Holiday Month... Still Crazy Busy

Hello all!!

This post begins with a huge answer to prayer!! As many of you know, right before leaving Zambia for the school holiday my VISA was actually handed to me. To be honest I had kind of given up hope that I would actually ever receive it in paper and would have to continue making monthly treks to the immigration office for a new stamp (my passport is filling up quickly lol); but God had other plans!! On my way to the airport to leave the country Helen and I stopped by the immigration office in Ndola (same city as the airport and about an hour and a half drive from Kakolo) to see if we could pick up the visa. When we got there we had to look through a huge binder of names and visa applications looking for my name to prove that mine had been approved. After finding it we showed the lady at the entrance to the tiny room that housed three desks for three workers. One of the gentleme inside said, "Ah, why do you come so late? You must come back tomorrow. We have already knocked off. (clocked out)." He quickly pointed to a sign on the door stating the times of operation for picking up visas. Helen began to tell him that we came from a long distance and because of our jobs we couldn't get there any sooner. Again he said that he couldn't issue it to us. As kind of a last ditch effort I said that I was leaving for school holiday as soon a second we left the office and wouldn't be able to come back for awhile. That's when God did a work. He looked at me for a second and then hurried me through then paperwork and I left with my visa in hand. It may not seem like much if you've never negotiated in a third world county before, but there was no reason why he had to give me that visa except that God changed his mind! God is good!

Off I was to South Africa to spend some time with my aunt and uncle!! It's been great so far and I have one more week with them before heading back on the 2nd of September. 

Andrew was hoping to come for a visit during this break, but work responsibilities have grown with his brothers business growing quite a bit in the last two months. Since he couldn't come he bought a round trip ticket for me to fly back to the U. S. for a couple of days! It was a fun mini vacation to see him and my family and to get some much needed school supplies!

I've been back in South for about a week now and am having such fun with my family here! Cousins are fun when you're little, but I think they're more fun when you're older! We're having a blast!

Thank you for your prayers!

*if there are any typos I blame autocorrect on my iPad 😉

A Day in the Life

It’s been a little while since I’ve been able to post so I figured why not give a walk through of a day here so you can kinda get a glimpse of what it’s like! :)

My day usually starts around 5 am and I have a couple of minutes to chat with Andrew before he goes to bed the day before! (6 hr. time difference) I’ve been reading through, studying the book of Romans with Rand Hummel’s book Gratefully Yours and have been much encouraged! Then I usually twist up my mosquito net over my bed, get ready for school, eat breakfast (usually a fried egg or granola and yogurt). Helen has a gas stove and refrigerator which makes all this possible! I fill up a mug with coffee on my way out the door (either percolated coffee that Helen makes or I have a little single serve French press). One of the teachers at school called my hot mug a brazier in my hands which is very accurate during this cold season! I try to pull it off the burner last thing so it stays hot longer! The mornings are quite cold right now during cold season, but as the day progresses the sun does it’s job of warming up the world! I leave for school and walk from the back of Faith Children’s Village up to the front gate where the school is located,, greeting students and teachers and workers along the way!

School starts at 7! (Chapel on Mondays, parade on Fridays). Parade means the students stand in the school yard and sing before lining up in a queue to greet all the teachers. Tuesday through Wednesday begin with singing in the classroom and then Bible class. We have 1^st break from 9:15-9:30 which is announced by one of the students using a metal baton to strike the metal beams outside that hold up the veranda roof. The kids use break to eat a snack or play in the school yard or during cold season, stand along the chain link fence where trees don’t block the sun’s rays. We begin again at 9:30 until 11:30. Lunch break is from 11:30 to 12:00 and we provide some food for the students coming in from outside FCV but the kids here usually just play in the school yard and wait to eat lunch at 1:00 when we knock off or finish for the day. I teach English, Geography, Reading, Vocabulary, and Art as well as assisting with Math and Bible. Each subject isn’t taught every day with preference being given to the more important subjects. The students also study Bemba, RE (religious education), CTS (creative and technology studies), Science, and SDS (social and development studies). From the 11-12 hour, I get to teach English to the grade 7 students!

After school, I head back to Helen’s and try to do some sort of exercising before eating a small lunch and resting for about an hour. The afternoons are a tossup, sometimes laundry needs to be done or my room needs some sweeping or there’s dishes to do! Sometimes they’re quieter and I get a little bit of a chance to read! I’m currently reading The Next Story by Tim Challies! I highly recommend it so far! It was a graduating college gift from the church I attended during college and it discusses what it’s like to be a discerning Christian in a very digitalized world. Kiddos usually come over in the afternoons and read or work on their math facts or spellings for their quizzes on Fridays. Sometimes I walk up to the nsaka or cement floors that’s open aired with a grass roof and play with the littler kiddos playing hide and seek or singing silly songs.

Around 5ish I try to get the next day’s lessons prepped with whatever I need. Whether that’s gathering art supplies, making art examples, screenshotting pictures from google images to explain a vocab word, writing quizzes to be copied in the morning, or pulling books that will line up with the lesson of the day. Around this time the fire needs to be checked to make sure its still going. We use a showmaker (probably not spelling this right, but it’s what I hear when it’s talked about :D ) which is a big black kettle of sorts that is raised by three stacks of 2 bricks that are arranged in a sort of tripod. The pot is put on the bricks and the fire is started in the middle of the tripod of bricks. Long thicker branches stick out of each opening between bricks and after the fire has been initially started, you can easily stoke it but pushing the wood that has burned down in farther to the center and fanning the flame with the lid of the pot. We use this heated water for dishes and bathing in the evenings!

Dinner is usually more American but usually once a week Helen will fix a typical Zambian fare of nshima (think a sticky more solid than grits corn meal) and beans. After dinner we’ll wash the dishes, wash up ourselves, and then play a game (Helen and I both are suckers for word games whether it’s Scrabble, Boggle or Upwords :D ) and a time of prayer and devotions before bed. Usually bed time is around 8:30 – 9:00 pm which makes it easier to get up at 5! :)

Thank you all for your prayers! I hope this helped you get a little picture of how a “normal” day goes!

Term 2 is almost finished and I will be heading to South Africa next Thursday to spend the school holiday with my Aunt and Uncle there in Joburg!

Thanks again for your prayers!!

Better late than never... right!?

So sorry for the delays in posting! I’d like to blame it on spotty internet connections or lack of time but reality is procrastination is following me… even after college! Yikes! The short story is life here is busy, hectic, and always changing! 😊 kind of like life wherever you are! Life happens, and one of the things God has been teaching me is that there is so much to be gained by being present where you are. I think it was Jim Elliot who said wherever you are be all there, I could be quoting the wrong person. While there is no Bible verse I can think of that says this exact thing, but I find that if my mind and thoughts are constantly on the next thing I miss so many opportunities to serve or minister or I just miss the people around me and miss opportunities for building relationships.

I am so thankful for the ministry I get to be a small part of and the blessings that come from it! After flying to Zambia, I spent a couple of days in town getting phone and finances sorted before heading out to FCV. After getting there I was able to help out for a Friday before the weekend and then a full week the next week. We then had our midterm break so I really have had it easy coming back and having lots of time to transition!

We’ve also had a steady stream of visitors which keeps us on our toes and is a big encouragement! When I got here, Haley was here. She’s from NC and we soon found that we had a ton of mutual friends. It was a blessing to have her even though our time only overlapped for about a week! Right now, there are several visitors both to FCV and CABC since the college is just finishing up their July block class and guest speakers and other visitors from the States have come. Next week, Mr. C’s sister and a friend are coming and by then we’ll be to the end of Term 2. It’s been an exciting couple of weeks and I’m sure the next several won’t disappoint.

We’ve had several snake spottings, including Helen’s septic tank. Thankfully our gardener saw it and killed it. They think it was a cobra because of the extra folds of skin around its face. I had a little baby snake in my room which Helen graciously saved me from! I knew something was weird when the baseboard of my dresser was for some reason warped in a wavy fashion… lol There was also a big puff adder over by the kid’s playground. Like I said, always some excitement!

Thank you for those who have been praying for our teacher! This week has been her first week back! We are grateful and thankful to God for answering our prayers and that she has returned. I am back to helping the grade 4-6 class again! They’ve been working hard and I’ve enjoyed spending more time with them! Stay tuned on Facebook for more picture updates of our art project this Friday! We will be attempting to make baobab trees!!

Thank you for your prayers, please pray for Mr. C! Yesterday, a pot of boiling beans was spilled on his feet and he was burned. The nurse and doctor were on site and he’s been given meds to help, but prayers would be much appreciated! 

In Christ,

Abbie Rysta

Kakolo or Bust!

Lord willing, today I will finally get out to Kakolo!! Thank you all for your prayers for safe travels! I made it to Zambia 7 pm (so equivalent of 1 pm EST) on Tuesday! Rachel picked me up from the airport and I've been able to stay with her in town to finish getting the last minute supplies I need before heading out to the village. This also gave me the opportunity to go back to Kitwe Church's Bible study and see and worship with so many friends who have been praying for my VISA as well! God is good in His timing!

My trip was very eventful; most of this being my forgetfulness or blonde moments :D But God is good through it all, and I was allowed admission back into country even though I don't actually have the final VISA in hand. (I have the receipt that says that it's been approved).

Today I'm meeting up with Helen and BC after working on this post :) and we will head out to Faith Children's Village (FCV)! I am excited to meet Haley, a volunteer who has come out to help at the school, who is also staying at Helen's right now as well! Please pray for a smooth transition back into school life!

Please pray also for Amano Academy right now. Our staff is small and when teachers are out for sickness or other physical struggles we get stretched thin. I'm excited to be able to jump back in and help! To start out I will be teaching grade 3 for this Friday (tomorrow.... wow!) and next week. Then we have a midterm break which will be helpful to continue getting settled and figuring out teaching for the remainder of the term that finishes up sometime around August 4th!

Please continue to pray for opportunities to build relationships with the kiddos! Coming back it is much easier to see ways in which I can be more intentional in this endeavor of getting to know the kids and building friendships with them. I'm also very excited to point them back to God's timing in working out the VISA situation as many of them were praying for it as well! I want them to see that God is good in His allowance of situations we may not understand at first or may not understand at all!

Again, to all of you who pray, thank you so much!! It truly means so much!

If you have any questions about anything, FCV or Amano, please don't hesitate to ask! My email is:
byhisgrace555@gmail.com or you can contact me via Facebook! Thanks again!

In Christ,
Abbie Rysta

Philippians 1:6 - Being confident of this very thing, that He which hath begun a good work in you, will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.

Comfort Zones

God has done it! My visa has been approved, and I am headed back to Zambia tomorrow Lord willing! I am beyond excited to go back and continue working with my kiddos in our 4^th – 6^th grade classroom and the dear staff members I’ve grown to love! But I’m also so thankful for God’s allowance of a little extra time home. He has taught me much about Himself and just how much I still must learn.  Originally, I was so confused as to what God was doing as I had to learn to patiently wait for His timing, but I’m so thankful for the teaching time He has so graciously granted.

See, I would have told you that being in Zambia was way out of my comfort zone and really forced me to rely on God’s strength! I thought that this time at home would be comfortable… but God had other plans! His plans were far above my own! God taught me the importance of being out of my comfort zone, through working on houses (which I knew nothing about beforehand) and through substituting for classes that I barely remembered from high school. But God has shown me Himself through it all!

God is Creator.

God has made all things in the world around me from the smallest atom and element to the largest galaxy!!!!

God is in control.

God has forgiven me of so much.

God is a God of beauty and design.

God wants His church to be unified.

God delights in the passing of His faithful ones.

God gives strength and help!

God alone is supreme.

God is love, unconditional love.

Christ is sufficient.

God is the only One who deserves my desire to please!

He has taught me so much! Many of these truths I am rehearsing daily because I still struggle with slipping into beliefs that contradict these truths, but as Paul says in Philippians, Being confident of this very thing, that He who hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.

Tomorrow I go back to another uncomfortable zone, and I praise God for it! I don’t want to be complacent in my walk with Jesus! I want each day to rely on Him and lean on Him for every word, thought, and action!

Am I there yet? Nope! But again, God is faithful and will fulfill His promises toward me!

I claim these truths as I head back to Zambia, begging God to draw me closer to Himself through this next season in my life!

I covet your prayers for safety in travels and for open doors to talk about my Lord with those I connect with. Pray that I would be able to build relationships with my kiddos and point them to the One who can give their lives meaning and purpose!

Thank you also to all of you who have financially supported me! I could not be where God has led without your generous giving! Know that it is an investment in the Kingdom!

God Bless

Abbie Rysta

Psalm 72:18 – Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, who only doeth wondrous things.

"just wait"

Hello all!!

Time is going by so so so quickly! I’m so thankful for all of the ways God has used this first term of school to help make me a better teacher, to stretch me to try new things in reaching out to my students, but most importantly I’m thankful for what He is teaching me about Himself. Many of you have been asking and praying about my current work visa situation. I was hoping to have all of the answers and some of you know how badly I wanted to just know what the outcome would be, yet God has seen fit to not give me all of the answers. He’s asking that I just wait. He’s asking me to trust

It’s funny, sometimes we feel as though we know what the answer should be or what the answer shouldn’t be and there are only two answers in our head. Then, God gives you an answer but it’s right in the middle of the two with a postscript of “just wait.” In my mind there were two answers to the visa situation: either they approve our amendment to my first application submission or they don’t. Simple. Then God showed me answer “just wait.” Today (Tuesday) I got a message from our Doctor’s wife Brandi saying their worker had checked with the office of immigration in Lusaka and that they said that I needed to completely resubmit everything. (This coming after they told us we merely needed to write an amendment to the original submission). Because of my tourist visa days expiring April 5^th, I most probably won’t have an answer about the work visa when I leave for the States for school holiday on April 1^st.

“just wait”

I might be able to come back. I might not. I might get to come back for term 2 or maybe just for term 3 or maybe not at all. I may be saying goodbye to all of my kiddos who don’t understand why I can’t come back. I might be saying hello again come mid-May.

“just wait”

But God! You might think that those words sound like a whiny child 😊 asking why God would ask her to wait. But let me explain. I’m so thankful for these two little words! Many times when they are used in Scripture it talks about how God has saved us even when we were the worst of sinners! My favorite is in Ephesians 2:1-7 (I know it’s long, but bear with me!)

And you were dead in trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience – among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature the children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ – by grace you have been saved – and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

But God! God has saved me!! Think back to the time when you came to the end of yourself. You were fed up with your sin, realized that you couldn’t do anything about it on your own, and that you needed someone to do something. You called out to Jesus that you were done running, that you wanted what He had to offer, salvation. His love had been pursuing you. The Holy Spirit had been working on your soul, and He now resides there.

We serve a God who cares about souls. We also serve a God who cares about the little details in our lives. The Spirit whispered this thought to my heart earlier today as I was thinking about and trying not to worry about the whole situation, “Abbie, I already know the outcome of this. I’m not bound by time.” What an assurance! His timetable is so different from mine. I could tell you what I want the outcome to be, but does that really matter? Is it more important that I know and understand everything about what God is trying to do in my life? Or is it more important that I beg for His will to be done, not my own? And plead that He would align my desires to fulfill that will?

I wonder how many of us are waiting on God’s timing. We feel like He’s forgotten because we haven’t gotten the answer we wanted. Instead we got the “just wait.” To any of you reading this who feel that, I understand. Maybe not your situation but the feeling and apprehension of having to wait. And I can tell you that it is possible to have peace in the midst of it.

A couple weeks back in Wed night Bible study we were talking about the significance of when God asked Abraham to sacrifice his only son. (have you ever studied the parallels to Christ in this chapter?!? Amazing!) Abraham could have questioned God’s timing, maybe he did, but he acted. He obeyed. BC summarized it perfectly this afternoon as we were talking about the situation when he said, “Now’s when the faith comes in.”

Do I say that I had faith to trust Him to save me from my sins? Then how is it that I don’t want to trust Him for an issue of timing? My God is in control! What an amazing God we serve. So do I know what the future holds? Nope. But my God does! And He has asked me to patiently wait.

Psalm 37:7a – Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for Him;

Psalm 72:18 – Blessed be the Lord God, the God of Israel, who only doeth wondrous things.

Thank you all for your continued prayers! I’m looking forward to seeing many of you when I’m home in April and sharing pictures and stories of the hard work and success of our students here at Amano Academy! 

It's March?!?

Seriously, where did the time go? It's not only March but also the 15th of March.... Also Happy Pi Day to all of you math people out there. I got to come into town a day early to get some computer work done and try to get some of the work visa/plane ticket thing sorted. When I come into town I stay with Rachel Johnson, the administrative secretary for CABC. I'm so thankful for her friendship! We went to the gym... yeah, there was a gym... just like any store front gym in the States and spent some time talking to some of the regulars that Rachel's been building relationships with... and we worked out some too ;) Then we grabbed a bite to eat and came home to make some pie for pi day!!

This morning I've been researching plane ticket prices and looking into visa requirements. What I didn't realize is for a tourist visa, you're only allowed to be in country on a tourist visa for 90 days in a year. Meaning once I leave in April, I've used up my tourist days and can only return once the work permit is for sure completed. Maybe this is no surprise to some of you, but I guess I was under the impression that it would be something like you just had to stay out of country for so many days before returning, but that's not the case.

So praying that God would grant the work permit in His timing.

The term is winding down and I'm thankful for the evident progress in many of the students. It's very different teaching a primarily second nature. Assignment grades in the States that I would freak out over and reteach everything, are fairly normal for term 1 of a new school year. It's taken some time to get used to, but it has been so rewarding to see the grades slowly improving as we are spiraling the content we've taught. I'll share one quick story. So some of you may remember my mentioning that one of our students battled cerebral malaria several years back and since then school and remembering has been very difficult where it once came naturally. It's discouraging when you can no longer keep up like you could and even when you try, you still struggle. One blessing of having so many teachers in and out of our classroom (BC, Mr. Kamfua, Pastor Royce, Pastor Edward, myself and Mumba even) is that we are able to pull kids out, almost like a resource teacher does in the public schools. Some of our kids that really struggle we've been able to spend extra time with and experiment with what works for them and how they learn. We've found with Medias that reading is the biggest struggle. So if you can read him the questions on the test, or have him point to all of the continents, seas, oceans, or give an oral quiz he can answer the questions and manage the material. Seeing a 90% at the top of his reading comprehension quiz was a moment of joy! He hasn't seen it yet, but I'm so thankful for the ability to make a difference simply by adding one more person to the staff so that there is more time to individualize instruction for those who need it. Please continue to pray for him!

Thank you again for all of your prayers! God is good and is working!!

I look forward to seeing many of you in April!