Newsletter (December 13, 2018)

Dear all, Greetings from Zambia and trust you all are well. Again, it has been many months since we last wrote to you. Below is a brief summary of our lives in Zambia, mostly in Lusaka.

First, some updates on Covenant College. Timothy went there at the end of August for a week to teach the students some basic library and study skills. He is pleased to meet many students whom he has met last year. He has basically finished cataloguing all the books. Since he did it from Lusaka, he needs to physically check the books and see if they are correctly catalogued in the library system. He has not completed the task yet and we went back to the College in November for him to try to finish the work. He will also need to teach someone to learn to use the system.

Regarding the College there are some very welcome developments, though the operation is still struggling financially. The farm has a new ministry leader and he was a former pastor who has a business background. He seems to take on this new role really well and we are seeing some encouraging results from the farm. Hopefully with these new developments the principal can concentrate on teaching and mentoring the students. Please continue to pray that God will raise up many more committed Christians that are honest, trustworthy and with integrity, and he will also provide good teaching staff to the College. At the moment the principal is the only fulltime teaching staff and he desperately needs more good Christians to come to help him.

Second, MMM [Mobile Mission Maintenance] Zambia has two containers of donated materials sent to them from Hong Kong. We used some of the space available to ship some Christian books and toys back. They arrived but then someone broke into one container at the border and stole quite a number of boxes. Our boxes were OK, as people were not interested in books. We went to Ndola to sort out the content. The Church which we used to go has a ministerial college and they desperately need books for its newly established library. We gave most of the books to them.

For the toys we did not have space to take them all, so we went back after several weeks to take the remaining ones. We gave some of them to one of our missionary couple who runs the Choma Youth Centre in the Southern Province, and some to the Christian Education Department of Covenant College. We also have a missionary couple retiring back to America after nearly 40 years here. They gave us some boxes of books and stationery plus a variety of things and we gave most of them to Covenant College as well.

Third, we are still involving in preaching and teaching Sunday School at the Chinese Church once a month. More and more Chinese are coming to Africa, Zambia is no exception. Our church is also very keen to have outreach to the Chinese in Lusaka and the pastor asked Timothy to give a brief talk to church members and suggest some ways on how to start this.

Zara has been going to the small community school once a week, but we will need to decide if she will go there again next year. Originally, we and our friends would like to know more about the students so that we will see if we could support some of them financially to continue their schooling at government schools. There are also one or two projects which Zara may want to help with, but we will wait till next year and see how they will work out.

Because of the bush setting of our small cottage there are many kinds of birds around. We enjoy watching them and most of them have very beautiful colours. We are thankful to be able to stay in such a place.

We will be taking a two-week break away from Zambia. So we would like to take this opportunity to say merry Christmas to all of you and wish you all a very blessed New Year. Thanks for sending us the bulletin every week so that we may know what is happening in the Church. We will be in Dunedin for about five weeks from mid-May to mid-June, housesitting for Louise. We will also need to further downsize our storage. We are excited to have the opportunity to visit Dunedin and meet all of you again. It will be three years since we last met.

That possibly is everything worth mentioning. Please continue to pray for us and we definitely need your prayer support. We have been travelling within Zambia quite a bit this year. It is always quite dangerous travelling in Zambian roads as there are many accidents happening. Every time we drive to another town we will see these on the road. We thank God for his protection and your prayers surely will be much appreciated. Blessings.