with a team of seven people from Canada arriving in the morning for a short-term mission in the Southern Province. In the afternoon a medical student from New Zealand came to the mission hospital at Kasempa to do her medical elective. Our regional director in the North Western Province happened to be here. So it was great to see how she conducted the orientations. When missionaries come to serve at Mukinge Hospital or other rural areas, we normally will take them to do shopping as things may not be easy to get in those places. So we spent the whole afternoon on Tuesday helping our Kiwi friend to do her frantic shopping. She left with our regional director on Wednesday morning. So everything is new and there will be lots of things to learn and remember.

Please continue to pray for us as we try to adjust to life in Lusaka and serving in our mission office. Humanly speaking this is not easy but we trust in God’s grace and we hope to get through this initial stage of adjustment quickly. With Christian love.