Life in Angola

Life here in Angola is going well. I am enjoying my experience at the hospital and teaching English. When I left Canada I was planning on working at the hospital for a while and teaching English later. Well no surprise my plans didn't quite work out like that. I am continuing to help at the hospital when I am not teaching English. So, I started teaching English 3 weeks ago or so. I help teach 2 classes each day from Monday to Friday. These classes were both started by Peter and I am now helping him with class. There are challenges with teaching English, for example somedays nobody shows up or they arrive 10 min. before class is over. But when the students, who are staff from the hospital, come we have a lot of fun together. Next week is the SIM conference- Esther, another Short-termer, and I have been doing some practicing for the music. For the past two weeks I have gone out to Rio da Huila with Peter and Shelly on Thursdays. Here we do an obstetric clinic- this week we had 32 or so ladies out from the villages. Most of these ladies don't speak Portugeuse but they do speak a tribal language, Mumhuila (which we don't speak very well so we use a translator). Each lady is weighed, blood pressure is taken, their belly's are measured and we listen to the fetal heart rate. This last week lots of the ladies were quite far advanced- mostly between 7-9 months.
One exciting thing is that we have electricity most of the time right now. Before we had power for 6 hours and no power for 12 hours but now we have power almost all of the time! So hot showers are more abudant now.
Congratulations to Tim and Erica on their wedding! I hope you had a wonderful day and you continue to see the Lord's blessing in your lives!

Blessings in Angola

Life is going well here in Angola. There have been some amazing stories from people at the hospital. This one girl- Maria about 14 years old- was in the hospital when I arrived in May. She had been walking on the sidewalk and got hit by a car. She had a broken femur and a broken jaw. First they set her leg and we put a cast on (my first experience of putting on a cast). We sent her home to rest up a little more before we were going to do jaw surgery and wire her jaw shut for 6 weeks or so. She came back less than a week later, her mom was telling us how she was eating meat and having a dance party. It was so neat. She had no pain in her jaw and we hadn't done anything. The Lord healed her- there is no other explanation. Another little boy whom I have grown to love is Fernando, 5 years old. He was burned with hot water back in April so he has been in the hospital for over a month. He had some third degree burns but he is doing pretty well. He didn't want to talk to me for a long time- he'd just cry when I tried to talk to him. But now he talks to me, Stacy and Hamilton (a student from Hamilton, ON); last week we discovered he loves cookies- bolachas. So everyday he asks us for bolachas or tells us to go by cookies and come back later. His mom gets him to eat by bribing him with bolachas for dessert!
Last weekend was Stacy's last weekend here- she's has now headed back to the States. So we took a little road trip up to Namibe, which is a port city where there is a beach. The water is a bit chilly but it was very nice to go swimming and sit in the sun. NOTE: when the travel nurse says, "You may be sensitive to the sun because of your malaria medication"- believe her! I have never had such a burn in my life. I must not know how to put on sunscreen or roticerate (spin) in the sun because my whole right side was burned while my left side was still pasty white!
This week I started teaching English to some of the staff at the hospital. So many people here in Angola want to learn English but some days I just don't know where to start. Please pray for wisdom for English class. Please also pray for a way to show these people the love of Christ through my actions and words.