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!