It has been a while!  I will continue to write as able/permitted.                                                 

We are honored to share with you our (always-brevity-challenged) continued vision and some of the latest updates, twists and turns from our work in Cavango. A written update can only scratch the surface, but hopefully this will be informative.  We sure wish we could be present with you and share in person!

The enthusiastic support we are experiencing from so many of you is encouraging, indeed. You are playing significant roles, in so many ways, every day, in serving those in Cavango who no one else cares about. I hope that, in reading this update, you are as encouraged as we are.

In so many respects, the work at Cavango is thriving and couldn’t be going better in accomplishing its vision of serving as many underserved people as possible, as well as possible, in as many ways as possible, whenever possible. What a different place is Cavango than just ten years ago, because you all have played such an instrumental part in the beautiful Kingdom music heard daily by those we serve! 

Pastor Vasco, a short time before he died at 83 years of age, smiled at me with tears in his eyes and said, “Cavango is serving again!”  This is evidenced in what follows…

Our missionary staff with Eduardo and Jocelyn is working so well together and our love and gratitude for them grows daily. They have relocated to their new house and we are all so pleased with the construction by a local contractor from Huambo, who greatly values our work and has helped us with many other projects.

Jocelyn leads a growing discipleship/evangelism program in Cavango, including leading a weekly afternoon discipleship meeting that is attended by 10-50 individuals from the community and hosting several evangelism/youth teams from Lubango and UIEA.  Jocelyn is also serving as children’s Sunday school teacher/coordinator at the Sunday church services.  The local people receive from Jocelyn in a unique and beautiful way, even after such a short time.  Jocelyn is also passionate about serving in the clinic part-time and she will soon be seeing patients autonomously, which will help greatly.

Eduardo’s gifts of tireless service, encouragement and clinical skills have benefited so many in just two short years.  His humble passion to learn and serve has been contagious among our whole staff and has changed the clinic culture.  Everyone is Eduardo’s friend and knows his love for them and this is beautiful to witness.  His daily laughter and joyful interactions are music in an otherwise often somber and overwhelming environment.

Betsy’s willingness to so warmly love all visitors and attack behind-the-scenes administrative tasks no one else can/will do, provides much needed support for every facet of Cavango ministry.  Everyone in Cavango loves “Ma Betti” – a beautiful testimony for any Jesus missionary.

A couple of twists – the Shroyer family and Laurel/Noah were to join our work in Cavango this year and decided otherwise.  Many varied reasons are involved, with all parties seeking to be where our Father would have them. The Shroyer’s had planned on relocating to Cavango after learning functional Portuguese in Lubango, but they visited Cavango very briefly (we didn’t really have the opportunity to get to know them) and decided that Lubango was a better fit for their family.  We sure enjoyed Laurel’s presence over two years and briefly enjoyed becoming acquainted with Noah and hope that our Father might direct them to a place of great need in their not-too-distant future.  Laurel/Noah returned to the US.

Marijn and Noortje Goud, an MAF pilot/mechanic from Holland, his wife (teacher) and their two kids, are hoping to relocate to Cavango in 2024 and bring a 182, four-seat MAF plane with them. They will be such a great fit with our team, as they will add passionate, sacrificial, tough, Jesus/people-loving hearts to our Cavango team. The Goud’s will likely stay in one of our empty houses intermittently as they build their own near the DeSouza house west of the other houses, and work on construction of a hangar at the airstrip. 

Betsy and I will return to live in our former house to more personally host guests (Betsy’s gift) and smaller groups of visitors. This house, along with the single bedroom annex (our current residence) and the house constructed for Laurel to occupy (now called the “SIM house”), which is now completed, will serve as “guest houses” until, and when, permanently occupied. Just last year, we had no space for visitors! We are still waiting on solar systems from Namibia for the SIM and DeSouza houses. They are paid for but have been held up by the company in Namibia. Therefore the DeSousa’s have been living on intermittent generator power only.

Jordan Yarbrough is a US missionary Nurse Practitioner who has lived in Huambo for 10+ years, and she wants to train under us and work with us part time.  She has a beautiful servant heart and will also be a great, part-time addition to our team.  She will be able to have a place to stay when she visits!

We’ve hosted many visitors this year from the US, Canada and Angola, all contributing in various ways to serving the patients at the hospital and others in the region to communicate our Father’s heart. 

The many facets of the work all seem to be gelling beautifully and we anticipate our Father will soon bring us more kindred hearts to serve these beautiful and hurting people.  

We would love to see join us both (!) medical and non-medical international missionary individuals and families with hearts to love/serve in a variety of ways and we now have places for them to live. 

Our dream of developing a local staff of kindred spirits and servant hearts is being realized. Our work is increasing in volume of critical patients and the hunger for learning and serving selflessly in our staff is clearly growing.  Four of the nurses who we sponsored to train in the city over the past five years have returned and they have positively influenced the culture of our hospital staff.  They bring kingdom attitudes regarding work ethic and selfless serving that have been contagious.  The weekly staff meetings are full of enthusiastic interaction and ideas for growth and improvement in our service. Disciple hearts, hungry to know and serve Jesus, are evident. The number of parts/roles on our team is growing all the time and we now employ over sixty local people full time.   

Rodé is serving well as administrator of the local team/work and growing in her responsibilities and leadership. Florindo is autonomously seeing patients daily and two others are receiving training to begin to see patients autonomously in 2024. 

The daily work of the hospital (salaries, meds) is self-sustained financially via adequate revenue received from the patient charges.  We have instituted an excellent centralized cashier system for payment collection and our non-payments have ceased, significantly increasing our revenue.

You would be so pleased with the construction improvements on the campus (you will see when you visit!), and we now employ all labor locally and the work has been done with excellence (buildings, windows, doors, cement, sidewalks, plumbing, jangos, etc.,). 

Over the past several months, we have averaged about thirty new patients and about ninety in-patients daily, and we are in our slowest months of the year. Our daily, morning talks on spiritual and physical health average 100 adults (different group each day), who hear the truth that Jesus is alive and pursuing relationship with each of them.

We send about 1/50 of our patients to CEML for urgent surgery via MAF and our ongoing partnership with these organizations enables us to serve those who arrive with urgent surgical needs. 

The airstrip is functioning nicely and is a huge blessing in our backyard.  Betsy is very pleased to drive five easy minutes, rather than a rough hour to Chinhama!  We haven’t had a car break down on the trip yet!  The current patients will never know what they have missed…

Our system for electricity is functioning well with two generators working alternate nights and battery/solar power during the day. Our X-ray unit is functioning solidly and is used almost daily. The lab is operational throughout each day and is growing in usefulness. These all make a great difference in our ability to diagnose and treat with accuracy, while communicating more perceived objectivity for the patient, adding essential trust to the doctor-patient interaction in a rural culture where there are no doctors (few would know the difference between a doctor and a shaman).

The patient “vila” (large, open, roofed and walled building outside of our campus wall) for families is completed and sleeping up to 100 people nightly.  We will need to add a duplicate.

We met with a large Angolan water company and we are receiving their estimates to add water tanks and perhaps a well at the hospital and in the village, which will provide two reliable water sources (spring and well) at each location.  We are investigating the installation of wells and hand pumps in surrounding villages.  This Angolan company seems solid and experienced (3000 boreholes in 10yr) and a US company (Design Outreach) is enthusiastic about partnering with us and the drilling company to provide clean water and solid hand pumps to the surrounding villages.

The main hospital building will likely be completed in 2024 with full solar energy.  We will look to add our last inpatient ward in 2025, which will hopefully be a duplicate of the original construction from 2018, which was so well done in partnership with AGA and our local workers, and is overfilled nightly.  We will then have a facility that will adequately serve many for years, with 120+ acute inpatient beds separated from 60+ TB beds.  This Cavango hospital campus will include:

•   a main hospital building with a large meeting area under roof for ministry meetings and morning talks on physical and spiritual health, an ED and ICU, consultation rooms, an office, a lab, radiology, a pharmacy, an immunization center, etc;
•   our current three-building “transitional hospital”, which is currently serving us well, will become an inpatient ward of 30+ beds with a surgery and recovery room;
•   two other inpatient wards which will each contain 25 beds for acute care;
•   a separated TB hospital with clinic with five private rooms (original clinic building), a TB inpatient ward with 20 beds (original inpatient building) and three TB houses (each housing 12 patients);

We also have added the following to better serve all arrivals in Cavango:

• an inventoried pharmacy “warehouse” in a 40’ container,
• the “vila” to sleep those feeding and caring for their family member,
• a guard house,
• an outdoor kitchen for the workers,
• a cantina to serve those who arrive without adequate food,
• a protected motorcycle parking area,
• a covered construction work area with generator power,
• a covered market for local sellers at the entrance to the campus,
• twenty solar streetlights which provide beautiful lighting on the campus nightly,
• internet at the hospital campus and a radio system for after-hours contact with the doctor on-call
• a private shower facility for our nurses 

We have completed a small house for each of our two, lovely and grateful diabetic patients who must live near our campus to receive daily insulin.  We would like to add the construction of a small house for our nurses who are from a village 8km away, where they can stay while working.

Sidewalks now connect all fourteen buildings and help to keep the floors in the hospital clean, as well as add to the appearance and organization of the campus. 

The 1200-meter fence surrounding the campus is almost complete with a three-adobe-block-high base and a one-meter, iron picket-style fence on top.  

We’ve instituted some basic, creative landscaping with flowers and grass.

Our nutrition project is progressing nicely with an orchard of 100 varied, irrigated and thriving fruit trees on about a 10-acre plot of cultivated land.  More to be planted this year.  We are considering the addition of simple ponds for catfish farming in order to improve the local economy and add much needed protein to the diets of those at the hospital.

We are financially supporting four individuals who are receiving training in the city to return as teachers in 2026 to work at our mission school, which will be in planning stages prior. 

We hope to construct a simple bridge over the rocks in the Cubango river in 2024 to enable crossing this large river, especially when it cannot be crossed from November to May.

We also now “employ” four cats to live on, and wander about, the campus and they have been well accepted by the patients and staff and our long-term battle with the presence of a large rat population in our hospital buildings has been almost won.

We are beyond grateful for your essential contributions to this work, and your trust in us in financing these many projects.

Continued/upcoming unmet financial needs:

• Bridge over river – $10,000
• Purchase of Laurel’s Hilux to be a shared Cavango mission vehicle (estimate pending)
• Surgical patient care at CEML – $100,000 annually (partially funded)
• Completion of new hospital building – $50,000 (the part unfunded)
• Completion of solar project in new building – $100,000 (partially funded)
• Duplicate family “vila” – $10,000
• Simple house for nurses – $10,000

Other pressing human resource needs:

• a homeschool helper for the DeSousa’s, for 1-3 years (Portuguese not required).
• a full-time maintenance person/mechanic to manage our campus and train local men to do the same
• an additional full-time clinician

As you know, little of the above is actually why we are here and why you partner with us.  We are here to introduce the forgotten people of this small region of the world to our Father and to demonstrate to them, by serving them, their value in His eyes and His affection for them.  All the above facilitate the same.

Thank you for your continued passionate partnership with us in serving/loving/honoring/valuing these beautiful people.

So many are benefiting!

tim and betsy