Well, here I am in good ol' Tete, with the temperature at a wintry 30 degrees, my favourite doctor and chef gone, and my only companion half-deaf with a waxed up ear and constantly demanding a fresh cup of tea. This is how things have been ever since the sixteenth of August when two thirds of my family left Mozambique. Dad and I pulled the short straw.

Mum and the others left early because Josiah needed to get into a school before the new academic year began. By the way Jos received his GCSE results and he did brilliantly, as we all knew he would. Dad and I will be joining Mum, Josiah, Nathanael and Samuel at the end of September - hopefully this year! Actually life without the rest of the family isn't that bad – for me at least. One thing that I am enjoying very much is not being woken up at five in the morning by LEGO being poured over the floor, requests to untuck mosquito nets, or screaming arguments about who cheated in which dinosaur game. Yes, with the departure of Nat and Sam, mornings in my bedroom have become much more peaceful. Being a budding teenager who enjoys sleeping in, this is bliss.

Not having a mother around is a bit harder to adjust to. We have a lady who helps around the house, but her cooking skills are somewhat limited. After you've eaten rice and beans for the seven hundredth time, it gets a bit tiring. When Mum was here, she would make sure we weren't served up the same four dishes. The occasional beef stew, pizza or cottage pie made so much difference. Previously Dad hadn't shown himself to be much of a cook, although he has since made the odd tasty meal. I honestly think the only reason we're getting some variation in our diet is that after a while Dad gets as tired of having the same food as I do. I have noticed a strange increase in chips and hamburgers on the dinner table. I wonder why.

I believe that I mentioned that my only companion is deaf with a waxed up ear. This is the other prominent change that came about as a result of Mum going - we lost our doctor. So far it hasn't been too difficult. Nobody has developed appendicitis or rabies or bilharzia or cholera or . . . well, you get the idea. Any cut toes I develop from never wearing shoes I can deal with myself, and Dad's being very careful to keep the water filter running. But he still couldn't avoid a build-up of wax in his right ear. This is actually a somewhat common problem for Dad, but previously Mum had been around to squirt some water in and somehow eliminate the blockage. Now Mum's not here, and Dad has had to suffer. It's been somewhat difficult for him in meetings and the like when he spends more time requesting repetitions of answers than he does asking questions. Yesterday, out of desperation, he visited a church member who has the necessary utensils for extracting wax, and with some helpful though remote advice from Mum, she syringed Dad's ear. Apparently his hearing has improved a bit, but there's still rather a lot of wax in there.

Another strange side-effect of being abandoned is that communications have more or less dried up. It seems that Mum must be the popular one in our family, because I've heard Dad complaining that everyone has forgotten about us. Apparently his email in-box is void of messages and the phone has lost its voice. Even my once faithful pen-pals seem to have forgotten that I'm here. Friends who used to write to me once a week have now dropped back to once a month. This is very frustrating for me and Dad as we actually are fond of conversing with other people.

That's basically the state of our domestic life. The church work at the moment is going really well. With Mum, Josiah and Nathanael gone, our international church has lost three key members. Now that we no longer have an excellent worship leader and translator in my mother, nor two very capable young men working the data projector, our church has had to make some changes. The worship group is not as slick as it used to be, but it's still functioning. Translators who had previously kept quiet about their abilities are stepping forward to serve, and a couple of computer-competent men are having a go at the projector. Of course, Dad and I will also soon be leaving, depriving the church of its founder, main preacher, main evangelist, main encourager and fair-to-middling translator. And, far more importantly, depriving the church of its expert drummer! Those of you who have seen my YouTube video will know that I was training up a successor. I have decided, however, that my original student wasn't getting very far, so I have switched targets. I am now training an eleven-year-old boy called Shima, who is doing very well. Next Sunday Dad and I will be away at another church, so it will be up to Shima to drum all on his own. I have a feeling that he'll do okay.

Dad has been busy training our church's leadership team. This consists of two Zimbabweans and three Mozambicans, one woman and four men. Despite the racial and gender differences, these five people are working very well together. They are breaking past racial and cultural barriers and are building up the church. A very recent addition to this leadership team is Mario Chataica, a pastor from one of our other Elim churches and also the secretary of our national executive. He has agreed to become the new pastor of our international church, and is working very hard to get used to the different customs and structures. He is good at his job, though, and Dad is confident that he will be a good replacement.

As missionaries we are constantly looking to build up an African church that doesn't constantly look to people in the West for handouts. For this reason our city church recently took up a collection to buy a bale of second-hand clothes so that we could help one of our village churches. We also encouraged our members to bring in any clothes that they no longer wear or have outgrown and to add these to the pile. Last Sunday we were very encouraged because at least ten people contributed plastic bags full of second-hand clothes that they were donating to their African brothers. This Sunday Dad and I will go into the bush along with two other church members and distribute these clothes. We are very glad to see that our church members are willing to give instead of always wanting to receive. This is the way it should be and we're delighted to see such growing maturity among our people.

Last Saturday we held our monthly training seminar. This one was about children's ministry. I was preparing myself for another day of boring people coming up and giving boring talks, when out of the blue Dad asked me to talk about what happens in our church's Sunday School. Well, I was not expecting that, but for some reason I agreed. I got together with one of the young men from Moatize and we put our heads together and came up with an idea of what to do. The biggest worry I had was not the content – goodness knows I've picked up enough training from Dad over the years – but rather the fact that I was going  to teach a bunch of people many years older than me in Portuguese. I had never done that before. Once I gave a little five-minute talk at a village church where it didn't matter whether I goofed or not, but to speak for half an hour solely in Portuguese on an important topic was an entirely new thing for me. Looking back, I can see that I shouldn't have worried. My Portuguese is actually very good, not to boast or anything, and I have learnt a lot of stuff from my dad about Sunday School work and how to give a good talk. So I practised and, come Saturday and my time to stand up and talk, I did very well. My dad says that I was clear, interesting, and it sounded like I cared about my message. Be that as it may, I was very glad when I was able to sit down again. My mean and unreasonable father recorded my talk and has posted 60 seconds of it on YouTube. If you've seriously nothing better to do, you can have a look at how I did by clicking here.

Grace to you

Gregory and Sharon Kane
Elim International Missions

• Pray for Sharon as she's busy settling the rest of our family back into life in England. Pray specifically that she would locate a suitable house for us to rent, schools for the boys, and that she would find a sympathetic GP willing to help her revalidate her medical skills.
• Pray for Mario, Stephen, Zivanai, Lucia and Jaime as they look after our international church.
• Pray for the distribution of second hand clothes, that the right people would be helped, and that our other village churches wouldn't resent being passed over. Thank God also for the maturity and generosity of the members of our international church.
• Pray for Gregory and Daniel's health and safety.
• We still need to freight some of our goods home as well as to sell our car. Please pray for the practical outworking of these issues.
• Give thanks for the successful seminar on children's ministry. All of our Tete city churches now run regular Sunday Schools, an innovation from this time last year. Thus far only one of our village churches has embraced the challenge of reaching children. Pray that this too would change.
• Gregory is busy in these last few weeks handing over various responsibilities and mentoring key individuals in the execution of these tasks. Pray specifically for Jaime as he takes on oversight of our project using the Saber MP3 player. Pray also for Araujo who has assumed responsibility for the many correspondence courses that Gregory has developed over the past five years. And pray for Joao Cafuliza, our General Superintendent, as he steers Elim in Mozambique into the next stage of its growth and development.