Sarah J spoke with Cathy & Andy Cowell

Cathy & Andy Cowell, leaders of Church With No Walls and Night Church in Stoke on Trent, spent 3 months in Africa in the summer of 2009; four weeks in South Africa, three weeks in Mozambique and five weeks in Uganda. Having seen the blind see and shrivelled hands straightened Sarah J got them into the Cross Rhythms studio to hear their story.

Sarah J: You guys ended up hooking up in Mozambique with quite an amazing work that goes on through an organisation called Iris Ministries. How did you first hear about Iris Ministries?

Cathy: I heard about Iris Ministries because I was chatting to somebody in a department I was working in and she said if you're going to Africa you must go and see Heidi Baker in Mozambique with Iris Ministries.

Andy: I had a friend, I was talking about going to Africa and he said oh have you heard of Heidi Baker? I said no. He said here's a video and gave me this video of Heidi Baker. I watched it and thought wow; two people just telling you out of the blue straight away about Heidi Baker Ministries. So we thought well it's worth a go.

Sarah J: Heidi and her husband Roland have been out in Mozambique for quite some time now haven't they, working amongst the poorest of the poor. Give us just a really quick overview of what Iris Ministries do.

Cathy: I think one of the most fantastic things about Iris Ministries is that they kind of do everything. So there's a real emphasis on intimacy with God and on prayer and all of that kind of spiritual stuff; they go out and do evangelism and healing and see quite a lot of healing, in the villages of Mozambique. They also take care of the poor. Just to give you an idea; the base that we were on, they'd got three hundred and fifty orphans on the base. They were feeding twelve hundred people every day, just from the village, which had no other means of getting food regularly. They'd got a Bible school for pastors, from the villages where they'd gone and done the evangelism; so quite a mixture of stuff. They do prison ministry; and they do well-digging; and they've got a sewing school; and they go and do prayer in the local hospital.

Andy: There was this village we went to, when we went there first, that had no water. These people went miles to collect water. This guy, when we saw the kids, they were just like all covered in scars, all covered in sores; because what was happening was, because there wasn't enough water, they weren't using it for washing. Also kids were dying because when they got dysentery, the parents weren't given enough water because they didn't have it; so lots of kids were dying of dysentery, there was lots of disease; all these people who had no water. As we passed there, we went in and we thought we've got to do something, we've got to get some water. They dug a well first and then they worked out that the main water main went under the town. So they actually got the main water main and asked the council if they could dig into it. So the council said yes you can have whatever you want as long as you pay for it. So they went in and dug into this well. Now they've got taps around it and they've got an orphanage set up and they've got a hospital/clinic set up. They're now building a massive church community building. They went in there and gave these people seed to grow and they gave them chickens and one of them laid an egg and there's these kids running around with this chicken holding on thinking wow these chickens are laying eggs. So they got involved in growing those crops, giving them chickens. Now they've got goats there and they get to milk the goats so they've got milk. When we went out, we went to this village and there were hundreds of kids there and we played football with them and now they're all healthy. They've got a big orphanage but also loads of kids from the town. This place is now the central focus for the whole town.

Sarah J: I can't quite get my head around what it would be like to live without clean water and things like that. What was the poverty like in that situation? Because you saw some bits; obviously you haven't seen it all there, but the bits that you saw. Just give us an impression of it.

Cathy: It's difficult to describe really. I think there were things that we kind of became used to. We became used to seeing kids who only had one t-shirt and people in Mozambique certainly didn't really wash much because they haven't got that much access to water. It was normal to be around folks who were kind of dirty and smelly and kids who were dirty. You go out from the compound where we were staying and within about forty minutes you were covered black; so I suppose that kind of thing we sort of got used to seeing.

Sarah J: The life must be quite hard dealing with all of that and disease flourishing; it wouldn't be so great for people. You mention people dying left right and centre earlier as well. I'm guessing food wise people haven't got lots?

Andy: We were out there and we were living on the staple diet of what people were living on. It's basically beans and rice and maybe something added like a bit of fish or chicken; or they had this thing of spinach and peanuts. It's mainly a staple diet of these beans similar to kidney beans; they're called sugar beans and just rice and that's it, that's what they eat you know. That's every day. I think after we bagged up five metric ton of beans and rice to take out to widows; after seeing five metric tons of beans and rice, it put me off for a long while.

Cathy: I think what was really heart rending was seeing - well hearing really about things like infant mortality and Mozambique really is, it's quite a destroying society for two reasons. One is that they had civil war for thirty years and were for a long time the poorest nation in the world and the other thing that's happened is the Aids crisis. So before Aids hit, life expectancy was about forty six, which is not great; but now it's more like thirty seven, thirty eight; so that's dropped quite a lot. Malaria kills more people than Aids does; but what Aids has done has wiped out that middle generation. There are an awful lot of families who are either headed by children or where there are grandparents looking after young children; because there's been a lot of destruction of the society in Mozambique, there's an awful lot of corruption and a lot of promiscuity. In fact the guys there were saying that the professionals they're training are contracting Aids and dying faster than they can train them. It's a really needy situation. The village that Andy was talking about earlier where they'd set up another orphanage; in this fairly small village they found there were about thirty six orphans who were living with the poorest of the poor. Their definition of orphan is not somebody who's lost their parents; it's somebody who's lost everybody in that generation. So aunts, uncles, anybody that could have taken care of them - grandparents, are gone. So these are people with literally nobody.

Sarah J: My understanding of Iris Ministries, is that they'll work with street kids, that there seriously isn't anywhere that they can go to for help, they're left alone and quite a number of those kids have been involved for example as child prostitutes and things like that. They're working with some really vulnerable people aren't they?

Andy: The original base area they've actually got a church in the rubbish tip. There are people who just live on the rubbish tip; it's their livelihood. From what I've heard the smell is disgusting. I mean everything's old.