As part of the meetings of the World Federation in Malawi, attendees had the opportunity to visit the Makapwa Mission Station, which was established in the early 1950s by an SDB missionary from New Zealand named Ronald Barrar. The station served as the headquarters for the Central Africa Conference into the 1970s, when the headquarters was moved to Blantyre. The station includes the SDB meeting house, a health center, and a primary and a secondary school, in addition to several other supporting buildings, including residences. It was also the home for many years of the SDB Bible College in Malawi.
The visitors from World Federation were treated to a tour of the entire station and were warmly welcomed at all the major installations of the station, including by the pastor and leaders of the Makapwa church (by a wonderful choir!), the teachers and students at both schools (more music!), and the administrators, doctors, nurses, and support staff at the health center. The faith and dedication of SDBs in Makapwa was clear throughout the visit, though those living at the mission still face many challenges.
Some of those challenges are made worse by declining support for the mission over the past two decades. The schools are sorely in need of refurbishment and expansion, and the secondary school does not have electricity and needs a transformer to be installed to increase student study times and to increase the curriculum in science and technology. The medical facility at Makapwa has been downgraded from a hospital to a health center by the Malawian government because of declining facilities. All of this is in the face of recent natural disasters in the form of typhoons which caused additional damage.
Despite these challenges, the people of Makapwa station continue to live faithfully, though they are sorely in need of partners in ministry to support the necessary maintenance, repairs, and expansions of their facility so that they can continue their ministry into the next generation. Knitting together global partners to achieve Kingdom outcomes was an unofficial theme of the World Federation meetings more generally, and so the visit to Makapwa was appropriate, inspiring, and challenging in equal measure. We ask that you join in the work of SDBs worldwide so that missions like those in Malawi at Makapwa can continue their good work into the next generation.
Check the Makapwa Health Centre Requests, which is a report handed to the delegates who visited Makapwa during the 2023 SDBWF Sessions.
Read about the recent floods in Malawi that affected the Makapwa Health Center: Flooding Badly Affecting SDBs in Malawi
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