The next thing…

That is a little how life feels here with us at the moment, always onto ‘the next thing’! We’re already in March and we can scarcely believe how 2011 is disappearing! Last week saw the end of my (Matt’s) first module (hence the ‘end of class’ picture), and this week I am getting stuck into ‘Language Project Planning and Implementation’. This two week course is outlining the major project planning tool used within our work, ‘Results Based Management’ (RBM for short), and getting us to apply these principles to the situation we have recently been involved in. It is good to think about these kinds of issues, especially as they have strong implications for future project management situations – particularly in the areas of resource allocation, risk management and reporting mechanisms. After this short module we will have four weeks of sociolinguistics and anthropology before a short Easter break. When I understand what this module is about I will write to explain more!

Liz is continuing in her proofreading work and fitting her distance studying around that varying workload. She continues to have better and worse days, however we are especially thankful that recent times with friends and family have coincided with some of her particularly ‘good days’. Please continue to pray that these strong days will increase and the ‘wobbly, sore muscled, nauseous’ ones will decrease!

We are also thankful for a good week off between my course modules. We made it up to Cardiff for the first weekend and stayed with my sister and brother in law and also with friends who were in Mbeya before us. It was great to see family and friends and enjoy exploring the city a little more. The second weekend we had good friends from Sheffield come to visit us on the centre. We had a great chilled out time with them and it was a real blessing to ‘hang out’ together and catch up on news. This last week has reminded us to be thankful for all the relationships that we have and that are a blessing to us despite many miles and months apart. The days in between the weekends were mainly for Liz to take it easy and for me to prepare a talk that I gave at Moorlands Bible College on the Friday. This was part of the undergraduate first year student’s lecture series on ‘Mission Today’ and it seemed to go well with quite a few showing interest in the work of Wycliffe and our experiences overseas.

Apart from this life is carrying on as normal. We’ll write again when we have more news!