France, Heating, Kyrgyzstan, October 2007
Response to various outreach efforts in France continues, especially amongst the immigrant community. Sister Tina's huge efforts continue and it was a wonderful experience to gather together with her group and meet her contacts, all of whom are a result of her personal witness, distribution of literature and internet work. They're a diverse group- refugees from Africa, ethnic French, naturalized French, and an elderly British gentleman who lives in France and is seeking to "rediscover faith", and who's currently reading through Bible Basics.
Photo: Sis. Tina's group:
A highlight of our visit was the baptism of EMMANUEL:
In another area of France, we met up with brother Ali, an Iranian who's been in France around 20 years. He does a grand job keeping in touch with the Iranian brethren in France and is a true father figure to them. He also works tirelessly seeking to teach the true Gospel to other Iranians. He has a number of contacts who are heading towards baptism and we hopefully encouraged them in that path. We were also able to give our brother good stocks of the Farsi and French editions of Bible Basics for his work; we're now passing many Iranian contacts from all over Europe to Brother Ali to deal with directly.
Our brother is also recording Bible Basics as MP3 audio files in Farsi and French, and is active in developing our Farsi web witness.
Please do pray for our brother. We broke bread together and he gave some very spiritual prayers, the thoughts of which haunt us as it were. Truly "I [we] knew [know] a man in Christ".
WINTER HEATING WORK
As the Winter sets in in Eastern Europe, the poorer folk are gathering in all the firewood they can.
Here's a child dragging sticks he's collected up a subway in Riga, Latvia:
We've bought radiators and firewood [long burning 'briquettes'] and are distributing them.
Here's one family we were able to assist. Brother Vladimir and Sister Maryte are both deaf as are their children. They read the Bible daily using the Companion reading tables. We were able to give them firewood and blankets.
You can see them here at a breaking of bread meeting last week:
KYRGYZSTAN
This Moslem republic in the ex-USSR is home to about 12 brothers and sisters whom we've baptized. We hear they are facing problems akin to those faced by our brothers and sisters in Kazakhstan. Please pray for them and for the efforts we plan to assist them.