Overflow arrived in Lilongwe, Malawi on Monday November 11th. We are staying as a team in a guest house all to ourselves (watch THIS video for a house tour) on a radio station’s property. We love our house!! Our ministry partner this month is Youth for Christ Malawi which I am so happy about since I absolutely loved my experience in Zimbabwe where we got to be with YFC there too.
What is really special about this month is that YFC in Malawi is new. We get to help pioneer the organization and build it from the ground up. Edward is the director, and he began to establish a music, drama (like skits), sports, outreach, and bible study ministry before we arrived. Week 1 involved going to each of these ministries and seeing how they were run.
This is Edward.
These are some of our YFC friends
Sports ministry. Yay for more basketball!
Week 2 involved giving training on how to effectively run each of these ministries and how to prepare leaders to come alongside Edward. It blows my mind how the Lord has been preparing me (and the rest of my team) this whole race for this exact thing. We were trained on how to do a Bible study at training camp, how to evangelize in South Africa, the different forms and expressions of worship at our first debrief, and how to preform dramas with a message in Zimbabwe. God literally set us up to be fully equipped to then train others on what we know. So it just makes me even more excited for what we have to offer YFC Malawi.
The above 2 pictures are of preaching/training
So with all that being said, so far our ministry has involved training and helping execute these different types of ministries as well as help train on the leadership side of things as well as go into schools and speak (bible stories, personal stories, songs, and dances). We live in a wonderful house that we get all to ourselves, grocery shop ourselves, and cook ourselves. Last month we ate the same meals on rotation each week, and ate what the people we lived with ate. This month we get to choose our own meals (aka I get to choose tuna patties for my meal each week haha), and grocery stores here in Lilongwe are similar to what we have at home but just with less options. We have running water most of the day and electricity this month! Praise the Lord for that!!! Laundry is still done by hand washing it in a bucket and hanging on a line. We travel to places using a taxi van, and there is a bookstore nearby that sells coffee which we have gone to a couple times so far.
Teaching a Bible verse dance at a primary school.
Just for fun, here is a picture of the Thanksgiving food we prepared as a team to serve our hosts, our drivers, and the radio station that is allowing us to live in their guest house this month.
UPDATE:
By the time you’re seeing this, we’ll only have a few days left in Malawi (approximately), which is also the LAST few days in Africa. How crazy is it that I have lived in Africa for the last 4 months and my time is almost up here??? On December 7, X Squad will meet up once again and travel to Asia. Our first country will be Vietnam. X Squad will have a debrief to process our time in Africa, check in with mentors, and rearrange our leadership structure. Vietnam is a closed country which means Christianity is illegal. For safety, my blog and all social media accounts will become private. Only those who are already friends/following me will have access to seeing my social media. My blog will be password protected, so only those with the password will have access to reading my blog posts. When I have more information on that, I’ll get the password out to you guys.
Please be praying for us as we travel (by plane again! Yay. Never knew how much I’d miss flying until I took so many stinky, long bus rides). Pray for our squad as we will all be getting new teams. Sometimes transition and change can be hard, especially going from doing life with people who know you better than you know yourself at this point to starting all over again all while doing it on a completely new continent in a completely new culture. Pray for our logistics leaders (Brooke and Jeff) as they are in charge of getting us from the airport in Malawi to our debrief location in Vietnam. And thank you again to every single one of you who is praying for me and following along with my journey- it means so much to me!
With love,
Hals
