Just a quick update to let you know that all is going well. We hit some road blocks trying to fix the old computers that were here but we made a break trough yesterday and were able to get 12 done by the end of the day! Praise the Lord!

Thank you all for your continued prayer for us – it is greatly appreciated!

We had a great flight into Zambia and have arrived safely! more to come…

We had a great flight to London and were able to see lots of the sites during our layover. We are back in the airport waiting to board for Zambia – thanks to everyone for your prayers!

We are down to our last few days before we board our first plane on our journey to Africa. We have all been busy packing our bags — getting our shots — raising our support — and getting mentally and spiritually prepared for the tasks ahead of us. For the last number of weeks we have been getting prepared in a whole different way as well — in a geeky kinda way!

Part of our task for this trip is to take 8 new laptops over to Zambia with us. We have been really busy getting the laptops and software and installing and configuring the computers. Bruce sent me this picture of one of our geek-fest nights — only a true geek would appreciate all the those computers in one place. We got a lot done that night! We had help from Michael Saunders who was part of the team that went over in 2005 to install the original computer lab — he was a great help.

Please remember to keep Team Zambia in your prayers as we fly out the week!

In about one week the members of Team Zambia will board a plane and head towards Kitwe Zambia in Africa. The travel will consist of 2 overnight flights (Toronto > London > Lusaka), an 8 hour lay-over in London and a 5 hour drive from Lusaka to Kitwe. We will be leaving Toronto at 8pm on Thursday the 16th and arriving in Kitwe Saturday the 18th – probably pretty tired

The team would love to thank all of you who have been able to support us financially and in prayer. Those of you who may be considering financially supporting a team member still have time to send in your support – details can be found at: www.mymission.ca/zambia/support

We will do our best to try to update the mission website while we are gone but may have spotty access to the Internet. Updates will be posted at: www.mymission.ca/zambia/news and possibly on the facebook group.

Thank you all for your great support and kind words – they are greatly appreciated! We look forward to reporting the great things God is able to accomplish through us in Zambia!

On behalf of the team;
-Andy

Here are some interesting facts about Zambia:

• Located in southern Africa just east of Angola
• Has a land/water area of 752,614 sq km – slightly larger than Texas
• Natural resources include: copper, cobalt, zinc, lead, coal, emeralds, gold, silver, uranium
• Population: 11,862,740
• Median age: 17
• Life Expectancy: 38.63 years
• HIV/AIDS – adult prevalence rate: 15.2%
• Religions: Christian 50%-75%, Muslim and Hindu 24%-49%, indigenous beliefs 1%
• School life expectancy: 7 years
• There are 107 airports in Zambia – 9 of them have paved runways
• …more

Source:  https://www.cia.gov/library/…/za.html

Yah — we’re geeks! So we like to use geeky tools like facebook. While we have this website and will always be updating you here — you can also join our facebook group. We will make sure the facebook group is updated when the website is updated so you will always know what is going on. We will also be able to send out group email from facebook to inform you of important alerts and updates.

So if you use facebook – swing on over to the Team Zambia 09 group and join today!

(of course a facebook account is required for the facebook links)

Update:
Villages of Hope Africa now has a facebook fan page – check it out here
You can see lots of photos of where we are going and some of the other Village of Hope sites!
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Villages-of-Hope-Africa/57975984717

The laptops have been delivered and we have started working on setting them up to take over with us. We were able to get a great deal on these used IBM Thinkpads. They are all exactly the same which is great for setup and maintenance down the road! A special thanks to Michael Thomas from ITXchange for helping us find these computers!

So here it is… LAB09-1…

We have bought the (new to us) laptops that we are going to take over! They are older refurbished IBM Thinkpads – they should do just fine for the task! And to top it off we came under budget by $83! not bad … now on to getting them all setup, software installed…

Wondering what “Keys-4-Kids” is? Well we will be letting you know real soon!

Come to Cedarview Community Church on March 15th to find out all the details!