Just thought it would be helpful to give a little (or a lot) of background info on the missionary we are going to be staying with and supporting, Richard Zwau. This is what Jodi's mom Jaime had to say about Richard:
I first met Richard Zwau on my initial trip to Zambia with Teen Missions in the early part of 2003, so I have known him for 8 years. He had just graduated from a two year Bible program at the Teen Missions Bible School in Ndola, Zambia and was working at one of their orphan rescue units in the bush village of Kansoka for a year of internship. He was 26 years old, skillfully overseeing the care of hundreds of orphans, and caring for the basic medical needs of the village people. I was impressed with his ability to give medical attention to a woman who could hardly walk due to a large tropical ulcer on her knee. Her sons had carried her on a bike to Richard from their home because her knee was full of infection, swelling to the size of a baseball. I had some antibiotics that I gave for her treatment and Richard told her that even with man’s medication, it was the Lord who brings healing and we prayed for her. Over the next few days, she came to Richard to have the infection squeezed out and cleaned with Hydrogen Peroxide. She often screamed in pain, but Richard lovingly tended her wound. I asked him how he knew what to do for her. He said he just prayed and asked God for wisdom. I was impressed with his courage and faith.
After working a year of internship in Kansoka, he joined the Teen Missions staff and began overseeing another rescue unit in Mansa, an area in northeastern Zambia which was 11 hours away from the TMI (Teen Missions International) base in Ndola. Doug Petersen, the director of TMI Zambia, had chosen Richard to work at this new location because it was so far from the TMI base, and he needed someone he could trust with the work without constant supervision. Richard was that kind of person. Richard not only oversaw the care and schooling of over 500 orphans in this location, but began a Bible Study, preached often in the local church, and various other outreach ministries. The village where the rescue unit was located was very close to the Congo border and Richard would even walk over into Congo to reach the lost with the gospel. He has a very dedicated heart to evangelism and the care of the vulnerable. When I went to Zambia on my second venture there in 2004, our team was sent to work at the Mansa rescue unit and I was again able to observe Richard’s ministry and was so impressed with his love for the children. He was respected by the children and the community, and kept large numbers of children in order, often with a small child sleeping in his lap. He seemed to be a very loving leader of people, and I came home feeling like I had worked with Jesus Himself for three weeks—Jesus so evidently flowed through him to the people.
Richard was extremely sad when Doug told him that again he needed him to move to a new location, to open a new rescue unit in yet another very remote location where he could be cut off from the outside world for long periods of time when rains were heavy and the clay roads would be washed out. He had now worked at two rescue units and in each location he had intended on living in that place the rest of his life. He connected himself so much with the children that he hated to leave them. He had a father’s heart toward them and wanted to see them through their trials in life as they grew up. I encouraged him that I felt that the Lord was calling him to this new place where there were people who could not read and needed to know that God loved them. It was a place with no pastor at the small local church, and no government school--the village had just set up a mud and stick school house and was trying to teach the children in a very simple way. It was a village called Milenge. Amazingly enough, on my third mission to Zambia, our team was again sent to the place where Richard was working since it was the newest rescue unit and I was able to spend some more time with him and see the gifts that the Lord had given him. He told us the story of a boy who was from that village. The boy’s mother had died and he lived alone with his father. He was the best student in his class at a school far away (a 3 hour walk to get there each day—so his father took him to school on a bike). The boy won an award at the end of the year, and that day he happened to have to walk home from school without his father. The other boys in the class were jealous and took his award and prizes and tore them up. He told his father, who went to the head school master and reported what the boys had done. The school master then visited the other boys’ homes and spoke with their parents, telling them that the boys would be punished. This made the families angry with the boy and his father and they began to shun them. Eventually, the boy’s father also died, and he moved in with his aunt. The families then began to shun the aunt also, so she kicked the boy out of her home also. The boy had no one to stick up for him, no one to pay his school fees, so he dropped out of school and lived in the woods, eating what he could from the wild plants and scrounging food scraps from people’s trash dumps in the village. When the people found out that the boy was eating from their trash, they quit throwing their scraps away. The boy was left without clothing and food for many months, and finally hung himself. Richard was not yet working there at this time, and it grieved him so much that he had not been there. He said, “If I had been there, I could have taken him in.” And that is exactly what Richard did with other young boys that had nowhere to go. One young man that you will probably meet is Wilson. He is one that Richard took in from living in the bush. While working in the villages for Teen Missions, Richard did not make a large salary—maybe $50 a month—yet on his small income, he always made room for taking care of the vulnerable. He often had several children living with him at the rescue unit. He was not about storing up for himself treasures on earth, but storing up treasures in heaven. Even to this day, when I send him money for himself to have enough to eat, it is not in his nature to store it for a rainy day, but he instead spends it feeding the needy and sharing with others. He is often hungry, with no food in the house, or undergoes illness without medication, or spends the nights without candles because he cannot afford them, yet he does not change his ways to store something for a later need. This is so contrary to the life we lead in the West, where we stock our homes with things for “the future”. We have medicine for a headache that we may experience next month, or stock our cupboards and freezers with food we may want to eat in three weeks. We are prepared for our future needs. It’s a whole other way of looking at life, contrary to our own. I admire him for that, yet I realize that my own way of living is also necessary for the culture I live in and it allows me the opportunity to be of help to him as he serves others.
During the three years when Richard worked in Mibende, he married a beautiful young woman named Yvonne. I had heard of her story from Doug Petersen, but it wasn’t until that year at Mibende that I finally was able to meet her in person. She worked at a matron’s unit for Teen Missions that was about 3-4 hours down the road from Mibende (by car) and we were able to stop and visit the unit on our way into Ndola. The Matron’s units were dormitories which Teen Missions had set up near middle schools and high schools, where girls who were going to school far from their villages could have a safe place to stay. (Otherwise they would have to rent a room from some local family and often were sexually abused by men.) Yvonne had helped to open the first TMI matron’s unit, and now was overseeing this second one. I was so blessed to meet her finally, and felt at the time that I had met someone of royalty. She was beautiful and gracious and had the look of strength and wisdom in her face. I was elated that God had chosen to give her to Richard to support his life and work! What a woman! Later I was able to make a wedding dress for her and they were married in late 2006.
Even though Yvonne was petite and spoke with a soft voice, she was one of the most courageous women I have even met. When she first came to Doug and Teen Missions, applying for Bible School, she had cycle cell anemia and Doug turned her away. He said that they were training missionaries to work in the bush and that she didn’t have the health to withstand the harsh conditions. So she went away and began her own work, preaching in a church in the bush. Then she returned after a year, and Doug could not turn her away this time. She was determined to serve the Lord with all her heart and she did. She and another young woman were sent out to be the first matrons to oversee the first matron’s unit. They had enough beds for 50 girls, but there were 150 sleeping 3 to a bed to be safe as they attended school. Yvonne was counselor and tutor and mother to them all. They dealt with all kinds of issues from school work to witchcraft. By the end of their first year, not a single girl had to drop out of school because of pregnancy and ALL of them passed their final exams. The Minister of Education came out to the matron unit to see if they were cheating, but found that they were under the good care of someone who cared for them and helped them to achieve their dreams.
Two years after Richard and Yvonne were married, she died. While they were living in Mibende she had taken ill with kidney failure and Doug brought them in from the bush and transferred them to a nearby rescue unit so that she could be closer to the city and medical care. Again, it was a hardship on Richard to leave the children he cared for in Mibende, and Yvonne wept at that thought that she was the cause of Richard having to leave them. Our family happened to be there in Ndola at that time (recording our Insansa CD) and was able to pray with them about their move to a new rescue unit, and to encourage them. They spend the next year ministering at the rescue unit in Chiwala (I think Richard plans to take you to that area when you are there). They were able to take in a few of the orphans from Mibende that they were helping already and didn’t want to abandon---Jenifer and Wilson. A little over a year later, Yvonne became ill with malaria and very dehydrated. Richard took her to the hospital and they hooked her up to an IV of fluids. Hospitals in Zambia are VERY different than hospitals here. The nursing staff is not around at night and people are not monitored like they are here by being hooked up to machines that monitor your heart and such. Around 10PM she smiled at her mother sitting near her and then died. My sister thinks that she was given too many fluids too quickly and then her heart failed. It was a very sad time for Richard, but through this trial he has not left his faith or his commission by God to serve the poor. Since Richard no longer had a wife, Jenifer went back to live with her grandmother, and Wilson helps with a ministry in Chiwala and visits Richard now and again. Richard currently has another one of his young disciples living with him from Mibende. His name is Peter and he helps with the ministry.
Richard was only in 5th grade when his own father died, leaving him an orphan (a person is considered orphaned who has lost one parent, and called a “double orphan” if they have lost both parents). At that time, the extended family came in and took all that they owned—house, land, animals, etc. His mother had 5 children and was forced to move back in with her parents who lived in another tribal area. Richard had attended school regularly and hoped to be a doctor, to help people someday. His grandfather was unable to pay his school fees, so he had to drop out of school and make sling shots from sticks and rubber car tires and sell them in the marketplace. He was very upset about that. He wanted to attend school. A while later, his older sister got married and took him in with her to the city, where he was again able to attend school. Then her husband died and he again was without someone to pay his school fees. I think one of his older brothers was able to send him to school then for a little while, enabling him to finish 8th grade. That was as far as he got in his education. No one was there for him in 9th grade. He later attended the TMI Bible School in his 20’s and even though he never was able to become a doctor, he HAS been able to fulfill his dream of helping people. So this is why he has such a great heart for serving the young children. He wants them to have someone to support them in their dreams when their parents have died or are unable to help them. He knows what it feels like to have no one.
A few months before Yvonne died, Richard felt that God was calling him to leave Teen Missions and begin his own ministry. He told Doug that if he remained with Teen Missions, he knew that he would always be taken care of, and if he left, he would have to trust the Lord to take care of his needs—that it would challenge his faith. He also had had a vision of a flyer posted on a tree that read “Come to the Shunammite House for healing and spiritual renewal” (remember the story of the Shunammite woman who took care of Elijah each time he passed her way—she and her husband prepared a room for him to rest in on his travels around Israel). Richard felt that God had asked him to open a house where people could be healed spiritually and find help to be trained in a skill to support themselves physically. So this is the vision he is fulfilling now in his ministry. He is building a house, where you will stay while you are there in Ndola, that he calls the Shunammite House. (He currently lives in a small little building on the property with no electricity or water). You will be his first ministry team and he will be blessed by your support in his work. Until a few months ago, the house just had a foundation and some walls. Then we helped support the building of a roof. Now, during the rainy season, he is able to have the orphans over to sing and share the Word with them, and to paint and various other activities under the roof. At Christmas, he was able to have a Christmas dinner for about 60 of the orphans in his house. Next, I hope to help him finish the floor, windows, doors, a bathroom, and maybe a little furniture in preparation for your coming. (I don’t know if he’ll be able to get electricity yet or not by that time). The area where this house is located is in a section of Ndola called a “compound”, specifically Pamodzi Compound. I think that the term “compound” is used for a poor suburb of a major city. So Richard spends his time going out to his neighborhood, visiting people and getting to know them, asking if they have anything he can pray for them about, and inviting them to his church and prayer meetings. (You will find in Zambia that people are very open to prayer and God.) He began a church, along with an elder man named Gilbert who had been discipling him at his former church. Gilbert does the preaching on Sundays at the local school building that they rent, and then during the week, Richard leads various early morning prayer meetings and evening Bible studies. He also invites the orphans to come to his house and meets with them to see what their needs are. This past Jan/Feb we were able to raise funds to send 30 of these orphans to school when they thought there was no one to support them. Richard goes to the schools now and checks on them, to make sure they are attending regularly and doing well. There are specific stories of people he ministers to on a blog I have begun last year www.Mutwafwe.blogspot.com Mutwafwe means “Help us” in Bemba, and this is the name of Richard’s nonprofit organization which is recognized by the government. (Sorry, I haven’t updated the blog since last October, but I plan to soon. I have a lot of new stories to tell and I will try to do that soon. But you can get an idea of what he does through reading the stories. There is also a pastor named Blessing included in the blog, but he works in another ministry in northern Zambia. Reading about the ministry of both of them, although, will help you understand the issues of what life in Zambia is like and what the needs of the people are like.)
When you go to work with Richard in his ministry, he wants you to spend a lot of your time just being with the children and getting to know them (and teaching them music). He may also want you to go with him in his visitation rounds of the community for evangelism and prayer times with the neighbors. I think he said that he has begun a little choir of kids to sing with you too. I think he has said that he will take you out to the bush villages also to minister.
Thank you so much for your willingness to go and encourage Richard in the Lord’s work, and encourage the children there also who have suffered much in their young lives. Taking the time to go really means a lot to them—they appreciate that someone will remember them.
Jaime Bagge
Lots of the funds that we raise will be going towards the completion of Richard's vision of his Shunammite house. If you want to support Richard or his vision, just contact us.
