Youth Drama

While in England I worked quite alot on street drama with young people. While being alot of fun, it also provided them with an opportunity to share their faith with other young people in a relaxed and neutral environment. We had particlarly successful times going for 4/5 day trips to Plymouth, Cardiff and Swansea where large groups of young people gather in the city centres during the holidays. Since being in S.A. we have started doing the same sort of thing and on the 29th we are off to Cape Town for 10 days for a little break and to do the plays wherever we can. We also hope to meet a man who is responsiblefor the stages outside the world cup venues to see if we can organise several drama teams to perform during the World Cup. Here are some pictures of some performances we did at a school and at a mall before Christmas. (I was hoping that if you clicked on the photos they would enlarge but it doesn't seem to be the case so sorry they are a bit of an eye-strain.)

Dogs !!

A pair of Rhodesian Ridgeback puppies (10 weeks old) became a available for free as they are without ridges! (and one has 6 toes!) ... apart from that they are lovely and the kids love them.. they will grow to be very big so we are already very strict with them as far as climbing onto the table etc!

The more the merrier!

The Kids!

Christmas lunch was remarkably stress free with three families coming together and sharing the cooking... and the young pepople and kids (all 16 of them), took care of themselves!


The Adults!

Happy Christmas!

Lots of love to all our friends and family! It has been quite new for us to be on our own for Christmas having had the special blessing of being looked after by our respective mothers for the last few years. I was rather apprehensive that it would not have the usual "magic", but it was very nice and the kids were all very generous and perceptive in their presents to each other and that was especially nice to see!

We are having our old friends Oli and Marie and Andrew and Phoebe for lunch with everyone contributing towards it so that should be fun.

I hope you are having a lovely Christmas too!

For cricket enthusiasts!

Shawn and I took a day out to see England play South Africa on the 4th day in the 1st test in Centurion about 20 mins from where we are staying. Shawn only had to pay 20 Rand ( £1.75) and I only 60 Rand (£5) for a full days play. That was one of the highlights of the day! The rest of it was rather dull, as South Africa slowly wrestled control of the game! Next time I think a one dayer would be more fun!


Swanny coming into bowl.
looking rather hot and parched at lunch time!

Drinks break! Kallis is drinking and Amla crouching down
Alastair Cook patrols the boundary
A typical SA supporter..note watermelon hat!

Ah.... now Leicester Paul would be turning the ball a mile in this strip! ( we were allowed on to the pitch at lunch time...there must have been over 50 games of mini- cricket going on in the outfield!)

Can't recognize who this is! But there was some pretty dour defending....


Stuart Broad running to bowl

Trip to Sun City!

Suki on trampoline bungee

Cool Gem soaking up the sun

A beautiful pool at sun city

The wave! I got into this pool with Gem, and Shawn said there was a big wave coming and to be careful. Well I thought how big can it be? Suddenly this tsunami like wave about six feet above the normal water height bore down on us! We turned to run but it was too late; the wave broke right over us and picked us up and carried us towards the beach shore. From then on Gem watched the wave from the shore! It really was something and this picture does not do it justice!

Beautiful Sun City Pool

Swimming japes! +......

Shawn

Amanda

Gemma

Suki diving




Amanda in front of our house

Shawn wrestling with Suki

Progress in Pakistan

Unfortunately (as per usual) I have left my laptop at someone elses house and therefore am unable to finish the Malawi blog. However the "punchline" of the visit is still to come so there will be more coming!

In the meantime we have exciting news from Pakistan..... our friend who we met at an immigration centre has been back in Pakistan for three years. He has ministries to four local prisons, an adult education centre and visits and supports Christian communities that have received persecution.

He translated the Foundation Stone Bible class into Urdu and we did a sponsored climb in England to raise funds for the printing. Here is Yaqoob and his wife, Surriya, with the finished product.....isn't it great ? And he will be distributing these freely in the prisons in the Lahore area.

There is a great deal of upheaval in Pakistan right now as terrorists are making all sorts of ground and really threatening the peace and stability there. I feel it means all the more that we should be providing the Pakistani Christians with as much Christian equipment as we can to prepare them for the times ahead.

Yaqoob , Shazzard and Asiya outside Lahore prison program.

Simon's Trip to Malawi Part 2

Having said good bye to the pastors on the Saturday we prepared for a drive to one of the rural churches the following Sunday.

We drove about 40km south of Lilongwe and then left the main road. Maston said that this was where he would normally start walking! 10 km later we arrived at the church, which I would like to call the "church on the hill".

Maston told us how the church came to be there. He had been trying to start a church in this village for many years. However there was a lot of traditional witchcraft etc in the area and when they used to meet in the village only a handful of people would ever come to the church. So he was close to giving up when he decided the solution was to build a church away from the village up on a hill. Maston went there for a few weeks, set up a kiln for baking bricks and built this church with his own bare hands. Soon the church flourished and when we were there it was packed with about 160 people.

We helped to lead the service there. My fellow travellers from South Africa Ike and Praise separately prayed about what to share with the people. Praise and I both received Psalm 103 as I found out when I asked her just before I was due to stand up! Its a beautiful Psalm the first few lines I will put here.

Bless the Lord O my sould and all that is within me
Bless the Lord O my soul and forget not all of this benefits.
Who forgiveth all my iniquities
Who heals all my diseases
Who redeemeth thy life from destruction
Who crowneth me with loving kindness and tender mercies
Who satisifes thy mouth with good things so that thy youth is renewed like the eagles.

In the church !

It was a wonderful time and musically very vibrant and entertaining. They used a "guitar" fashioned from a an old tin can and wood and a sort of bass cello also from a larger tin can and wood and with just a single "string". The quality and noise was wonderful.

Praise and myself after the service.

All in all it was a very impressive time and you could see what a service to the community this church brings. AIDS is also a significant problem in these areas and several people asked for prayer against it.

Having left my computer at someone's house I am unable to finish the posting so will do so later in Part 3. But I will leave you with a beautiful Lilongwe (capital of Malawi) sunset. Lots of love to you all.

Simon's Malawi Trip Part 1

Here are few pictures from my Malawi trip. I want to post some more shortly. It was such a blessing to travel up into Africa, through Botswana and Zambia into Malawi.

One of the first things to comment on was that people don't have Bibles. They are really quite expensive and common people just cant afford them . We brought up 200 Bibles from South Africa to distribute along the way and it was so precious to see the peoples reactions, hugging the Bibles to their chests, signing their names to the flyleaf asap, and sometimes literally jumping for joy! So one knows that if one takes alot of Bibles up into Africa you are going to make a lot of people very happy!

Both Botswana and southern Zambia were quite dry and dusty and had huge expanses of seemingly empty bush.. only punctuated by some waterways most notably the Zambesi river.........

The massive Zambesi--hippos were visible at a distance.

Lorries waiting to cross Zambesi

Ferry across the Zambesi


but as we climbed up to Chipata on the eastern border of Zambia, we rose out of the bush up into very well populated and developed agricultural land which increased as we arrived in Malawi.

We were greeted by our host Bishop Maston Davite a 55 year old ex-cartographer who singlehandely has planted 26 rural churches north and south of the capital Lilongwe. He has no car but relies on public transport and his own two feet!

I meet the bishop!

He loves to talk about David Livingstone and often exclaims "If David Linvinstone a foreinger should walk so far up into Africa to spread the Gospel howmuch further should I, an African, walk." We stayed with Maston for our entire 8 day stay in his house. He put in a European toliet and shower especially for our visit!

The Bishops House.... our car on the side ..... (we bought this car just a couple of days before the trip after quite a few weeks of procrastination..its a Toyota Prado..we discovered on the trip that it has a 180 litre fuel tank ..excellent for doing long distcances through Africa..meaning next time we may be able to drive straight through Zimbabwe where diesel is very hard to come by)

The bishop had invited us to teach his rural pastors a Bible course over a week period ..the same one I had used in the prisons and immigration centres... this meant we would be teaching four classes a day two in the morning and two in the afternoon each lasting one and a half house with a break for much meaning that we generally started at about 9 in th emorning and finished around five.

We were in a rented school room. Amazingly he still has no permanent church in Llilongwe. he rents a school hall. He has spent all his money on helping to build churches in the rural areas.
Due to some misunderstanding we had to move to another school. It was baking hot no fan or air con but somehow it didn't seem to matter and we all had a great time. There was generally a fairly good breeze to keep us somewhat cool!

The pastors in the classroom!

Simon and Isaac and Ebenezer , Maston's oldest son, who also interpeted for us with Bibles for all the attendees.
I teach a class intepreted by the wonderfully named Hardwell!

On the last day of classes we went out into the local community to witness and distribute tracts.

Here I am with a group of school children, Hardwell translating for me.

At the end of the week we had a fun graduation party on Saturday morning so the pastors could get buses back to their churches in time for Sunday morning service.


Graduates of the Bible course all together!


Team-building fun at the graduation ceremony..

All of us together!

Duty calls so have to go now but quite a bit more to share which I hope to do in the next few days!

missing you

groovy we got internet
i am so happy
i miss eveyone one but i guess that south africa is ok and i hope that it will grow on me. just got my bed which is a blessing. our pool is getting so warm and i hope that some day you guys can come visit us. the heat is sometimes un bearable but at least i have a great sun tan he he he. we all got our school uniform which is ok but i definetly perferd the kings school one.

Assorted Photos

Here are some assorted photos.......of Gemma riding,.... Amanda and Suki at the beach with friend Bethy,N .....Gemma on the way to the beach,..... Suki and Gemma at horseriding show.....