Dear friends,
I have to start this letter with congratulations to our team member, Calvin Khoza, who this month successfully completed his 29th Comrades Marathon. This is an ultramarathon, about 90 km in length, run between the cities of Durban and Pietermaritzburg, here in South Africa. To complete one Comrades marathon is a great achievement. To complete 29 is quite remarkable.
Calvin’s work in the local schools of our area is also proving to be successful. He and Nico set out early each Tuesday morning to visit as many schools as they can whilst they are open. They always return with a good response. One notable day they returned with 545 exams. This means that, during the preceding week, 545 students had chosen to pick up and study a lesson teaching them about God’s Word. We know that this will bring good into their lives.
In addition to visiting the schools, Nico has always been busy distributing our lessons to the people he meets around town in various locations, shops, cafes and the complex where he lives. These 3 students (below) all live in the same complex and have completed our courses through Nico’s encouragement.
The work of Emmanuel Press in Mozambique has been progressing well in these months. Domingos continues to see much interest and response to the work that he is doing. In addition, Mark and Lesley Harper have distributed a good number of our lessons. The Harpers have been working in Mozambique for many years and have developed a network of contacts throughout the country, to whom they send the lessons. This includes the provinces in the north of the country. Sadly, attacks by insurgents in the north have once again increased. This has caused many to be displaced from theirhomes and villages. Mark and Lesley have visited some of these people and are now facilitating the distribution of our lessons among them.
Lesley Harper is also using her contacts to find people able to translate our Basic Discipleship Course into other languages spoken in Mozambique. Translation work is not easy, so we are extremely grateful to Lesley for organising this.
Our own offices, here in White River, were in need of freshening up. The logo and design on the front wall were looking a little faded and worn. Douglas Boyce, the newest Director to join our Board, was instrumental in organising this. With scaffolding in place, he put together a team of volunteers to prepare and paint the whole wall. I say thank you to this team! Then Wouter was hired to paint the logo, a map of Africa and the name of Jesus on the wall. He did this beautifully and we are all delighted with the finished result.
Thank you for your continued support of me and the work of Emmanuel Press.
