Hi!
Few more days between this blog post and the last, but a few things to tell you all about! So here goes…
As of yesterday we had officially been here for One Week! So we celebrated with the team from England…by having Nando’s! A small luxury which I feel we won’t get to have very often!!
Firstly…It’s getting hotter and hotter! After our strange weather welcome from the first few days, it has steadily increased in temperature each day and we are now looking a pretty colour! (no sunburn yet!)
Secondly…we have a CAR! We have name it Merv…Merv the Mitsubishi. It is so fantastic to be able to have some more independence through having the car, it can be quite frustrating waiting around for people to take you to places, especially if you need to be somewhere on time!! So we have been relishing in getting used to African driving – which includes plenty of swerving deep potholes, no road markings and free for all driving wherever they fancy much of the time! But Greg is doing a fantastic job! I am yet to drive the car as my licence is still in England but when that arrives I will look forward to trying out driving myself!
On the subject of the car, we had a minor bump the other day whilst driving around some of the English team – our car bumped into the back of theirs – small scratches on front of ours as we hit their tow bar….their car was bigger! No serious injuries praise god! So the pastors here have prayed over the car to bless it to the lord to prevent anything else! Its all learning.
We are settling into our home which hopefully we can show you when we set up a photo gallery. We are hoping to take over a second room in the center to have as an office/living space as currently we are living in one room plus the short trek to the kitchen in the office on the other side of the center. So we need provision of items such as a kettle, toaster, mini fridge etc…as this will further help with our independence – which we are praying about.
We were really fortunate last night to be able to go, along with the team from England, to the house of Mr and Mrs Timba – whom we have stayed with before on previous trips to Zim. They have always been such firm friends of ours here and we respect them highly, they care for us like their family for which we are grateful. They are currently not attending One Way Ministries for a number of reasons and we wanted to go and see them and pray for them for their situation personally as they have had a very tough year – please do pray for them if you get a spare moment, they are a fantastic family! And will be of a huge support to both myself and Greg over this year so we would love for their difficult circumstances to be resolved.
Very excitingly, the team from England have arrived and been here since Wednesday. They are staying in two houses nearby the center with two families from the church. We have had a few team meetings and spent some time together with the team helpers from Zim which have been positive. Everyone is very motivated and excited and everyone seems to want to get started! Myself and Greg are doing less than previous years as there is a team of 6 already from England doing the main programme and so it is a joy to see the conference growing and expanding with team since when it started 6 years ago it was just Dave Bankhead and my Family! The children here look forward to the conference every year with such anticipation and we are praying that they will come with hearts ready to receive all the team have to give!
We have many of the children from the rural areas staying at the church center for the week in the spare bedrooms and we have already had 4 of them in our bedroom today playing with our remote control car, so I think this week may be quite busy and noisy! But we are so excited to be able to spend more time with these children as normally we are staying further away and we don’t get to see these children often as they live in the rural areas so it will be a pleasure to get to know them and show them how loved and special they are!
We have also booked to have a meeting with both Pastor Gatsi and Pastor Musora on Monday afternoon to discuss some of the finer points regarding the pre school as arund 50 people from One Way are off to Israel for 2 weeks in September and if we are to open the school in January, we need to start preparing, painting, renovating, resourcing, registrating etc…now. So we are going to have a busy busy week ahead with both the school and conference going on, but we are going to face it with much prayer!
Thank you to those of you who have sent us messages over the last week, we appreciate all communication and look forward to blogging after the meeting on Monday to let you know the latest on the happenings with the school.
We should also have some more information in a couple of weeks regarding other projects the church are interested in us helping with – including sunday school, youth group, tutoring for exams and such like! So the Lord is providing us with many opportunities to connect with the ministry and we would love prayers to help us focus and hear from the Lord on his plans for us!
Speak to you all soon!
God Bless,
G&S x