Tuesday, May 19th

Host Family
While I am in Lilongwe, I am staying with a host family. There are 3 children – Freda, Jeremy, and Michael. Freda is 18 and we share a room. We get along well  The younger two are 11 and 7 and are very nice, they like to play video games a lot. One of the games is Harry Potter, which I don’t think I’m all that bad at actually. It has been good so far. Everyone is really nice and they have gone out of their way to make my stay comfortable. For dinner last night, we had nzima, the staple food of Malawi. It is a mixture of corn flour, and is sort of like a thick kind of grits, but in a consistency that you can pick it up with your hands. It’s not bad, a little dry by itself, but ok when eaten with a sauce or other foods. Last night it was chicken. So far so good on the food front, haven’t gotten a stomachache, and I am hoping that I haven’t eaten or drank anything so far that will make me sick. We drink a lot of tea here which makes me happy  The view out the back yard is wonderful, it’s a field with a lot of grasses and corn stalks. Jane, who works at WR, does a lot of gardening, so the landscaping here is beautiful.

Before going to bed, the family has a bible study in their living room led by the dad. The passage that we studied last night was Acts 11, followed by Acts 12. The chapters were about the apostle Peter and his visit to people who were unclean. When his actions were questioned by other believers, he answered that God had told him that he was not to call anything impure that God had made clean (Acts 11:9), meaning who are we to question or judge God’s creation or our fellow human beings? If God has given others the same gift that He has given us, how could we oppose Him and treat them differently? It speaks to me in that I know I need a constant reminder not to judge others, no matter how easy it might be to do so, and that we are all the children of God, no matter where we are in our lives, and what we do. It is only our job to love one another with a full heart and let God judge who has been good and bad. Acts chapter 3 tells of Peter’s arrest and then his rescue from prison by an angel of the Lord. As the dad described, God will always be with us, no matter where we are, and He will provide. In order to live, we need to depend on Him and live through Him, or else we will not have what we need to help others and be fulfilled in our lives. When Peter was in prison, he was being guarded by two soldiers and was chained to the wall. The angel woke him, his chains were broken, and the angel led him out of prison. It also said that Peter really had no idea what the angel was doing was actually happening to him, that the angel was actually freeing him from prison; he thought it was a dream. I think that many times, we do not know what the Lord is doing in our lives. We cannot see that what He is doing is real, that He is leading us through life in His way. For me, I think that going to Africa and working with WR has been a kind of a dream. When first thinking about going to Africa, I did not see it is as a reality or as a place where God was leading me. Though I do not know how God will use my trip to Malawi in the future, I know that He has led me here now. So that is where I am. Here, in Malawi, Africa. 