From Sheenagh Burrell, ALMA Co-ordinator
almacoordinator@london.anglican.org T: Tuesdays: 020 7932 1231
Dear ALMA Reps and Friends,
ALMA has had a busy autumn: October saw Bishop Paul’s visit and St Paul’s Ealing visit to Niassa and Lebombo. The news hounds among you will have picked up the two reports on Bishop Paul’s visit in the Diocesan news: Bishop Paul shares confirmation with Bishop Mark of Niassa and Bishop of Kensington joins a gathering of 5000 at the Diocese of Lebombo family weekend . We also have an album of photos of the family weekend in Maciene on the ALMA website sent to us by Fr Juliao Mutemba. Later on in the circular I will try to give you a flavour of my parish visit, and the ALMA days I spent in Lichinga and Maputo.
November has proved no less full, with the complication of some wintry coughs and colds! John, Helen D and I went to Swanwick to the Partners in World Mission Conference where Janice Price’s book ‘World-Shaped Mission’ set the tone for a conference on Being Cross-Cultural Christians. Since then we’ve led the monthly MU prayer meeting in the Cathedral and updated Hammersmith and Fulham Deanery Synod on the two church building projects, Xai Xai and T3, they have supported in Lebombo. And finally Revd Richard Fermer has been licensed as Priest in Charge of the Grosvenor Chapel. It is good to welcome Richard and his wife, Giseli, to London.
December of course brings the happy event of Bishop Dinis’ wedding to Lina Valoi on 8 December. Please do pray for them and their families as they prepare for their marriage. I am thrilled to have been given an air miles flight to Johannesburg and to be making a very short visit to Maputo for the wedding to represent ALMA.
1 December. World Aids day
7-9 December. Bishop Dinis and Lina’s wedding weekend. Wedding at St Stephen and at Lawrence Maputo on 8 December
After my parish visit to Nampula area in Niassa I had three days in Maputo. In that time, I visited St Peter and St Paul Thlabane, twinned with St Thomas Finsbury Park, who had recently extended their church by incorporating the office, sacristy and store room into the church and replacing those three rooms elsewhere on the site –all built to a very high spec. It was so good to have tea with Fr Elias, his family and the church elders. On Sunday Fr Silva and his wife took me to T3 on the outskirts of Maputo. This congregation was started by Berta Sengulane in the 1980s, is a satellite of St Cyprian’s, and Hammersmith and Fulham Deanery Synod have assisted in building a permanent church. It is almost finished and, although the early rains underlined the urgent need for the roof, umbrellas sufficed and did not dim the worship or thankfulness. It was good to see the youth taking such an active part in the service and to hear their submission and their new name-the Esperanca Berta youth. On Monday, in addition to meetings, I visited St Barnabas (twinned St John’s Greenhill), Santa Monica (twinned St Paul’s Bow Common) where the new chairs were proudly displayed, and St Stephen’s School Matola, where I delivered some posters from St Matthew’s Yiewsley whose Portuguese translations were much admired! It was a delight to return to Maputo, to renew acquaintances and friendships and to see the tangible bonds that unite us in ALMA.
Just two hours' flight north of Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, a new rush is under way. It's a rush for resources, a rush for money, a rush for a new life. And at the heart of it all is the unlikeliest of boom towns. A few years ago, Tete was a sleepy, dusty backwater. Nestled on the banks of the Zambezi River, the town was a place for truckers to stop overnight as they made their way to and from Malawi and Zimbabwe. For many people, there was no good reason to spend more than 24 hours in Tete. But everything has changed. Thousands of people have headed to the town, tripling its population. It is due to the discovery of what is believed to be the most valuable reserves of coal to have been found anywhere in the world in the past 50 years
‘as electricity demands grow and rising global temperatures affect rainfall patterns, the dams will be unable to meet energy needs or control floods, warns a new study, ‘A Risky Climate for Southern African Hydro’, was conducted for the NGO, International Rivers by Richard Beilfuss, a hydrologist and environmentalist who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering in the US and the University of Eduardo Mondlane in Mozambique. The report uses the Zambezi basin as a case study to inform governments planning to establish new hydropower plants.
‘Amnesty International encountered several children who both claimed and appeared to be under 16 years old. When questioned about this, prison authorities said that the burden of proof was on the detainees to prove their age. But only a tiny minority of people in Mozambique have birth certificates - those from very poor families are unlikely to have any kind of documentation’
Interestingly at the ‘Partners in World Mission’ Conference we met Sally Thompson from the International Anglican Family Network who are also working on this vital issue.
With best wishes to you all, and thanks to those who baked for and helped with the Reps meeting with Bishop Mark,
Sheenagh Burrell
ALMA Co-ordinator
Tel: 020 7932 1231 Tuesdays Diocese of London, London Diocesan House 36, Causton St, London SW1P 4AU.