Newsletter (December 19, 2013)

Dear all, December seems to be a quieter month, although a number of missionaries are taking their holidays and passing through Lusaka. Timothy went to Choma in Southern Province (about 300km southwest of Lusaka) to check on some missionary housing. It is a duplex and one part is occupied by our missionaries from Ethiopia and the other part is more or less completed.

He started off very early in the morning and came back the same day. There were lots of road works but now most of them have been done and we have some very good roads in our main trunk routes. The government has embarked on an ambitious road programme and many roads will be improved and tar-sealed. This indeed is good news as better roads mean safer roads and less traffic accidents.

Please pray for the missionaries from Ethiopia mentioned above. They went home to visit their sick elderly parents and we pray that they will be fine and get well soon. Before they went back we went with them to an Ethiopian restaurant. Ethiopian food is very different from Zambian food and we all enjoyed it.

For various reasons Timothy needs to visit a building construction company, mainly because it is owned by Chinese people and Timothy can communicate with them in Chinese. Once you start talking to Chinese in Chinese then it is much easier to build relationships and understand each other well. Timothy was very surprised to meet the manager who is a very young chap.

That perhaps is a trend which we seldom see in the past. Some years ago, most Chinese people working overseas possibly were middle aged men who can’t speak much foreign language. Things have changed and we notice in Lusaka alone, more and more Chinese have come to do business in all areas. These people are mostly young professionals who come with the family (normally husband and wife plus their child) and many of them speak very good English and most of them are university graduates who, after graduation, come to Africa as the opportunities are good and they can earn much more than working in China.

We will not go away during Christmas and New Year. There are some medical students coming at the end of this month and early January, so we need to be around. We will go to Ndola for about two days during Christmas to visit some TCCA graduates. One couple will leave the country to go to Malawi and we hope to see them before they go. We will also visit our missionaries who are in TCCA.

Please continue to pray for our work in the office. We need wisdom from God to deal with the many issues that come our way, and sometimes it can be stressful for us.

We wish all of you a very happy Christmas and a blessed New Year. Let’s remember each other in our prayers. We thank all of you for the prayer support that you have given us and we are sure without your prayers we would not have been able to do all the things that we need to do for God in Zambia. With Christian love.