Nine Days and Counting...

The "Swazi 14" have been working to prepare for our trip now for weeks.  We meet together for the last time before the trip this Sunday to pack our VBS materials, notepads, medical gift kits and all sorts of other items to share with our Nsoko church family.

The anticipation has been building.  But the vision of this trip - loving the kids, meeting the families and spending valuable time with our brothers and sisters in Christ has never been more clear.   We want to share our lives as peers in the Kingdom - laboring side-by-side.

Also during this trip, we'll be looking at opportunities to provide some home improvements (cement floors, home repairs, roofing, etc.) to the extent we can.  A couple of engineers in our group will be looking at sustainable building opportunities - ways for other churches to send housing "packages" - predefined materials sets to build better housing.

Not only is this trip coming into focus, but a whole set of related ministry opportunities is coming into view:

1. After this trip in August, we'll be doing a training/test build of a new kind of housing - earth bag housing - to see if it would be another viable way to help with the desperate need for low-tech, inexpensive yet livable housing in Swaziland.  We will work out ways to minimize the tools and expertise so that we can take this to Swaziland on a future trip.
   
2. The House of Cards project (http://newhopehouseofcards.blogspot.com/) has been quietly bearing fruit.  As second house is nearly funded and the vision is expanding.  After a blog entry from a missionary, inquiries began to come in from other parts of the US.  When an AIM (http://adventures.org) missionary couple visited in June, we discussed how to expand the distribution of House of Cards publications - even with the idea of possibly producing them in Swaziland as a possible employment opportunity.  (We'll explore that option with the folks on the ground in Swaziland during Swazi 14 trip too.)
   
3. The AIM Timbali Crafts  (http://timbalicrafts.org/) ministry is also getting a boost.  A talented "crafter" from New Hope will be ministering with others from AIM to the 90 Swazi women who find employment and healing with the Timbali project in Swaziland in August.

—>  One more thing - during the Swazi 14 trip, watch this blog for updates (as often as we have Internet access)!