May 2005 News from Paul & Cathy in South Africa
 

Dear All, Sorry, I think we've slipped a bit by not being in touch for a while. Again its cos we've been up to our necks in all sorts of ... stuff (office work, planning for flights, installing a wood burning stove, house maintenance etc) and the flight bookings board has just sprouted a plethora of entries so we figured we'd best write now before we're completely immersed. We are just about to post our next newsletter out so we won't duplicate many of the juicy bits here, but this should give you a rough idea of what's up down here.

Cathy has been particularly involved in a number of home births. Some of these have been for friends of ours at the church we attend – that is, the friends go to our church but the deliveries were at their homes – you knew that! The one was quite a drawn out affair as Cathy left our house at 04:00 in the morning and returned at 03:30 the following day.

Paul has been out flying a few times with his latest trip being a one day outing taking some British visitors to a Christian couple’s citrus farm on the Zimbabwe border. Looming large on the horizon are a number of possible mission flights to Moz. Two of them involve medical teams (dentistry, dispensing glasses and primary health care etc), another is a work team for another flying mission and there is one flight to a week long missions conference that both of us will go on. There are also a number of flights where we will just pick up members of teams from Moz at the end of their mission and bring them back to SA.
 

Matthew is coping well at uni. He is finding second year a step up from his initial uni experience as evidenced by the reduction in communication from him.

 

Lastly, to prove that a little fun is still possible, we went to visit friends in Swaziland this last week end and took part in a mountain bike race - held in a game park. I must say I felt a little like those bowls of sushi you see on conveyor belts as we cycled through the grass lands. We saw quite a few things during the race but fortunately none of them had big teeth and felt hungry.
 

Paul & Cathy Middleton