A weekend of highs and lows…

As some of you may have seen, our 31 boxes finally arrived in Zambia just over a week ago and (apart from the clearing agent phoning me to ask if we could send him some money to buy sugar for a hot drink!!?) the collection and delivery of the boxes to Mkushi went pretty smoothly. We were excited on Saturday to go open them up and grab a few things - warmer hoodies, toys etc and we were also looking forward to meeting up with the missionary mechanic who’s said he could try to get us some seatbelts for our car. But that’s when we things went a bit off track…

Having worked out what seatbelts we’d need, the mechanic (Tobi) then offered to take a look underneath the vehicle since we were by the ramps. What we discovered was not good!! Not only could we see a massive oil leak on the gearbox (which turned out to be pretty much empty) but there were other obvious leaks too and even missing parts! The good news really only seemed to be that we were still alive! We don’t yet know how much all the repairs might cost or if there’s more wrong with the vehicle than the immediately obvious, but either way the need for us to find a more reliable vehicle has somewhat grown (and the need for us to find seatbelts less so). 👇🏻 Spot the missing part!👇🏻

One possible prospect is a charity that helps missionaries get hold of brand new vehicles at a massively reduced price... We're still trying to work out if that would be the right thing. A new Landcruiser would obviously be an amazing asset in the long run, but the initial outlay would still take most of what we have saved up and more besides. Please pray and we’ll keep you posted.

The old Landcruiser being out of action meant that on Sunday we all went to church in Beulah’s big yellow truck - affectionately known as ‘Bumble’.👆🏻 The kids seemed to enjoy the novelty of the ride and our ministry went well.👇🏻

Despite Tim not feeling well (with quite a lot of flu-like symptoms and sickness around at the moment) it was good to be able to share songs, a drama and some words with the church. They were encouraged (one young lady even gave her life to Jesus!!) and so it finished the weekend on a much more positive note.

As has rightly been pointed out to us, we just have to trust that God will show us the way forward with our vehicle situation and keep going in whatever way He leads us. Again though, we'd really appreciate your prayers. It would be great to have something sorted out by the time our outreach begins in mid September. 🙏