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!