Building New Relationships​

March 1, 2023

February has been a good month for us here in South Africa. We hosted a team from First Family Church in Ankeny.  Everyone seemed to have a good experience, and we accomplished a lot. They assisted us in enlarging our garden at Del Cramer and now we are able to use the garden to teach the children how to grow their own food and work in the garden to grow to produce that they enjoy eating at Del Cramer.  We also moved 350 laying hens donated by HyLine Poultry company to Del Cramer to begin our feasibility study to add a boiled egg every day to the children’s diet and document the benefits that we see of doing that.  It is a research project that we are working on with the University of Iowa medical school.  We are also thinking that the children will be able to help us harvest the eggs and care for the layers to learn more about where their food actually comes from.  We have been working for more than a year now to deepen our relationship with First Family Church and this successful mission team has solidified our relationship with another great church.

We enjoyed hosting the African representative from Ghana for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.  We are looking forward to signing an agreement with them to become the primary hub for FCA in South Africa.  With this agreement, we hope to send our Sports 4 Christ coach to Cape Town for a one-month training program to become the country coordinator for FCA in South Africa.  I am excited that this new relationship will also permit us to host many American coaches and athletes to work with our youth here on our campus. My recovery from my open-heart surgery on December 12th is going well.  I am about 90% back to normal. I am able to ride my bike for two to three hours every day through our beautiful Waterberg Mountain Range.  My physicians were a bit concerned that I was rushing to come back to Africa just four weeks post-op, but it has been an excellent decision.  This is my happy place and I would much prefer to recover here versus Iowa in January and February. On March 27th Beth and I will be heading back to Iowa to prepare for the annual gala on April 25th.  We pray that we will see many of you there.  It is always a pleasant reunion with many people who love and support our ministry here in Africa.

Doc