"Welcome, Our Visitors"

I admit that I am not a very travelled person across the world, but I have done a great deal of travelling in America, and never in any of my travels has there been a place more warm and welcoming than Malawi. Everywhere we go we are told to "feel free" and "be welcome," even to the point of having all church members shake our hands at Blantyre Baptist Church and having the kids at MCM welcome us with a song: "We are happy today; we are happy today; welcome, our visitors."

Some quick updates and then a very necessary early bedtime for us all (we are TIRED!):

Church yesterday morning was a joyous occasion for us all. Here we are looking fancy in our Sunday best:



Then we had a tasty and relaxing lunch before heading to our first hospital visit. (No pictures of that because cameras are not allowed.) The experience is always a sobering one, especially when we ran out of supplies and were not able to give all the children the gifts we intended. It is heartbreaking to know that at home there are more resources than we could possibly need, and yet we have no way to get them here when we realize we have come up short. We hope to be able to bless more people when we return next week, but while not all may have received gifts, we hope they were blessed by the singing, kind words, and heartfelt prayers of our students. As one student said, "I couldn't give them a physical gift, but I could give them the love of Christ, and that is infinitely better than any gift anyway."

After the hospital we took an evening to relax so that we would be ready for our first day at Malawi Children's Mission today! We arrived to joyful faces, hugs, singing, and laughter, and nothing could have warmed our hearts more. (Not that we needed much warming, given the weather here.) If playing with amazing kids could be termed "work," we worked HARD today. Here are some favorite pictures from today:

(Sorry I didn't have time to edit them to make them prettier - they are straight from the camera!)

Thanks so much for all your love and support - more updates when we can!