We have just returned from our latest trip to Malawi, when we were delighted to be joined by an excellent group of volunteers for two weeks of open-air preaching and Seed Sower text distribution. Thank you sincerely for your prayers – the Lord was exceedingly gracious and gave many opportunities and much help to spread the Gospel, mainly around the busy streets of the capital city, Lilongwe.
We completely exhausted our supply of 25,000 bilingual texts and also handed out a large quantity of Gospel tracts. It was encouraging to receive immediate responses to the distribution, and Brother Harold and Goodson continue with the follow-up work.
At present I am trying to organise a brief return visit to Malawi at the end of next month to tie-up a number of loose ends in anticipation of the commencement of the 2019 Gospel Calendar distribution later in the year. One of those is to try to get our elderly Land Rover Discovery back on the road following a clutch failure a month or so ago. Harold and Goodson rely upon it for the follow-up work and regular literature distribution, so it is important that it is available. This is particularly so as we are just about to take delivery of 1,000,000 Gospel tracts, many of which need moved to distributors around the country.
We now have three shipping containers for use as regional literature storage depots. A couple of these need further fitting out and painting, so I am keen to move this forward, and to get them stocked as soon as possible. We hope to add to their number in the months ahead, Lord willing. In the meantime, there is also a wide-open door to access the Malawi Prisons (no pun intended), having been given the go-ahead to visit and send literature into every prison in the country. During our recent trip we had a visit to one of the district prisons, and the entire prison population was assembled to listen to the Gospel and to receive the literature we brought. We were able to provide a quantity of food to help relieve hardship within the prison. There are other exciting opportunities opening up, of which I will write more at a later time, when I hope to be able to furnish more detail.
A highlight for most of the team was a visit to the Dzaleka refugee camp, about 40 mins north of Lilongwe. The camp is home to around 40,000 refugees from around 8 African countries, the majority coming from Democratic Republic of Congo, and there are many young children among them, some of whom have witnessed terrible atrocities and have been orphaned or separated from their families. It was a privilege to visit the camp twice and to be able to preach the Gospel and to bring food and other supplies to support some of the most vulnerable there. There are abundant opportunities to bring the Gospel to these needy people, and we look to the Lord for wisdom and enablement so to do.
Please continue to pray for wisdom and guidance as we seek to maximise the opportunities presented to us in the work in Malawi.