What the missionaries are saying

In our weekly round-up, Eternity looks at what some of our Australian missionaries are up to each week. We’ll be recommending missionary blogs to read, videos to watch, prayer requests and families to keep your eye on as God works through them in far flung places around the world.

We know some missionaries work in sensitive countries and we’re setting things up so that they’re not compromised.

Got a missionary we should know about? Email us here and we’ll follow it up.

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Tim and Catherine Walker in Rwanda

Tim and Catherine are in Huye in the Southern Province of Rwanda, where they have been living and working in Butare since January 2011, serving with CMS (Church Missionary Society) Australia. Tim is a doctor and Catherine is a primary school teacher.

This week, Catherine reflects on enjoying the ‘looong school holidays’ with their children, on the experiences they had at the Kumbya Conference for protestant missionaries and on how they have adapted to life in Rwanda.

“In the beginning we wanted to share our new and unusual experiences. Now we have few of them: it has become quite natural to be here. Well, relatively anyway. We will never understand this culture the way we do in Australia, but these days our learning curve has slowed down. This is very helpful.” (Read her full post here, and view her photos, which include a glimpse of a Congolese refugee camp they passed on their way to Kumbya).

Joe and Sue Radkovic, Kenya

Joe has set up a general medical clinic and maternity hospital in Korogocho slum, in the north east of Nairobi. The clinic’s aim is to show God’s love through medical care and a clear proclamation of the gospel. Sue teaches at West Nairobi School, an international Christian school that has an outreach to increasing numbers of Kenyan students.

Jo and Sue Radkovic have completed 10 years of gospel ministry embedded in Tumaini Medical Clinic. This video shows the legacy they have left behind:

Diane and Nathan Lovell in Cape Town, South Africa

Nathan teaches Hebrew and Old Testament at George Whitfield College, while Diane works in Bible translation with the Fwe people of western Zambia. She also helps coordinate the GWC external studies course. On her blog, ‘Rubicon’, Diane says of herself: “I love life, craft and Jesus Christ. I’m a missionary to southern Africa (Zambia and South Africa) with the Church Missionary Society. To cross the Rubicon is to knowingly pass the point of no return. As a disciple of Jesus Christ my life will be forever changed and there’s no going back.”

Diane loves learning languages, and she blogs this week about her desire to, as a missionary, become fluent in another language:

“I always assumed that when I eventually did become a missionary I’d fulfil a lifelong goal of becoming fluent in another language. I didn’t really care what language… In our plans to move to South Africa I was really excited to learn Xhosa once we arrived. The language has clicks, for goodness sake! How much more fun is that!? Or maybe perhaps I’d learn some Afrikaans. I thought I’d definitely learn Fwe since I’d be training the translators in Zambia. Maybe even Lozi, the lingua franca of the Western Province in Zambia. Why not?” (Read her full post here, and learn what she resolves to do).