Khamisi Kwela’s father was a strong Muslim believer who took his eight children to the mosque and made sure they attended weekly Islamic classes.
“My dad was very strict when it came to religious matters,” Khamisi said. “There was only one religion allowed in our family.”
But when Khamisi was 10, his dad died and the family lost their way.
“We became completely financially incapacitated,” Khamisi said. “My older siblings and mum worked hard to ensure we had food, but we struggled to put a meal on the table. Poverty was part of us.”
It was a hard life. But it was also brought a little freedom to Khamisi’s mother and she started going to church.
“My mum had wanted to know Christ for a long time, but due to the restrictions of our dad, she would not have even dared,” Khamisi remembered.
Soon Khamisi’s mother and older brothers all started going to church and soon became Christians. But Khamisi and one of his younger brothers didn’t
“We wanted to maintain the religion of our father,” he said, “so we continued to attend mosque.”
Khamisi knew about Christianity from his friends at school and from the Christian Religious Education classes there. But still, he lived in darkness for five years after his father’s death.
“I FELT AS IF SOMETHING WAS BURNING WITHIN ME. I WAS GLUED TO MY SEAT AND LISTENED ATTENTIVELY TO THE WORD OF GOD AS IF THAT IS WHAT I HAD COME TO DO.”
Until one Sunday when he went to pick something up from one of his brother’s at church. When he arrived the church service was still going.
“I sat in the last row, waiting for the service to end. As the worship was going on, I felt as if something was burning within me,” he said. “I was glued to my seat and listened attentively to the Word of God as if that is what I had come to do.”
When the pastor asked if anyone wanted to come forward and become a Christian, Khamisi couldn’t resist.
“Whatever was burning within me became stronger,” he said. “I was pulled to the altar by the power of Holy Spirit and for the first time in my life, I felt the need for Jesus.”
The pastor prayed for him and his family was overjoyed.
Khamisi joined the discipleship class and was mentored by the senior pastor to help him grow in his new faith.
“Today I call him my spiritual dad,” Khamisi said. “When he learned about my story, he took over paying my school fees. I went to a school in Malindi town, which even in my dreams I never thought I would do! I had never seen such demonstration of love.”
Khamisi read his Bible with an undying fervor and did all he could to learn about prayer and ministry in the church. In his last year of high school, he became a leader of the Christian Union, sharing his testimony with as many people as he could.
But in 2017, tragedy struck his family again.
“The death of our mum last year was the lowest moment of my life after salvation,” Khamisi said. “Her sickness took her when we needed her most.”
He and his siblings have struggled with this loss but are leaning on the love of their church community.
He joined the AE Kenya Foxfires this year after seeing last year’s team minister at his school during the Malindi Mission.
“I look forward reaching out to young people with the Word of God in 2018. Through our interactions, I want them to know and experience the love of God as I have.”
Because of you, Khamisi and many others have joined the Foxfire programme as an outlet for ministry and personal growth in 2018. Without your support, this programme would cease to exist. Please consider giving to this programme. To find out more, visit out Foxfires page here.
Zimbabwe’s first national election in the post-Mugabe era will be held in July, President Emmerson Mnangagwa announced on the weekend.
“As a nation, party and government, we are looking forward to very peaceful, transparent and harmonised elections in July this year,” he told reporters following meetings with South African President, Cyril Ramaphosa on Saturday night.
This will be a historic event for the Southern African nation and the first time since its independence from Britain in 1980 that Robert Mugabe won’t be on the ballot.
UNDP Administrator, Mr Achim Steiner concluded a three-day visit of Zimbabwe on Saturday, noting that a peaceful and credible election is vital for setting the country on the right economic and political pathway.
“UNDP is committed to continue supporting the preparatory process for the election and economic recovery efforts,” he said in a statement from the UN.
The President has made promises that the polls later this year will be free from the violence that has rocked previous elections and has damaged some of Zimbabwe’s foreign relations.
Mnangagwa also plans to hold a roundtable meeting with opposing political leaders to discuss committing to a non-violent election.
Mnangagwa has previously met with many of our AE International team, including Stephen Mbogo and Michael Cassidy.
Mnangagwa spoke at AE’s National Presidential Prayer Breakfast in Harare back in 2015, which was a part of the Harare Pan African Leadership Initiative.
AE are set to run the Harare University Mission in the capital in August this year and are aiming to reach over 14,000 people for Christ.
Please be praying with us as Zimbabwe prepare for this historic election.
For more African political news from AE in March, read about the recent Sierra Leone election.
This month’s election in Sierra Leone was the first time a country has used Blockchain technology in a national election.
In a world first, Swiss company, Agora provided the service to Sierra Leone’s highly populated Western District, which includes the nation’s capital, Freetown.
Blockchain has developed with the rise of Cryptocurrency. It is essentially a digital ledger that is a decentralised recording of data. Information is stored across many computers which makes it practically impossible to modify the data.
In other words, Agora has developed a voting system for Sierra Leone that dramatically reduces the chances of an election being rigged.
Agora’s COO Jaron Lukasiewicz told Coindesk that “A country like Sierra Leone can ultimately minimise a lot of the fall-out of a highly contentious election by using software like this.”
This is an exciting development for the small West African nation who have just had their second unsupervised election since the end of their civil war in 2002. We thank God the election process has also been very peaceful so far.
This could also be a positive development for the future of politics in Africa and has the potential to limit a party’s autocratic reign in power.
2018 will see Zimbabwe have a national election after the 37-year rule of Robert Mugabe came to an end last year.
Burundi are also about to go to a referendum to decide whether to increase presidential terms from five to seven years, with a maximum of two terms in office. This could mean that President Pierre Nkurunziza could run the country until 2034.
African Enterprise Australia reported earlier this month about the great political instability that rocked several African nations in the month of February.
We are hopeful that developments such as Blockchain could work as a tool to support peaceful democratic processes in many African nations.
Preparations are well underway for AE’s first mission of 2018, which will operate in the Rwandan capital city of Kigali.
The ‘Kigali, West Mission for Jesus 2018’ will run from the 10th to the 17th of June, and will focus on the Nyarugenge District, which is one of the three major areas in Kigali.
Our team in Rwanda are working to partner with 50 local churches in the targeted area and are aiming to reach over 56,000 people with the good news of Christ.
The team’s preparations include training around 520 people from local churches with basic evangelism skills, in order to see as many people as possible come to know Jesus. The team are hoping to see approximately 7,000 conversions to Christ through your prayers and support.
Nyarugenge is in the Western part of the city and is home to most of the city’s government and financial institutions.
While many of the country’s wealthiest business people live in this region, there is large income disparity between the rich and the poor. A large exodus from rural areas has resulted in the district having the highest population density in the country, which has also led to widespread unemployment among younger people.
Nyarugenge is also home to the Islamic Cultural Centre. Recently, young people have been converting to Islam in great numbers, which further presses the need for evangelism in the area.
The region also has the University of Rwanda and as well as a campus of Mount Kenya University. There is a high potential for outreach amongst the region’s large student population.
Large evangelistic meetings have already been planned for the Kigali city centre, large colleges such as the Kigali Health Institute, and even some of the local prisons.
The prostitution trade is also quite common in the area, but the team are working on strategies with local churches to effectively minister to people in this industry. The team are looking to provide training in areas such as tailoring and catering so people in the trade can eventually run their own businesses. Food supplies will also be provided to households in desperate need of support.
There’s still a great deal of work to be done before the mission launches in June, but we’re excited to see how the Gospel will transform the local community.
Please keep the AE team in Rwanda and the local churches in Nyarugenge in your prayers over the coming months.
Khamisi Kwela’s father was a strong Muslim believer who took his 8 children to the mosque and made sure they attended weekly Islamic classes.
“My dad was very strict when it came to religious matters,” Khamisi said. “There was only one religion allowed in our family.”
But when Khamisi was 10, his dad died and the family lost their way.
“We became completely financially incapacitated,” Khamisi said. “My older siblings and mum worked hard to ensure we had food, but we struggled to put a meal on the table. Poverty was part of us.”
It was a hard life. But it was also brought a little freedom to Khamisi’s mother and she started going to church.
“My mum had wanted to know Christ for a long time, but due to the restrictions of our dad, she would not have even dared,” Khamisi remembered.
Soon Khamisi’s mother and older brothers all started going to church and soon became Christians. But Khamisi and one of his younger brothers, didn’t
“We wanted to maintain the religion of our father,” he said, “so we continued to attend our mosque.”
Khamisi knew about Christianity from his friends at school and from the Christian Religious Education classes there. But still he lived in darkness for five years after his father’s death.
This all changed one Sunday, when he went to pick something up from one of his brothers at his church. When he arrived the church service was still going.
“I sat in the last row, waiting for the service to end. As the worship was going on, I felt as if something was burning within me,” he said. “I was glued to my seat and listened attentively to the Word of God as if that is what I had come to do.”
When the pastor asked if anyone wanted to come forward and become a Christian, Khamisi couldn’t resist.
“Whatever was burning within me became stronger,” he said. “I was pulled to the altar by the power of Holy Spirit and for the first time in my life, I felt the need for Jesus.”
The pastor prayed for him and his family were overjoyed.
Khamisi joined the discipleship class and was mentored by the senior pastor to help him grow in his new faith.
“Today I call him my spiritual dad,” Khamisi said. “When he leant about my story, he took over paying my school fees. I went to a school in Malindi town, which even in my dreams I never thought I would do! I had never seen such demonstration of love.”
Khamisi read his Bible with an undying fervor and did all he could to learn about prayer and ministry in the church. In his last year of high school, he became leader of the Christian Union, sharing his testimony with as many people as he could.
But in 2017, tragedy struck his family again.
“The death of our mum last year was the lowest moment of my life after salvation,” Khamisi said. “Her sickness took her when we needed her most.”
He and his siblings have struggled with this loss but are leaning on the love of their church community.
The light of Christ still shines brightly within him despite these difficulties. He joined the AE Kenya Foxfires this year after seeing last year’s team minister at his school during the Malindi Mission.
“I look forward reaching out to young people with the Word of God in 2018. Through our interactions, I want them to know and experience the love of God as I have.”
