The Bennetts In Africa: 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.