Spring Growth

An update from Equip Mozambique! View this email in your browser It's been an exciting month for Equip Mozambique! We are thrilled to have Janie back home with us after her unexpected visit to the States for her grandfather's funeral. She had a great time reconnecting with her family, as well as sharing her love for Mozambique with friends and church family, but now it's good to have the team back together again.  We have our Janie! New Team Member Speaking of the team, we're excited to announce that it's growing again! We hired a young lady named Flavia to start working with us in the areas of admin, projects, and promoting and advertising our ministries. She has been working with us for a little over a week now, and she seems to be a great fit so far. She is very passionate and outgoing, which will greatly help get word out locally about what we do.   Flavia is learning computer skills to help us with administrative tasks, including translating the Equip Moz website into Portuguese. Janie has been helping out the Peniel media team in the area of photography. She recently did photos for the church's 7 days of prayer that led up to Easter. It's amazing to be part of a church that is so fervent in pursuing the Lord.  Janie made a cake to celebrate Dino's birthday this month. He is such a blessing to us and a great member of the Equip Mozambique team. The first term of the sewing school is wrapping up and we're looking forward to starting the new term soon! Facebook Website YouTube Email Donate Equip Mozambique is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, so all donations are eligible for tax-exemption. Welcoming New Board Members We're also excited to announce the addition of two Mozambican friends to our board of directors! Bernardo Magira is the administrator at Peniel, and has been instrumental in helping us get established here in Beira. He walked us through the process of getting our Mozambican residency status and continues to help us with paperwork and admin. Nora Binda is the leader of Peniel's compassion ministry, which cares for widows and orphans, and is where the idea for the sewing school ministry was born. Nora is full of ideas, vision, wisdom, and practical advice that have been a valuable addition to the team. We have so much to learn from their wisdom and experience of Mozambican culture, and we are excited to help them fulfill their visions for transforming Mozambique. LEFT: Bernardo Magira & his wife, Delfina RIGHT: Nora Binda & Carla. Nora's husband, Gabriel, is also a valued friend.  Bible App Jon is expanding the audio Bible website into an app for Android, Windows, and Apple phones. While the website is currently being used, we've found that the amount of interest in an app over a website has been overwhelming. Most cell phone users here understand how to use apps even if they don't understand websites, so the app will make preaching and audio Bible resources readily accessible to more people. We are also trying to partner with other churches to upload a greater variety of materials in local languages. Sewing Project Expansion The sewing project has been going SEW well! The widows who are in the class now will be graduating at the end of March, and Carla is training Maria, one of the graduates, to be a teacher for the next course. We will soon be able to take in a new group of ladies, and we plan to start including single mothers in addition to widows. The progress is exciting! LEFT: Amelia, a pastor's wife, with her new Bible cover! RIGHT: Maria, with a new dress that she and the ladies of sewing class made. She will be helping to teach the next group of students. New Work Space! We found and rented a second apartment to become our work space! We've had to work out of our bedrooms and living room for as long as we've been here, and there are times when broken electronics or other projects are strewn over every flat surface in the house. It will be nice to separate work and home a little better. We plan to use two bedrooms of the new place as office space and the other bedroom for guest housing or future missionaries. The apartment is only a couple blocks from our house, so walking back and forth will be easy. It was in need of a few renovations, which we are working on now, but the place should be usable very soon. We hired our friend, Brian, to paint the new apartment. He is doing a great job! Thank you for your prayers! Praise Reports God's guidance in finding a space where we can accommodate more projects and visitors. For more Mozambican partners. This prayer is definitely being answered as Flavia, Nora, and Bernardo have all joined our team! That Janie was able to have a good visit in the States and safe travels back to Mozambique. Prayer Requests Wisdom for Carla and Nora as they begin enrolling the next group of women for sewing classes; that they would be able to find the women with the greatest need, where the classes will have maximum impact. Pray for favor for our documents, as we are trying to register as a non-profit organization here in Mozambique. Protection for our health: there is a lot of malaria and other diseases going around right now. Please pray that we would manage our time well and be able to take times of rest. Baptisms at the beach on the day before Easter. Despite chilly temperatures and rough waves, more than 800 people made this public profession of their new life in Jesus. Thanks for reading, please remember us in your prayers!

Starting strong in 2016!

An update from Equip Mozambique! View this email in your browser Starting strong in 2016! Happy New Year, by the way We hope the new year has begun well for you all, it certainly has for the Equip Mozambique team!  Here's Team Equip Moz as of the beginning of the year, but we're hoping to grow in 2016! Christmas in Malta We had originally planned to spend the holidays in Mozambique, but Carla’s parents offered to help buy tickets for the whole family to visit them in Malta! It was so good to be with family for Christmas and New Year, the kids loved spending time with “Baba” and “Poppers”, and visiting a little village on their island that is set up to look like the town of Bethlehem. It was also great to see the ministries the Cotitas are involved in now, and take a step back from Equip Mozambique’s various projects to evaluate how to move forward in the coming year.  We had a great time with Carla's family in Malta for Christmas! Sewing lessons are going *sew* much better with the new reading glasses to help! Back to school! Kyran started 3rd grade and Jariel is in preschool. Facebook Website YouTube Email Donate Equip Mozambique is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, so all donations are eligible for tax-exemption. Janie and Parents Janie’s parents, Robb and Cathy, were able to visit us just after we got home from Malta! Robb works in construction and was able to help us out with fixing broken things in our house, and gave us lots of advice and counsel from his years of ministry experience. They had planned to stay for 3 weeks, but unfortunately Cathy’s father passed away after they had been here only 1 week, so they had to cut the visit short and returned home with Janie for the funeral. So now Janie is back in Missouri and will stay until early March, which has been really good for her. She had 3 nieces and nephews born last year that she hadn’t been able to meet yet, so she was excited to finally see them!    We had a good time with Robb and Cathy, even if their visit was cut short.  Sewing Project Carla’s sewing lessons picked up where we left off for the holidays, only now we’ve experienced even greater productivity thanks to a donation of reading glasses! Some of the older ladies had never been able to thread their own needles or do good quality work, simply because they couldn’t see well enough. Now they’re able to work much better and faster, and they take greater pride in their work. We are hoping to graduate this class at the end of March, help them start their own businesses, train up a couple of them to be future teachers, and enroll a new class of widows to learn how to sew. While so far we have a good market for our products locally, we are also looking into export options to see if we can start to sell online internationally.   Odete's much-loved and worn out study Bible- before and after it received a beautiful cloth cover! New Place Please pray for us as we are making some big decisions about our location. Our house is already a bit tight for the ministries we are trying to run and how many people we have (especially when we have visitors!), so we either need a new worksite/office space or move to a bigger house to allow for more work to be done effectively. We especially need a permanent home for the sewing project, as our current situation is less than ideal. We are also trying to recruit more missionaries to join us, so we’ll need more housing for them as well! In short, we need more space, and we need God’s guidance and doors to open up. We don’t know if we should rent a second place, buy something bigger, or buy land and build on it. Please pray God would show us what to do! Family Update The kids are back in their English school, we decided to put off transferring them to a Portuguese school later and let them keep focusing on maintaining the friendships they established last year. We know this is important for them to feel “at home” here!  Praise Reports Sewing lessons for widows is bearing much fruit, it’s encouraging to see how much this program has helped them. That we were able to visit Carla’s family for the holidays, and that Janie is now able to be with her family. After months of dealing with a broken refrigerator, we finally got a new one! So often it's the little things that make life easy or hard. Prayer Requests For guidance in where we should live and work. For more partners to join us, both Mozambican and missionary. For comfort for Janie and family as they grieve the loss of her grandfather. Maria, Rainha, and Stella showing off some of their lovely handiwork- Bible covers! Thanks for reading, please remember us in your prayers!