Station Visit to Isoka

On Thursday, April 8th we went to visit fellow missionaries on our team, the Kimbroughs.  Blake Kimbrough is now our immediate boss, so we did business on Friday.  Saturday we went to visit a waterfalls that they have near their place.  On Sunday we went to a new church that has only been meeting for about 6 months.  For me, I think that was the high light of the trip.  To worship God in such a simple setting.  It was wonderful.  You know how sometimes you go to church and on the way home you don’t feel like you had church, you really don’t feel like you worshiped God that morning.  Well, this was really a simple worship service, led by Zambians.  We sang a few songs, we prayed, we read the scripture and discussed it a little bit.  After about an hour it was over, but God was worshiped! 

I know I take a lot of pictures of roads.  It is mostly to show you back in the US the road conditions.  Last August Blake came to see us and got to hour house in 2 1/2 hours.  His words – If you can drive 80 kilometers an hour on a dirt road, it is a good dirt road.  Well it took us, I think, around 5 hours to drive it.  The following pictures will show you why.  I think it is as bad as riding a camel!

On the way home we were driving part of this road in the dark.  On a lonely stretch with no people anywhere around we heard this awful sound.  A grinding, screeching noise – like our brakes are grinding or something.  We pull over.  There also were no bars on the cell phone.  I’m wishing I thought to pack more flashlights, but handy Steve, his air pump that you plug into the power outlet also has a flashlight on it.  I drove the vehicle slowly while he figured out were it was coming from.  He jacked up that corner and took the tire off.  There is a cover on the back side of the disk brakes.  It looked like it was bent and rubbing the disk.  While trying bend it out some a very little stone fell out.  All was fine.  We only lost 1/2 and hour, but it was 13 more kilometers before we got any bars on the cell phone.  We are very thankful God was looking out for us.

We ended our trip by stopping at the Schaefer Take Away to pick up our supper.  We ended up just eating it at their house.  The Schaefer’s are good friends we have here in Mbala.  Twice now they have fixed us food for when we are coming back into town late in the evening.  What a blessing!