Articles – Page 16

Find the balance

Family is central to Africans, who we are and how we exist. Remove family, and we are not a people. Our nuclear and extended families are interconnected, and this web often determines many decisions we make. Family in Africa exists to support indi...

Called: Ralambo Tiffanie – no longer lonely

I faced a lot of suspicion when I first arrived as a missionary on the Island. Unknown to me, some Malagasy single women who arrived before me were involved in prostitution. It was tough to settle as a single Malagasy girl on an Island tha...

Missionary call and family – an “Ubuntu” option

Must a missionary abandon his family to truly answer God’s call to reach the lost? Across the continent, a new generation of African missionaries is going out, and their families do not always understand the reasons. It can appear se...

A turnaround for Reagan

Reagan had never left the town of Kumasi in his entire life. So the day he boarded a bus for the mission field far away from home was a big day. Upon arriving in Tamale, he discovered that the bus to Gbintre moved once a day. He didn’t m...

Missionary calling and family concerns

You have been called to serve as a missionary, but family concerns threaten to pull you the other way. How do you resolve the dilemma? We have compiled advice from mission leaders to address some common family issues that arise when you de...

The support mothers: standing in the gap for missionary kids

In February 1996, the EMS children’s hostel opened in Jos, Nigeria, to provide a home for the children of EMS missionaries who were serving in the mission field. The idea was motivated by a finding that 25 per cent of missionaries left t...

People Groups: the Beja of Eritrea, Sudan and Egypt

The Beja people are nomads who have occupied their homelands across the Sudan, Eritrea and Egypt for more than 4,000 years. Some scholars believe they are related to the ancient Egyptians. In the course of their history, they accepted Isla...

Language learning and culture

When a group of Kenyans and Malagasies were sent to a third country to serve as missionaries, it was a lot harder to communicate than they imagined. One team member already knew the trade language, and most had five or six other languages ...

Culture shock

Can an African experience culture shock? Absolutely. Culture shock is when a person is unable to cope well in unfamiliar surroundings. Reactions vary from anger with the host culture, to withdrawal, grief and loneliness and sometimes spiri...

The doors a business can open

When Lucy Pius Mwiru decided to go to Oman as a housemaid, the goal was to eventually become economically stable and serve others, but things didn’t go as planned. The wages weren’t as much as she had been promised, and the job was tra...