Miscellaneous Missionary

This week looks like another trip. Lord willing, I will be returning to the Lolo work for an extended period of time. This trip, like all of the others has been set with complications. The government paperwork has been set back, forcing us to get a later start in the morning. The pastors with which we had tried to work are not available. However, the director and I hope to head south to Zambezia with another pastor for the opportunity of beginning study of the Lolo language. Right now, it is an area without any formal infrastructure, and I will have to arrange my own electricity, water, and everything else. However, I am piloting a new pattern of not building my own house, but renting an existing house from a local family, which means that the hassle and expense of housebuilding has for now been avoided completely. I should be out of touch in many senses until August, since I will be out in a very rural area. In August, the field has a workshop on advanced language learning, communication, and translation, which will bring me out for about two weeks. At that time, I will know more about what the time line will be and so forth. The Lolo team had hoped to begin teaching chronologically in the month of June, but the lesson preparation has been set back a little by some training of teachers aids. The hope is that this will greatly help the teaching in the future, since the people group is so scattered. The literacy class is moving forward, and the first readers of Lolo are emerging. There is not a lot of momentum for others to want to read at this point, but the base that exists in key in setting up the program in the future. The Zooks, who have been responsible in large part for all of this work give praise to God for the help of the literacy teacher that is nearly fully trained and able to teach most of the classes himself.
We would ask for prayer as we seek to prepare the soil of the hearts of the community for the planting of God's Word.
We would ask for prayer for wisdom in interacting with the community so that they will have clear understanding of their need for God's Word in their own language. Right now, the general mood is that missionaries are here to fund development projects, and the expectation of teaching God's Word is minimized. Please pray for God to create through our team a hunger for God's Word in the hearts of the Lolo people.