vathi va toko wirimu

November 2011 update

2011-11-09T21:27:00.001+02:00

Dear family and friends,

We send you our hot, sweaty greetings from northern Mozambique! The temperatures have been rising steadily, and these days it isn’t unusual for the temperature in the kitchen to be over 90 degrees. Please join us in praying for RAIN as this season begins. With only one rainy season, the distribution and quantity of rainfall directly affects the amount of food our Mozambican friends have for the entire year. We’re praying for enough rain for all the crops, but not so much that flooding destroys crops.

In July we went to South Africa (a three and a half day drive) to have the truck worked on by a fully equipped mechanic, and also for Ellie to have surgery to close her umbilical hernia. We are grateful for all your love and prayers for Ellie; the surgery went well without any complications! My parents joined us in South Africa right after that, and we had some time of rest and play and seeing some of God’s amazing creation together while Ellie’s incision healed. Our time with them was a very precious gift.

Two days after we pulled into our driveway from the trip to South Africa, Alan’s youngest brother Aaron and his wife Erin arrived to visit, which was so wonderful. We introduced them to as many of our Mozambican friends as we could, and though I’m sure the names of all the new people and places began to run together, they were good sports and Erin took a lot of pictures (some are pasted here in this post). Over a weekend we took them to a game reserve north of us that we’d never been to before; we saw multiple species of antelope and bird, and we even blundered right into three lions with a fresh kill (we stayed safely in the jeep, of course)!

Robert, Allison, and Miriam Berger arrived at the end of September; Allison is our team’s school teacher for the year, and we are so thankful to have her! The Bergers have been with us for a little over a month now and are getting settled into the teacher house that our teammate Jeremy Smith has been building. School has been going well; there are two classes: third and second grades together and then kindergarten, and the kids love having “Miss Allison” for a teacher. I have been teaching each class a Portuguese lesson three days a week, which has been a lot of fun.

One significant blessing from having a team teacher this year is that I’m a little freer for ministry time outside our home. This month we’ll begin switching one village day a week from Alan to me; the women (and the men) in Chipembe/Nkunama/Omeringue churches have been asking for more time for the women to study together. These are some of the women I have known the longest, and I am really looking forward to my Fridays with them.

We’re humbled and thankful to announce that the fundraising for the house is completed! Praise God; he is faithful and his children are so generous. Construction is going well, though definitely behind the schedule we’ve hoped for. Recently we had been anticipating moving before the end of November; but now we’re aiming for the end of the year. The roof is on (just in time for a good hard rain yesterday!), the plastering of the brick walls is partially done, and the wiring is installed. We have been told that the electric company will come to hook up our house this week – but we are only cautiously optimistic because that is the same thing we were told last week, the week before that… and the week before that.

While the house is nearing completion, we are still waiting on a solution for water or a well on the land. We’ve had a quote from one company of around $17,000, which was higher than we had hoped, but we’re still waiting on a quote from another company. $5,500 has already been given; please join us in praying for a reliable water source on the land. If you feel led to contribute financially to this need, you can send a check made out to Donelson Church of Christ to the following address: 2706 Old Lebanon Road, Nashville, TN 37214. A note should be included to specify that the funds are for well drilling.

Our work with and in the churches this year has taken on a different shape. Certain villages have had fewer visits than before we started on the house. While some of them are hanging in there (we’re celebrating baptisms in Nkororo and Newara next week), others are barely hanging on (Namwaciko is really struggling due to a leader’s drunkenness). It’s hard to see people we’ve invested in choose to please themselves instead of seeking to follow the will of Jesus; just this past week we participated in an impromptu intervention with a couple where the husband has taken a second wife.

Others, though, are enjoying a season of growth. In October we participated in the provincial conference where around 140 people from villages and towns all over Cabo Delgado came together to enjoy fellowship and Bible study together. It was really fun to see church members from rural and urban areas connect with each other and worship together. It was a full weekend for Jeremy, Chad and Alan as they taught, shared in many conversations, and provided a lot of the transportation with our trucks. Early Friday morning Alan drove 45km south of the conference location to the area of Macoka; he picked up over twenty people to bring them to the conference, but unfortunately had to turn others away because the car was way over capacity. He was humbled and amazed late that afternoon to see thirteen more people who walked that distance all day to come join in the fellowship, some of them carrying very small children. One of Alan’s young friends from the village of Siwewe pulled him aside and introduced his Mom, telling Alan that he had baptized her just a few weeks before. Those moments are such an encouragement and keep us going.

This week we are actually still basking in the warmth of a very loving visit from three sweet people from the Donelson church, our sponsoring church in Nashville. Roy Young and Brian and Laura Beth Oliver took the plunge and came over to visit and encourage us, our team, and the churches that we work with. We took them around to as many villages and churches that we could fit into ten days, trying to give them an overview of our life and work here, how God is moving, and how the churches are doing. We are so thankful to the Donelson church for their continued love, encouragement, and broad support, including sending Roy, Brian, and Laura Beth to come visit!

Overall 2011 has been a weird year for us, and in some ways we are feeling weary. A few times throughout the year when considering how full the calendar had been, Alan and I have thought this might be the busiest year we’ve had or will have (with house construction as the main culprit) in Mozambique. The busy-ness has led to stress, for our family and within the team as well, and we are ready for this season to be over. We’re extra thankful for the abundance of visitors this year, who have reminded us not only of how much they love us, but of the wideness of God’s love and mercy, too. Please pray for wisdom as we make choices of rest and work for our family as we finish out construction, and we’d like prayers for our health as well. Just within the past couple months, Alan has suffered from both malaria and amoebic dysentery, and I had a bad case of adult strep throat. Thankfully our children have stayed pretty healthy and are as full of life as always. Abby continues to love reading and school with her friends; Ellie is delighted to finally be in school like Abby. Katie Joy seems to think at times that she is just as big as her sisters, which of course means she can (at least try to) tell them what to do.

Please join us in praying:

· For God’s kingdom to come among the Makua-Metto, not just among men, but also women and children

· For leaders to grow into maturity as they seek to follow the way of Jesus

· For enough steady rain to supply food for the coming year

· For our health and balance of work and rest

· For construction to finish well and soon, and for a well to be dug on our land for water

With much love and peace,

Rachel and Alan Howell

heading south for the winter…

2011-06-30T20:44:00.001+02:00

Dear Friends and Family,

Hello again from northern Mozambique! We’re in the middle of our “winter,” which means the air is very dry, and it’s actually chilly in the mornings and pleasant all day long, which we are thankful for! This week we are preparing and packing for a trip down to South Africa; we are in need of a few services hard to come by in northern Mozambique. For starters, our truck needs some work by a fully equipped mechanic, and we are also all lined up with dentist appointments – nothing like driving 3 ½ days so you can go to the dentist! Also, on July 12^th, Ellie will have surgery to close her umbilical hernia – please keep her in your prayers! My parents will join us in South Africa a few days after that, and then we’ll have a week of vacation before re-packing the truck and driving 3 ½ days back up Mozambique.

We got word Monday that Belarmino, a very sweet man from one of the churches here in town had died. He had been very sick for a long time, and a few months ago his relatives came from the Namuno district and took him back to his home village with them. We were sad about that, especially since his sweet wife Delfina, along with other believers were doing such a good job taking care of him, but it is a common practice in this culture to take very sick people away from their immediate families back to their mother’s original village. Tuesday Alan took Delfina and other family members out past Namuno to that village, and yesterday I took church members out to do the Third Day ceremony together in that village.

A few weeks ago Alan went and visited with Belarmino. He was pretty sick, being mostly confined to a rope bed and after spending a few minutes catching up on the news from Montepuez he asked Alan, “Do you know why I am sick? My family member was jealous of me and put a curse on me.” After listening for a few minutes Alan asked him if a child of God can be cursed. Belarmino shook his head “no” and said it was hard being confined to a bed and sometimes he thinks too much about it. Alan reminded Belarmino of the scripture that he had been memorizing with our teammate Jeremy Smith earlier in the year and encouraged him to “remain in Christ” and not to give up hope. We believe that Belarmino will have his hope fulfilled!

Our team has had missions interns from Harding University with us for almost a month now. The Missions Internship is for students who think they might be interested in living and working in Africa, so they can come and experience a small slice of that. At the first of June eight college students arrived and have had a busy schedule learning Makua, spending weekends out in villages, eating interesting foods and job-shadowing us for the last few weeks. Right now they are with our teammates Jeremy and Chad doing a survey of another people group here in Mozambique, in hopes that God might plant a seed for one or some of them to come back long-term!

Work with the churches over the last couple months has seen a number of issues come to the surface, both good and bad. The churches in Newara, Nkororo and Kambiri have had some difficulties but seem to be heading in the right directions. Newara had a few baptisms earlier this month and are almost finished building their own church building (we only helped them with some black plastic for the roof). Nekwaya has had a lot of internal conflict lately and needs prayers for maturity. On the other hand, the Bible study and discipleship training in Chiure continues to be one of the most enjoyable and fruitful things we are a part of. The churches in that district have planned and held a number of meetings on their own, planted multiple churches this year, and the men we have worked closely with over the last few years have been mentoring others. We have been studying through the book of Acts together, and a few weeks ago the different men each shared about the baptisms that had happened on Easter Sunday in their churches. Alan started making a list and we realized that 70 people total had been baptized in the different churches in the Chiure district that day. Praise God!

One leader from each of the churches in Chipembe and Nkunama are also in leadership positions with the minority political party and are currently on bad terms with one of the local officials in the area (who is a member of the party in power). She is the woman we mentioned in our last newsletter who declared that the churches in that area were not allowed to teach their children and had to stop making visits to another village to plant a new church. This past Saturday, Alan was a part of a meeting with multiple government officials and church leaders as they tried to resolve this issue. Please pray for peace and wisdom for us and these leaders as they consider their allegiances.

The last week of May I was blessed to go to a missionary women’s retreat/renewal called Come Before Winter in Kigali, Rwanda with my teammates Martha and Amy. The CBW team travels to several places around the world each year conducting renewals for women in ministry, and the experience was a rich, deep blessing from God that was very much needed. Mentoring and counsel from believers who have been walking with God ten or twenty or thirty years longer than us is hard to come by when we live in such a remote location; we crave it and are very, very grateful when we are able to receive it.

We are really, really excited to share an answer to prayer: Allison and Robert Berger are joining our team for one year to come and teach our children! This fall we will have one older class (Abby, and Luke and Andrew Smith), and one kindergarten class (Ellie, and Maggie Westerholm), and so we are very grateful that the Bergers have chosen to come work with us. Robert and Allison currently live in California, and they just celebrated the arrival of their first child Miriam, and they plan to arrive in Mozambique early this fall.

The house construction is going well – it’s always a little behind the schedule we’d prefer, but this is Mozambique, which means we don’t have a Home Depot down the street! Alan has had to work as the contractor while continuing in ministry activities. We have finished the walls up to the top of the windows, but work will stop for a few weeks while we are out of the country. We have received $24,525 towards our fundraising goal of $30,000 – praise be to God and thank you so much!

One significant challenge the last month has been the lack of water. We built a cistern out near the house and hooked it up to the city water, but because of broken pumps and lower water levels, we have not had water coming into the cistern for over a month. It is becoming clear that we need to pursue digging a well on our land to deal with the water shortages for most of the year; this would serve all the families on the land (us, the Westerholms, the teacher house and school house, one Mozambican family living on the land) as well as providing water for ministry events. We have begun looking into the process of digging a bore hole on the land; depending on which company we use in the area, the cost could be between $5,000 and $10,000, which unfortunately was not part of our family’s original construction budget.

So we need $5,500 more to reach our construction goal, and then we are praying for God to provide the additional funds for digging a well on the land; if you feel led to help contribute to these needs, checks can be written to Donelson Church of Christ, 2706 Old Lebanon Rd, Nashville, TN 37214. The memo line should read “Mozambique Construction,” and a note included specifying that the funds are for Construction in Mozambique.

Both construction and our drive down to South Africa are weighing on our minds right now. Please join us in asking God for:

· The remaining funds for house construction and well-drilling

· Protection from car accidents, breakdowns, and theft as we travel to and in South Africa

· Ellie’s surgery on July 12^th to be successful and peaceful and that she will heal well

· Our dental visits/procedures to be reasonable

· Our vacation to actually provide the rest we need

· Kingdom vision for us and our Makua-Metto friends!

May God’s will be done here on earth as it is in Heaven! Amen!

With love,

Rachel and Alan

April 2011 Update

2011-04-11T22:47:00.001+02:00

Hello again from northern Mozambique!

Yes, we’re a little late getting this newsletter out! Life and work have been very full lately, making it difficult to set aside the time to sit down and write.

It has been a wonderful rainy season this year – rains were plentiful but not to the point of destructive flooding, and we are so thankful for that blessing from God! Our Mozambican friends love sharing their food, and there are regular piles of corn and pumpkin in the kitchen (sometimes overflowing to the back porch!) While we are still receiving some sporadic rains, the roads that were impassable in January are clear again (though still muddy and bumpy!), and people are starting to spend more time back in their villages again instead of so many days out on the farm.

With the end of the rains our weekly women’s study group will start back up next week, which I am really looking forward to. During the hiatus I still enjoyed taking Thursdays to go visit those women in their homes, but I am looking forward to seeing the whole group more often again.

Alan and our teammate Jeremy have continued studying twice a month with church leaders in the Chiure district (southeast of us), currently going through the book of Acts together. The fruit they are showing is exciting – these leaders are planting new churches and teaching others what they are learning.

The church members in Chipembe and Nkunama, along with Alan, have had to put their regular visits to plant a church in the village of Maputo Familiar on hold. A recently appointed local leader recently decided to show off her authority and publicly stated her belief that Alan and the church are working with the minority political party; she also decided that the churches aren’t allowed to teach the children on Sundays when they gather together. Alan has met with the leaders of those churches about this; they were encouraged by stories in Acts 5 where the early church dealt with persecution and how their consistency in the midst of suffering was a powerful witness. We were encouraged to see these believers leaning on each other and seeking wisdom from God about what to do. Alan and the church leaders met with local authorities, and Alan has also spent time meeting with the authority one step above the local leader causing the problems, who has been kind and professional about the issue and recommended a wise course of action for avoiding problems with her. Please pray for the chief over the locality of Chipembe that God would change her heart and that the churches in that area would display the fruits of the Spirit in all they do.

Recently two churches that have had problems in the past, Nakuka (several years ago) and Neewara (more recently) have reorganized and started gathering together again. This past Sunday we enjoyed joining the church in Neewara for worship together, followed by a shared meal of xima (stiff corn porridge) and matapa (whatever you eat with the xima, in this case beans and also mushrooms). That morning a rain shower had just passed through, and following the rain, swarming ants came out by the millions all over the ground – they were in the paths and around the houses and in the crops nearby. We all had to squeeze very close to each other on the porches of the mud hut we were worshiping in, as it seemed at the beginning that the ants weren’t interested in coming up onto the porch. By the end, though, we were starting to get bitten on the feet, and we were ready to get the kids into the car!

Lately we have committed as a team to work very intentionally towards redeeming a relationship with a church leader in town who, while a gifted visionary, has at times been very stubborn and frustrating to work with (for our team and for some church members). We realized how this problem has affected or caused other problems, and it was time to actively pursue resolution instead of just wishing it would go away. We have been praying diligently over this relationship and Jeremy, Alan, and Chad have been meeting together with him monthly to pray together, and already we are seeing fruits of increased trust, understanding, and humility. We are praising God for the way the spirit and atmosphere in the church where that leader usually worships has started to change.

One recent Sunday we worshiped with the Napai church here in Montepuez, and we were so encouraged. The joy of the Spirit was palpable that morning as we all praised God together. This church has begun including their children more in the times of gathering together to worship; the kids presented some songs for the church and Abby jumped up there to sing along with them. It was a beautiful, joyful day. There was also one woman there who we were surprised to see, the mother of a believer named Saide, whose family has been almost completely Muslim. She was very angry at first that her son had become a follower of Jesus and one day called Alan a pig to his face in 2008 while he and Saide were studying the scriptures together. She recently decided to follow Jesus, and to watch her sing and dance while the children were singing was amazing, considering how far she has come since Alan first met her.

In March we had the very special blessing of a visit from Steve, Lidian, Henry, and Kate Howard from Plano, Texas. The Howards worship with my parents there and have always loved on us a lot when we are in their neck of the woods, and this year they got on a plane and came all the way over to see us! They loved on us a lot, and they even brought us some Dr. Pepper and summer sausage! We tried our best to show them a “little bit of everything;” they enjoyed meeting many of our Mozambican friends – as many as you can in eight days, and they practiced greeting them all with Makua phrases. They ate Mozambican food with their hands and rode in the back of the truck with 10 other people, and they endured frequent power outages and our poorly-planned plumbing in this rental house. We hope we didn’t wear them out too much, and we hope they’ll come back again!

This year is a construction year for our whole team. We and the Westerholms are both building our own houses. The Smiths have been working on a large meeting pavilion, an entrance gate, and building a schoolroom and house for a teacher. It has been an interesting challenge to try to balance construction, life and ministry and keep everything in a healthy balance. Our hope is to have the roof on by the end of June and move in sometime in October. We have been blessed by many of you who have donated to our construction fund. Currently we have received donations and pledges of $26,625 towards our budget of $30,000, leaving $3,375 to be raised – thanks be to God! If you feel led to help contribute to this need, checks can be written to Donelson Church of Christ, 2706 Old Lebanon Rd, Nashville, TN 37214. The memo line should read “Mozambique Construction,” and a note included specifying that the funds are for Construction in Mozambique.

Katie Joy is extremely mobile now – she walks all of the house and yard and does her best to keep up with her sisters. We really enjoy trying to translate her attempts at communicating with us – she’s got “Mama” down very well, of course, and is working pretty hard at getting “Daddy, Abby, Ellie” to come out. Most of the time she can also tell you what a lion, elephant, duck, dog, monkey, bird, and gorilla say. Abby and Ellie love riding their bikes and do a great job keeping an eye on their little sister; Ellie continues to enjoy learning to read, and Abby may be soon at a point where she has more gaps than teeth in her mouth.

It looks like God is answering our prayers for a team teacher for the 2011-2012 school year, and we are REALLY excited about that! We’ll write more about that in our next newsletter, but we wanted to share that answer to prayer!

As we close, please pray with us:

· For the Kingdom of God to continue breaking into this area

· For maturity, humility, and unity in church leaders

· For rest and balance as we balance ministry, house construction, and family

· For our trip to South Africa later this year (July) that will include surgery for Ellie (to close her umbilical hernia)

· For fundraising for our school teacher!

We love and miss you all!

Grace and peace,

Rachel, Alan, Abby, Ellie, and Katie Joy Howell

Under Construction

2011-04-07T14:59:00.001+02:00

It has begun. This week we (mostly) finished our storage/guest building and broke ground on the main house. I’m also posting some other pictures of some of the other things happening at the land right now (not including the Westerholm’s cob house construction which deserves its own post). The large pavilion for seminars and meetings was just finished on Tuesday and we put it to use right away to host the last day of a farming seminar for a Leprosy group here in our province. Keep all our team’s construction work in your prayers – especially as we try to balance it with ministry as well.

Storage building and some guest space

Working on our cistern

Digging the foundation for our house (I hired 18 guys and we finished most of it in one day – no backhoes here!)

compressed earth bricks ready to go

Jeremy lining up the teacher house

the new gate (almost finished)

the newly finished meeting pavilion (way to go Jeremy!)

the leprosy group after finishing up the farming seminar

happy new year!

2011-01-21T20:27:00.001+02:00

Hello again from Mozambique!

Happy New Year! We hope that your holidays were peaceful and full of time with loved ones. We’ve enjoyed seeing pictures and hearing stories of all the beautiful snow many of you have had in the States – meanwhile we are right in the middle of our hot, humid season! We enjoyed celebrating Thanksgiving and Christmas together with our friends and teammates, though ours involved sunscreen and swimming and temperatures near 100 degrees. (and some pretty sweet holiday care packages!!!)

Over the past couple months Alan has begun going with a few men from the Chipembe cluster to teach in a new village called Maputo Familiar where some there have been asking us to come. He has also made visits with the leaders of churches in several different districts and hearing from them what their goals are for 2011; it has been encouraging to see some of them grab hold of a vision for their area. In some places our ministry is changing to more of an equipping role for local leaders. In the Namuno district, we are working with Napoleon to provide training resources for him to work with leaders in his area, and we are hoping to start soon in the district of Balama as well. While some of the churches are doing well, others are struggling; the churches in Nkororo, Neewara and Namwaciko need prayers for godly leadership and freedom from drunkenness.

In November, we participated in a meeting in Pemba of all the Churches of Christ in the province of Cabo Delgado. It was encouraging to see some of the emerging leaders teach boldly and encourage each other to be faithful, and Alan taught using the story of Achan from the book of Joshua about how the sin of one person can sabotage the plans of the whole group. The churches are at a tough transition point and are going through some growing pains; please pray for us as we work with Germindo Jaime to try and move the focus of leadership down to the local level and encourage the churches to focus on loving God and loving their neighbor.

In 2010, a donor in the States provided funds to purchase 30 wind-up MP3 players and they have been a huge blessing. The players have over 100 songs in Makua-Metto, recordings of the books of Mark and James and some Bible stories. It is a fun way for the churches to share the good news with their friends and neighbors and a great way for them to learn the stories, especially in such an oral society where so few read well and many can’t read at all. Many of our friends sit up into the night winding these MP3 players surrounded by a crowd of interested listeners. During lunch on Tuesday, my friend Joao summarized the story of Job (that he had heard on the recordings) for some neighbors and talked about how we as God followers should respond to suffering.

The weekly women’s study group continued into December working through Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount from the book of Matthew, including one trip out to visit and study with the women from the church in the village of Nanhupu. I’ve also participated in a couple Ikomas (girls’ initiation ceremonies) in the last few months; it’s encouraging to see women who follow Jesus work to reclaim and redeem a practice that is so significant in this culture. The women’s group takes a break every year during the rainy season, usually from December through February, since everyone is spending so much time out in their farms. During this break I still go out on most Thursdays to visit a few women if we can catch them at home.

With the start of the rainy season some of our normal ministry activities are put on hold, not only because so many people are out in their farms, but also because some of the roads are increasingly impassable due to mud and lack of bridges. The villages along the main roads are still reachable by car, but the ones on the secondary roads are not. With the heat and the rain and the ripe mangoes lying on the ground everywhere, we also see an increase in flies and mosquitoes, which means that malaria, cholera, and other diarrhea illnesses are on the rise. Please join us in praying for rain, enough for the crops to grow (the last two years did not see sufficient rainfall), but not so much that it floods, and also in praying for health during this time of sickness.

We recently spent a few days in Pemba with our team to pray together and cast a vision for the next five years. The days spent there together were a blessing (it’s difficult to have that much uninterrupted time here in Montepuez), and we are almost done prayerfully fleshing out the vision and timeline. Our desire is to always be joining God in the work he is already doing in this corner of his kingdom.

Our girls are doing well! At our recent trip to Pemba it seemed they spent more time in the water than on dry land – they played and swam very hard. Even Katie Joy loves the water – she loves to dunk her own face in the water repeatedly, which is a little weird, but cute. Abby has started the second semester of second grade, reads voraciously and also gets a kick out of math and science. Ellie is learning to read and has moved beyond the first level of phonics, and is enjoying it more and more. Katie Joy just had her first birthday and is crawling all over the house, though she doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to walk just yet.

Our team is praying very hard for God to send us a school teacher (or teachers!) for our children – this fall we will have two third graders, a second grader, and two kindergarteners. We are very committed to educating our children well, but having a teacher come to help teach will allow us more time to participate in ministry with Mozambicans. If you know of anyone who might be interested in coming for a year to teach five (delightful, well-behaved!) children, please have them contact us!

To wrap up, we want to shout out a big ‘thank you!’ to everyone who has given to the house construction fund! (You will remember that we learned in July that we were moving from one rental property to another.) We are very glad to be free from the original landlord, though we are still trying to get running water here at the second rental house! We are encouraged and grateful to have received $14,100 with another $4000 or so pledged throughout 2011, which brings us to just over $18,000, nearly two-thirds of our construction budget of $30,000. So we’ll be starting to dig the foundation in the next couple weeks, and we request your prayers for the house construction to go smoothly. If you feel led to help contribute to this need, checks can be written to Donelson Church of Christ, 2706 Old Lebanon Rd, Nashville, TN 37214. The memo line should read “Mozambique Construction,” and a note included specifying that the funds are for Construction in Mozambique.

Please pray with us for:

· Enough rain for an abundant harvest but not flooding

· For God’s kingdom to continue to break through!

· Healing in the time of sickness

· Construction of a new home for us

· A teacher (or teachers) to come teach our children this fall

We love and miss you!

With peace,

Rachel, Alan, and the girls

a week in the life of the Howells

2010-10-27T19:41:00.001+02:00

Sometimes in the States friends ask us “So what’s it like over there?” No small question! =) Often the answer starts with “Well how long do you have?” (and often includes a “really you should come visit us and see for yourself!”) So here’s a slice from last month to give you a week’s snapshot of our lives in Mozambique!

Saturday, Sept. 18 – We spent the morning receiving visitors and getting ready for a celebration with some church leaders I have been working with. We bought rice and goat meat and set up a big tent in the backyard, and the guys started arriving around 10am. These ten church leaders are from six different villages; I studied with them in two different groups based on where they live (Chiure and Chipembe), but we decided that the celebration should be together. These men committed to memorize the book of Titus together, most of them memorizing in Portuguese but some using Makua-Metto or Swahili. We all gathered on our front porch to take turns quoting Titus to each other. Some had the whole book down perfectly while others struggled to finish the first chapter. After we each finished our turns we had a big celebration meal together, and after the feast we went around the circle and shared what we had learned from this book and how we would apply it to our lives. It was a good discussion and fun to see them so invested in the study. On a side note, our lives here include a lot of interruptions. Part way through the Titus recitations, the land lord from our old rental house pulled into town and I had to run over to meet briefly with him to turn over the keys (see previous newsletters!)

That afternoon Rachel had arranged to take the truck to go help her friend Gracinta bring in a bunch of harvested, dried cassava root from her farm way outside of town. Gracinta had asked for the ride for her cassava as a favor; they had agreed that Gracinta would go out in the morning to load it all up into sacks, and that Rachel would show up at two in the afternoon to bring Gracinta and her cassava back into town together. However, at eleven am Gracinta’s daughter showed up at our house saying “my mother is waiting for you.” Katie was napping well in her crib so Rachel went ahead and left to go pick up Gracinta and also visit another friend Delfina who was sick. On the way out of town, however, Rachel passed Gracinta and her huge sacks of cassava riding in the back of a truck coming into town. While waiting on the side of the road by her farm Gracinta had gotten worried that Rachel had forgotten (even though it was still three hours before the agreed upon time!), and so had flagged down a passing truck and gotten in with her huge load, knowing that the driver would charge her a lot for the lift. When the driver saw the situation – that it was a white woman who was the friend coming to get Gracinta, he immediately doubled his price. Thankfully, where they had met in the road, and where they had unloaded her sacks of cassava, was right next to another believer’s home who they both know well and who had come to join in the discussion. Rachel thought it would be smart if she went away for awhile, so she left and went to visit the friend who was sick and came back a few minutes later. The angry driver was gone by this point, and Rachel and Gracinta and Madalena discussed the situation. Since Rachel had helped Gracinta with money to buy sacks, the church was going to pay Gracinta’s debt to the truck driver, and Gracinta would donate large bundles of grass to the church as they are redoing a roof. Thankfully not all our afternoons are that complicated!

Sunday morning Rachel was sick so she stayed home with Katie and I took Abby and Ellie with me to worship in Chiure. We left about 7am and took the men from both Chiure and Chipembe with us – the Chiure group to go back home and the Chipembe group to visit an area that most of them had not been to before. We discussed scriptures from Luke 18 on Jesus’ parables of the persistent widow and the humble tax collector/proud Pharisee and how Christ gives us two keys for the life of prayer – perseverance and humility. We talked about how that actually happens in the context of their lives and then after worship we ate a lunch of xima (stiff corn meal mush) and fish (the girls loved it – me, not so much!). Unfortunately throughout the time of worshiping together I kept seeing fleas on Ellie, and then I realized that the little church building we were meeting in was full of them!

Chiure is a long way from Montepuez (it takes over 2 hours each way) and Abby and Ellie did great spending so much time in the car. On the way back I stopped at a vendor and bought some juice and a snack for them. Arriving home around 4pm we soaked our clothes in water to keep the fleas from invading the house, and we each took bucket baths. Sunday night is our family movie night, so we enjoyed watching Kung Fu Panda and eating one of the girls’ favorite meals - hot dogs!

Monday is our family’s day off or Sabbath. We spent the morning at home, played UNO with the girls; I fixed some of our wiring problems in this new rental house, and Rachel worked on a quilting project. Around lunchtime, some of our friends, the Salyers, came over from the village of Balama and we headed to a café in the middle of Montepuez for lunch. All the kids had fun playing on the oddly shaped playground equipment, including the broken down airplane resting in the park while we waited for lunch. In the afternoon we rested at home and received a few visitors.

Tuesday morning I headed north out of town towards the village of Nekwaya, stopping for a few minutes in the village of Kambiri to pick up about eight of them to go on with me to Nekwaya. These churches are about an hour’s walk from each other and worship together frequently. In Nekwaya we sat in the shade of a big mango tree visiting and hearing how everyone was doing. After singing together for a while we discussed scriptures on forgiveness, and then we walked to the house of one of the older church members who has been sick for the past few weeks. After visiting and praying for her, we went back to the mud church building to share a meal together. Several people from that village had asked for a ride back into the city, so about 15 or so of us bounced down the road in the truck dropping off some along the way and picking up others as we go. At one stop we were sad to learn that the son of a church member had died the night before; I had been asked to name this child and had named him after my brother Aaron. So the father and a few of his family members loaded up some food (corn and beans) in our truck to take to the funeral. When we arrived in the village of Namwaciko we heard that they had already buried the toddler so we greeted the family and sat down with the small crowd next to the family’s house for about an hour. After awhile I went inside and greeted and prayed with Aaron’s mom. Then we said our goodbyes and left for Montepuez. After dropping off all my passengers in different parts of town, I made it home in time to help Rachel get the girls bathed and ready for team night at the Smith’s house (every Tuesday night our team gets together for a meal and worship time with the kids). After putting the kids to bed, the adults enjoyed playing a game together.

Every other Wednesday is a team meeting day. So, this morning Jeremy and Chad came over to meet about different ministry decisions, requests, and evaluation of our team goals. After the meeting, we go to eat lunch and to have our accountability time together. Then we head home to be with the kids so the women on the team could have a meal together and their accountability time. So while Rachel spent time with Martha and Amy, I played with Katie, and Abby and Ellie had some of the neighborhood kids over to play. Our water pressure has been poor lately, so when the water started coming out well, our guard and I filled up buckets and jugs in the yard, carrying some into the bathrooms and kitchen.

On Thursday morning I had to go to our team’s land to resolve a problem. Our guard dog had snuck through the bamboo fence and eaten a neighbor’s duck, and the neighbor was upset and wanted to meet with us about it. One of the guards and I walked over to her house to try and resolve the issue. We visited for a long time, talking about her poor health and then finally settled down to the business of negotiating the price of her duck. After paying for the duck, she started sharing about how impressed she was with the way the churches we work with handle funerals. An uncle of hers had died earlier this year, and she shared how hard it was on the family when they had to provide a huge meal and money gift for the local religious official in order to have a proper burial. She asked us why the churches we worship with don’t require payment and a huge meal for burial services. We talked about how the book of James says that true religion is to care for orphans and widows in their distress, so we see funerals as a time to show love to people who are suffering, not as a time to add to people’s suffering. She shared that she was interested in following Jesus, but that since her whole family was MusIim it would be difficult. We talked for a while longer and then she asked some questions about spirit possession and whether followers of Jesus could keep doing divination. At the end of our conversation I gave her a copy of the Scriptures we have in Makua-Metto and prayed for her to get well. Walking back to the land, the guard and I talked about how amazing God is that he can turn something bad and inconvenient, like a dog eating a neighbor’s duck, into an open door for someone to see the Kingdom of God come near.

Every Thursday afternoon Rachel joins a group of women in town who meet together for fellowship and to study the scriptures together. This year they are going through the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew’s Gospel, which has been really rewarding to walk through together. Rachel is one of five or six who take turns reading the section in Makua and facilitating the discussion.

On Friday morning, I took the motorcycle out to the village of Nkororo. The church there has been struggling over the past year because the leader, Victorino, whose house the church has met at since the beginning has fallen back into drunkenness and now his marriage is falling apart. During the Bible study a couple of us counseled him again that he needs to leave the alcohol behind because it is destroying his life, his family and the church, and Victorino promised that this struggle was now behind him. I told them that since we had finished the section of studies we had been doing, I wouldn’t be coming for a while until some of this church’s outstanding issues had been resolved. (Please pray for the church in Nkororo!) On my way home I stopped in a couple of other villages along the way visiting with friends and church members. After arriving home I sprayed our yard for ticks and fleas (it has been really bad this year), while Rachel received the blind and the lame that come by every Friday for some food or a gift. While I was in the middle of spraying the yard one of our friends, Maissi, came by asking for help. One of his wife’s relatives had just died out in a village and he asked if I could bring the body into town to be buried near their family. So about an hour later we drove about 40 minutes down a dirt road to the village of Unidade. Arriving at the village in the dark, we loaded the body in the back of the truck and drove back to town. As the truck pulled up to Maissi’s house all the women passengers started wailing and the family assembled at the house began to cry as well. We took the body into the house where it would be prepared for burial the next day. After paying my respects I said goodbye and left for home. Arriving home, we ate together, and the power went out for about half an hour, but came on in time for game night with the girls.

We hope this week-long glimpse has helped you picture what life and work here is like. We love and miss you all and appreciate your support and your prayers!

October 2010 Update

2010-10-15T10:58:00.001+02:00

Greetings again from warm sunny Mozambique!

Our tropical “winter” has ended, and our temperatures are rising, and for the last week or so about once every couple of hours you can find Alan proclaiming “wow, it’s HOT!” Just to clarify, he’s not complaining, but describing the awe we feel knowing that it really is 95 degrees in the house at that moment. It seems like every year it always takes our bodies a few weeks to adjust to the heat at the beginning, so we’re waiting for our sweat glands to kick in…

Right after our last newsletter the national women’s conference for Churches of Christ was held here in Montepuez. About 150 women from multiple provinces and multiple churches gathered together for three days to study and learn together. Discussion topics ranged from loving your husband, teaching your children, building each other up instead of tearing down, not living in fear, and loving God and loving others. The conference went well, though we were a bit worn out by the end!

Unfortunately the non-profit chicken business had to be closed. There were a number of factors that made it difficult to stay in the black – being far away from our source of feed, chicken mites infestations, and too few clients. That has definitely been a disappointment, but it has also been somewhat of a relief since it was frustrating to try to keep it afloat over the last few months. For now our team is keeping the guards employed at full salary to guard the land. We did another sustainable agriculture seminar just this past Friday and had good participation, and we have another one scheduled for Balama next weekend. Our prayer is that a more sustainable method of farming can help communities in this area cope with problems like poor soil and low rainfall to make the land more productive, therefore increasing the food production for their families. For fun we also proposed a contest that whichever seminar participant produces the most crops from his or her farm will get a bicycle!

This year we’ve been going through the Sermon on the Mount in the weekly women’s study group, which has been great. Also, Alan just wrapped up his Titus study with church leaders from Montepuez and Chiure. Alan and 10 other men memorized (some or all of) Paul’s letter to Titus. It was a great experience and we celebrated by having a party here at our house a few weeks ago. We enjoyed generous portions of goat meat and rice and cokes! It was encouraging to hear what they learned throughout the study and what they felt like they needed to do to put it into practice.

Our August was busy and stressful! We found out in July that we’d be moving in August, so we adjusted our schedules and tried to do our part to be ready. Alan had to rearrange his plans in different villages, and I squeezed a month’s worth of homeschooling into a couple weeks. It’s been a long time since we moved, and our family has grown a lot since then… so we found out moving is hard work! The landlord of our new rental house was having trouble moving his things out of the house according to our original agreed-upon day, which meant our move-in date got moved back several times, but we were finally able to move into the new rental house at the end of August.

Trying to officially hand over the keys to the landlord of the old house was more difficult, however. To make a very long story short, it turns out he had never had the most recent contract officially registered at the appropriate government office (like he said he would and we had trusted him to do), so he was trying to hold us to terms of an old contract and threatening to take us to court if we didn’t do everything he wanted. Unfortunately, justice in this area often can have more to do with who you’re related to or how much money you have to bribe someone, so going to court is not a wise option. We realized the smartest option was to try to give him what he wanted (paint the inside of the house, leave the hot water heaters that were ours) so we could be out of that relationship as quickly as possible.

We are very grateful for the new rental house, mainly for being a peaceful place that has allowed us to leave the old house and landlord, and especially since there really aren’t many ready-to-move-in houses here in Montepuez. As a comparison, some things about the new house are a little nicer than the old one (nicer floors and a better paint job), while other things are a step back from where we were before (back to no grass in the yard and no running water!). We’re working on our water situation to cope with the ongoing drought, but mostly we’re relieved to have moved and be feeling “at home” again.

Our agreement with our new landlord is for one year, so we are still fundraising to build a house on the team land. So far $4,800 has been contributed towards the goal of $30,000 – we would love for you to prayerfully consider giving to this need! If a house is built with donated funds it will not be ours when we leave Mozambique someday but belong to the ministry. If you can give to this need, funds can be sent to Donelson Church of Christ, 2706 Old Lebanon Road, Nashville, TN 37214. Checks should be made out to Donelson Church of Christ and a note should be included that the gift is for construction in Mozambique. Please keep us in your prayers!

We are also asking for your prayers for RAIN. The past two years have had very low rainfall during the annual “rainy” season, and as a result the water table is very low. Many wells have gone dry these last two years, and people talk about how “everyone is thirsty.” Please join us in praying for a good, wet rainy season (December through March), enough for the rice to grow but not to the point of destructive flooding.

We were so happy to receive our teammates the Smiths back in early September from their furlough in the States, so we were finally able to meet baby Micah! Abby has started back to school (second grade!) with Luke and Andrew Smith with Martha as their teacher, and I’ll be teaching about one week a month. Katie Joy is growing well and babbling constantly to join in with her talkative sisters, Abby has lost her two front top teeth, and Ellie is learning to read and really enjoying our new puppy Yoder.

As we close, please join with us in praying for these desires:

· For the Kingdom of God to come here in our area!

· For a good rainy season

· For God to provide the funds for house construction

May God give you peace,

Rachel and Alan and the girls

PS – for those of you who’ve asked what our lives are like on a daily basis, we have another “week in the life” newsletter/blogpost coming up soon!

interns and meetings and moving, oh my!

2010-07-22T11:32:00.001+02:00

Hi again from northern Mozambique! We have been keeping a busy pace the last few months, and have been reminded how much having a small baby affects day-to-day life (including newsletter frequency!)… so if you’ve wondered why you haven’t heard from us, Katie Joy is the culprit – and quite a cute little culprit if I do say so myself! Katie is six months old and growing well and frequently rewards our goofy attempts to make her laugh with chuckles and gummy grins with two tiny teeth at the bottom.

In April and May Alan started memorizing Titus with a few groups of our more mature leaders in four different churches. Right now there are about ten who are memorizing and another ten or so who are participating regularly. It has been fun seeing them internalize the Word of God in Portuguese, Makua, or Swahili, and wrestle together with what the scriptures are saying. It has been a challenge for Alan to memorize scripture along with them in another language! Alan has also been teaching through our basic church curriculum in the villages of Nekwaya, Kambiri and Nkororo. We’ve been studying about overcoming temptation, how to study the Bible, prayer, fasting, and church leadership. In order to save money on gas and try to make our car last longer Alan bought a motorcycle and has been using it on about of his trips out to the nearby villages that we work with. Also in April the weekly women’s study group here in town started up again after the harvest.

Our teammates the Smiths went to the States to have a baby and go on furlough in April, and May 15 we were excited to hear of the arrival of Micah Timothy Smith! We know they’re having a lot of fun being loved on and blessed by so many sweet folks stateside, but we’ll be really excited to have them back here with us first week of September.

At the beginning of June we received eight Harding students for a six-week missions internship. Together with the Westerholms we hosted them in our homes and showed them what are lives and work are like here in Mozambique. The internship is for students who think they might be called to foreign missions, and is specifically not a campaign, but more like an apprenticeship or job-shadowing. For six weeks they went wherever we went, learned some Makua and Portuguese (and some of the frustrations of language learning!), ate strange foods and spent nights in villages with Mozambican families. Part of the internship includes a survey trip to another area to see what the needs are and what kind of servants are needed there; this year Alan and Chad took them to another province to see the area of the Makua-Xirima people. We enjoyed having the interns here with us, getting to know them and being blessed by their fellowship – we put them on a plane Sunday in Pemba, and it was hard to see them go!

This weekend is the national women’s conference for Churches of Christ, and this year it is here in Montepuez! In a day or so women will be arriving from other provinces farther south, and the study and teaching times will begin on Thursday. Some women from another province will be planning the program – I have been informed that I will be teaching some but not yet informed as to when or what topic! =) Please pray that the weekend will be full of listening and learning together about life with God in his kingdom.

For a couple months the non-profit chicken business was doing okay – producing enough eggs to meet salaries and buy more chicken feed, but over the last couple months it has really struggled because of a lack of egg production due to sickness and poor quality feed. Being so far away from our supplier has hurt us more than we expected and we’ll be meeting next week to figure whether the project should continue or not. It has provided a good salary for three employees for almost a year and a half now, but lately it has been more trouble than it is worth. Please pray for us to make a wise decision.

Many of you will remember our difficulties with our landlord last year; there was a lot of unkind and irrational behavior on his part (not honoring previous agreements, demanding a 60% increase in rent or he would kick us out). In the end, though, he knew he wasn’t going to find another tenant to give him what he wanted, and he accepted a reasonable solution. Because of his behavior and unreasonable nature, we have been praying for a year now for God to provide us a place to live, whatever that might look like, so we would be able to get out of this relationship. Our contract with him runs September 1 through August 31, and he called again a few weeks ago. We were expecting a repeat performance of last year’s behavior, but thankfully that has not been the case. He said he got a loan from the bank and he wants to use it to improve his three properties, including this house. He wants us out of this house so he can fix it up and bring in twice what we are paying in rent right now. So we have written up a contract with the owner of another house around the block – we hope to sign it and pay him by the end of the week. The new house is really the only one this end of town ready to move in – and the toilets aren’t yet connected to a septic system and it doesn’t have running water 24 hours a day. The new house also shares one wall with a bar – it is common in Mozambican construction to cut whatever corners you can to save money. When the owner of the new house built his bar, he used the west-facing wall of the house to be the east wall of the bar. This means that the second window of the master bedroom and the window of the second bathroom look directly into the bar. Obviously we’ll be renting out the bar space as storage and the owner will move his beverage business with him to his other house.

So we are fundraising to build a house on our team land. We have an estimated construction budget of $30,000. In the past some people have asked us what financial needs they could help with – now is the time! If you are interested in helping with this need, funds can be sent to Donelson Church of Christ, 2706 Old Lebanon Rd, Nashville, TN 37214. Checks should be made out to Donelson Church of Christ, and please include a note clearly stating that the funds are for construction in Mozambique. If the house is built with donated funds, it will not belong to us when we leave Mozambique someday, but instead belong to the ministry and be used for ministry purposes.

On the family front, Alan and I celebrated ten years of marriage in May, and we’re ready to go for the next ten! Abby has been doing well with her school subjects, though she’s looking forward to having Luke and Andrew Smith back in class with her. Ellie has started reading words with short-vowel sounds and is so proud of herself! They are both so so sweet with Katie Joy, talking to her constantly and picking up all the toys she drops on the floor. We’ve been a little sick recently - we’re coming into a nasty season for allergies as the mango trees start pollinating and many people start burning their fields. In addition, we’re feeling a little overwhelmed adding moving to a new house to our month of August – it looks like it will be a crazy month!

As we wrap up, we ask you to join us in praying for the following:

· For the Kingdom of God to come here in northern Mozambique

· For our health

· For funds to build a house on the team land

Love in Christ,

Rachel, Alan, and the girls

back home in Mozambique

2010-04-01T13:23:00.001+02:00

Hello once again from Mozambique!

We are home! Transitioning back to Mozambique after an absence isn’t always easy, and coming back with a new baby adds its own special challenges, but with God’s grace we are here! Katie travelled really well on the long plane ride (actually all three girls did wonderful!), and though we had a few hassles with our luggage not being checked all the way to Pemba, we and all our luggage made it to Pemba intact and at the same time. Abby and Ellie were waking in the middle of the night for several days - it seems to take about a week to be completely over jet lag. Our house had been empty (and our fridge and freezer as well!) the whole time we were gone, but our teammates came over to clean before we arrived and also provided meals for over a week, which is a HUGE blessing!

We were so richly blessed by our time with treasured family and friends in the States. Thank you all for blessing us and helping us welcome Katie Joy into the world while we were with you. We live a strange double life; we miss our Mozambican home and friends when we are in the States, and we miss our stateside family and friends when we are here. Whatever we may have given up, God has richly blessed us with loving community to welcome us wherever we land.

Getting settled and getting our lives started up again takes some time here. Since our teammates the Smiths were leaving for travel to South Africa and the States for furlough, anything we wanted to do as a whole team we had to get done in 2 and a half weeks. So we had two major meetings to participate in right after our arrival. First, our teammates hosted a meeting of different missionaries and NGO workers in the southern part of our province to share experiences, ideas, and encouragement to understand how to more effectively bless the Makua-Metto. Then the next weekend our team met with almost 80 church leaders here in Montepuez. Chad, Jeremy and Alan shared the information gathered from last year’s church growth study looking at the way the churches of Christ in Cabo Delgado have grown (from 350 members in 2006 to around 1000 members at the end of 2009). They assessed together (“where are we”) and worked on forming a vision together for the future (“where do we want to go?”). Just a few days after that meeting, the Smiths left to begin their travels.

Our house also takes some time getting back into shape. For starters, it took the telephone company several days to start up our internet access again, but even once it was restarted we couldn’t use it anyway because there was a lot of lightning damage all over town from a big thunderstorm the first week we were back, and it took the phone company a long time to make it to our street for repairs. We’re going on four weeks back in the country, and our phone line and internet were just fully functional a couple days ago! Our plumbing and water situation has needed attention, too. It took three weeks to get running water in the house again, and we only just now have toilets that flush. We just returned from a trip 5 hours south to Nampula for 4-6 months’ worth of groceries (meat, cheese, butter), household supplies (toilet paper and bug spray), and hardware (to repair all our broken and leaky plumbing).

We are looking forward to an unusual year here in Montepuez – not strange, but different from our “usual.” We are actually “alone” (only in an expatriate, English-speaking sense) in that both of our teammates are gone at the moment – the Smiths for vacation and then on to furlough and childbirth in the States to return in September, and the Westerholms for three weeks of travel to meetings, vacation, and car repair. We will host interns again from Harding University for six weeks in June and July, and Abby will be schooling without the Smiths boys while they are gone. Also, in the next few months we will begin prayerfully fundraising to build a house due to our landlord’s increasingly unreasonable behavior over the last few years.

We are happy to be home, though, and enjoying seeing our Mozambican friends we missed for three months. They have all enjoyed meeting Katie Joy and talking about how big she is, how much hair she has, and how she isn’t a boy like the doctor in Nampula predicted last year! The harvest is underway and nearly over, and so the women’s study group is ready to start up again, and I am very much looking forward to that.

Before leaving Mozambique in December, Alan wrote a letter and read it to the churches that he consistently works with thanking God for the ways that the churches have grown over the last few years. He asked them to do three main things: keep studying the commands of Jesus, obey what they are learning and share it with their family and friends, and take a portion of whatever offering they receive each week and give it to someone in their community who is in need. In the letter, Alan shared that with the growing number of churches and leaders he needs to focus on those that are serious about living the kingdom life, and that after our return from the states he would be working with those communities that were doing those kinds of things. So, in the next few weeks we’ll be visiting the eight churches in the Mirate area as well as others to see how they are doing and to continue working on leadership training and church planting.

The non-profit business has been busy with chickens and sustainable agriculture projects. The 100 chickens are still young and have started laying eggs but haven’t reached full capacity yet. As of right now we’re having trouble supporting the three Mozambican employees of this project. We’re hoping that once the layers produce at full capacity the business will be self-sustainable and that we’ll be able to use any additional income to support additional projects. We planted a big plot of beans using a sustainable agricultural method that we’re hoping will catch on with others and we’re looking forward to harvesting that in a couple months so we can testify to this method’s effectiveness. Last year, we did one sustainable agriculture seminar that was very well received and this year we would like to do more. If you’re interested in helping with these projects, please contact us and we’ll send you some more information.

We invite you to pray with us:

· For us to stay in a posture of listening to God’s Spirit

· For our health, especially Katie Joy as she grows

· For adjusting to life and responsibilities in Mozambique with a new baby

· For God’s kingdom to come in this area, and for church leaders to have that vision

· For Katie’s Mozambican Residence documents to be approved without hassle

With much love,

Rachel, Alan, Abby, Ellie, and Katie Joy

Katie Joy

2010-01-22T04:45:00.001+02:00

We’re happy to announce the birth of Katherine Joy Howell. Katie was born on January 19th at 5:55pm. She weighed 8 pounds and 14 ounces and was 20.5”. We had some drama surrounding her birth. We had planned on doing a home birth at Papa and Nana’s house (Larry and Evelyn Wilson’s), just like our birth experience for Ellie. But Katie’s head was in a funny position and the midwife said we should go to the hospital. A couple of hours later our new baby was born. We were also surprised that this baby was a girl. An Doctor in Mozambique had used an ultrasound to tell us we were having a boy. Abby and Ellie are excited and getting used to the fact that they have a new baby sister…and I’m getting used to the fact that I’m seriously outnumbered!

We’ll be in the US until the beginning of March getting Katie’s documents together and wrapping up doctor and dentist visits for the family. Thanks for keeping us in your prayers.

Peace,

Alan

2009-12-31T05:53:00.000+02:00

We're safely back in the United States getting ready for the birth of what we are told will be a baby boy! He's due in the middle of January and we can't wait to meet him.

We met with our midwife again today. She came and visited with us at Larry and Evelyn Wilson's house. Rachel's parents have graciously agreed to let us do a home birth again (Ellie was born in their room!). As we talked about our birth plan, I was impressed again with the craft of midwifery. Check out this blog that makes some great observations about what we can learn from midwives about ministry.

Peace,
Alan

2009-11-20T21:02:00.000+02:00

Greetings from northern Mozambique!

It is hard for us to imagine that most of the people reading this are experiencing cold weather right now! For those of us in this part of the southern hemisphere, our temperatures have been climbing, we’ve been sweating, guzzling water, and eating ripe mangoes around the clock. We’re also getting ready for the rainy season – it has rained a couple of times already and many of our friends have been busy working in their farms. Please join us in praying for the rain – asking God to send plentiful rains for a good harvest, but not too much that the fields flood and crops are lost.

Speaking of prayer, thank you to all of you who joined us in praying for peaceful elections here in Mozambique last month! This was only Mozambique’s fourth general election and it went smoothly. You might remember that it was in the context of an election year (2004) that rumors were started locally that we were political spies working for the minority political party, which resulted in us living in exile in another province for over a year. The atmosphere was much more peaceful and mellow this time around, and we are so thankful that they dialed down the rhetoric and that there was no violence.

At the end of September we participated in a women’s conference that was attended by about 50 women from 16 village churches all over the southern half of our province. The subject up for study and discussion was the ikoma, the initiation ceremonies for girls as a transition from childhood to adulthood. The ceremonies traditionally include many harmful practices (beating, abuse, ridicule, encouragement of sexual promiscuity), and in the past few years several women from the churches have done a Christian ikoma, and many more have expressed interest. We went through several passages of scripture from Deuteronomy, 1 Peter, Ephesians, and 1 Corinthians and discussed how we could redeem the ikoma for God’s kingdom. The weekend was tiring, but fascinating and fun watching women get into debates with each other and ask each other hard questions. I also bumped up against the limits of my Makua-Metto language ability a couple of times: in a room with 50 women and awful acoustics, between 1 and 3 crying babies at any given time, 1 toddler with squeakers in his shoes, and up to 8 women all excitedly talking at once about something they care about… it was hard to follow in those moments! But it was exciting watching our friends think critically about what parts of the ikoma glorify God, and what parts don’t, and discuss how to change those parts and possible implications of making changes to cultural ceremonies. Some of you may remember that we do not yet have the full scriptures in Makua-Metto; for this conference we had several of our Metto friends translate the additional passages we wanted to use – and it made us even more thankful for SIL/Wycliffe and all the hard work they are putting into translating the scriptures!

We’ve kept busy with our regular ministry activities as well. Recently we have been teaching marriage seminars with different clusters of churches in our province. This past weekend, Alan and our teammate Jeremy did two seminars, one with the churches in Nekwaya/Kambiri/Namwaciko, and another with churches in Chipembe/Nkunama/ Nkororo/Nhinawe/Neewara. These seminars are good times of encouragement as we learn what a Christian marriage should be like. It is also fun seeing friends from different villages getting the chance to worship together and enjoy each other’s fellowship. This fellowship was a big blessing especially to the church in Nkunama. One of the founding members of that church died the day before the seminar and when we arrived we went directly to the funeral. There were over 200 people there. Gabriel, the brother who died, was a very quiet old man, and it was surprising to see so many people in attendance. When Alan asked why there was such a big turn-out, the other church members said that the village of Nkunama wanted to see what the church would do. Funerals are very significant in this culture, and it was important that the church do a good job of taking Gabriel through this “last ceremony.”

We have continued doing leadership training and discipleship groups in Montepuez, Chiure, and in the villages north of town. Since Alan’s trip to Rwanda we have adopted a simpler, more reproducible method of studying the scriptures (called “Discovery Bible Study” by some), and our Mozambican friends have easily picked it up. Alan has encouraged different churches to work through the commands of Jesus with this method when they study together. He has spent a lot of time lately talking about the importance of trusting Jesus and living the life here in this world that he has called us to live – he really means for us to live out the Sermon on the Mount, for example. In addition, Alan has been studying with a group of folks in the village of Nhinawe that is interested in becoming a church. They have recently started studying through some of the key stories in the book of Genesis; please pray for this new contact point.

A few weeks ago we hosted a sustainable agriculture seminar on our land and were pleased with the turnout! We had almost 60 participants even though we were only able to give about a week's notice; this included representatives there from 15 or so villages and a number of men and women who live here in town. Even though there was not enough time to implement all the ideas before the rainy season, we decided to go ahead and have an initial seminar to introduce some of the concepts. We talked about not burning fields (a huge problem here), planting at the right time, planting with proper spacing, making a "blanket" of leaves and grass to help conserve rainwater, how to make compost, etc. Our project manager (running the non-profit chicken business), Domingos, did an incredible job; he presented it effectively and kept the participation level high. One of the best Mozambican farmers we know was there and he rushed home the next day saying that he was going to try to go ahead and get started this year. Implementing these concepts should drastically increase production. A representative from the Mozambican department of agriculture attended as well, liked what he saw and heard, and encouraged us to keep doing these seminars. The seminar was hosted on the land our team purchased earlier this year. In addition to housing the non-profit chicken business, we’re in the beginning stages of developing the land: planting some crops, and clearing brush and making improvements to get ready for more agriculture and possible construction next year.

We have about 3 weeks left until we leave for the States, and it feels like there is a lot left to do to get ready. Our baby is due mid-January, and I have been feeling well, trying to stay cool in this heat! Due to the poor state of healthcare in Mozambique we will be having the baby in the US, but we’ll be returning to Mozambique the first week of March. Last month, we were able to do an ultrasound in the city of Nampula, about 5 hours away, and the doctor told us that we are having a baby boy! He said he was about 90% sure, but due to our track record, we aren’t sure we’ll believe it completely until the little guy makes his appearance in January.

Our prayer requests:
• for the kingdom of God to come among the Makua-Metto
• for the non-profit business and future development of the team’s land
• for safe travel to the US on December 12th
• for the safe birth of our baby in January
• for a good rain this year leading to an abundant harvest in Mozambique

Thanks for keeping up with us and participating in this work,

Alan, Rachel, Abby, Ellie and baby Howell

Alan's solution (?) to global poverty

2009-10-25T12:48:00.002+02:00

A few weeks ago Rachel sparked a lively conversation on Facebook. She posted a link to an article by Michael Moore on capitalism and poverty and religion. In response to that conversation, I put some thoughts together about poverty and wanted to post it here on the blog and see if there are any takers to continue the discussion.

1. So, what causes poverty? or Who or what is responsible?

There is a book by Michael Landon called Sweating it Out: What the “Experts” say Causes Poverty, where he looks at the various explanations for poverty. He sees ten of them, but names 4 as the most common reasons cited. He puts them in a quadrant. With two axes representing differing answers to two fundamental questions: (1) is the cause of poverty primarily a way of thinking or a way of acting, and (2) is the cause of poverty located in the poor themselves, or in the society as a whole? So, depending on the answer to these questions, the reason for poverty could be due to

A. Culture of Poverty (Individuals think “poorly”),
B. Economic Ethos (Economic system keeps people thinking “poorly”),
C. Personal Irresponsibility (Individual makes “poor” choices),
or D. Structural Sin (Economic system is unjust).

Now, if this were a multiple choice test, I would like to choose E. “All of the above.” My hunch is that where poverty happens it is usually due to a mixture of these factors. Certainly some people are in a state of poverty mostly due to personal irresponsibility and only a little bit due to structural sin, but others may be in poverty through no fault of their own, they were just born under a failed system and suffer for it. This grid is helpful for me because it reminds me that there are a number of factors in play contributing to poverty.

Maybe we could think of this Jack Bauer-style. A person is bound to a chair about to be interrogated. His ankles have a cable tie that binds his feet to the chair. His hands are tied behind his back with rope. He’s got duck-tape over his mouth and a bandana over his eyes. If we come in and try to liberate him by removing the duck-tape, cable tie and bandana is he better off? Yeah, a little. Is he free? No, not yet. To really address poverty we need to help remove all the barriers: internal and external, personal and structural. Now, we all know that some people don’t want to be free. But that doesn’t mean we are going to say that no one wants to be free.

2. What does God have to say about poverty?

I’ve been thinking about the book of Amos lately. Here was an unlikely prophet – a poor southerner (from Judah), a hick farmer/shepherd who went to the wealthy in the industrialized north (Israel) to share a warning from the Lord. In his most scathing and memorable rebuke he refers to the wealthy women of Israel as the “Cows of Bashan” lounging on their couches asking their husbands to fetch them something else to drink. Whew! What strikes me about this passage is that these women were not doing anything to directly oppress the poor. They went to church…er… temple to worship, they went shopping, but they were probably not out in the field beating slaves or forcing others to carry heavy loads. But, the interesting thing is that even though they were not directly responsible for the economic suffering of others – Amos and God held them accountable. So, what does that mean for us? Huge question.

Another part of this discussion is wealth distribution. We’ve been talking about this in these posts. Rachel may be more optimistic about the government’s ability to redistribute wealth than I am. No matter what we think, though, about the government’s ability to redistribute wealth effectively, it is clear that God has thought a lot about wealth distribution and redistribution. The idea of Jubilee (Leviticus 25) was a central piece of the economic system of ancient Israel. Every 50 years, land that was sold was to be given back to the original owners. God even said that when you sell the land, you need to consider the number of years remaining until the jubilee into your accounting practices. Now, we don’t know if Israel actually practiced this, but it is clear that God wanted to put some checks and balances into place to keep people who experienced a bad crop or a famine or an irresponsible family member from putting them in a situation where the oppressive boot of poverty will be forever on their neck. God told them to clear the books every 50 years in order to not oppress those who fell on hard times.

Now, I’m not saying I think the government could do this well, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he chooses to use imperfect systems to bring about some ideas of his own. He’s done this in the past. In his own day, Habakkuk complained at God for using the pagan Babylonians to accomplish His purposes. He said, “How could You, a just God, use unjust systems and powers like these?” (ABH paraphrase 1:1-4). God replies, “Watch and be amazed, I am going to do something that you wouldn’t believe even if you were told” (ABH paraphrase 1:5). Now, I’m not saying that God wants the US gov’t to redistribute wealth – that would be an ugly and painful process to say the least – but I wouldn’t put it past God to do that, if he feels like “something’s gotta give.” At the end of Habakkuk, we read that in the midst of the confusion of God using unjust systems to bring about justice Habakkuk confesses that he will rejoice in the Lord and be joyful to God his Savior. “The Sovereign Lord is my strength, he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to go on to the heights” (NIV 3:19). No matter what our Sovereign King is up to and what kind of instruments he chooses to use for his purposes and how it affects us, we will still be able to stand.

3. What should Jesus followers do about poverty? And more specifically, as citizens of a democracy, what responsibilities do we have?

I think that we should use whatever gifts, resources, and talents we have to release those in bondage. I’m thinking about those four causes of poverty: internal and external, personal and structural. On a personal level (external), we can loan or give money to the poor to help them get out from under debt (Jesus said we should do that). On a personal level (internal) we can teach our friends that are poor how to effectively manage money (if we ourselves are good at that ). It is right that Jesus said that “the poor will always be with us.” Sometimes we use that statement as a reason not to do anything, but I think that in the context of that passage (Mark 14), Jesus was saying, “It’s okay to lavish worship on me now, because you’ll still have time to take care of the poor…I want them to always be with you.” Unfortunately my perception is that in our fractured society it has become easier and easier to isolate ourselves from the poor – they are not really with us anymore. We don’t know very many poor people and that makes it difficult for us to help on a personal level.

Okay so here is what I think about what to do about poverty on a structural level. I think if we are to take seriously our task to “love our neighbor as ourselves,” then if/when we vote, we need to “look not only to our own interests but also to the interests of others.” So, as we do research and weigh out how to vote on a complex issue like health care, etc., we need to figure out what would really help our neighbor. When Jesus talked about who our neighbor was he told a story about a Samaritan and a Jew – enemies who didn’t give each other the time of day. So, if Jesus really defines who my neighbor is, then I have to vote with a whole host of people in mind including those of different socio-economic statuses and zip codes (even our neighbors outside of the US!).

Ultimately, though I’m personally agnostic about our ability to bring about big, macro-level structural change through “political” means (this is where Rachel and I might differ I think). I’ve been reading a book called The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done so much Ill and So Little Good. It is actually a pretty boring book, but the main point is that big, top down structural solutions to huge economic problems… don’t work. Instead we need to focus on local, small, effective solutions. As more and more local solutions start working and changing things for the better, the big, macro level system will have to change to accommodate it. So, on a practical level, if we work to release people from as many of the four barriers on a personal level (duct tape, rope, cable tie and bandana…) and pray that God will work out the macro stuff, I think he will do it.

Okay…any thoughts or responses?
Am I just copping out by saying that there is not much we can do to bring about structural or macro level change?

Frontier Missions article

2009-10-08T17:22:00.005+02:00

Over the past couple years I have been thinking a lot about the atonement - the significance of Jesus' death on the cross. I've been wrestling with what this means and some different ways to approach it, as well as how best to talk about it with my Makua friends. That exploration turned into an article and eventually the International Journal of Frontier Missions decided to publish in their latest issue - which I'm excited about - I've never been published before! If you are interested in checking out the article, you can download a copy from their website International Journal of Frontier Missions.

Peace,
Alan

Putting it into Practice

2009-09-26T10:13:00.001+02:00

In August, my teammate Jeremy Smith and I went to a seminar in Rwanda where we learned a lot about Church Planting Movements and what we can do to see them happen among the Makua-Metto. We got to spend time with colleagues from all over the continent and get some advice and insight about this stage of ministry. One of the best things that we learned was a new (or is it a very old?) way to study God’s word. We called it a Discovery Bible Study. It basically has three parts. First, you read the text a few times to get familiar with it (literate people can write down the text as it helps it get into your brain). Second, you put the text into your own words. Third, you talk about what you need to do to obey it. At the conference we turned a piece of paper sideways, folded it into three parts and divided the page into three columns: copying the text, paraphrasing the text, and making “I will…” statements about how to obey what you have learned. At the end of the study you ask who each person will tell what they’ve leaned. While this way of Bible study is great for church planting, it also can work in place of preaching in the church setting. One of the most immediate improvements we’ve seen is in participation. Oftentimes, the nature of preaching and teaching as it is usually done (even when it’s done well) is to make us into passive recipients of the texts instead of forcing us to be active participants with the text. Maybe the difference is like between watching ice skating on television (seeing a religious professional or qualified layperson interpret the text) and actually lacing up some skates and getting out on the ice to skate (having to wrestle with interpreting it myself). By studying in groups each person shares what they hear and how they should obey and by sharing that with the group, the group can help correct and guide the individual if their interpretation or application is unhealthy.

A couple of weeks ago I drove about 4 hours south to be with a cluster of churches in the Namuno district. I spent the night in the village of Masha and when I was asked to speak on Sunday morning I divided the group of about 60 adults into groups of 4 or 5 and asked them to read from Deuteronomy 6. We made sure that each group had someone who could read and I asked them to read the text a few times until they felt like they understood it. My small group seemed to understand it pretty well. I asked for a few volunteers to tell everybody what they heard in the text and a number of people offered up the pieces they understood as we stitched the passage back together in our own words. Then, I asked the groups to meet again and talk about what each person would do to obey the text. When I posed this question to the whole group, one man said he needed to teach God’s word to his children. An older lady stood up and said that she understood that since there is only one God, in order to obey the text she was going to give up divination. A number of us were shocked – divination is a huge problem in our area. Then I asked everyone to talk about who they would share what they learned with. Some said brothers and sisters and friends and one young man said he would share it with his family in another village.

It has also been fun to use this method of Bible study in a small group setting. On Tuesday, I met with about seven people from the church in Nkororo who have wanted to plant a church in the village of Merenge. They have gone there a number of times to visit and I’ve gone with them twice. But the last time we were there, we all left feeling that something wasn’t right. So, after we chatted for a while this week, I asked them to look at Luke 10 with me to check out Jesus’ instructions for his disciples when they were going to new areas. We read through the text a few times and then I asked them to tell me what they heard in the text. Armindo summarized it pretty well, Victorino shared some insights from the leadership meeting last weekend, and a few others chimed in to fill in some holes. Then I asked them what we would need to do to obey Jesus’ instructions to plant a church in Merenge. That kicked off a lively discussion where I said almost nothing for half an hour. As the discussion wore down, I asked them, “So, what are we going to do?” They responded that they would go two-by-two back to the village of Merenge and look for a person of peace who would be the gateway for starting the church there. It was one of the best and most practical Bible studies I have ever led or been a part of and I barely said a word.

One of the best things about this way of doing Bible studies is that the text does the work. We’ve been in Montepuez for about five years now and I’ve been directly involved in planting a handful of churches and a big issue has been reproducibility. Specifically, the way I was teaching and church planting could not be replicated well by our Mozambican friends. This way of teaching and doing Bible study is more “text dependent” and much less “teacher dependent.” It has been fun seeing the work of God’s Word in the presence of His church and I’m excited to see where this will take us.

Peace

Alan

resolution of our sticky rental situation... for now

2009-09-19T13:47:00.000+02:00

Thank you so much for all your prayers and encouragement in our unpleasant dealings with our landlord (see the background info below). God hears our prayers and he is faithful no matter what happens.

The landlord came up over the weekend and had some very long conversations with Alan. Much of the (more than four hours of) conversation centered around money and the improvements we have made on his house. His attitude was basically that what we have done to improve this house is no big deal to him and not worth keeping the rent stable, and that what he wants is a lot more money.

In the end, Alan offered a very modest monthly increase in the rent, which the landlord promptly refused. After which Alan told him that if that was the case, then we would be leaving, leaving him all the improvements we have made without our being compensated for them (kind of like giving him the shirt off our back). This caught him completely off guard, and all of the sudden he was very accepting of the modest increase that Alan had initially offered. So we are increasing the rent slightly for the next year (Sept 1 to Sept 1). We were serious about leaving, despite the loss of the money invested in the house, but Alan feels that our desire to leave called his bluff – that he really has no one else to rent this house right now.

Obviously we have prayed a lot about the outcomes of our discussions with him, but we also really wanted to show God’s love (and not get angry with him) in the midst of our frustration with his behavior, and we feel like God answered both of those prayers. We agreed on a modest increase in rent, AND Alan was able to remain calm, patient, and respectful during their conversations.

Because of the landlord’s increasingly unreasonable behavior towards us over the last few years, though, we are very much ready to be out of this relationship; we know that these unpleasant confrontations (and all the accompanying frustration and anxiety) will only be repeated each year, until there really is another prospective renter, at which time he will make us leave. There are other factors involved besides his direct treatment of us; in casual conversation with Alan (while not discussing our rent), he has boasted about other things going on in his life that make us even more uncomfortable being in a financial, contractual relationship with him. We would really like for this to be our last year in his house.

Ready-to-move-in rental property is hard to find in Montepuez; pretty much every other house for rent would require extensive work or has serious disadvantages. The other option is house construction, which would include fundraising, both of which are a little overwhelming!

So keep praying for us! We are so thankful for all your prayers and encouragement. We want most for God to be glorified in all we do!

our rental situation (but the newsletter is still below!)

2009-09-10T20:08:00.003+02:00

Hello again,

As we mentioned in our newsletter, we are in a difficult situation with our landlord and the house we are renting. We want to share with you the details of our rental situation so you could join us in prayer. We have tried to summarize, but the situation is a little complex!

First of all, renting property and relationships with landlords can be very different in Africa than in the States. Due to lack of funds, many people in Africa may take years or decades to build a house, adding on little by little as they have money. That means that when expatriates arrive and look for a house to rent, some of the options they look at may be in various stages of not being completed, depending on the economy of that particular country or region. Rent may seem low compared to rent in the west, especially in rural areas, but, also unlike the States, very often the tenant is responsible for any and all repairs and improvements. This keeps the rent low; it is a stable income for a landlord who may or may not have another source of income, but the ways the tenant improves the house increase the value of his property.

Montepuez is a small town, and when our team decided to move up here, there were very few rental options for our (then) six families. Most of us moved into houses that were unfinished or in serious disrepair. We began renting this house in April of 2004 with many things in it broken or unfinished, and we have put a lot into this house and property, and in our opinion, greatly increased its value, while the landlord has invested in this property only very little. In the last few years, however, our relationship with our landlord has gotten increasingly difficult. It has seemed to us that he wants to be a rural African landlord (where the tenant makes all the repairs and improvements) AND a western landlord (where he can increase the rent every year).

There are several other factors involved, first of which that he is educated, well-connected, works for the finance department of the government, and is trying to acquire/invest in properties in a few different areas (those things are still very, very rare in Mozambique). Also, he lives in Nampula, which is the second largest city in the whole country, and where a house of this size with a yard (though in much better shape) could rent for $1500 to an NGO with a large budget (Doctors Without Borders, World Vision, etc). Also, his family is a factor; he is probably the only one in his family with any money. In many African cultures this means that he is expected to support not only his immediate family, but most of his extended family, too (uncles, aunts, parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins) whenever they have a financial need or want.

Please understand we are not saying the American rental system is good and the Mozambican system is bad. What is difficult is the meeting of different expectations from different cultures, understanding each other, and trying to make that work so that we can live here.

A year ago we had drawn up a new contract “for one year to be renewed for four additional years.” The expectation was that the rent would remain stable for the life of the contract, for the express reason that we had invested so much to improve/repair his house (the value of all our improvements spread out over the next five years is equal to the rent he wishes we were paying). However, the first year is up and he has just sent us a new contract without warning that included an increase of more than 50% of our rent.

We have been having difficult conversations with him by phone over the last few days. Our desire is that he either honor what we had agreed upon, or agree to a modest yearly rent increase for the remainder of the contract. His behavior is erratic, with some conversations almost being reasonable, and then a few hours later receiving an angry text message from him saying he’s through and wants us out of the house in 90 days. And then, the next morning, a conversation that is almost normal again, only to be followed in a few hours by him declaring that he wants us out of the house.

At this point, we are trying to arrange a time where I can meet with him to talk in person; we pray that conversation will go well. However, due to his increasingly unreasonable behavior over the last few years, we think it is wise for us to get out of the relationship – he may end the contract himself, we are not sure. If he does, we hope he would follow the contract and reimburse us for what we have invested in the house. Because of our experience with him, and because of the lack of rental properties in Montepuez, we are hesitant to rent another house with the expectation of living there for the remainder of our time in Mozambique. Another option would be to build.

Our prayers have been:
• that we will be kind and still show God’s kingdom of love to our landlord, even in our frustration
• that his heart will soften and that he will know God
• that God will provide our family a place to live

We would appreciate you joining us in these prayers; we know we are in God’s hands. We also know that though he never promised we won’t have trials, he does promise that he is always with us, and that we can’t be separated from his love.

Grace and peace,
Alan, Rachel, Abby, Ellie, and baby Howell

September 2009 Newsletter

2009-09-08T14:06:00.000+02:00

Wow! This year is our busiest to date – we are thankful for our God who sustains us and for a few moments in between events/travel/visitors to catch our breath! You can find a copy of this newsletter and past newsletters on our blog www.howellsinmoz.blogspot.com.

Alan has continued studying regularly through the Train & Multiply curriculum with leaders from Chipembe/Nkuunama and Nekwaya. He also has continued to study with the young churches in Nkororo, Khambiri and Namwaciko (inaugurated in February), and with another new church plant (July) in the village of Neewara. About once a month Alan and Jeremy have gone down to do Train & Multiply with church leaders in the Chiure district, and they have also continued to host leadership meetings here in town with leaders from village churches, focusing on having God’s love for each other and working peacefully together. Recently Alan also made the trek to visit and worship with the church way down in Maxoca (4 hours on a bad road) that we don’t get to very often. It was a good weekend studying and worshipping together, and 26 people were baptized.

Each year our team commits to at least one weekend study seminar in each of the districts/church clusters in which we work. Last year we studied through Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount; this year we are studying faithfulness in God’s dream for marriages. The lack of faithfulness in marriage remains as one of Satan’s big strongholds here, and we ask for your prayers that God through his Spirit will grow people to walk in faithfulness. We have already done this study with the Balama/Upaco cluster and the Milamba/Chiure cluster, and in October we will study and discuss marriage with the believers in Chipembe/Nekwaya, Pemba/Nanjua, and Namuno/Montepuez clusters.

Earlier this year God answered our prayers for land here in town to start a non-profit chicken business and to have space for a development/resource center. We have started the non-profit chicken business and are finishing selling our second round of broiler chicks. The dream is to have a chicken-selling business that pays for itself, provides a few jobs, and also provides extra income to invest in other projects in the community. The first round was a good start, paying for itself and for the next round of chicks; the second round has not gone as well – we had a cold spell soon after we received the tiny chicks, and close to 200 chicks died. Please keep the chickens and this small business in your prayers!

Over the next few weeks our team will be talking more concretely about how to best use the land to encourage development. There are many possible options – ways that we can encourage better nutrition, more sustainable farming techniques, sanitation, etc. Some of you have already given towards the development of the land (building a storage facility for future construction) and the non-profit business (a group of layer chicks and another group of broilers). Currently, we have received $1000 and still lack $4500. If you would like more information or are interested in helping, please let us know!

On another note, as many of you know, our teammates Aaron, Mika, Josiah, and Elijah Roland went to the States in December 2008 to receive counseling and care. Based on the wisdom and counsel they have received there, they have decided to remain in the States and not return to ministry in Mozambique. We are thankful for all the ways the Rolands have blessed our team and our Mozambican friends, and we miss them and continue to ask for God’s blessings for them. More recently, in the midst of their transition as a family, several of Aaron’s extended family members have experienced severe health problems, and we ask you to continue to lift them all up in prayer.

In early June we received a team of 7 missions interns from Harding University. Kara, Harrison, Matt, Ashley, Amy, Abby, and Daniel lived, worked, and learned with us for six weeks, and God blessed the experience very much – it is difficult to summarize in one paragraph! The Harding Missions Internship is not a campaign; it is a learning experience for those who think they might be interested in foreign missions. The interns immerse themselves in life and work here for six weeks: language and culture learning, spending a weekend out in a village, joining with Mozambicans in projects (building a mud hut) and in daily life (harvesting and pounding grain), and fellowshipping and studying with believers. The internship also included a survey trip to an area where more workers are needed, and a visit to the team in Lichinga to see their development/resource center there. We were so thankful for the interns that God sent our way; we pray that God is leading them to come back to serve in Africa… and maybe even join our team!

God blessed us this year with more visitors as well: before the interns my brother and sister-in-law James and Kirsten Wilson came from Denver to visit us for two weeks in May, and we thoroughly enjoyed having them here! It was their first time on the continent of Africa, and did a great job meeting our Mozambican friends and visiting people. Their visit went by WAY too fast! Then after the interns left, my parents came for two weeks in late July/early August. We enjoyed having them here for Abby’s 6th birthday, and many of our Mozambican friends they met two years ago were happy to see them again! While my parents were here our teammates Chad and Amy Westerholm returned with Maggie and her new baby sister Jane after their furlough/ childbirth/ fundraising time in the States. We rejoice in God’s provision; he provided the funding that they lost in the previous year due to the economy, plus more! Then right after my parents left, as a team we received Dr. Van Rackley from Harding’s Marriage and Family Therapy department. Dr. Rackley has invested in our team since the beginning, working with us on team dynamics, our working relationships, our communication with each other, and personal and marriage counseling as we have adjusted to life and work in Mozambique. His time with us is always an invaluable blessing.

Dr. Rackley’s departure coincided with Jeremy and Alan flying to Kigali, Rwanda for a Church Planting Movements conference. They flew through Nairobi, Kenya, and were stuck there one night due to the strike of Kenya Airways employees, but thankfully still made it to Kigali the next morning, in plenty of time before the conference started (thanks to so many of you for praying!) Alan and Jeremy enjoyed the conference and learned a lot; much of the information presented seems to be very appropriate and reproducible for the kind of grass-roots movement we are in the middle of here. We have already enjoyed trying out some new ideas and changes in our study times with our friends here, and we look forward to growing in this further.

In three weeks there will be a women’s conference here in town for our province. We have been planning together with our friends here, and we are really excited about our time studying together as women. One main theme of the weekend will be the girls’ Ekoma, the initiation ceremony done for girls in this culture to mark the transition from childhood to adulthood. While it is a great idea to celebrate this transition in life, traditionally the ceremonies include a lot of abusive and harmful behavior from the older women in charge; beatings, humiliation, and instruction in sexual promiscuity are the norm, and sometimes even female circumcision is still done in a few areas around us. In the last few years many of our friends have been interested in doing God-centered Ekoma, focused on blessing and prayer for the girls/young women, and instruction/encouragement in walking with God. A few friends have already done an Ekoma within the church, and we are looking forward to discussing it with women from the whole province.

Speaking of transitions, we have had a few in our family this year as well. Abby finished kindergarten, lost her first two teeth, and has started first grade. Ellie is growing a lot, enjoying preschool lessons, and really likes to go with Alan on some of his visits out to village church members. And… as several of you already know, we are expecting baby Howell number 3 in mid-January! So far, both the baby and I are in good health. However, due to the poor state of healthcare in Mozambique, we will be going to the States to have this baby, and will be returning to Mozambique the first week of March.

We currently have a sudden, urgent need concerning our rental housing situation here in Montepuez, but since this is already a long newsletter, we will write about that in the next day or two so you can join us in specific prayer. Your prayers to God over us are so precious.

Our prayer requests:
• for the Kingdom of God to come among the Makua-Metto
• for the health of our team, especially our pregnancy and childbirth in January
• for the Roland family
• for the non-profit chicken business and future development & resource center
• for the women’s conference at the end of September
• for us as we parent and educate our children
• for our rental situation

We love and miss you all!
Love,
Rachel, Alan, Abby, Ellie, and baby Howell

Giants in our midst

2009-08-11T08:14:00.002+02:00

I have been thinking about the story of David and Goliath lately. There is a reason why this story has captured the attention and appreciation of people throughout history. It has some iconic imagery: An undersized and less-than-capable-hero amazingly overcomes the odds. Small of stature and yet, full of faith, this hero dramatically succeeds in knocking down the odds-on favorite. Through his victory, the little champion secures freedom for his own enslaved people. As I studied through this story with the church leaders from the Chipembe/Nkunama cluster, we all sensed that this story was about us. Here in a grass covered hut on bamboo basket chairs sits the “David” – six believers convinced (mostly?) that the power of the Living God can overcome any Giant. While out in the open stands the “Goliath,” the embarrassingly powerful and arrogant Giant, who has the respect, admiration and loyalty of the crowds. Goliath is calling out challenges to them…mocking David’s undersized appearance and oversized faith. When our small group talked about the Giants we face in this area we came up with a pretty daunting list. I’ve rearranged it some, but we basically named three Giants: Unfaithfulness, Drunkenness, and the Occult (Divination, Evil Spirits and Witchcraft).

Giant #1: Unfaithfulness and a lack of trust
There is a passage in the letter to Titus where Paul encourages his young disciple serving in Crete. He reminds Titus that “Even one of their own prophets has said, ‘Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons” (1:12). And while it is hard for us to imagine anyone having such a low view of their own people, this expression is similar to what the Makua we serve with have to say about themselves all the time. They say, “you can’t trust us…we will lie and cheat each other.” This lack of faithfulness could come from a number of places – broken family structures, poverty, the effects of war on a society. But, no matter where it comes from, this unfaithfulness leads to many problems within the church. Leaders won’t follow through on commitments to the church and to each other. The church is reluctant to give because they don’t trust each other to administer well what has been given. It makes Paul’s counsel to Timothy to entrust the message to “reliable” people ring true (2 Timothy 2:2). Reliable and faithful people make up the backbone of communities of faith. For the gospel to truly take root in this area – we need faithful men and women.

Giant #2: Drunkenness
Drunkenness is a problem in many parts of the world, but it seems to most severely effect cultures that are already saddled with poverty. Men (and women) give in to hopelessness and get lost in the escape of alcohol. All over this area village after village you find people distilling their homemade brew. We have been encouraged to see some of our friends succeed in leaving this lifestyle behind. While others escape for a while, and then sadly get pulled back in. Churches in our area talk about drunkenness as it leads to other problems within families (misuse of money, physical abuse). It takes the intervention of God’s Spirit, family, friends and the church to effectively break this cycle.

Giant #3: the Occult (Divination/Evil Spirits/Witchcraft)
Three weeks ago I was on my way home after spending some time with the church in Nekwaya. I had a number of people in the car with me (as usual). Joaquim was riding back with me. He is from the village of Kambiri, but now lives in the village of Namwaciko where he has helped start a church. Joaquim was going to stay in Kambiri for a few days and when we arrived there, he wanted us to go visit his sister who has been sick. We walked to the house and sat for a few minutes on his front porch. After the greetings, Joaquim shared the problem with me. His sister, Julieta, has been having seizures lately. When I asked what they planned to do about it, the family responded that they were going to take her to the Diviner. Around here seizures are usually understood as coming from the demonic, and many people in this area are afraid of the hospital. One lady I spoke to said, “Everyone I know who has gone to the hospital dies.” From our time here in Mozambique we’ve learned that when people do divination there is usually only one of two results. The Onkulukano, Traditional Healer or Diviner, will tell you that you have been possessed by an evil spirit or "macini" and need to receive instruction from another person who has that kind of spirit to learn how to appease it. The second option is that the Onkulukano will tell you that you have been hit by witchcraft by a certain family member or neighbor that is jealous of you and has cursed you. In conversations with our Mozambican friends we have sent that this act of divination more than often leads to further participation in the occult.

We talked about the stories of Jesus healing people with seizures who were possessed by evil spirits and I asked the family to wait a week before going to the Diviner while we (the church in Kambiri and myself) could pray and fast for Julieta – asking God to release her from this evil spirit. We prayed for her and later that day the church in Kambiri prayed for her. At the end of the week, though, the family showed up at my house and informed me that Julieta had died. One of her brothers said, “Obviously, the magic that she had been cursed with was more powerful than your god.” It is hard to know how to respond well to that. His analysis of the situation sure seems accurate – if this was a power/truth encounter – then we did not have access to the greater power.

This system of demonic oppression has a hold on the Makua-Meetto (the picture above is from a "macini" ceremony we witnessed in the town of Balama). They constantly live in fear of the evil spirits and their power to disrupt and destroy life. When we share the good news of the Kingdom with our friends here we talk about how through Christ’s death and resurrection we have been freed from the powers of sin, death and Satan. We have been released from this Kingdom of Death and can now live as we were meant to in the Kingdom of Life.

When I shared the list of these giants with my friend and father-in-law, Larry Wilson, he noted that these giants are not all that different from the ones the church faces in the US. They have different names and different expressions, but the “Powers” or “Giants” seek to dominate us no matter what culture we live in.

Thanks for thinking about us. Please pray for us to have David’s confidence as we face down these Giants under the power of God’s Spirit.

Grace and Peace,
Alan

starting something new...

2009-07-08T16:48:00.003+02:00

We have had an exciting past couple months here in Montepuez. I (finally!) finished up my master’s degree, our team received 7 interns, and we also took the first steps towards a new project that I have been dreaming about for some time now. After living in Mozambique for over five years, we have a deeper appreciation for the needs of the people here. Some of our friends require help in the form of relief (one-time help in a time of crisis) and others could really benefit from some type of sustainable development (changing the dynamics of the system here to enable people to find meaningful employment). A little over a year ago, I began to have a vision for something that would bless people in both ways. My dream was to start a non-profit business that would pay a good salary for its employees and provide enough profit to support some development projects and give consistently to ADEMO, the association of handicapped and disabled people.

While on furlough in 2008, I spoke to a number of individuals and Bible classes about these ideas and was blessed with $2000 of start-up money for this enterprise. After returning from the States to life and ministry in Mozambique, I began to more thoroughly investigate what it would take to make this dream a reality. Our team’s goal, here in Mozambique, is to help get a church planting movement going among the Makua-Metto people. I spend a lot of time in villages and in the city helping young churches get started and training church leaders. I enjoy what I am doing and feel gifted and called to it. Because of these ministry commitments, realistically I can only commit about five hours a week to this new project. So, as I looked at what it would take to start the non-profit business, the biggest initial barrier was finding a trustworthy manager to run the day-to-day operations. As part of my final two classes in finishing up my degree, I met regularly with a Makua-Metto pastor of an evangelical church here in town, Domingos Aurelio. I have known him for a few years now and he is well-respected in the community and one of the few leading pastors in area churches that is actually Makua-Metto (the majority of them are from other parts of Mozambique). Domingos has been employed for the last eight years as the manager of a wood-cutting business in Montepuez. He was responsible for overseeing their human resources as well as keeping track of finances and materials. In January of this year, I started praying more earnestly about this venture and shortly thereafter learned that Domingos’ boss was closing down his business in order to move on to other things. Domingos and I talked about our vision for this project, he was excited to join something that sought to bless the community and agreed to manage the day-to-day operations of the business.

As we looked for a small plot of land to house the business, we came across a larger piece of land (about four acres or roughly the size of two city blocks here!). Besides being in a prime location, the price was very good as well. One of the Smiths’ supporting churches had funds available, and we were able to purchase the land for just under $10,000. I am continually amazed and overwhelmed at God’s timing and plans. The original vision was to have something relatively small, and God has surprised us with a much bigger vision than we could have asked for or imagined.

In June we completed the sale of our first round of chicks and made enough money to pay the guards, manager and buy another round of chicks that will be ready to sell in August. We have employed one of the church leaders to sleep in the coop and feed and water the chickens. As far as our business plan, we are buying chicks from a business in Nampula and are raising them to sell here. Eventually, we would like to have housing for three or four groups of chickens at different stages of growth. We should be able to turn a profit of roughly $500 for every round of chicks. While that does not sound like much, it could really make a big difference here. At some point, we would also like to have layer chickens in order to sell eggs (which would make a good profit and bless people through the added nutrition/protein).

The land is large enough to house a number of different ministry projects, not just the chicken coops, and there are a number of costs involved in getting the land ready for long-term use. For the near future we have identified some things that would help the non-profit business run more effectively.
• start another group of broiler chickens and a small group of layers ($2500)
• construct a storage building used to hold feed and other supplies (about $3000).
So, with about $5,500 we could finance the first permanent building for this project and help stabilize it financially. If you are interested in helping out financially with this project, please let us know.

The non-profit business and resource center will initially only use a small portion of the new land. We have brainstormed a number of possibilities and are excited to see how God may use it for his glory. Please pray for the success of this new initiative and let us know what you are dreaming and imagining.

We’ll send a more newsy newsletter soon.

Grace and Peace,
Alan

April update

2009-04-11T17:36:00.000+02:00

Hello again from northern Mozambique!

Whew! The pasts two months have been really full and busy since we wrote our last blog post in late January!

In addition to our usual day-to-day ministry activities, in February Alan continued working through the Train & Multiply series with the leaders in Chipembe on Tuesdays, and teaching through the scriptures with the small church in Nkororo and a new group of believers in Namwaciko on Thursdays, and Train & Multiply every other Saturday with church leaders here in town. Twice on the alternate Saturdays, Alan and Jeremy hosted a weekend-long leadership retreat for 20 church leaders in our province. The leadership retreats used ropes course-style activities and debriefing sessions to teach and discuss the unity that we have through the love of Christ. Too often being a leader in a church means bossing other people around and focusing on being in charge instead of leading through servant-love, listening, and working together. It was neat to see them grow deeper together as a team and build trust. We have several more leadership retreats planned throughout the rest of the year; we are excited to see what fruit will come out of these encounters.

Also in February the small group in Namwaciko that has been studying with Alan decided to become a church and near the end of the month had 4 baptisms. Believers from Montepuez city, Chipembe, Nekwaya, Khambiri, Nanhupo and Nkororo joined them to worship together. About 25 of us gathered to inaugurate this church. Alan talked about what it really means to be a church – being the body of Jesus and following his example through sharing the good news of the Kingdom of God, teaching about what it means to be a citizen of the Kingdom of God, and helping others through the power of the Kingdom of God. It was exciting to see this church plant rise up mostly out of the initiative of our Mozambican brothers. One Christian from the church in Khambiri had moved to Namwaciko and after a few weeks of living there said, “I miss worshiping with the church in Khambiri, but it is too far to walk… so, we should plant a church here in Namwaciko.”

Alan has also had two additional tasks on his plate these past few months, one being to complete his second practicum to finish his M.Div. degree through Harding Graduate School. The M.Div. is an 84-hour master’s degree; it will have taken Alan nine years to complete it since we left the States before he was finished! We are really excited that we have reached the end! Of course, we won’t be there for the graduation ceremony, but it sounds like they will let Alan’s dad accept his diploma for him on graduation day. This last class is a practicum that he has planned out one-on-one with his professor, and Alan has been focusing on witchcraft/divination aspect of Makua-Metto culture and its intersection with the folk Islam of this area. This has involved a lot of extra reading and extensive interviews with several people locally.

The other extra task Alan has been juggling lately is the beginning of a non-profit business and resource center, including working towards purchasing the land to house the project. The initial idea is to raise broilers from chicks, and the money taken in from the sale of those chickens will pay the salaries of the Mozambicans running the project, as well as the next round of chicks and feed, and also provide a profit of several hundred dollars a month (hopefully more if everything goes well). That profit money will be used to bless the community, through relief in times of crisis (hunger in drought, wheelchairs for our handicapped friends, mosquito nets during the rainy season), and to fund different development projects. One answer to prayer is that God has provided a very trustworthy Mozambican friend of ours to serve as the manager of the project. He is the pastor a local church in town, and has faithfully and honestly served as the manager of a wood-cutting business for years. Just as we were beginning to pray for someone who would be faithful and honest to fill this role, he lost his job due to the owner relocating the wood-cutting business. As we shared the vision for what we wanted to do, he took a cut in pay to be a part of it! His role is important as he will be handling all the day-to-day aspects of this project, and Alan will meet with him regularly for accountability and vision casting together.

We had also been looking and praying for a small plot of land to house the project, but a number of prospects that seemed good initially didn’t pan out. Then we spoke to the owner of a large piece of land about the size of two city blocks right in the middle of town – much bigger than we expected. The price is extremely reasonable for land of this size and it looks like it will work out to purchase this property. Praise God! We will keep you posted.

At the end of February we left Montepuez for the four-day drive down through Mozambique (it is such a LONG country!) to South Africa for the annual meeting of Good News for Africa, our legal organization within Mozambique. We really enjoyed the fellowship; some families we hadn’t seen in quite awhile! We also took the opportunity to put our truck in the shop and give it a good, thorough tune-up. Our truck hadn’t been back down to South Africa since we drove it up five years ago, and we feel really thankful to be able to get it worked on down there – it needed it! We were also able to purchase a new canopy, since the old one was busted. I am sure it is just our imagination, but the truck just looks like it feels better itself! =) We also took advantage of being all the way down there to take some family vacation time as well. South Africa is so beautiful and diverse; we stayed in two Unesco World Heritage Sites: the Drakensburg mountains and the Isimangaliso Wetlands, and we saw lots of amazing scenery and lots of wild animals! By the time we had our vacation and wrapped up the Missions Meeting and then got our truck out of the shop, though, we were really ready to not be living out of suitcases and to come home. As we were driving back up through Mozambique, our teammates the Smiths were a few days behind us, making the same trip home. The newly rebuilt gearbox in their truck was bad, however, and they broke down farther south in Mozambique after the first day of driving. God has been taking care of them; a man from the shop where our trucks were worked on came up from South Africa to bring a new gear box to put in their truck, and as I type they are driving the last few hours to reach Montepuez.

The Westerholm and Roland families are still on furlough/visits in the States, and we miss them a lot and look forward to their return, especially since we haven’t yet met baby Jane Westerholm, born at the beginning of February! In mid-May by brother and sister-in-law from Denver are coming to visit us, and we are so excited! This is their first trip to Africa. Shortly after their visit we will receive a group of seven missions interns from Harding University for six weeks, which will then be followed by a visit from my parents. So the next few months will be busy! We really enjoy having visitors from the States; the fellowship is so refreshing and rejuvenating for us since normally we are separated by so many miles. Our Mozambican friends are always excited for us to have visitors, too; relationships and connections are so important here, and they are so honored to get to meet people who come all this way for a visit!

As we close, we ask that you continue to pray for
• the purchase of this land and the beginning of the non-profit business and resource center. Thanks to all those who have already helped with start-up costs; if anyone is interested in helping, please contact us for more details! We will write again very soon to share specific needs.
• our teammates the Rolands and Westerholms in the States right now
• peace and wisdom in the next few busy months
• for the transformation of hearts that comes when people truly decide to enter into God’s Kingdom

With love in Christ,
Rachel, Alan, Abby, and Ellie Howell

weekend gathering

2009-02-01T20:55:00.005+02:00

We had a fun and interesting weekend. Twenty leaders from different churches in the Montepuez district converged on our house and the Smith’s house Thursday afternoon for a weekend gathering (about ten slept at our house!) Our hope was that this meeting, along with a few more like it throughout the year, would increase the leaders’ trust and confidence in each other. We planned a program of group games and low ropes course activities where they were given a problem and had to figure out a solution; Jeremy did a great job organizing and thinking through these activities and then debriefing with the leaders. Our essential theme for this meeting was that the process or journey is as important as the goal or destination. We looked at passages in Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12 and 13 and talked about how the leaders and the churches they serve can function more effectively as a body. We also focused on how, according to Paul, it doesn’t matter what we accomplish, if we don’t have love we haven’t accomplished anything. Our plan is to have five more of these leadership gatherings throughout 2009. Pray for us; the next leadership gathering is in three weeks, and we still have a lot of work to do! Also a big thanks to our New Heritage church family who sent us a couple boxes of BOGO lights. Each of the leaders received one and they were a big hit!

happy new year from mozambique!

2009-01-24T19:52:00.001+02:00

Greetings again from northern Mozambique!

Thank you so much to all of you who have joined us in praying for rain. The rains started just before Thanksgiving, but then right around Christmas, the rains stopped for almost three weeks, and we were nervous that we were seeing the beginnings of a drought. We contacted a few of you to join us in prayer for God to send rain to Mozambique, and he has answered our prayers and sent rain, and we are so thankful. Many of our friends here are subsistence farmers, meaning they grow all the food for their families for the year during Mozambique’s one growing season, and so drought and floods can be catastrophic.

Right before Thanksgiving we drove 12 hours through the bush to Lichinga to visit our friends Rusty, Ann, and Hallie Caldwell and see their resource center/ development farm there. We hadn’t seen them in two years, and it was a lot of fun to reconnect with them and get to experience their lives and work in person. The Caldwells, along with their teammates the Holtons (who are in the States teaching at Harding University this year as the missionaries-in-residence) have worked hard setting up their development center, and are investing in their community through co-ops using various community development projects. It was exciting to see what they are doing and brainstorm ways we could implement some of there ideas over here in Montepuez.

We are always reminded during this holiday time of year that even though we live so far away from our families in the States, God has given us other families in our teammates, colleagues, and friends here. We returned home to Montepuez just in time for Thanksgiving with the Rolands and Westerholms, and just a few days later the Westerholms left for the States for an extended furlough and childbirth in February (we are really looking forward to hearing the news, whenever he or she decides to make an appearance!). Also, the Rolands left for the States on December 20 for a few months to visit family and get some rest and recuperation. We enjoyed our Christmas, though it was unusual, since the girls both had stout cases of giardia and felt pretty crummy – we had to drag them out of bed to come open Christmas presents! For New Year’s Eve we had wanted to try and replicate the fondue tradition from Alan’s family, though we realized at the very last minute that we didn’t have the right kind of plug adaptor for the fondue pot we had borrowed. The food was still yummy, though, and then on New Year’s Day we enjoyed going to a party at one of our workers’ homes.

At this time of year our weekly schedules change as the rains come and the people here start planting their crops. From the times the rains begin in earnest, we cannot get to several churches in villages that we normally spend time in. We visited Nekhwaya and Khambiri a few extra times in early December, knowing that it would be awhile before we could go again. Since Alan can’t get to Khambiri right now, he has begun the Train and Multiply leadership course in Chipembe on Tuesdays, and is continuing to teach in Nkororo on Thursdays; both are places we can still get to even on muddy roads. There is also a group in the village of Namwaciko that would like to be a church, and we started teaching there last week. Every other Saturday Alan and Jeremy are doing Train and Multiply with a group of men from the churches here in town, but the weekly women’s study group is suspended through January and February, since so many people are spending almost all their time out on their farms during the week.

This time of year is also the time of hunger before the harvest gets underway in March and April. Thank you again for all of you who contributed extra funds last year to help us help people here who have run out of food. Also, we are looking to start our small chicken project in April when the chicken feed will be a little cheaper. Alan has been looking at different properties in town to find one suitable for the project and should be meeting with government officials about this non-profit business this next week. Alan has also been building a lot of Lorena stoves lately (see previous newsletter!), teaching different friends how to build these efficient stoves out of local material, and many of the guys he has built stoves with have begun building them for their friends and neighbors.

Last week we had two baptisms in Nkororo; one woman who was baptized got a ride with us back into town because her baby was sick. They took the baby to the hospital, but a few days later her baby died, and they went back to Nkororo for the funeral. The lack of sufficient health care is huge here in Mozambique, and the mortality rate is high – we have a hard time thinking if we know anyone who hasn’t had a child die. Even so, there has been even more sickness and death in the last month than we normally hear about or come in contact with; many people are suffering from severe diarrhea, and a lot of people are talking about cholera. We often get people showing up at our house asking us to help carry a dead body back to their village, or sometimes it is someone who is near death and has been told at the hospital that there is nothing to be done, and so they want to go back to their village to die there at home; sometimes we know these people, sometimes we don’t. Last week one of our night guards showed up for work and told Alan how tired he was, and Alan asked if he had gone to work in his farm that day. But he said no, he was tired because he had had to help dig three graves that day because three of his neighbors had died. And then one of our other workers had a baby son die just this past week on Thursday night. Death is always sad, whether you are an American or a Mozambican, but here in Mozambique we are around death more often. We struggle not to feel numb, but we hear of death so often that it can be overwhelming.

Recently, though, there have also been some things worthy of celebration. In December we had a small wedding at one of the churches in town – it was really the first church wedding that we have been to between two Makua-Metto new believers who are from here locally. Getting married in this culture is usually little more than moving in with someone and beginning to sleep with them, and while that is different than the culture we came from, that alone does not make marriage weak. However, marriage is very weak in this culture, rarely involving strong commitment, and very easily and quickly dissolved for a variety of reasons, and we can’t help but think that publicly celebrating the beginning of a marriage relationship with other believers could be helpful in redeeming marriages and bringing them into the kingdom of God. This really isn’t a foreign idea around here, but too often people don’t have a wedding ceremony because of the cost involved of feeding so many people at a big party. So we were encouraged when our friends Victor and Julieta, each from different villages in the area, told us they wanted to get married with the church, and that they had the courage to keep it small and manageable, so other people can see that it doesn’t have to be a huge party with a lot of cost involved. We enjoyed celebrating their commitment to Christ and each other and hope that many others will choose to follow their example.

This weekend I will be getting together with women from two churches in town are joining together to do an ikoma, an initiation ceremony, for one of the women’s teenage daughters. Initiation ceremonies are a big part of life here, for both boys and girls, marking the transition from childhood to adulthood, usually done sometime around puberty, though the age range varies. Initiation ceremonies around here often involve a lot of negative traditions, including beating, verbal abuse, instruction on sexual intercourse and encouragement of sexual promiscuity, and we have recently been told that even in a few places nearby they are still practicing female genital mutilation (we had previously heard that “oh, nobody does that anymore”). While in the past some churches’ response has been to declare that ikomas are bad and insist that everyone in the church forsake that tradition, we are seeing more openness to the idea of redeeming the ikoma in ways that glorify God and build each other up. After all, there is nothing wrong with celebrating the transition to adulthood with a ceremony involving the community. The opportunity is wide open to reclaim ikomas for the kingdom of God, replacing insult and beating with love and encouragement, replacing teaching of sexual promiscuity with teaching of sexual purity, faithfulness in marriage, and what it means to be a Godly woman. The interest among women especially has been high these last few months to do ikomas within the church, and we are hoping to make that a big part of the women’s conference later this year.

In March we will make a trip down to South Africa for a missions meeting, and also to have some work done on the truck. Our truck hasn’t been back to South Africa since we brought it up five years ago, and we are looking forward to getting it worked on. We will also take some of our family vacation time to get some rest and enjoy some of South Africa’s amazing scenery.

As we close, we ask that you continue to pray for the two requests that we mentioned last time:
• Pray first for a good rainy season so people can eat in the coming year. Enough rain for the food to grow, but not so much that fields and flooded and crops ruined. And long enough that each crop gets the water it needs to grow in its time.
• Please pray for everyone, especially those of us with more than we need, to work together to share deeply and together end poverty (physical and spiritual). Pray for the imagination needed to make this happen.

With love in Christ,
Rachel, Alan, Abby, and Ellie Howell

warming up in the southern hemisphere

2008-11-21T21:42:00.001+02:00

Hi again from Montepuez!

It is HOT in northern Mozambique! We have always said that we thought November was the hottest month, and it has been confirmed yet again. The rains don’t really start until about mid-December, which helps cut the heat, so until then we are sweating with temperatures in the 90’s in the house. It is difficult for us to imagine the cooling weather for all of you not in the southern hemisphere… And yes, we know that we are overdue for a newsletter! When we last wrote we had been home one month from furlough, and it is almost three months since then. We have been busy enough that it has been difficult setting aside time to write an update.

At the end of August we went to Balama (an hour and a half further out into the bush) together with the Smiths to spend the weekend with the church there. Each year our team does a weekend visit/teaching seminar for all the churches in each of the 6 districts that we work in (Balama, Chiure, Namuno, Montepuez, Pemba, and Ancuabe), and this year we taught through the Sermon on the Mount at each seminar. The teaching went well in Balama; we really enjoyed the fellowship and we also got really dirty – Balama dirt is really fine red clay dust, and once it gets on it is hard to get off!

About a week later, we had our team retreat together in Nacala, a town about six hours away on the coast. It was a good time of fellowship, vision-casting, praying and playing together. A few days after we got back Alan and Chad headed back out to make another visit/teaching seminar, this time in the Namuno district, which went well.

Alan and Chad got back late Sunday night, and then very early Tuesday morning (23 Sept) our teammate Mika called and said that her husband Aaron, who had been sick for several days with severe headaches, was getting worse and that they were getting concerned about the possibility of meningitis. So within a few hours Alan and Chad were in the car taking the Roland family to Pemba (the medical facilities here in Montepuez are not good). There they met up with a South African doctor friend of ours and took Aaron to a clinic there in Pemba, where he began to improve slightly. Because of the difficulty in diagnosing what was making Aaron sick and the concern for meningitis, they arranged for Aaron to be flown out the next morning to South Africa with an aviation group called Mercy Air. Once they arrived in Nelspruit, South Africa Aaron was taken to the emergency room at the hospital there, and while they tested and treated him for several things, they were never able to pinpoint exactly what made him so sick. The Rolands were in South Africa for a few weeks making sure Aaron was well enough to return, and we are so thankful that he recovered and that they came back to us. Thanks so much to all of you who joined us in praying for Aaron.

The same morning that Alan took Aaron to Pemba was Abby’s first day of school with Luke, being taught by our teammate Martha. They have been in school for nine weeks now, and they are both doing well and eating it up. Due to the nature of our lives over here, Abby and Luke are getting a hybrid of regular classroom schooling and home schooling, and so far it is working out really well. Last week I stepped in and taught for a week for the first time, so I am now officially broken in! I was nervous at the thought of teaching for awhile, but Martha guided me through the prep that she usually does, and my week with Abby and Luke went very well. It is an understatement to say that we are thankful to be doing this together as a team, and though it is going well, we are still recruiting for a teacher to come over and teach our children (and fundraising for this as well); please see our website for more information.

Alan’s weekly teaching schedule for the past several months includes Tuesdays with the young church in Khambiri (studying key stories from the Old Testament and the Life of Jesus), Thursdays in Nkororo (studying the life of Jesus and what it means to be a church), and Saturdays doing Train & Multiply. He and Jeremy wrapped up one year of teaching Train & Multiply with leaders down in the Chiure district two Saturdays a month, and they have begun T&M now with church leaders here in Montepuez town. Thursday afternoons I have a women’s Bible study in town. Sundays we worship with one of the various churches we have relationships with, Fridays are for lesson preparation and extra visits, Wednesdays are team days for business and prayer together, and Monday is our Sabbath.

This past Tuesday in Khambiri we baptized 10 new believers into Christ. As Alan walked to the river with the church, he talked to one of the members who had been a part of the church since it began about a year ago. He was excited because his wife and her uncle were being baptized that day. Alan was excited as well, because the fact that both these family members were coming to Christ meant that others were seeing signs of change in this man’s life. That same day before the Bible study, one of the members who has been a Christian for about 3 months shared a story from the previous week when he had taken a short cut through the bush and ended up lost and hungry. He thought, “I’ve been learning to pray with the church, I’ll ask God for help.” He walked for another minute and found a huge mango tree with tons of ripe fruit. He sat down and ate and then began to realize where he was. An hour later he was back at home. He shared that, “I was lost and hungry and God helped me get home.”

One project that we’ve been excited about is helping people learn how to build Lorena stoves. Almost everyone here cooks over an open fire. This way of cooking uses a lot of firewood, and is a health risk as many children each year are burned by these fires and mothers and the small babies tied on their backs breathe in a lot of smoke. Lorena Stoves are made from readily available material (dirt from a termite mound, grass, and water) and a couple hours worth of effort. The Lorena Stoves help save firewood and keep the smoke and fire away from mothers and their children. As a team, we’ve taught how to build the Lorena stoves in six places and we’re hoping that it will catch on as people begin to see the difference it can make.

Alan is completing his first practicum for his M.Div. this semester… he is on schedule to complete the second practicum next semester, which means that, Lord willing, he will graduate in May! Alan was in grad school full time beginning summer 2000 though fall 2002, when we moved to be with our sponsoring church in Nashville before moving overseas. From then on he has taken his remaining classes online or while on furloughs to the States, so it will have taken us nine years. Even though Alan won’t get to walk across the stage in May (since we are so far away), it will be very exciting for him to finish!

The first weekend in November Alan went down to Nampula to teach a one-day seminar in one of the churches there. The Nampula and Zambezia provinces have quite a few churches that we have known in the past, and they have struggled a lot with some significant divisions over the years. One of the church leaders contacted Alan to ask if he could come down and answer some questions of identity and division. They talked about some of the specific issues and we’re hoping that these churches will move forward together.

The next weekend was the weekend seminar for the Montepuez district, which was held here in town. Alan and Aaron taught through the Sermon on the Mount, and people came from all of the churches in the Montepuez district, which is quite a large district. We had about 12 churches represented and around 70 participants. It was exciting to see people we know from various villages all together in one place worshiping, studying God’s Word and getting to know each other.

Ellie’s birthday was Monday, and she is very happy to be three now, though that day up until the party she kept insisting that she was still two. Friday we are taking off to visit our friends Rusty, Ann, and Hallie Caldwell over in Lichinga to visit with them and see their development farm there, and we are really looking forward to that – we haven’t seen them in two years. We will be back just in time to celebrate Thanksgiving with the Rolands and Westerholms on Thursday, which is just a few days before the Westerholms leave for an extended furlough/childbirth in the States. We will really miss them while they are gone, and we know they will miss us too, though I doubt they will miss the sweating part of Christmas in Mozambique.

Thank you so much to those who contributed towards some of our special projects earlier this year! Some of you contributed money for MP3 players and speakers, and now that the Makua hymnal is finished (with 125 songs in Makua-Metto), we’ve lent out the six MP3 players and speakers. The churches are enjoying using this resource as it is helping them learn these new songs as well as hear some of the scripture recordings we have in Makua (the majority of people here in the churches do not know how to read). The chicken project is about ready to get started, though we’ve decided to wait until April when corn for chicken feed will be cheaper. We are currently starting to line up the appropriate paperwork and get land here in town to house the project. Also, since we’re now in the time of hunger these next few months before the harvest, some of the funds you gave are being used to help some of our friends who’ve been hardest hit during this time of need.

Our health has not been great these last few months, the most significant illness being that Alan had malaria last week. But it also seems like we have been continually under the weather with one minor illness after another, whether it is respiratory infections, stomach bugs, fevers, pink eye or sore throats. But we are thankful for the health that we do have and the healing God gives.

Our internet is, we think, pretty close to being functional. Our teammate Jeremy has worked hard to get the system set up, and then we ran into a few kinks and are waiting for the technician for the cotton company in town to come and help us work it out. It would be very nice to have fast internet as a Christmas present… but we’ll just have to see.

We miss you all! Conventional wisdom says that the longer you do something the easier it gets. But we have recently discovered that it isn’t true in regards to living so far away from those we love – it is getting harder to be away from you!

We ask that you please
• Pray first for a good rainy season so people can eat in the coming year. Enough rain for the food to grow, but not so much that fields and flooded and crops ruined. And long enough that each of the crops get the water it needs to grow in its time.
• Please pray for everyone, especially those of us with more than we need, to work together to share deeply and together end poverty (physical and spiritual). Pray for the imagination needed to make this happen.

With love in Christ,
Rachel, Alan, Abby, and Ellie Howell

getting started again in montepuez

2008-08-22T12:33:00.001+02:00

Hello again from Montepuez!

We have been home for a month now, feeling settled and enjoying being received and welcomed by so many. Our team provided meals for us for over a week, which was a big blessing (especially since the fridge and freezer were empty), and our Mozambican friends were very generous, too, welcoming us back with gifts of chickens, oranges, rice, cassava, corn flour, peanuts, honey, beans, peas, bananas, and watermelon. We have been greeted with very big smiles and warm handshakes, and for a few close friends I told them “I have to hug you like an American!” (Hugging isn’t really weird or offensive here, but people just don’t do it.) Our friends here have really enjoyed seeing the photo books we brought back, one from Alan’s brother Aaron’s wedding, and also the one we made about our work in Mozambique that many of you saw when we were on furlough.

We had an easier time than we expected jumping back into speaking Makua. We definitely felt rusty getting those words to come out of our mouths at first, but it came back quicker than we thought. We realize that we are in a tricky place in language learning; we can communicate and make ourselves understood very well, and it would be easy to not study language much more. But we know we don’t yet sound just like our Makua friends; we still need more work on the way we put our sentences together and on the more complicated verb tenses as well. I have also been reminded that the biggest test of language comprehension (in my opinion!) is being in a group of women who know each other well, and trying to keep up in a discussion about something they care about, where several are talking fast all at once! So we still have our work cut out for us.

We set aside this first month back for making the rounds visiting the churches and villages where we have relationships, to see how they have been doing these last few months before jumping into the same activities and routines we had before furlough. While we were in the states two of the churches in the area we work (north of Montepuez) had key members who passed away. One of the women from Chipembe, Nantolo, a woman who is a Queen in her clan and a solid member of the church, died. Also, we were sad to hear about the death of our brother Cassimiro who had been a Christian for about a year and a half. After deciding to follow Jesus, he gave up drinking and was becoming a leader of the church in Nekwaya. He and Alan had a number of conversations about the ways his life was being transformed by the power of the gospel. Shockingly, Cassimiro was murdered by a new member of the church in Nekwaya who had been drunk and violent at the time and who then fled from the village. The church in Nekwaya has some very young men who have stepped up and led during this awful time. When we visited in Nekwaya this past Sunday Alan went and visited with Cassimiro’s family and walked out to the grave site together.

The church in Nekwaya is young and has a long way to go. Alan is picking up where we left off in teaching our infant church curriculum to the newest churches in this area (Khambiri and Nkororo). Also, our team is spending more of our time on leadership development, so in the next few months that will increasingly be the focus. Please keep these churches in your prayers. Our goal is to see a movement of churches who are maturing and planting other churches here among the Makua-Metto people.

Abby’s 5th birthday was July 30th, and she really enjoyed having a party with the kids on our team. Abby and Luke will start kindergarten mid-September with Martha (Luke’s mom), and then in November I will step in and teach about once a week. Shortly before they start school we will have a “graduation” from our informal preschool so they will remember that they are moving on, and hopefully not be too disappointed that they are missing preschool with all the other kids. We are so thankful to have a teacher on the team (Martha) as we begin our kids’ formal schooling, though our plan and prayer is that teachers will come over to teach for a year (or more!), beginning next year (’09-’10 US school year). Please visit our website and pass this information along to anyone you know who might be interested!

Shortly after Abby’s birthday we headed down to Nampula for several days to change money, get groceries, and to get the truck worked on. The roof rack had come off earlier in the year and needed to be reinstalled, and the cable that holds the spare tire under the bed of the truck was broken. Getting a car worked on in Mozambique isn’t quite like it is in the States; sometimes we take it to Toyota (in Pemba or Nampula), but often it involves something along the lines of “I know a guy…” But the roof rack and spare tire cable are fixed and secure now, and we are thankful for that (though apparently the guys who fixed the spare tire cable didn’t tighten all the connections to the secondary fuel tank that had to be moved to do their work, and Sunday we had a major fuel leak coming back from Nekwaya, but thankfully Alan was able to fix that easily). So now we just need to have the windshield replaced…

In addition to groceries and truck repairs we always enjoy the fellowship (and hospitality!) of our colleagues and friends in Nampula. This time we were blessed to see Shawn and Sarah Gardner and their kids Ben, Olivia, and Caleb. Many of you will remember that Caleb had to be life-flighted out of Mozambique a year ago for severe respiratory distress. Many of you joined us in prayer for Caleb and his family through his long illness and rejoiced with us in the healing that he received. After a lot of prayer and time for healing and recovery, the Gardners have moved to Nelspruit, South Africa (just across the border from Moz) for a year or so. From there they can continue their relationships and ministry in Mozambique for a time and still get the regular therapy that Caleb needs. We love Shawn and Sarah and their kids and it was a blessing for us to be reunited with them, and we look forward to seeing where God leads them in the future.

We also were able to see the Maddux family who are new to Good News for Africa (our legal organization here in Mozambique) and have just moved to Nampula from the States. They were gracious enough to allow other GNFA families to send items to their container to be shipped over to Moz, and so Abby now has a big-girl bike, and we now have camping cots and sleeping bags so sleeping out in the bush won’t be so painful! Our team also sent over on the container some hardware that will hopefully allow us to piggy-back off the satellite internet connection of the cotton company in town, who have been very gracious with us. Our teammate Jeremy is working on getting all that set up; it will be very nice to have high-speed internet. We are trying not to set our expectations too high (since this is still Mozambique and not the US), though we are very much looking forward to being able to access to online resources, online banking, sending pictures of our ministry (and of our kids for the grandparents!), and being able to receive more than just text from all of you!

Next weekend begins a busy few weeks for us. First we will go further out in the bush to the town of Balama with our teammates the Smiths and spend the weekend with our friends in the church there, teaching and learning together. The next week our team will receive a visit from another Nampula GNFA missionary family, the Beens, and the next week we will head down to Nacala to have a retreat for our team. After the retreat our family will stay a few extra days in Nacala for personal vacation time, and then after heading back to Montepuez we have 2 days to wash all our dirty laundry and head back out for another weekend out in the village with churches, this time in the Namuno district.

Last, but not least, we are looking forward to hearing from the participants from the “Big MO,” the conference/gathering of friends, family, and churches of missionaries in Mozambique (both our team and the team in Lichinga) coming up this Labor Day weekend in Searcy, AR. They will convene to fellowship, share stories, learn from each other, and to coordinate together as they support and care for these two missions in Mozambique. This is a rewarding experience that will not disappoint; for more information see our website www.makuateam.org.

As we wrap up, we ask that you pray for:
-the kingdom of God to come in our area
-our health (this a bad season for allergies here, with dust, mango pollen, and smoke from burning fields)
-fundraising and healthy pregnancy for our teammates the Westerholms
-as we begin schooling for Abby and Luke

We love and miss you all!

Love,
Rachel, Alan, Abby, and Ellie

internet? what internet?

2008-07-28T10:39:00.004+02:00

We are finally home in Montepuez!

Heavy air traffic followed by rain in New York made us miss our flight Thursday night to Johannesburg out of JFK, though thankfully we were able to get on standby for Friday night's flight. That meant, of course, that we would miss our Saturday morning flight from Joburg to Pemba, which wouldn't fly again until Tuesday, so we spent three nights in Joburg resting and getting over jet lag, which really wasn't so bad. We have never had a good experience flying through JFK, so maybe we should try something else next time...

So we are finally home; we have unpacked, cleaned, dusted, and hung up a bunch of pictures of family and friends from furlough. It has been a very smooth transition compared to our return from our first furlough, and for that we are thankful. Our teammates helped open up our house for cleaning before we got home and prepared a bunch of meals for us; we are so blessed by our team! We are planning a number of visits over the next few weeks to reconnect with our friends in Montepuez and in the surrounding villages with the main goal of listening: to hear recent news and how people are doing. Yesterday we worshipped with the church in Chipembe, and it was like coming home; it was so great to see them all again. The day after we got home a number of women left with my teammate Martha to a womens conference in another province, so we look forward to hearing how that went.

Abby and Ellie did GREAT on the 19-hour flight, which means they slept a LOT. Of course, that also means that they woke up at 2am every night for the next 5 nights, but it seems they have recovered and are sleeping all night again now. They have been pretty good about jumping right in there and greeting people in Makua and Portuguese. Abby's fifth birthday is Wednesday, and she is SO excited, changing her mind at least once a day about what she wants her cake to look like.

Our house is in pretty good shape after being empty for four months, with only one leak in each bathroom, and the improvements the landlord made (without telling us!) aren't bad. =) Our snail-pace dial-up internet connection, however, seems to have given up and bitten the dust, so I am at the lone computer at the telephone company office in town working online, going through emails, copy/pasting, and getting kicked offline with technical problems every thirty minutes or so. We have some equipment coming soon on a container that hopefully will allow us to piggyback off of the internet service of the cotton-processing company here in town; we are all really hoping that will work.

Please join us in praying for the following cares:
-for God's kingdom to come among the Makua-Metto
-for vision as we pray and plan for the next three years
-for the health and unity of our team
-for our own spiritual nourishment
-for Abby and Ellie to learn Portuguese and Makua

We love and miss you all!
Love, Rachel (and Alan, Abby, and Ellie)

See You in Three Years (or in Mozambique!)

2008-07-17T05:06:00.000+02:00

Well, we have finished up packing, and the suitcases are in the car for our early morning departure. We have had a wonderful furlough – we feel so blessed to have seen and spent time with so many of you, and we are so sorry for the few of you that we missed. Though we have left the States to live in Mozambique, God has blessed us with many homes, especially in Nashville, Memphis, and Dallas. At the moment we are dealing with a strange swirling of emotions; we are looking forward to being home, but have been sick to our stomachs saying all our good-byes that we know will be for awhile, especially in light of how fast grandchildren grow.

Please pray for us as we travel:
--that we and all our luggage will arrive safely into Pemba and Montepuez
--for us as we get settled back in Mozambique and get re-oriented to life there
--for the next three years as we listen and discern how God is working and leading in northern Mozambique

Love,
Rachel, Alan, Abby, and Ellie

out of the mouths of babes

2008-07-07T05:07:00.002+02:00

Our families (my parents and many of the Wilson clan) have all been together for the July 4th weekend here in Plano, TX. Since our family will be heading back to Mozambique shortly, we had an early birthday party for Abby and Ellie. They received some gifts and were really excited. After Abby, our four-year old, played with one of the toys she sighed and said:

"Wow, this is just what I always wanted. But, I just didn't know about it, yet."

We all laughed at her honesty. Haven't we all felt that way before?

Grace and Peace,
Alan

memory and imagination

2008-07-03T05:16:00.000+02:00

Two weeks from tomorrow our family will get on a plane with all of our luggage (yikes!) and head back home to Mozambique. We have been having a great time here in the US with our families, but our minds are starting to think about life and ministry among the Makua.

I’ve been thinking about our teaching ministry in Mozambique. Our team is using a chronological storying method. This approach understands the key stories of the Old Testament as necessary preparation for hearing about the death and resurrection of Jesus. So, the churches we work with hear about the Creation and the Fall, Noah, Abraham, Exodus, David, and the exile among other things before they hear about the coming of the Messiah. We believe that this approach gives the hearer the best preparation for understanding the story of Jesus and sets the stage for their own transformation in order to begin to look like Jesus.

I came across a quote that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

“Reading and interpretation, therefore, reflects a conversational mode that looks backward and forward – backward as a function of memory, which provides fuel for the imagination that looks forward. Embodiment of biblical truth in the present, therefore, stands at the place where memory and imagination meet.” - Gordon Matties

This quote is a little thick. What I’m taking away from this quote is that for the church to be the people that God has called them to be in any context they’ll need to draw on the deep wells of stored memory from the biblical text to inform their imagination as to how to live out the faith in that place. We need to be rooted in the biblical stories. But, we’re not expected just to repeat exactly what happened to the faithful who have gone before us, but instead to be faithful - be consistent - with the story we’re apart of.

So, our memory (formed by the biblical testimonies and local testimonies of God’s faithfulness) equips our imagination and allows us to live out the faith. My goal then is not to tell interesting narratives, but to outfit the Makua-Metto with the formative stories necessary for living out their faith in their neighborhoods.

Grace and Peace,
Alan

May 2008 Newsletter

2008-06-28T00:00:00.003+02:00

Dear Friends and Family,

Greetings from the United States this time! We are writing from Memphis, Tennessee, and for all of you we have not seen, it is nice to be on this side of the pond with you!

travel trials
Our travels didn’t get off to a good start, or at least not a timely start! Every single flight we took to get from Pemba, Mozambique to Dallas, Texas left between one and four hours late, which resulted in a forced 2-night stay in New York City (at the expense of South African Airways, thankfully). This would have been more frustrating except that we had built in two days at the beginning of our schedule just for recovering from jet lag so we wouldn’t get sick, so basically we just got over our jet lag in New York instead of Dallas. We considered for about half a second leaving the hotel to do some sight-seeing; the problem was that we only packed warm-weather clothes and it was about 33 degrees in New York – we even saw some old, gray snow still sitting on the tarmac at the airport! Needless to say we were a little road-weary (or is it air-weary?) when we FINALLY got to Dallas.

We took a week of our personal vacation for the year that first week, which was nice and restful. My parents watched the girls and sent us off to a hotel for a few nights for some kid-free relaxation, and then a couple days later we took the girls to San Antonio to go to the zoo, the River Walk, and most of all, Sea World, which they enjoyed. A couple days after that we started making our way to Tennessee, stopping for a few days with Alan’s family in Memphis before heading on to Nashville, where we spent a month with the Donelson church, our sponsoring church family.

furlough fun
Missionaries live unusual lives, and furlough is no exception! Basically, when we are in Nashville, our job is to spend as much time with Donelson folks as we can, reconnecting relationships with those who have sent us, and sharing about the work in Mozambique so that members at Donelson feel connected to the work they support. So for the four weeks we were in Nashville, we averaged lunch with Donelson people about 5 days out of the week, and dinner about 6 days out of the week, with sharing in Sunday school classes and Sunday night home churches and missions committee meetings on top of that, with visits to the dentist and the eye doctor and the financial planner squeezed in as well! We were very blessed by our time in Nashville; we feel very much like we are at home with family when we are with Donelson, and it is a joy to pick up right where we left off in our relationships there, even though it had been 2 and a half years since we were with them.

It was a pretty busy schedule to keep for a whole month, though, and by the end of the four weeks we were pretty tired! On 5 May we left Nashville for Memphis to be with Alan’s family; we have enjoyed the change of pace and have been catching our breath and catching up on emails and finances, etc. This past weekend we took a quick trip to Searcy, Arkansas for Alan’s brother Aaron’s graduation from Harding University, and this coming weekend Aaron Howell will marry Erin Gray here in Memphis (yes, that’s right, it’s Aaron and Erin!). We are excited for Aaron and Erin, and we are glad we could arrange our furlough to be here for the wedding – Abby and Ellie are especially excited since they are flower girls in the wedding and get to wear pretty dresses! While we are in Memphis we are also hoping to take the girls to the zoo and catch a baseball game, and on Memorial Day we will head down to Florence, Alabama to spend more time with Alan’s family there.

On 2 June the girls and I will head on to Dallas, and Alan will stay behind for 2 weeks to take his last class at Harding Grad School here in Memphis. After this all that remains are his 2 practicums, and then he will be finished with his M. Div., which will be very exciting! While Alan is still in Memphis my mom and I will take the girls to Virginia Beach to see my Granny, which we are really looking forward to. After his class Alan will join us in Dallas for our time with my family, which will include a trip to Colorado to see my brother and sister-in-law.

Monday we will be officially halfway done with furlough, and saying that makes it feel like it is going by fast! Since we are away for such long stretches at a time, it is a blessing to us to reconnect on furlough with so many people we love. At the same time, furlough can be a weird experience (not a bad kind of weird) – furlough is part of our job as missionaries but so different from our regular activities in Mozambique. Alan and I end up processing our emotional reactions together: reverse culture shock coming back to the States, wondering how we will adjust back to life in Mozambique in a few months (Will it be easy? Will it be hard?), and the strange joy of being together with people here we love while at the same time really missing our life and friends in Mozambique (more than on our first furlough). While not always easy to articulate, we generally regard that last one as a very good thing that is a gift of God’s grace: that even though life there isn’t always easy, Mozambique is becoming more a part of us, and we miss it when we are not there (just like we miss you when we are not here).

The girls have generally done well, and though we try to anticipate their needs and their possible reactions to all the travel and transitions, they still surprise us sometimes. Ellie, still being so young at 2 years old, has been pretty flexible, though still with normal 2-year old behavior! (whining when tired, etc. =) ) Abby, though, surprised us by asking to go home to Mozambique several times the first few weeks – even while watching whales leap through the air at Sea World! We realize, though, that we shouldn’t be surprised; even though Abby enjoys her grandparents and aunts and uncles and Bible class and French fries and ice cream and playgrounds so much, Mozambique is still home for her – more so even than for us if you count the portion of her life that she has lived there. We want to do a good job helping our girls adjust through the years to all the transitions we put them through; we know we are in God’s hands and that He knows even better than we do what our girls need and how to care for them.

meanwhile in mozambique…
Our teammates the Smiths, Rolands, and Westerholms are still plugging away in Mozambique, and they have done a great job sending us emails to keep us updated on what is going on in our area: our Mozambican friends and the young churches and Bible studies and seminars. We treasure every email they write; it lessens the disconnect we feel when we are so far away, especially since none of our Mozambican friends can do email! We were very sad to hear of two friends of ours who have died since we left for furlough: a woman named Nantholo from the church in Chipembe and a man named Cassimiro from the church in Nekhwaya. We have been to many funerals in Mozambique, but these two believers were by far closer to us than any others we have known, so we are sad to lose them and that we were not there to participate with the communities in the funerals. Our teammates also told us that four guards were killed at night in another neighborhood in Montepuez in April; violent crime is pretty unusual there and this is only a recent development – please pray for God’s protection, for his kingdom to come in Montepuez, and for wisdom for our team to make wise choices.

new pictures on the website
Due to our slow internet connection in Mozambique, we had not posted pictures on our team website since last August, so we are long overdue. We sent a whole batch of pictures to our website administrator, and they are up and ready for viewing; they cover September through March, and we hope you enjoy them! Speaking of internet and email, we sent our last newsletter in early March, and we had more bounce back to us than ever before (almost all were hotmail or Comcast addresses); the error message said that the reason “may be related to spam-like content.” Since we send out our newsletter to such a long list of people from a location in Africa, our messages may be being flagged as spam; please be sure to add us to your email address book. So for those of you who did not receive our newsletter in early March, please feel free to read it on our website! We may look into choosing a different format for our newsletters (maybe a blog?); we will keep you updated on that.

since you asked…
Many of you that we have already spent time with have asked “What else can we do to help?” So we wanted to share in our newsletter the different ministry opportunities/ projects that we are looking at in the next few years:

Development project. Over the past year or so Alan has had a vision for starting a not-for-profit business in Montepuez. We have had some experience with raising our own chickens and there is a market in our area for fresh eggs and buying quality chickens for consumption. With about $1300 we could purchase a plot of land in our town, build some chicken pens as well as purchase the chicks and starter feed. We have a good relationship with the handicapped association and I would like to employ a few of them as guards and train a manager to run the day-to-day operations of the business. This business should be able to support 3-5 employees and the profits could be used to do a number of good things in our area. From buying corn to give to the leprosy association, supporting orphans, to starting a similar venture in a different area in the future. Our team sees this as a good way to show that we want to be a blessing to our community.
Hearing the word of God: MP3 players and speakers. The lack of literacy is a big problem for the churches in our area – both in Portuguese and Makua. A missionary friend of ours who serves among a different people group has had a lot of success using recordings of the biblical texts and having people listen in small groups. He has let people borrow MP3 players and speakers and when the rechargeable batteries run out – they bring it back and can add additional recordings. This way of sharing the word of God has been really effective so far – so, we’d like to try that among the Makua-Metto as well. When we return to Mozambique, we would like to take back 10-15 MP3 players and portable speakers (We would probably purchase these in Dallas – and the cost estimates we have so far are about $70-100 per unit).
Mozambican churches sending their own missionaries – One of the most exciting things happening among the churches in Mozambique is that at a national level the Churches of Christ are catching a vision for sending their own missionaries into unreached areas of Mozambique. Alan was present at a meeting a few months ago where they laid out their time table and came up with a plan for supporting these missionaries. So, far they have raised over $1000 USD. They want to prepare these missionaries well for this cross-cultural work and want to spend about 9 months of training before sending them out. With about $4-6,000 we could help them purchase some land and contribute towards the building of a storage room (to hold the food that the Mozambican churches will be sending to support these missionaries while training), a meeting area for the students, and set-up costs for the missionary training. We are excited about the possibility of helping in this way because this help would allow all the contributions that the Mozambican churches are making to go towards directly supporting the sending of their missionaries.
Giving in the time of hunger. Though some years are worse than others, December through March are difficult months for many people in Mozambique when there is often not enough food (the harvest starts in late March). This coincides with the rainy season, which means more mosquitoes and more people suffering with malaria. We help out many people who come to us for money to buy food or medicine or mosquito nets, but during those four months we often run out of money. Extra funds for hunger relief during December through March would bless many people.
Schooling our kids. This year in the fall our teammate Martha will begin teaching our two oldest kids, Luke and Abby, (with me as backup and assistant!), but we hope to have teachers come over from the States beginning in fall 2009. This will be the beginning of the adventure of schooling the children on our team, and we are looking for individuals and/or churches to partner with us financially in this effort, both one-time and long-term, since there are no funds for this in our personal salary or our work fund. In the beginning this would involve some initial one-time funds (curriculum purchase, bookshelves, desks), but would expand to more regular needs (renting a school house as we teach more kids, supplies, more curriculum). In addition, don’t forget – we are looking for teachers! Many who do this will fundraise to come over and teach missionary kids for a one-year commitment, and we have made a few initial contacts, but please tell anyone you think might be interested; we would be happy to start lining up teachers for the next several years!
If you are interested in helping with any of the needs above, please email us and let us know; the different projects have different time frames, etc.

please pray
As we wrap up here, we ask that you pray for
For the Kingdom of God to come among the Makua-Metto

Furlough travels: safety and peace through transitions
For unity and health on our team

May God bless you as you serve Him,

Love,
Rachel, Alan, Abby, and Ellie Howell