Equip Mozambique

Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Starting strong in 2016!

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An update from Equip Mozambique!

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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.

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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!

Saturday, November 7, 2015

Exciting Months in Mozambique

The last few months have been filled with travel, a new project, and exciting things happening at Peniel.

Job Training for Widows

Carla has found a ministry opportunity that fits right in with her skill set as well as Equip Mozambique’s goal of equipping and training Mozambicans to be self-sufficient. Along with the leaders of Peniel’s widows’ ministry, she has started giving sewing lessons to widows who want to learn a new skill. Many of these women are elderly, and there aren’t many other work opportunities open for them. Most of them are dependent on charity or relatives for support. But, with some training, they will be able to have the dignity of earning a living once again. Capulana notebook covers Carla’s first project was teaching the ladies how to make notebook covers out of the bright capulana material that is popular here. The design was very quick and easy to learn, so even their first sewing efforts were able to turn over an immediate profit. There is nothing like these notebooks in the market here, and they’ve been a big hit! They are selling as quickly as the ladies can make them, and we expect our next projects of capulana purses, wallets, shopping bags, and especially Bible covers will be equally successful. The profits from selling their products goes toward buying each of the widows their own sewing machines, so they can set up their own small businesses to support themselves and their families.

Jon's U.S. Trip

As we write this, Jon is in transit back home from a whirlwind 3-week trip to the States. He was able to speak at several churches and college groups and do TV and radio interviews, in addition to one-on-one meetings to talk about the progress we’ve made in a year on the ground. He was also able to interview a few people considering visiting us or even joining us long-term, and we are excited about the prospect of having more help! Our workload is getting to the point where we need a bigger team; the opportunities here are endless. The fields are ripe and the harvest plentiful!

Church Construction

After many years of red tape and holdups, Peniel’s new church building is finally underway! This past week the main metal frame of pillars and trusses went up, and it is so exciting to see the visible progress every day. This building is calculated to seat 8,000 people, and with the way God is moving in this city we have no doubt that every seat will be filled within a very short time!

Monday, August 31, 2015

July and August Update

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An update from Equip Mozambique!

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Praise God for more helpers!

New Team Member

At the heart of Equip Mozambique is the mission to Discover, Partner with, and Empower Mozambicans to reach their goals. We get to live this in a very practical way with our new teammate--Dino! Dino is the leader of the media team at Peniel, so he’s been doing church projects with Jon ever since we got here. Now we have hired him part-time to help with Jon’s never-ending stream of work, and he is also receiving training toward eventually starting up his own video production company. Along with Dino, Jon is continuing to disciple several young leaders and helpers in the church about how to live and work with diligence, integrity, and honesty.

Jon training Dino how to fix electronics

Jon designed and printed some Christian posters to sell at church as a fundraiser for the construction project. They were very well received!

Kyran and Jariel are still enjoying their school! We went out for ice cream to celebrate when they did well on their exams last month.

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Equip Mozambique is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, so all donations are eligible for tax-exemption.

International Conference

Peniel puts on several conferences per year, and in August we had the International Conference with speakers from all over the world. Thousands of people attended, and hundreds responded to every altar call. In the following weeks, we’ve heard several testimonies of people whose lives were changed through physical, emotional, and spiritual healing during the conference. God is so good! We served in our usual, background jobs to help make sure everything ran smoothly. It’s definitely exciting to be part of a ministry like this.

It's always great to see lives deeply transformed through God's power and presence!

More Visitors

As we wrote in our previous newsletter, the last few months have been full of visitors. Our most recent visit was from Laura, a young lady from Jon and Carla’s home church. She blessed us by bringing a lot of hard-to-get supplies and equipment with her when she came, and spent three weeks serving alongside of us. She took over the English classes that Carla had started with Pastor Mario’s family and spent many hours with them. Two of Pastor Mario’s daughters are hoping to study abroad, and this was great opportunity for them to learn more English while also having fun and forming friendships with someone closer to their age. Laura utilized some of her skills as a Sunday school teacher to help a fellow missionary, Sharon, with her work in the Peniel Sunday school program. All of our visitors have had great experiences and we’ve been very blessed by their time with us. Let us know if you’d be interested in coming to see us too!

Laura with one of her English classes where she built friendships and equipped Mozambicans!

Prayer

Praise Reports

Jon was offered a part-time job that has flexible hours and can work around his ministry. It has also provided capital to make it possible to help some entrepreneurs start up businesses.
Dino has been a blessing to our team, it's great to work with people of integrity!
The conference went well and many lives were touched
Visitors have continued to be a blessing to the team and our work here

Prayer Requests

Please pray for protection for our team’s health, we’ve all been hit with colds and stomach problems for a while; Janie was home-ridden for almost a month. We’re all on the mend now, but please pray that we can STAY healthy!
Carla has started some sewing lessons to help a group of widows to support themselves. So far there has been solid interest, but please pray that keeps up and that they are able to learn quickly. Will update more in the next newsletter!

Jon training and discipling the media team--equipping them to do their work better!

Thanks for reading, please remember us in your prayers!