It's been a tremendously busy season for our family and the ACTION Zambia family. I have multiple blog posts to put together to highlight the work here and what God is doing in our family and ministry. Somehow we haven't posted since June and A LOT has happened in a few months and we want to share our excitement, concerns and hopes and dreams.
Since our last post we hosted a Beau and Mim Ellison from California who helped us do two school outreaches that really challenged us and our Champs youth. ACTION Zambia has historically worked with churches that run schools in their communities. These church-run community schools teach the national school curriculum usually at a more affordable cost than the "free" government schools. It's not just that many community schools are cheaper, they are more available because the government simply has no ability to train enough teacher, build enough schools and create enough curriculum for a country with millions of children who have little to know hope of getting through grade 12. Zambia is the still the sixth youngest country in the world and has one of the lowest life expectancies in world. All this to say that the Zambia is overwhelmingly young and poor with little opportunity. But there are churches standing in the gap. In our community, kids are walking as far as16 miles roundtrip from heavily populated urban area with no schools. to go the government school
I'm just going to say it.
ACTION Zambia has the access to work with thousands of community schools. But we don't actually have the resources, personnel or infrastructure to continue working with the three churches we currently work with. But the opportunity to work with schools, churches and children are tremendous, overwhelming and amazing.
Here's one example. The Ellisons are teachers and love working with youth, children and other teachers. It took less than five minutes to arrange two separate dates to visit two community schools. We packed the Beast (the new [to us] Land Cruiser) with 10 of the current Champs (Ciyanjano's youth discipleship group) and loaded the roof rack with games, balls and the big parachute. We drove deep into Kanyama Compound and arrived at a school run by a Church of the Nazarene pastor. The school has 6 or 7 teachers and about 1000 kids. Literally. While the Ellisons met with the teachers and did some training and encouraged them during the two different sets of school shifts (morning shift as about 600 kids and the afternoon shift was about 500), the Champs were able to go into the classrooms and teach the Bridge Illustration
(click here) to over a thousand kids. They answered asked and questions, encouraged kids to come to the church if they wanted to know more and then erased their version of the Bridge Illustration from the board and had the students recreate it. We also played games, ran races and had blast. With a fully funded missionary dedicated to child evangelism and funds for the ministry - we could do this in a different school every day of the week and literally never run out of schools.
Pray for us. Pray for wisdom and guidance and vision!
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| Auntie Queen and Uncle Issac teach the Bridge Illustration |
Love working with children, teachers, youth? Feel God calling you outside of your comfort zone? Please contact us. Of course God can accomplish this work without us. But ACTION Zambia can't do this without YOU.
Pray for us.
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