(Top) The oxen ready to work hauling the abundance of maize harvest.
(Just above) The opening of the Farm Market
Praise and worship begin the work day each morning.
These three pictures show Kimberly and Mary teaching Bible class to grades 4&5 and grade 7 at the Okada Community school.
Greetings Dear Friends,
I hope this finds you and your loved ones doing well. On April, we were delighted to welcome our dear friends Dave and his wife Debbie Durant from our church in Delaware who came to visit us here in Zambia. They had taken the time to record greetings from people in our church and six months of messages which our Pastor has been preaching since we left Delaware in September.
We were very encouraged to see faces and hear recorded voices of our dear church family and it made us realize how much we love and miss each one of them.
During their visit, Dave and Debbie were encouraged to witness first hand what the Lord is doing here in Zambia.
...from Kamau
The work continues to progress well here at the farm. The digging and construction of the septic tank and the soak away were completed towards the end of April. Finally, the two stubborn oxen have completed their boot camp training and have now begin to bear the yoke and burden of the work at the farm.
We bought an ox cart a while ago and have now begun use the oxen for various tasks at the farm which was very timely as the tractor had broken down and we were unable to use it. For now the oxen have saved themselves from ending up on our dinner plate! (At least temporarily, as I see it!)
The morning devotions have been going great, we usually meet every morning from 7am-7:30 before the work day begins, we start with praise and worship and then a brief sharing of God's word. So far about 7 individuals have made a commitment to live for Christ and some have begin to attend church on a regular basis. Many of the workers and the Conservation Farming students have shared that hearing God's word taught in the morning before they start work has meant a lot to them and enabled them to reflect on the things of God's throughout the day.
The very latest development has been the opening of the Farm Market which was June 19th. The goal of the market is to aid in sustaining the children's village. The surplus of the food grown at our farm will be sold there and also local farmers that we have befriended have agreed to supply their produce to sell at the market as well. The market is located on the Great North Road which is Zambia's busiest highway and we have already witnessed a fair amount of customers.
Finally, the screening of children who potentially will be admitted at children's home began in May. Together with two social welfare workers from the district office and four local community outreach workers, myself, and Miriam, a lady who will be the first house mother of our children's home visited five families and screened eight children. The first child we met was a girl named Inoge who lost both parents five years ago as a result of the Aids pandemic. She is five years old and her grandmother is taking care of her. She told us of her struggle to provide for the little girl because her only source of income is working temporarily as a house help for a family not too far from her village. The grandmother also explained that when she first started to take care of this child, she did not expect her to survive for long because the girl was constantly sick and at one time had sores all over her body. However, Inoge has now sufficiently recovered enough to attend Kindergarten. She begged us to take the child because she feels very limited in what she can do for her.
We then visited another family where we found a girl called Precious, her mother has died and her father is somewhere in Lusaka. As in almost all the cases with all of the children we screened, she is being cared for by her grandmother. The grandmother is not sure how old Precious is, she told us she will try to obtain her medical form which will assist in getting the details needed. Precious is cheerful yet a shy little girl, she appears to be seven yrs old.
We later met a family of four adults and two children, all the adults including one seven year old boy where on ARV'S ( Anti-Retro viral ) treatment due to the HIV virus. The other child who is four years old looked somewhat healthy. He has a mother who is 19 years old. The relatives told us that they have been taking care of the child, their health challenges notwithstanding, because the child's mother has neglected him. She gave birth to him when she was sixteen years old. She also has no source of income to provide for her child. After our visit with this family, we then visited another grandmother who is a peasant farmer, she is taking care of six orphan children. Four of them were at home while the other two were at a nearby school. The youngest ranged from four yrs and the oldest about 9yrs old.
It was very disheartening to see this frail looking grandmother single handedly running what appeared to me as a little orphanage. It seemed as if it took every ounce of the strength she had to get up and work on her little garden to provide for the children. The tragedy of the Aids pandemic in Africa is that it is taking the strong and leaving the very weak, the grandmothers and the children. One of the boys had the virus, I asked the social worker if he was on medication and he told me no. I wanted to know why the 7 yr old was not taking medication although the government hospitals are providing free ARVs and I was told that the grandmother is already too overwhelmed with trying to obtain food for the children. Also, it is hard for her to find the time to walk to the hospital which is a distance from where they live. I looked at that child and wondered if he even knew what ailed him. It was quite obvious that his future is very bleak if no intervention takes place. The social worker instructed the community outreach worker to liaison with the grandmother and look into putting the child on medication right away.
The last family we visited consisted of a grandmother and the four children she is taking care of. Two of the children were at school. The two boys who were at home were about 5 yrs old and the other one 6. John the 6yr old, is an orphan and the grandmother is a distant relative relative. She decided to take him in because none of the other surviving relatives were available to take care of him. He looked very malnourished and untidy.
It was a very difficult day for me. It is one thing to read or hear the statistics, that Zambia has more than 1 million orphans and a totally different thing to actually meet and put faces to those numbers. It is not until you go out to the villages and begin to knock on doors and speak to people that suddenly, the enormity of this crisis hits you. You see the sad hungry look on the faces of the children and the lost, listless look in their eyes. Then you talk to the grandmother and you find out how burdened she is with worry about what will happen to her grandchildren when she is gone. You sense this dark cloud of desperation and utter hopelessness. This is a terrible tragedy, the magnitude of the problem is overwhelming. Consider the fact that we had only visited five families yet this is being repeated in every village in the entire country of Zambia and in Sub-saharan Africa as a whole. It rends your heart and makes you want to cry out to God for answers. I have to believe that God has a solution to this crisis, but it is so very hard to see these children suffering so!
After our visit with the families, the next step will involve setting up the process of admission.
In light of this, we would appreciate you joining us in prayer about the following:
● That we would recognize God's leading on which children are to be admitted first.
● Please pray for discernment for each member of our team, as some of the children we will receive may be coming from ungodly backgrounds steeped in immorality, witchcraft and abuse. For this reason, we need God to give us insight on how to minister, counsel them and even how to pray for them.
● We have a deep desire to hear God's voice and sense His leading in each step that we make. Pray that we will be still enough to hear Him and that we will not permit unclean hearts to hinder His voice.
from...Kimberly
Recently, Mary Zulu and I invited the students in our grade 7 class to write down prayer requests for us to that we could be praying for them. This turned out to be a challenging task for them and some required help from Mary to write down their thoughts. When the teaching was finished for the day and we returned home to go through the requests, we were grieved to see that many of the requests were to learn how to read and for us to pray for parents and other family members who are ill. These students will be taking important exams in December in order to determine if they will go on to high school level. As we read the slips of paper, we saw that many could not spell or write a complete thought. On many of them word “play” was written for “pray” and on one of them “mi” was spelled for “me.” We wondered on how these students could possibly hope to pass the exams in December and we felt the need to seek the Lord on what we could do to help them. The situation is such that, there is not enough money to pay a full staff of teachers at the school. The teachers that are there make very little income and some of them are volunteers. The class sizes are large and it is difficult to spend additional time with a student that may be struggling. Many of the parents of the children in the school are themselves illiterate and/or unable to assist their children in learning.
When we approached the headmistress to inquire as to whether we could provide assistance in tutoring for reading she graciously welcomed us and took us up on on our offer. Our second week of tutoring the grade 7 students is has gone well. We have divided them into two groups; those can read but need help with reading comprehension and spelling and those that are unable to read or read very poorly. Since we are not trained teachers by profession, Mary and I both feel inadequate to take on such a task but we know that the Lord is encouraging us both to be faithful in doing what we can and trusting Him for the results.
Here is how you can pray for Mary and I as we minister in Okada School:
● Pray that as God's Word is taught every week that the hearts of the children will respond and be changed.
● Pray with the passage of Ephesians 1:17-23 in mind, that those children who have responded to the invitation of salvation would grow up to be strong believers in the faith.
● Ask the Lord to continue to give Mary and I sweet spirit of unity and friendship as we work together.
● We really need the Lord's wisdom and guidance as we spend time getting to know the grade 7 class and tutor them. Ask the Lord to open up their minds to be able to understand and retain the new reading skills that they are learning.
● Pray that God will send out laborers because the harvest is truly great!
Praises
God has graciously provided a vehicle for us in answer to the many prayers that have gone out!- We were able to get our driving licenses switched over without falling prey to corruption by going through middlemen who were demanding exorbitant sums for their assistance.
