Dear CEF supporter,

I expect you have forgotten what the CEF is, as I've been so negligent in sending newsletters. Sorry about that. In case you need reminding, the Christian Education Fund supports Christian education in community schools in Eastern Zambia. More information about our work is available at www.zambianmissionsupport.org.
There are three matters I want to bring to your attention in this newsletter.

1. You may remember that we now have a qualified teacher living at Covenant College full time and overseeing the work of the CEF. Her name is Marjanne, and her most important task is to train teachers. The quality of the teachers is the most important issue for the CEF. Some are not true Christians, some are not competent, some are neither and very few are both. While giving some training to all teachers, Marjanne has followed the CEF policy of concentrating on one school. She has chosen Kuunika pre-school, where the main teacher seems to be a Christian, but the school had significant weaknesses. The wisdom of this policy has been seen in the response of the teacher - she has been putting into practice what she has been taught, and the school is being transformed. The potential effect as pre-school children are now taught well is exciting.

2. A massive step forward for the CEF has been the employment of another full-time worker. Dorica is from Katete, a nearby town in Eastern Province. She trained as a teacher in South Africa, and for Christian work at the college in the Copper Belt with which we have connections. She is now working alongside Marjanne, and is able to concentrate on training teachers at other schools. Obviously this moves the work on simply by increasing the work we can do. One of the big problems we face has been negative attitudes among the locals about what they are capable of, and dependency on the whites. To have a competent Christian who is a local is a massive help in this area. It also obviously helps that sheis fluent inNyanja. This is a very exciting development. Please pray for Dorica - her spiritual health, help to train teachers effectively, and that she and Marjanne would work well as a team.

3. Despite these advances we have had a shocking reminder of our dependence on God and the need to bring the gospel to the teachers for their own sake as well as the children's. On 6th December a minibus carrying 20 head teachers of community schools was travelling back from a training event run by the government. Near Covenant College a wheel came off and the minibus turned over. Five head teachers plus the bus conductor were killed. One of these was Lufeya Tembo from Chewizi School - the school Dorica was concentrating on training. Understandably she is very upset. Another was Simon Njobvu from Mtumpha School. Mr Njobvu was one of our most able and reliable teachers, his school was always well-organised and busy (if you knew what a contrast that is to most community schools, you would realise what a massive blow his death is to us). He was a pleasure to meet, and it is very sad to think I will never meet him in Zambia again. I hope one day I will meet him again, because, although he was a Roman Catholic, his conversation and his desire to study the Bible had for quite a while made me wonder if he was a Christian. He leaves a widow and children. Please pray for his fellow teacher at Mtumpha, who is also a reliable and competent man, that he would continue with the standard manner of Mr Njobvu.
In the very tightly-knit communities which our schools serve, everyone will know of these accidents. Please pray that they will prepare themselves to meet their maker.

Thank you for your support.

Joseph

Dear all,

I have been very negligent in sending out Christian Education Fund newsletters – none since August 2007. Sorry about that; I can assure you that it doesn’t reflect an attitude of thinking the CEF and my recent trip to Zambia don’t need prayer support.

I was in Zambia from 1^st to 17^th April. It was a very encouraging trip, and possibly the most productive of the 7 visits I have made. One of the main reasons for this is that the CEF is in its best state ever. Here’s some news.

The CEF

Marjanne is taking exactly the approach I’ve been advocating for the last couple of years – concentrating on a few local schools and on training teachers. This has meant that the main activities of the CEF recently have been:

1. Weekly visits to Kuunika pre-school to train the teachers. The two teachers there have been very keen, responsive and reliable. It is a great encouragement to see the improvements there. Especially when we consider the great potential there is through pre-schools – the two best schools I have seen in Zambia base their success on pre-school work.
2. Regular visits to three other local schools. This focused approach, building up relationships and giving training that is specific to needs, is much more effective than spreading our resources more thinly. It may sound less impressive than trekking through the bush to give blackboards to 25 schools, but in the long term it is far more fruitful.
3. Conferences to train all the teachers in the 20 schools we support.
4. Visits to all the other schools to assess their needs and maintain contact, but not to distribute materials – this has gone on hold until we have made proper assessments of how the materials are being used and what the greatest needs are. It is all too easy to give materials simply because we see a need, without considering how they will be used; this can even worsen the education being given in the schools.

While I was in Zambia we were able to work together to make progress on a number of fronts:

1. We visited a number of schools to decide what our future relationship with them should be. This included deciding in favour of some we were previously negative about; having to give serious reprimands to three teachers about repeated dishonesty; formally ending our relationship with a few schools – some are no longer suited to the help we are giving, and some are proving unreliable in their use of our help. Although this is disappointing, we hope it acts as a pressure and incentive on other schools to take responsibility and respond rightly to our support.
2. We decided not to set up a school at Covenant College . The main reason for this is that our emphasis, as is stated in our governing document, must be on helping the local community schools and promoting Christian education within them, not providing schooling directly ourselves. While there are advantages to founding and running our own school, we must be helping the locals to provide education for their children, not encouraging the prevalent attitude of looking to the white man to provide for them. We had thought that having our own school would provide a place through which we could train other teachers. However, while this sounds good in theory, it is doubtful that it would be effective in practice. In our current situation, starting a school would distract from the work of regularly visiting schools to provide practical training to teachers, and that is the most effective method for us at present.
3. We interviewed a Christian teacher called Dorica. She has both South African teacher-training, and Zambian mission-training. She is from Eastern Zambia . We need to work out if the time is right to employ another member of staff to train teachers, and if she is the right person. Please pray that we would have wisdom in this matter, and that God would guide Dorica also.
4. We re-wrote the constitution of the CEF and re-structured its management team. This now consists of Marjanne Hendriksen, Mirjam Molenaar, Solomon Lungu and me. With Cammy Macleay being called upon if we have a split vote.
5. We are re-starting distributing materials to schools now that we have reassessed needs. We will continue to provide basic materials such as chalk and stationery to all our schools. We will be providing more to those few schools that have proved themselves particularly reliable and competent. For example, good pre-school materials to Kuunika. Class sets of text-books to Mtumpha where the teachers are both very competent and reliable and are keen to learn from the Bible.
6. A big and urgent need for the CEF is a more suitable vehicle for Marjanne to use (she has been using a rather wrecked car that is not meant for Zambian off-roading). The trustees of Covenant College Zambia Trust agreed that CCZT should buy a vehicle to be used by the college and the schools. CCZT is currently raising funds for this. As the CEF has nearly sufficient funds to buy such a vehicle, we agreed to make them a loan so we can get the vehicle quickly. We expect the vehicle to cost around £12,000.
7. We got a number of other important administrative jobs done, such as re-writing our travelling secretary’s job description to make his work more effective.

Non-CEF news

1. The Covenant College Zambia Trust AGM was long as usual, but that was because there were many important issues to consider. The college is developing rapidly. It was a great encouragement to see the assistant lecturer, Heinrich Zwemstra, and his family settled in and so eminently suitable for the work and situation. The new dormitory for the students is completed, there is now a reliable electricity supply and even internet connection at the college – which transform living conditions. The current students seemed to be a good intake, both in terms of understanding the lectures I gave to them, and their commitment. Some are cycling for 8 hours each way in difficult conditions each week to be at the college.
2. I was very encouraged by the work Phil is doing on the farm to spread good farming techniques to locals, especially current and former students (all pastors are also farmers). The method he is teaching is really a set of principles which puts the protestant work ethic into an African agricultural context. Its seems to have great potential if they have the discipline to put it into practice.
3. I preached at a local village church. Again my visit reminded me what a mixture the Zambian church situation is. There is such a consciousness of God and acknowledgement of him in public life, as well as a hunger to learn. Yet the leadership of the churches is weak and untaught. This emphasises further the importance of the work Covenant College is doing.

Please continue to pray for the work in Zambia . If you would like more information, contact me or see www.zambianmissionsupport.org.

Joseph

Update (May 2008)

Dear all,
 
I have just received the following information which I was unable to include in my latest Zambia news:
 
The CEF held another teacher-training conference on Wednesday (30th April).  One of the difficulties with the work of teacher-training in Zambia has been finding the teachers to be very passive and not taking an active role in their training.  Therefore it was an encouragement for Marjanne and the teachers to be together and see the teachers get more and more involved in the programme; answering questions, thinking, suggestions etc. Also to find that they remember things from the other conferences.
We did much about preparing Bible lessons, but also about lesson planning, Farming God's Way* and about teaching Bible songs.
 
* Covenant College farm is promoting in the local area something called "Farming God's Way".  It is not claiming that this is the way God tells us we must farm, but looks at biblical principles of living responsibly and of stewardship and at how vegetation grows naturally in an African context when there is no human intervention, and then uses this to give farming methods which are an African agricultural version of the Protestant work ethic.
 
Please pray that this conference would help teachers to teach effectively and especially to point the children to Christ.  Also that Marjanne would be enabled to follow up this conference with systematic visiting of the schools involved.
 
Joseph

Dear all,

During the last two years as I have been at London Theological Seminary, it has been interesting and encouraging to discover in church history lectures that many church leaders of the past were involved in founding and running schools – often of an elementary kind in areas where few people were literate and in contexts similar to that in Eastern Zambia. They recognised the importance of this for the health of the church. Paulerspury in Northamptonshire in the mid-eighteenth century had a small school for boys with one teacher – a local weaver; it was probably similar to our schools in Zambia in some ways. One pupil there was particularly inspired by the stories of Columbus, prompting an interest in both travel and languages that would remain throughout his life. That boy – William Carey – went on to become the father of the modern missionary movement. What future missionaries and church-leaders may be pupils in our schools in Zambia?

I expect you remember that we have a new worker for the CEF: Marjanne Hendriksen. As is to be expected of someone arriving in Zambia for the first time and facing such a large and important task, there have been encouragements and discouragements.

One difficulty has been that Mirjam Molenaar, the wife of the principal of Covenant College has had some serious health problems which means she has been unable to help with the schools. After persevering with the very poor Zambian hospitals, she has had to return to the Netherlands for five months.

Anyone in Marjanne’s situation would soon realise she faces a daunting task, the sort where it can be hard to see where to begin. So, for example, Marjanne has found that many teachers will just start a lesson when she arrives to visit the school. Often the teachers don’t prepare their lessons before starting a new day at school. They will just copy a lesson from a book onto the board when she asks to observe a lesson. The children spend much time just waiting. Most of the lessons she observed do not ask any use of the child’s mind; they can just copy, without thinking. She often observes teachers making big mistakes in their lessons without any correction. There is also a problem with a high turnover of teachers in some schools. All these problems reinforce that the most important thing we can do for the schools is provide training for the teachers. Yet most teachers if asked what their school needs will ask for materials, not for training. This just goes to reinforce the point further.

Marjanne comments: “It was an overwhelming experience to visit the schools. You see much need. But when you just have in mind that the teachers are all volunteers and untrained then you are very happy when you also see teachers loving children, having good communication with them during a lesson, and I also saw a few good lessons!!!”

So, rather than getting discouraged, we thank God for giving us such an important task, and for putting Marjanne in a position to do so much good. She is able to visit the schools far more regularly and systematically than has been possible before, and to provide better training.

One example of this is the recent conference to train teachers. This was held in August, run by Marjanne, attended by over forty teachers and was the first time we have been able to run a conference without me being present – that is a great encouragement to me and a big step forward for the CEF. Marjanne described it as very enjoyable as the teachers were keen to learn. She is in a better position now than we have been in the past to monitor and help them in putting what they have learnt into practice.

Marjanne’s experiences confirm the suitability of our long term strategy: providing basic support to just over twenty schools but varying this support according to what we see occurring in each school (we have had to warn one school that it has one last chance to respond to our efforts to help it sort itself out, or we will withdraw support); concentrating on a couple of schools; starting our own school on the Covenant College grounds. To start our own school would be a big commitment and requires much prayer and planning. Nevertheless, in many ways it is far easier to do in Zambia than in the UK, and the potential good it could do is far greater there.

Another encouragement is that one of the schools which has the most keen and teachable teachers is right on the doorstep of the college (a massive benefit when travel in Zambia can be so difficult). Also it is a pre-school – and all the successful schools I have seen in Zambia have based their success on the quality of their pre-school education.

Please join with us in thanking God for these encouragements, and praying for the issues raised in this newsletter.

Joseph