Hey yall!
Thank you as always for all of your thoughts and prayers for the team and me as we went out to the bush this past week! We all arrived at Mwai Kalupe (apparently it’s “mau-wee-ka-loo-pay”...my bad!) safely and returned to the base in Mongu indelibly changed all and only because of God’s grace. So thank you again, and keep them prayers a-comin.
So much has happened in the last week that I hardly know where to start! Mwai Kalupe was incredible in every possible way. I’ve gone on one-week missions trips to fix up a churches or help out with VBS or something, usually in small Texas towns, but I’d never communicated the message of Jesus Christ to people who would be receiving it in full for the first time. When we arrived to Mwai Kalupe our first day, the villagers immediately helped clear a patch of ground so we could set up camp and watched closely as tents popped up.
Our first sunset in the bush
We all thought that after we’d settled in a bit, the villagers would go on home to eat dinner and come back the next day to check out what we were up to. But they actually stuck around - even after Ron, our team leader, invited them to come back for a service at our camp site the following day. They wanted to know, Don’t you have anything to say to us about Jesus now? They’d heard that we were coming to talk about Jesus, and they were so excited to hear our message that they didn’t want to wait another day! It was just like that the next day, and the next, and the next…I’ve never seen such genuine hunger to learn about the gospel before. Then again, I’d never done anything like this before, and the surprises just kept on coming.
Each morning, the team split up into small groups of 4-5, each with one English-Silozi translator and at least one team member who felt comfortable sharing Christ with unreached people groups. As a team, we covered a lot of ground - some groups walked upwards of 4 miles to reach remote clusters of huts/sub-villages that made up Mwai Kalupe, and a couple of the guys walked even further to labor alongside villagers in their rice fields. At about 9 hours (or whenever people showed up…the sun was the best clock out there), we invited villagers to come to the camp site for discipleship class.
Discipleship class at the camp site
In the afternoons, some groups headed out again while half the team stayed at the site to play epic soccer games and hang out with kids.
By Day 2, we were learning the Lozi form of “duck-duck-goose” and painting the kids’ fingernails with Tara’s sparkly nail polish (the boys were just as excited as the girls, if not more so!). Every night at 20 hours (8 pm for us American folk), we held a service around a huuuuge camp fire just outside our site. Lloyd, Moses, Felix, Mobi, Goodson, Bonny, and T-bo (our translators) helped us open worship with awesome songs in Silozi, then Ron/Lloyd/Moses stole the night away with solid teachin’ and preachin’. The services were definitely my favorite part of our experience in the bush – all the villagers that came were so excited just for the opportunity to be there, and by Saturday night’s service, they kept the service going on their own even after we’d all gone back to the tents!
Dancin and rockin out at Sunday's service
Since I’ll be here for another three or so months, I’ll hopefully be able to join other short-term groups when they go into the bush this summer. Till then, though, I have a lot of reflecting and praying to do…so more updates coming soon! Hope yall’re doing fantastically, and I can’t wait to see you again soon!
All my love and in His peace,
Stephanie :)
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