Our Macha partners have shared this story with us:

Macha was blessed just recently by a team of 10 wonderful people from the State of Virginia, USA. They spent their time visiting government schools and showing love to the children. They also did evening outreaches where they showed the Jesus film and many people were changed by it.

At the same time, the visitors were learning about the Tonga culture through interaction with the local people and a 'village live-in'.

They painted the Assembly of God church in a beautiful Zambian blue inside. They had a young people's day at church for the teens and the unmarried 20-30's. They visited the hospital and saw the new hospital playroom for children.

Chilongolo, base for Flying Mission operations in Zambia, is growing in all directions. This new hangar, funded jointly by Beit Trust and a supporting church in USA, is the latest development. It will provide much-needed wind protection and hard standing for our aeroplanes. Indeed it may even enable us to apply for status as a maintenance base in the future.

I just have to tell this story. It is definitely different! A bit frightening too, at first. I won't mention any names or places because of how it might impact the family involved.

Open for business! Connections Guest House is finally ready to welcome you!

After several years of effort by many helpers from around the world, the main house at Chilongolo (Flying Misson Zambia's base outside of Lusaka) is ready to receive guests.

Not many people want to live out in the Kalahari. People living there are largely un-thought of by the outside world. Seherelela is a settlement in the Kalahari - a place with a school for the children of the families working at the surrounding cattle posts, where people of Botswana who own cattle keep their herds.

There is no church here, but about 250 children here learned who Jesus is because a team of people cared enough to take time to share about him with them.

When knitting wool arrived in the container from USA - you can read about it in the item, Worth waiting for - and needles appeared in boxes from UK shortly afterwards, we knew here at Flying Mission Zambia that it was time to get people knitting!

The girls in the neighbourhood were the first ones to try. They knitted 'squares' - in reality they were many interesting shapes - which they crocheted together to make a colourful blanket, of which they are most proud. It was fun to see them walking around with needles clicking, instead of sitting aimlessly around their houses. They will give the blanket to an older person when the cold winter nights come to Zambia in June and July.

We headed into what was, for me, unexplored Africa. Mansa is the main town in the province of Luapula. Luapula is the poorest province in Zambia. If you are a government or medical official, it is the last place you want to get assigned. And, if you do get assigned there, you serve the minimum amount of time and then get out of there. It’s a long drive from Lusaka. So it is a bit of a forgotten part of Zambia. If you find someone who has lived there long, it is because they have a heart for the needs and people of the region.

We flew there in the Flying Mission Zambia C206 to check out two things:

I wonder what you get excited about. I would guess it's unlikely to be a mud-encrusted truck piled high with corrugated iron sheets. But that was exactly what did it for Macha folk this week, because the opening of their school depended on the safe arrival of that particular delivery.

Ronda Krause heads up the MICS (Macha Innovative Community School) deep in the bush in Southern Province. There at Macha they are building new premises for the school. When Ronda and her husband Gil returned from USA after Christmas to open for the new term, they found that the building was missing a vital component: the roof!

Flying Mission Zambia (FMZ) uses the Internet extensively to conduct its business and communicate with the rest of the world. EvaLynn Lott (16) has written of some events which finally enabled her family to have an Internet connection at their home 4 kilometres from Chilongolo, FMZ base, where her father David is Chief Pilot.

'Okay everyone - are you ready? 'asked Dad. The tension was building inside of me, just like the tension on the ropes that were helping to raise the Internet tower in our garden. I was excited - and scared. If this tower did not go up as hoped, we could end up smashing a corner of our house, or worse still, hurting someone.