Every heard of Christmas in July?!? Here we are going to celebrate Christmas in India in August!! Follow along to see how our squad celebrates Jesus' birthday!!!

After about 18 hours of driving the engine just stopped while we were driving so we pulled over to check everything out and there was no visible sign that we could see that anything was wrong...all the fluids were good so we waited about half an hour and then the car started right up again. Phew.....thought we were going to be stranded on the side of the road in Mozambique...that doesn't sound like fun.

 

 

About an hour later the engine stopped again...'this is not good' I thought. And it wasn't...It was about midnight thirty or so and our truck wasn't going anywhere. We made a few phone calls the guys checked under the hood to see if we could figure out what the problem was. No luck. So we saw some lights in the distance and praise the Lord we were at the top of the hill so we decided to push it to town. We got it rolling and took a running leap inside as the car rolled down the hill. We pushed it over a long bridge to a highway check point just after the bridge.

One of the officers working the checkpoint escorted Kelton and Caroline to the village mechanic's house. At this time it's about 2:00A.M.. They woke up the 'village mechanic' and told him our dilemma and he said he would be there to help us at 5:00am.

We had been in contact with the people that let us borrow the car and they contacted one of their ministry partners in Mozambique and asked him to come pick us up so we didn't have to sleep on the side of the road in the car again. Someone had to stay with the car and the brave men Kelton and Matt said they would do the job. So Jaco came to our rescue and took all the girls to a camp site where another AIM team was having a little retreat. It just happened to be right on the coast and we got to play on the beach and go swimming in the Indian Ocean. Don't tell the boys that though....they had to sit with the car all day and sleep in the car that night.. shhhhh....

That 'Real Life Team' that was already there took us in and cooked us dinner and we got cleaned up and got a good night sleep.

We eventually got the whole car thing taken care of and made it back in time to go to the 'Brown Sugar', a backpackers hostel, where our team was going to stay while we waited for our India visas. That wasn't the end of the chaos though. That night at the Brown Sugar is one that I will surly never forget.....check out  "Held up" coming soon...

Our time in Africa has come to an end and we are off to India! I have so many stories to tell you and I will post them very soon. In India we well be working with an orpahanage and a leper colony. Please pray for our safety as we enter a new leg of our journey. I will have more updates soon! Thank you all for your prayers!

For the second part of Malawi we headed north to a village called Nkhotkota and we worked with an organization called HIM (Harvesters International Ministries). We did door to door evangelism in Muslim communities and we showed 'The Jesus Film' successfully 3 times with an attempt at 5 times. The people in these villages are so hungry for the Jesus.

There is a strong Muslim presence in Malawi and it is really heavy in Northern Malawi. It started back in the beginning of slave trade. Arab people came to Malawi, lets just say a long long time ago, and they would go into the little villages and give the people a choice. Either become Muslim or become a slave so the mosques started going up right and left.

While we were there we learned a lot about ministering to the Muslim community. We worked with a pastor named Eddie who grew up in a Muslim family and was being trained to be a Muslim leader when the Lord got a hold of his heart. Now he is an amazing man of God. Because he grew up in a Muslim family we had the opportunity to meet some of the Muslim leaders in the community because Eddie was related to them. We had a chance to ask questions and even pray over one of the leaders in their community.

We attended many church services while we were there and we saw 3 people baptized and over 50 people receive Christ.  

Pastor Dunkin was our Pastor and he is also the Director of the high school in Magowi. Him and his family welcomed us into their home and took very good care of us. They were so welcoming and such a blessing to live with for three weeks. While we were with them we were invited to teach Conversational English to a couple of the classes and we made ourselves available if any of the students wanted to ask questions or just practice speaking English.

Pastor Duncan also arranged a conference for the pastors in the area and each of us had the opportunity to speak to them about what the Lord had been teaching us and share a bit of our testimony with them. That was something that was really hard for me. I am not a huge fan of public speaking. But I got up there twice and said what I thought I needed to say. I get so nervous that I don't remember anything that I said afterwards but I think it went well. It will be ok if I don't have to do that again for a while though.

After the last church service that we were going to be able to attend there were a few people that asked us to pray for them before we left. They all had different physical ailments and they all got healed when we prayed for them!!!  One of them was an older man and he was having pain in one of his legs and he said that first it was one leg and then the other and the Lord revealed to Meredith that it was a problem with his back and that was making his leg hurt so we prayed for his back and his leg and when he stood up he said all the pain was gone!!!  That's the first time I have been there when the Lord has healed someone instantly.

Well, after a lot of prayer and a few extra long days in the car, the Lord has brought us to Malawi. We are the first World Race team to come to Malawi and we are hoping to establish a contact here with a local orphanage and help them with only the Lord knows what. After however many days we end up staying in Malawi we will head down through Mozambique to meet up with an organization called "His Ministries".  I don't know what that hold either. Please pray that we would be in tune with the Lords voice as we continue our ask the Lord trip to different countries in Africa.

I am sorry that it has been so long since I have updated everyone. We have been in Africa for about 6 weeks now and my team was in Botswana for the first month working with Fly Missions. We visited orphan feeding programs and put our painting skills to work again in an apartment. That month was about building unity in our team and learning about our spiritual gifts.

Unity was something that we had to work on every day. Where we were staying there were two little plastic kids tables with 6 tiniy little chairs and at the end of every day we would sit down for dinner at the tiny tike's table and talk about the things that annoyed us or frustrated us about that days events. Sometimes we just needed to establish our team norms like; when your done with your dishes wash them and don't leave hair in the bathtub. So we've started becoming a family and we are starting to prefer each other.

Twards mid month in Botswana we started to pray about going to Zimbabwe. Several members of our team have heard from the Lord that we are supposed to go there we just didn't know what time. We had a contact and almost everything set up but not enough set up to enter the country safely because of the amount of unrest they are experiencing right now. So after all that planning and the Lord clearly closing that door for right now we are on a ATL ( ask the Lord ) road trip right now.  The Lord told us to go to Namibia and here we are. He didn't tell us how long and He didn't tell us what we would be doing. We just take every day one at a time. So right now I am in Windhoek, Namibia staying at a backpackers hostel called "The Cardboard Box" and I don't know how long we will be here.

Since we have been in Windhoek we have gone to the Park downtown to do a little bit of a prayer walk and I met a woman there that I will call Mary and I have had a couple conversations with her and hope I get to have lunch with her before we have to go.

Mary has an amazing story. She was born in Germany in 1975 and when she turned 15 in 1990 her and her family were forced to come back to Namibia ( her family is originally from Namibia) after the war ended. Her dad died when she was young and she is an only child so it was just her and her mom growing up. When she was old enough she started to work so she could put herself through school. She would still like to finish school but she hasn't been able to . She got a education certificate and started to work in the tourism industry and has been for several years now until the company she was working for started to go bankrupt and they didn't have money to pay her anymore so now she comes to the park every time she has free time and thinks while she waits for interviews to call her back so she can start working again and take care of her 6 year old son. We just sat in the park and talked for a long while and she let me pray for her. I don't know what is going to come of our friendship only the Lord knows...

Thank you all for all your prayers and support.