May Update...

Thought it was about time for an update on things here. This month Tim spoke at a ladies conference with the local baptist church here. He spoke on the Bible and the family and had a great response. He has also been working on getting things together for the Simply The Story training we are doing May 29, 30, and 31. We have a team coming from Kenya to do the training. Tim will be driving to Lilongwe, Malawi and picking them up on Sunday, the 27th of May. We have about 16 people coming to the conference right now, but think we will still have quite a few more, and 6 of them are pastors from Malawi. This conference will be held in English, we thought mainly for the missionaries in the area, but got a great response from people in Malawi where the official language is English. With these pastors coming, we wanted to make it as affordable as possible for them. They will need to pay for visas to get into Mozambique, lodging, and other expenses while here and they don't have the money to cover those costs. We were trying to figure out best how to help them. Recently, good friends of ours held a garage sale and have donated all proceeds to our ministry here in Mozambique. We just found out today that they raised $600 and that will be more than enough to cover the costs we need to for the conference. We plan on doing another one in Portuguese in August/September for the local pastors and church leaders here in the area, and the funds that we have left we will use to help the people here attend. We are so thankful to all of you who helped put that together and especially to the Loveless' who arranged everything. Through you an exponential amount of people will be reached in Malawi and Mozambique.

While we were in the States, we received 3 boxes of donated eye glasses to give out to the people here. It is almost impossible to get glasses here and many people have vision problems. We have informed the eye doctor here in Lichinga that we have glasses for those that need them. When he sees people, he gives them a script with their prescription number and then they come to us and we give them the eye glasses. They must have a script to receive them. We have already seen quite a few people and even all the doctors in the hospital have come by for a pair.

We are also awaiting an intern, Beth from our home church, who will be with us for 3 months. We are getting things ready for her arrival and preparing.

Here are the kids trying on some of the glasses.

This is one of our first recipients of the glasses, Abubaka. He is a pastor in Meponda (the village on the lake).

The glasses come in all shapes and sizes. Here are some of our favs.

I've never had a thumb sucker before, but Jurnee loves her thumb. She has been sleeping through the night, so I think maybe its not such a bad thing.

And she is full of smiles.

This is on Mother's day. Our director, Janice had some of us mothers over for dinner and here are all the kids. God has blessed our kids with plenty of friends.