Village Bible Church || Aurora | Indian Creek | Sugar Grove | IL

Hey, Village Bible Church, thanks so much for your prayers. This is Sunday, November 15, and I appreciate you remembering not only me, but the students and the churches and the host families that have been taking care of us. Pastor Titus is the head of the group of Zion churches in this area, and I’ve been staying in his house with his family. They are very, very kind. As I mentioned in my last note, his family has been touched by the AIDS crisis here. He lost his daughter and son-in-law due to the son-in-law’s unfaithfulness. And he brought AIDS into their relationship and it cost both of their lives. It was a period of significant, extended suffering for his daughter, the pastor’s daughter, and it orphaned their six-year-old boy, Tito. I posted (below) a picture of Pastor Titus with his namesake, little Tito – short for Titus. Now Tito is eight and has made a new life with his grandparents. But can you imagine? And this is in the pastor’s family, and the Church of ____ has gone through a lot with this.

The AIDS crisis in Africa is huge, and it’s particularly bad in southern Africa. Swaziland, where Bridget Buenz went and served last summer, has an AIDS rate somewhere between 25% and 30% of the adult population - South Africa and Mozambique are nearly 25%, almost one in four. Richard Akers said that in one town where they lived in the Transkai, that 90% of the women who were pregnant tested positive for HIV. That ‘s just huge. And the lifespan for those in South Africa and Mozambique is 37 and 39 years of age, respectively, because of how drastically the death of so many young people in their twenties has on the average for the population.

I guess my big question for us tonight is: Will you pray, and will you remember these families and the churches and the continent suffering? And then we should think together, what else can we do? So anyway, hope you are doing well. I look forward to talking to you later.

I was moved by Pastor Titus' plea for more missionaries to be raised up to train the pastors of the Zion churches ... to reach the Amazioni people.