Our mission is to DISCOVER Mozambicans who want to change their nation,
PARTNER with them in their vision, and
EMPOWER them to reach their full potential
(Carla here :-) When I married Jon in 2007, I quickly applied for a new passport with my new last name, knowing we'd need it soon. Now here we are, coming up on our 10 year anniversary, and that passport is expiring full of travels--so full, in fact, that we had to add extra pages 3 times to contain all the visas!--and each page tells a story of God’s faithfulness, protection, and provision. In April we made a trip to Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, where we visited the US embassy to apply for new passports for Jon and me. It was so interesting to stay at the Iris Ministries base where our Mozambican journey first began in December 2007—and to reflect on all that has happened since then! The mission base has changed, the city has changed, WE have changed… but our God remains the same; always faithful, always true.
Blast from the past! This was us our first year in Mozambique. Hard to believe it's been 10 years!
Spring Growth
The past couple months in Beira have been full and blessed! Our team has grown again, we now have Kristen, a friend in Michigan, helping coordinate our Facebook communications (if you’ve liked our page I’m sure you’ve seen more frequent posts!). We hired Domingos, a youth who used to live in the children’s center we ran in Dondo. He just finished culinary school and he now fixes breakfast and lunch for all of our workers and is our odd-jobs errand-runner handy-man the rest of the time. We have also been enjoying the volunteer help of a Brazilian teen named Pedro, who has been picking up programming skills to assist with the Fonte da Vida Bible app. Add to that Caetano, who also works on the app and websites, and Simão who is with us temporarily for some technical training, and our office is bursting at the seams!
"Sew" Successful
The sewing school is going amazingly well! We imported 25 sewing machines from South Africa for our partners and graduates. The school has 19 students total, 11 of whom are the teachers-in-training from the partner churches that want to start up their own schools. One church has already started their school, and three others have taken some of our sewing machines on a rent-to-own system to make them more accessible. We just exported a shipment of hundreds of the school’s products to the States, and are working on distributing them to our partner/vendors all over the country.
New Project: Library!
We recently had a couple very fruitful meetings with some of our partner pastors in Beira, and they brought up a need that we could potentially help with. They would love to see an interdenominational Christian library in our city to help believers from all churches to grow spiritually. A Christian school has already offered space we could use to get it started, we received a special donation to get the first resources which we purchased at a Christian bookstore in Maputo, and a furniture shop from the States offered to send nice shelves! We set May 12 as the grand opening day, and we're scrambling to invite as many churches as we can contact. As quickly as that came together, we feel the project definitely has God’s hand on it. Next we’d like to import more resources from Brazil (since they’d be in Portuguese), and we are excited to see how God will continue to provide as we move forward!
The team is super excited about all the books we've found to get the library started! Next step will be to have local churches contribute books and resources as well.
Praise Reports:
New members to the Equip Mozambique team
Sewing school growth and continued success
The initial stages of the library!
Carla is over halfway through her pregnancy and the baby is still healthy and growing well!
Prayer Requests:
That the library could be organized and stocked with more books very soon
For continued unity and fruitfulness in our partnerships across many churches in our area
That Equip Mozambique could finally get registered in Mozambique (we are so close!). Up to now we’ve been working under the umbrella of our nonprofit registration in the States, but we need local registration as soon as possible.
Thanks for reading, please remember us in your prayers!
