Sorry Can't Think of A Cool Title Today

Well I am too tired and frustrated with the internet to try to sit here and think of a fun and exciting title that would make you all want to read my blog. :-( So hopefully you are reading it anyway!

Internet: Although we have internet now in the village it is VERY inconsistent! Since our generator broke (we are working on fixing it) and we are in the middle of the rainy season, sun and solar power is a hard thing to come by...the best time to get on is first thing in the morning when I am at school. By the time I get home the power is very low if on at all. So for all of you who are sending me emails and messages thinking that "oh great she has internet and can respond quickly now" I am very sorry. Please give me grace and time to respond. Also even if I did have unlimited internet access I don't think I would be on all the time anyway b/c I still want to be very present here in Dzuwa and with the work I am doing. So please DON'T stop sending me emails and messages as I love reading them and getting caught up on all of your lives...just remember it is still going to take me a little while to get back to you. :-) Please pray for patience for me as the whole internet thing is very frustrating to me! I think it might be more frustrating knowing that you have the internet capabilities and that its just not working than not having it at all!

School: Well we are heading into our 4th week back at school and things are going relatively well. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the teacher who has taught standard 1 for the past 10 years and who was supposed to be helping me the first term is actually coming to my class and helping me this term! Praise the Lord!!!!! As my translator is now gone I was unsure of how teaching by myself was going to work out. Thankfully the Lord provided me some help! I would say as of right now its a mix 50/50 of the time I teach by myself and with Mr.Wanyemba's help. Surprisingly the kids are more well behaved when I am teaching by myself most of the time (as I set up some pretty strict rules first term) than when Mr.Wanyemba is with me (he just lets them do whatever they want and doesn't enforce any rules). Please pray for calm children! There has been a great increase in students this term as we are in the hungriest months now. Every day in standard 1 we have between 100-140 students!!! (Compare this to last term when we had between 70-100 every day) The same increase in kids is also being seen in the other classes too so I think we are currently feeding between 600-700 kids a day in the feeding program! Wow! I am so thankful this program is in place to help feed these kids but our resources are being stretched even more now than first term. So far the Lord has provided what we need for the first 3 weeks but PLEASE PLEASE continue to pray for continued provision as we are short on sugar and money again.

Witchcraft: The other night Gloria, Elliot, and I were eating dinner and listening to the news on the radio as is our typical nightly routine when a crazy and disturbing story came on. (side note: The radio is actually a wonderful piece of technology that I think we overlook in America as we have the TV, computers, and the internet...when you live in the bush and have no other access to the outside world the radio is such an amazing resource and gift! Its especially fun when randomly amazing english worship music or the new top songs in America come on) Anyway the story was about a woman in another nearby village who had given birth to...get this...2 plastic bags!!!! filled with some rocks (not small stones), a centipede, mango seeds, and other random things!!!!!!!!!! I was dumbfounded and was asking Gloria and Elliot how that even happens! They looked at me plain as day and said with a straight face "witchcraft of course" just like it was matter-of-fact regular occurrence! At first I though they were joking but they weren't! Witchcraft is just sooooo out of the realm of my everyday experiences that I guess its just really hard for me to believe. I mean when you are growing up as a little kid (at least in my experience) you are always told that witches and magic and all of that crazy stuff is not real and doesn't exist. But here in Africa it IS REAL and IT DOES EXIST! This is something that is going to take me some time to get used to...to work on changing my mindset....when I hear a story about witchcraft instead of totally doubting whoever is telling me the story and thinking that they are crazy and are just making things up or are believing in something that is so obviously not real it makes me want to laugh out loud I need to take them seriously because what they are telling me is REAL...I know that Satan is alive and is fighting against Christ, His people, and all of the great work they are doing in the world because I've seen it!...in America though it shows up in very different ways...in Malawi though Satan is alive and fighting through witchcraft!!!! Please pray for the country of Malawi and for countries all over the world who struggle with witchcraft! Pray that God would reign supreme and that His name would be known  not Satan's!

Books: Now to finish up with a super sweet cool story about God providing for me! :-) When I was packing for Malawi there were a bunch of books that I had to leave behind because I just didn't have the room for them. I was super bummed! But what is super cool is that God has provided every single book I left behind for me here in Malawi! Gloria and Elliot have a big bookshelf of books that they have collected from people throughout the years and every book that I left they had!!! The last set of books that just recently appeared when a friend returned some books she borrowed last year is the Chronicles of Narnia!!!! These books were the ones I was most upset to have to leave behind. I reasoned with myself that since I had already read them that I should bring books that I haven't read yet...so I left them behind. I was SOOO excited to pull the set out of the bag and Gloria was very taken aback by my huge reaction! haha  What is even cooler though is that I opened the front cover and found a note. The book was given to Fletcher (the head of the ministry) from the 2002 Summer Service Team from the New Wilmington Mission Conference!!!!! This conference was the conference that sent me to Malawi for the first time on the Summer Service Team of 2008! My leader of my trip was actually on the 2002 team! So its soooo crazy cool to me that God would provide the books that I most wanted and missed through the conference's summer service team!!! :-)

Thats it for now! Thanks for your prayers and encouragement!!! For all of you back home with cold weather and snow enjoy it for me! I am really missing it! Go sledding, make snow angels, have snowball fights, build snow forts, and then come inside and bundle up in sweatpants and a sweatshirt under a quilt with a nice warm cup of hot chocolate/tea in front of the fire! Maybe even take some pictures and send them to me too! :-)

Love to All!
Steph

Picture of Chico (Gloria & Elliot's Daughter and my little sister here- she turns 3 in Feb) and Me at Fletcher and Angela's Wedding in Lilongwe on January 8th

Tried to put up a picture of Fletcher and Angela but the internet wouldn't let me :-(  

At least I got one up though!

MERRY (late) CHRISTMAS & HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

Well I am sitting here on the internet in my little village. Sooo crazy! I still can’t believe it! Its officially 2011 both here in Malawi and back at home! I actually got the chance to watch the ball drop in NYC with my sister Darcy via skype! How Amazing! It was so great as I was a little disappointed last night that instead of getting ready to watch the ball drop or bang pots and pans to celebrate the New Year I was sitting in my bed working on a report that I had to finish. What a great surprise to wake up to!

December feels like a blur to me. It went by soooo fast! How is it that I am already starting into my 5^th month here?!!! The major highlight of the month was the presence of the World Race Team (WRT). God seriously poured out His blessings on me through them this month!!! It almost leaves me speechless. He answered so many of my prayers through them and I am sooooo grateful. Going into the beginning of December I was really struggling being here. Really missing home and family, and just feeling like there was no possible way I was going to make it. When they arrived they took me in as one of their own teammates basically, loving on me and encouraging me, which was exactly what I needed. It was so great getting to know each person on the team and getting to hear all about their experiences in the other countries and how God has been working. Hearing their stories really helped to continue to grow my faith and teach me more about God’s power. Its really easy for me sometimes to fall into the trap of totally limiting what God can do in my mind and not praying with total confidence knowing that God is totally capable of anything. They helped to show me what praying with complete trust and faith looks like on a whole new level. Everyday we had devotions together too. It was so amazing to be back in Christian community with people of my same age group, culture, and language! Although we are a community here within JTW it is very difficult to connect deeply with people whose culture is just sooooo vastly different from mine and who speak another language. It was also so great to just “be” with them. To be able to walk over to their house and just hang. To read by myself if I wanted to, to play cards with them (learned a super cool new card game called 13), to listen to someone playing the guitar, to talk with them, or to just sit quietly and enjoy being in the presence of others. They were just sooo welcoming and caring. I even got to make two trips into the city with them to first, run some errands to the embassies in preparation for their next month and second, this past Wednesday, to see them off as they were leaving. It was so great to be able to escape with them on a mini-retreat to a super cool hostel in the city and to be able to again just “be” with them exploring the city and fun restaurants. Some special treats during the two trips include: a chocolate milkshake and grilled chicken, tomato, & cheese sandwich for dinner one night, yogurt and granola and fruit salad for breakfast, movie night with the girls (we watched My Big Fat Greek Wedding), getting to witness one of the hostel staff members come to Christ as a result of the World Race Team loving (they had also stayed at this hostel as an entire squad 65+ people before coming to Dzuwa and other teams going out to other places so they were continuing to build on relationships during our 2 stays there), and homemade secret recipe Italian ice cream at an Italian restaurant run by a man who moved to Malawi from Rome. Well I could go on forever about how great the team was and how much I learned from then but overall God just totally used the WRT to minister to my heart! Thank you sooooo much team A-mor3!

Christmas in Malawi:

As much as I missed my family, all of our Christmas traditions, Christmas decorations, cold weather and snow, and just the holiday spirit that permeates the air this year, it was super cool to be able to experience Christmas in such a pure way. No commercialism to pollute the true reason for celebrating Christmas- the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ! J The whole advent season was really sweet as I was able to go through an advent reader I had in my bible. It was sooooo amazing to be able to go back and read through many of the different prophecies made about Jesus and then to be able to see how they were fulfilled in His birth! I learned a lot! Christmas Eve night there is no church service here in Malawi so while I was cooking dinner that night out on our front porch I sat and sang all of the Christmas carols I knew and had my own little church service. After dinner I went over to hang with the WRT and we sang more Christmas carols and watched ELF. Christmas day is very simple in Malawi. You go to church in the morning and then come home and if you have the money make a Christmas meal. So that is what we did (or tried to do) here in Dzuwa. The Christmas church service bell rang around 9am but church doesn’t usually start until 10am so all of us (JTW & WRT) didn’t start off for church until around 9:45am. When we arrived we made it just in time for the closing prayer and for announcements. Whoops! We missed the entire service! Oh Malawi time…you never know when things are going to happen! So we headed back to the house.  We had our own little devotion when we got back and then hung out until we started cooking dinner around 3pm. Well dinner took longer to prepare (as is always the case) so we didn’t end up eating until around 8:45pm but everything was delicious!!! We had rice, nsima, tomato “soup” for the rice, 3kgs of goat, 6 chickens, and vegetables. On Christmas Eve Rachel and Christal from the WRT and I decided we were going to make some Christmas dessert surprises. J So for dessert we had plain and strawberry rice krispie treats (they don’t just sell plain marshmallows here in malawi), peanut butter fudge, chocolate and peanut butter no bake cookies (compliments of Alexandra), and vanilla cake with caramel sauce topping (which we baked on a little grill!!! similar to a webber but a much cheaper version). Everything was soooo delicious! We were very excited since we did everything from scratch without measuring cups or spoons or a real oven! Ha! It was also very hilarious to watch the Malawians try to secretly pass off their desserts to one another since they didn’t like them!!!!! I guess its because they just haven’t grown up with sweet tastes like what we made! Hahaha very funny! Anyway Christmas was overall very nice and fun and just a great time of fellowship celebrating the birth of Jesus.

Our New Sets of Wheels!!!

JTW Malawi is now the proud new owner of 2 motorcycles and an SUV!!! It is crazy to see how God is providing for our ministry. Transportation has been a struggle here with lots of money being poured into public transportation and lots of time being wasted travel on that public transport. Thanks to an amazing donor we were given the money to buy our new wheels to help alleviate this problem! I got to take our new SUV for a ride yesterday (just a 2 min drive down to the school and back haha) and am super exited! It was really weird though driving on the right hand side of the car while having to shift with my left hand instead of right! Oh boy! Something new to get used to! The SUV will be especially helpful in ensuring that I have clean water to drink as we can now take it to town and load it up with water. I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to get clean water here in Dzuwa since my water pump died so this is a huge answer to prayer!!!

Prayer Requests:

-Safe travels for the World Race Team: Praise the Lord they arrived safely in Johannesburg after a 36 hr bus ride, one team still has to make the drive to Swaziland so be praying for protection for that drive, and pray for renewed strength and energy heading into their 7 month

-School starting back up here in Dzuwa: Sadly I am really really really really not looking forward to going back to teach, I am so excited to see the kids but teaching is sooooooo hard and exhausting and I just feel soooo inadequate! I also just found out that the guy that has been helping me teach and translating for me (my co-head of the Feeding program) got accepted to college in Uganda and is leaving mid-January! So I am really not sure what is going to happen and how I am going to teach by myself. Pray Pray Pray

-My Health: I am just getting over being sick. I got sick this past Monday while in Lilongwe. I think it was dysentery (whatever that is I am not really sure). One of the girls on the WRT had it and my symptoms were very similar to hers so that is what I am guessing. I started on a course of Cipro and seem to being doing fine now. Pray for continued healing and that I wouldn’t get sick again. Praise the Lord I got sick in town where there were toilets!!!

Okie Dokie…that’s all for now J Thanks for hanging in and caring enough to read to the end!