NEW MISSION PARTNERS FOR KIPPEN CHURCH

Ida and Keith Waddell have recently gone out to Zambia as Mission Partners with World Mission Council, returning to where they have lived and worked for many years.

“It's good to be home. It is a rather strange feeling returning to a place you know and have come to love to do much the same as you have been doing. Yet in many respects this homecoming is a new beginning for us both.

We are stationed at Mwandi LICZ (United Church of Zambia) Mission, Ida working in the Mission Hospital and Keith at the Basic School. In our spare time we've been running the Mission House, a job we're doing really to get a roof over our head! The Mission House is a rather grand looking American pile but don't imagine that we are luxuriating in opulent splendour; our single room quarters have more the air of a single-end, serving as office, store, sitting-room and bedroom.

We are therefore looking forward to the completion of our own home which is being built. This will provide us with a more balanced life than we enjoy at the moment and will allow us to carry out full-time our primary functions as support for education and health.

Ida is the Coordinator for the AIDS RELIEF Programme. With the advent of antiretroviral drugs, a new hope has been brought to over a thousand people in this community, one hundred of them children. The Mission Hospital now is a place of new beginnings and new life instead of a place filled with people dying on floor-beds. Ida is also involved with providing milk formula for almost 70 babies. All babies born to HIV+ mothers are tested for HIV and those who are negative are changed onto milk formula to prevent them from becoming positive through their mother's milk.

For the past three years Keith has been teaching Grade 7 girls who range in age from 12-16. For as many as one third this was their last year of education. Unfortunately insufficient value is given to girls' education, though our Mission School has a proud tradition of offering girls academic subjects. The Mission is building a High School so that our children do not need to go 70km away to Sesheke for higher education. Keith has been involved in the fundraising and logistics of building a new Science Lab and Classroom block, both of which are now completed.

So what makes Mwandi our home? Well, we have also our foster-child, Mubita here. At an age where we should be grandparents, we have a lively, and much loved 18 month child that we have looked after since he was 2 weeks old. He has brought us great joy; another new beginning.”

Ida and Kieth will be at Kippen Church on Sunday 12th Oct; come along and meet them and hear molre of their ministry work