The Pastors' Book Set Project has come to Zambia! This project has served pastors in many places around the world and this year it was the privilege of 4000+ Zambian pastors and lay leaders to be encouraged in this way.

Recently, Flying Mission Zambia had the privilege of flying the Baptist Strategy Coordinator, Mike Howard, and Treasurer, Tim Shaw, to the far north-east corner of Zambia. James and Mary Margaret Adair live up there in the village of Kaputa, which is only 6 miles from the border with Congo. This couple have been placed here as part of the Baptist strategy to reach the “least reached” or “un-reached” people groups in the area. James and Mary Margaret have spent the majority of the last six months sorting out a house and working on learning the Taabwa language. They have also been learning the Bemba language, the trade language of the area.

Flying Mission has lots of visitors: some come to spend time with family members or friends serving with the mission, some come from the sending missions to find out how their people are getting along, and some come from organisations that are looking into whether we can work together on a particular project. One of our visitors last year was a Canadian, Len McKay, who served with Flying Mission as an aircraft mechanic in the mid-1990s. He wasn’t here simply for a nostalgia trip but to find out what we are currently doing and if his home church could contribute in some way.

Flying Mission Zambia (FMZ) has placed Phil Smith and his family at Chitokoloki Mission with a Cessna 206, to serve the Church and Mission in that area. When Chief Pilot Dave Lott was checking Phil out on airstrips in the North West Province, neither had any idea that very soon they were going to be used significantly by God. Phil’s first Air Ambulance flight for FMZ saved Gladys, a 16-year-old girl.

Mercia’s attention was caught by the Radio Pulpit programme, which today was focussed on the ‘CrossRoads’ Programme, a Campus Crusade educational programme geared towards young people. Developed in two parts, ‘Better Choices’ aims to help young people make choices based on godly values; ‘Life at the Crossroads’ is a training programme for those eager to pass on these values to their peers and establish Abstinence Clubs.

Mercia, with her professional nursing skills, and already involved with HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, knew this was a programme in which she wanted to get involved. She volunteered, and was soon pitched into an introductory training session whose aim was to teach people how to effect behavioural change in the battle against HIV/AIDS through messages of abstinence and faithfulness.

Participants in Flying Mission's Lifeskills training courses, entitled "Life at the CrossRoads", do an exercise using poetry to help them reflect on their views of life in the face of the effect that HIV and AIDS has on the people around them.

The exercise is guided with words to begin each line of the verse. The participants complete the line in their own words.

The following is one of the poems written by one of the young women during a Lifeskills course.

A typical combi!

Early this morning I arrived at Holy Cross Hospice and almost immediately found myself leaving again. The staff were all heading off to do some home visits. Myself, another nurse, a couple of nurse aides, a few social workers, several volunteers and a pre-school teacher bundle onto the combi and set off to a worn-out area of town called Old Naledi. Here, we bump and shudder along the dirt roads, negotiating crumbling homes, ditches, broken glass and excitable children.

We wait and wonder, “What will they be like?” It’s a question we ask ourselves every time we make a trip to the airport to meet newcomers. We have seen their photos, read their CV’s (resumés), communicated by e-mail, but until we see them, there is still that question.

The doors open and there they are; Deborah from Switzerland, and Christian and Stefan from Germany. The youngest is 18 and the oldest 20.

The Tumelong Child Care Centre in Kumakwane has a new look. Tumelong, which provides a feeding program and learning facilities for orphans and other vulnerable children, now sports brightly painted walls inside and out. Flying Mission provided the paint, and Samara Lubbe and her friend Safura, both art students at Maru-a-Pula school in Gaborone, volunteered to paint pictures on the walls.

It was not just an ordinary Sunday in Botswana. It was Boipuso, Independence Day. During his greeting, our pastor remarked that many babies born on Independence Day are given the name Boipuso. Mark tried hard to think of anyone he knew who was born on the 30th of September, but his mind drew a blank, and the thought of babies born on Independence Day passed out of his mind.