November and December 2022

God is continuing to write the most amazing story here in Zambia. The last months of 2022, we really saw Him move!

Rainy season

Rainy season is so much more than we could have imagined. I have never heard such loud thunder or rain in my life! It felt like the storm was right over our house, even though it could have been miles again. It would shake the house and we couldn’t even hear each other speak. Our first big rain flooded parts of our house and the roads around our house. We were up most of the night just trying to protect our furniture and keep bugs and creatures out of our house. Once the morning came, we were called to come help with the flooding at the school- it was worse than we could have thought. The roads literally became rivers, people jumped across rocks to get anywhere, yards became full-on lakes, and peoples’ homes were completely flooded. As we just had some of our employees at the school move into the housing quarters (they are there as security for the building), we saw terrible flooding, and so many belongings were completely ruined. Something we didn’t realize is that this flooding is extremely dangerous and people die from rainy season every year. This is because the rains can come so quickly that people will drown in their sleep, or be electrocuted from water being in and on the power outlets. We spent the day finding temporary solutions and praying for permanent ones, squeegeeing and mopping up water, and trying to get the school prepared for students to be there.

As more rain came, the termites started coming up in huge swarms. They would find ways in our house, and we took each towel and piece of cloth to cover any gaps in our doors and windows to keep them out, but the termites and other bugs continued to come in, buzzing all around our house, crawling on our walls, and flying towards any light within our house. It was only the beginning, as we had spiders the size of mice come in our house and beetles galore sneak into our living spaces. Luke would run around, trying to help contain and keep out all of the bugs and rain, but it was a huge challenge. There were times I would come home from work and tightly tuck in our mosquito net and just stay in our bed, where I was mostly safe from all the little creatures. I’m someone who isn’t really even afraid of bugs but the amount and size would make anyone’s skin crawl.

It rains like this all the time in the rainy season, which is from November to March.

Camel spider that charged Luke lol

Vision & Growth

The beginning of November also began a time of praying for our grade sevens who were taking exams to have a complete primary schooling and move on to grade eight, as well as prepare for graduation. Students were preparing, reviewing, and taking their end of the year exams and tests. As the end of the school year neared, we began preparing for the new year ourselves. We attended an amazing leadership conference put on by the Jubilee center, started referencing other ministries as professional development, and asking God how we as a nonprofit can better align with God’s vision in Zambia. We started to set vision, a clear mission, goals, priorities, and invite people into what God has called Hands of Hope to be. It’s really exciting to have our team to all run our race together, at the same pace, with the same goals in mind. We are ready to see more life transformation in 2023 in the name of Jesus!

At Leadership Seminar

Baby!

As we looked into the new year, Luke and I began working on the baby’s nursery. Of course getting quality baby items proved to be challenging, and I became very grateful for finding gently used items on Facebook marketplace! There’s no Amazon or Target down the road, so it’s a lot of running around the city trying to find what would work for us. As we began finding the few items we really needed, things seemed to become more real to us about having a family and raising a baby in Zambia. We are so excited that our baby will hear English and Nyanja as they say their first words, will be in a community of people that truly value time together, and will be around believers that truly have faith that God is present and is a provider in their every day. It’s so beautiful to us to raise a child around a family that is different than us, but so welcoming towards us, and know that this kind of childhood will be a blessing to our child.

Thanksgiving

As Thanksgiving came around, Luke and I decided to host a Thanksgiving dinner at our house. Neither of us have ever been in charge of the Thanksgiving meal, and also living in Zambia means you have very limited ingredients (and no cans of anything) so everything would have to be completely from scratch with a lot of replacement ingredients. But we spent the whole day cooking and had friends over that evening, with all the fixings set- deviled eggs, mac and cheese, mashed potatoes, stuffing, etc. We did buy chicken instead of turkey, and it ended up being everyone’s favorite thing (haha!). In Zambia, they don’t usually cook with dairy, like milk or cheese, and really don’t eat a lot of bready or pasta dishes, so it was a very unusual meal for our Zambian friends. They tried everything at least! Luke and I definitely enjoyed the food the most, and we got to worship and pray and pull for the USA in the World Cup as we spent time together. It felt like a small piece of home to have people around our table, eating foods that feel familiar, joking and laughing and enjoying one another. It’s something I didn’t know how much I missed or needed until I had it, and something I pray will happen a lot more in the new year.

Care For Classrooms Challenge

A huge praise for us is that our Care for Classrooms Challenge was a huge success! We thank God that every cent we needed was provided through people’s generous gifts. Because of these gifts, we were able to present new contracts to our teachers with liveable, fair wages. We had such sweet celebrations with them, and in our meetings with each of them, got to celebrate God’s provision over their lives. Those who were with us from the beginning remember the little we were able to pay them, and they still worked with us because they believed in the mission of the school. We praise God for how far He’s brought us and those who have said ‘yes’ to partnering with us in our mission to see Zambian lives transformed by Jesus through quality education!

Christopher

One amazing testimony that I feel is important to share is the story of one of our Hands of Hope Trust School students, who we identified as being greatly in need and we have seen our school being used to display God’s hand over His life. Christopher is a student in third grade and a double orphan. We identified his family as in need of support, and went to do a home visit. We were met in his home by his older sister, a 25-year-old who works days-long shift work. She has children of her own as a single mother, and has also been supporting Christopher on her own since their mother died two years ago (as their father had died early in their life). She was working for days, and having to ask a teenager to come and watch and care for all the children so that she could make enough money to care for them. She had no support from family, and was working to just provide food and shelter for them, and hopefully send her children to school. Hands of Hope had been a blessing to her, because she was previously selling any clothes she had to put him in school to try and help him. She wept and told us how hard life was since her mother died, and how the grieving time had not been easy. Christopher and his other young siblings were split between her and her sister, another older sibling. She, being young and a newly single mom, refused to give up on her brother or younger siblings. We know that being a single mom is hard, but in Zambia, it is a whole other level, because there are very few jobs and single-income households suffer from extreme poverty more often than not. The children and her were living in a one-bedroom apartment, and she was thankful to have gotten in touch with us through one of our teachers at our school who cared about her and was showing God’s love to her. As soon as we heard of her story, we decided to step in and put Christopher on sponsorship to assist the family, even though we don’t have a sponsor for him yet. This story, while sad, allowed us to bless Christopher's sister, encourage her that God sees her and honors her faithfulness to serve Him even when it’s hard, and to let her know that we would be standing alongside her in the journey of caring for her orphaned sibling. This story, and so many others, deserves to be heard because I know God wants us to be inspired by this young woman’s sacrifice and obedience, and for it to build our faith. If you are led to become Christopher’s sponsor, please reach out and email Savannah at savannah.handsofhope@gmail.com. We believe that as our sponsorship program grows to serve children like these, we continue to see people in the U.S. excited to jump in and become family with these orphans.

Update: A sweet family has decided to sponsor Christopher after reading this newsletter! Hooray! If you are interested in sponsoring a child like Christopher, please reach out! There are so many that are living a very similar story and waiting on sponsorship.

With Christopher and his family

Graduation

As we continue to praise God for His blessing over our students, at the beginning of December, our students graduated! We had reception (kindergarten), grade three, and grade seven graduate. This was our very first grade seven graduating class, and they are graduating from primary school! We are so proud of them for doing well in their exams. We celebrated by inviting families to celebrate with their graduating students along with the students in our school. We had a great lunch for all the students and families, a cake for everyone to taste, and performances and awards for top-performers. It was the perfect way to end our school year- celebrating all God has done for us and His faithfulness over the students in our school.

Worship Sunday

Our church, Patmos Church, hosted a ‘worship Sunday’ on our last Sunday before coming to the US for Christmas, and Luke got to preach on the Sunday! It was a wonderful time of being together with church family, focusing on worship coming from intimacy with our father, and what true worship looks like! Some of our friends came and stayed with us in that last week, and it was so cool to show them our church and have them experience church here in Zambia. Being in Zambia really opens new ways to see God, learn new things about Him, and truly expand our knowledge of who He is! We get to know Him on a personal level because of the blood of Jesus! We love getting to share that with people that come and visit! 

If you want to listen to Luke’s sermon, click on the “Play” button below!

With friends visiting Zambia after church

Worship Sunday with our little friends

Safari & Mumbwa

As our friends were visiting and we were out of school, we also headed to Mumbwa to spend time with our friends in the village and in the town of Mumbwa. Being hosted by Abraham was so special, and we got to go on our first safari in the national park a few hours away! We got to experience so many amazing things on the safari and see so much of God’s creation that we have never seen before. It’s exhilarating but also so inspiring to see protected land for wild animals in the bush of Africa! We really love every time we visit the village, because it brings us closer to the people of Mutanya. It has become mango season and we ate from the mango trees for the first time, and as you can imagine, it was truly the best mangoes we had ever eaten! It was sweet, in this new season, to see new little piglets being born and visit with friends coming in from working on farms and seeing clay homes finally finished and being housed by people who truly made the home with their own hands. It makes us so excited and honored to be working with them in new ways in the new year, to bring forth what God has called in their village, for their people and His glory. The people there are so excited for us to begin our Transformation Center there in 2023, which will bring education, business, and sustainability to our nonprofit and the village there. We don’t exactly know what that looks like day-to-day for us yet, but are keeping our hearts ready and willing to step into whatever God needs from us.

Safari

Mumbwa

Christmas

Hands of Hope closed out the year with a Christmas celebration on Christmas eve with all of our sponsored children. Children and their families heard a powerful word from Pastor Bitwell about the meaning of Christmas. Thanks to a generous donor, families then were given gifts of a Christmas feast- macaroni pasta and a chicken to have for their big Christmas meal (something very common for them to eat on Christmas). Patmos Baptist Church also had their Christmas service, which many of our Hands of Hope kids go to, so it was a very Merry Christmas in Lusaka indeed! 

Coming Home

Luke and I left Zambia mid-December to come home for Christmas and spend time with our families. It has been really sweet to spend quality time with our friends and family over this holiday season, and we are so thankful for the support and encouragement. I am not in my third trimester with baby, so I’ll be staying in the US until baby arrives. Luke will be heading to Zambia for a few weeks in the beginning of February with a vision trip and to continue work in Lusaka. We are working full-time remotely, and are also preparing and planning for our second annual Hands of Hope events in the CSRA and the upstate. We will be sharing more details about this soon!

We really thank God for everything that 2022 brought- Luke and I going to Zambia, making it home, and being a part of what big things God is doing there. We can’t begin to thank everyone who has texted, prayed, or given towards this mission– it truly is something that is not only the joy of our lives, but the fruit of your faith in our Savior! We believe 2023 is going to be an even bigger year for Hands of Hope, and for our family. We’ll be having our first baby and having them in Zambia soon, expanding more of the Hands of Hope mission in the bush and villages hungry for Jesus, continuing to really go after God’s calling for our college, sponsorship, and school programs in the city of Lusaka, and can’t wait to share it all with everyone back in the US! We’ll be adjusting our newsletters a little bit, sharing Luke and I’s journey quarterly, while also sharing stories, testimonies, and updates that we believe will stir your faith and have everyone know all about what God is doing through Hands of Hope in Zambia in between!

Praises

• God’s faithfulness to begin mission trips! We are beginning the process of working on our mission trip programs and can’t wait to see what all He has in store for us! 

• Our baby is healthy, happy, and we are so excited to be a family of three! As we have felt led by God to give birth in the U.S., we’ll be able to continue to do a lot of U.S.-side Hands of Hope work in the mean time while also staying consistent with our friends in Zambia until we return full-time.

• Care for Classrooms Challenge was a HUGE success and we are now able to make so many necessary changes in order for our school to be the excellent school God has called it to be!

Prayer Requests

• All our friends in Zambia would be safe during rainy season and power outages. Not only are they struggling with all the heavy rains, but our communities are going days without power due to a power crisis that the country at large is having. You can read more about the ever-concerning situation here. We pray our friends in Zambia have full protection and God’s presence surrounding them as they navigate this season.

• Grade seven students would all find a place to go to school for grade eight. Right now the Zambian government doesn’t have enough schools or room for those that have even scored excellent to continue their schooling, and so we are believing and praying for room for all of our graduated Hands of Hope students.

• Please pray for Luke and the team that will be going to Zambia on the vision trip in the beginning of February. We pray for people to hear and respond to the gospel, be encouraged by the team, and that all logistics are smooth.

• God will place the right people in our path as we begin dreaming and beginning construction on the Transformation Center in Mumbwa

• God will continue to set our hearts towards Him and His will over our own power and expectation- let Him be the lens in which we see everything else for Hands of Hope!

• We would have opportunities to share God’s story in Zambia in the U.S. in churches and groups that will not only partner with us, but that God plans for them to hear and build their faith!