Area Bishop:-

Bishop Bill Musk
St George’s Church, 5 rue Ahmed Beyrem, 1006 Bab Souika, Tunis, Tunisia

Phone in our flat: +216 71 335493
Mobile (Bill):    +216 23447439
Mobile (Hilary) +216 23446739
Email:   billamusk@gmail.com
            hilaryamusk@gmail.com

 

Christmas card from Bill and Hilary Musk

St Marys Tripoli Libya
Group Algeria
Church social get together after Sunay morning service. Tunisia

MuskNews: “Please pray for us!”
February 2010 

Family news

: we made two visits home during the busy month of December. We returned for a long weekend to celebrate Nicola’s 21st birthday on the Saturday with all her sisters and their families. Then on the Sunday we drove down to Dorset to visit my mother who has moved to a Residential Care Home in Lyme Regis to see her after a serious post-operative illness. After Christmas, we took a week off to be in UK and celebrate (a late) Christmas with our family. They all came down to our home in Newhaven to stay – or to stay nearby – and we saw a lot of each other. Unfortunately the days were mostly cold and wet. But we certainly enjoyed a panto together – we took up most of a row and were probably the most rowdy (well not me, of course) in the audience, yelling “I believe in fairies” and other such inanities. It was lovely watching our grandsons laughing so much. Then Hilary and I got stuck in England. We turned up early one morning early in January at Gatwick airport to join the amassing throng of frustrated travellers. Miraculously we got back to our flat on the south coast despite snow and closing down railways and tried again two days later, when we made it out on a flight to Tunis by the skin of our teeth. It doesn’t get any easier to say goodbye to family and friends!
: Hilary has done wonderful job over the last year and our flat in Tunis is lovely to come “home” to; it truly feels like home. Some aspects of making it function, however, are a little harder to get to happen. Last week there was a knock at our front door at 8.00pm one evening. A five man team appeared on the doorstep – they’d been sent to cut open the road and put in a pipe that would link from a collection “box” (do you “collect” sewerage?) just outside our building to the main sewerage pipe in the street. I stayed with them till midnight – they were very nice men and there was a lot of bantering between them as they used picks and shovels to dig up the road. They finished their job at 3.00am. Now we have to get our own team of builders and plumbers to dig a channel through the concrete floor of the “garage” on our ground floor so that the existing sewerage pipes can be connected to this new exit directly into the larger mains on our street. The idea of all this wonderful work is that the sewerage will disappear more quickly off the site with less chance of backing up and blocking the whole system and then leaking in the cellar, perfuming our apartment! That’s the sewerage. Equivalent works are afoot to try and rationalise the electrical and water supplies to the property so that appropriate amounts of each can be available – and we can take showers etc without experiencing shocks of alternating scalding and freezing water every now and then – you never know quite when! Good way to wake up though!  
: we are thankful to the Lord for a renewed carte de sejour (residence permit) for Hilary and Bill.
 

St George’s, Tunis

: Christmas in Tunis was busy but with good opportunities to share the real meaning of this festival. Actually, in some of the shops there were quite a lot of Christmas trinkets for sale – they tend to be bought by some Tunisian families to decorate their homes for the New Year! Carols along with mulled wine and mince pies was generously hosted by the British Ambassador and his wife at their residence for several hundred folk; I led the carol “service” bit.
:  Hilary played violin and I flute at a friend’s informal Christmas gathering. She (a member of our congregation) is an artist and runs a gallery in a trendy part of Tunis. She has built a brilliant relationship with many Tunisians in the “arty” world and her house/gallery was bursting at the seams as we sang some carols and read some Scripture and she explained the meaning of Christmas in a very accessible way.
:  there were many celebrations over the Christmas period at church. One Saturday some adults organised a day of preparation in which the children and youth came and practiced music, drama, dance, skits etc and then on the Sunday performed them in the service. It seemed like chaos on the Saturday with many children on site and being fed lunch but the effect on the Sunday was wonderful!
: on Saturday 26th December, the Arabic speaking congregation at St George’s held a retreat day at the church. I spoke at one of the sessions and then Hilary and I hosted them all for lunch.

North Africa Episcopal Area

: we are still praying for a visa to be granted to an ordained Indian minister (and his wife) who are ready to move to Tripoli, Libya and join the leadership team there. I will need to go and welcome and license him on behalf of Bishop Mouneer – so visas are needed for Hilary and me also.
: the Algerian government granted me a visa that allowed me to visit within a month of 10th January! I have just got home from that visit. It was wonderful to be able to go and see the situation firsthand. The Anglican church in Algeria is composed almost exclusively of students – the South African Ambassador and his wife are probably the only adults who attend. But what lovely students – and what a brilliant job they have made of managing without a chaplain for nearly a year now. They have organised themselves into different ministry groups – practical and spiritual (if one can divide the two?!) ­– and altogether they provide a place of spiritual nourishment for 180 fellow students who attend regularly. I arrived at the church on a Friday morning at 9.30am for the 10.00am service. Various prayer and training sessions had already being going on since 8.00am! Immediately after the (two hour!) communion service a group met for an Alpha course session in the building. I met with the Church Council and listened to their concerns and briefed them on the progress we feel we are making in trying to find a permanent ordained leader for the church. Then we ate together. Emmanuel is their leader, a fourth year Zimbabwean student with a gentle and gracious authority.
:           I was kindly hosted at the British Ambassador’s residence in Algiers on the evening before the service and met the British Ambassador and his wife, plus a couple of elder statesmen (actually statesman and stateswoman) of the English-speaking, expatriate community. I was able to learn from them of some of the concerns of various expatriates living in Algiers plus their perceived opportunity for Holy Trinity to re-establish itself as a place where the various needs of many groups of residents might be met.
: I am so glad to have been able to get to visit the church and the folk in Algiers at last. Bishop Mouneer will be paying a visit to them in February after which he will come on to Tunis. We are hoping that a potential chaplain for Holy Trinity Church in Algiers might be able to visit Algiers soon, also (visa dependent). Please continue to pray for a good appointment to that strategic ministry during the first half of 2010.

Personal touch!

: Yes, we did have an amazing time visiting for Nin’s 21st! See the pictures! We generally had fun and ate and laughed together. Simon organized a lovely treasure hunt in the Natural History Museum which included prizes at regular intervals for the grandsons and the birthday girl! We had fun with an ice skating session at the Tower Of London, too!  Happy memories!
:  Kitty news is that we still have two, one of each sex! We hope to find homes for them as soon as possible as they will begin to fight as they get older and maybe do other unmentionable things! They enjoy sitting on top of the gas water heater that sits outside the kitchen all snuggled up! Their home is now a couple of chairs with a dry soft place underneath to protect them from the rain. They also spend some time on the kitchen chair each day for a nap; actually the little male one prefers the bread basket, but it is not such a good idea! I had to use ingenuity to feed them while we were away, especially for Wednesdays as no one with a key to our flat is here then, so I asked Khaled to lower their food from his office above our kitchen in a little margarine tub by a piece of washing line! Then before he went home at lunch time he lowered another one with 6 sardines in it in ice! That way they had to wait for it to defrost later in the day!
:  I spent a happy hour or two balanced on top of a chair on top of a tall IKEA butchers block scraping varnish and paint off the top windows with a Wilkinson’s Sword Razor and a plaster on my thumb! Nearly all the windows need this treatment! They are nearly 4 metres high and I haven’t counted how many still need doing!! But they look much nicer once they are done! I am hoping to get some similar work done on the tiles in the guest rooms before Sarah and Andrew come to visit at the end of January. There is still a lot to do in the house, but it will all happen gradually and be an investment in the building for whoever comes after us; at least the little bit we live in is much more cosy now!
:  We have just had the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity and I had to speak at the Catholic Church in La Goulette on the story of Perpetua and Felicitas, two very young mums who were martyred together, here in Carthage, in AD 202. It was very humbling to speak in front of Archbishops and so on!! The young women were thrown to wild beasts as a treat for the Emperor on his birthday! The story is very moving and I presented it using dramatic readings to bring it alive. Do google ‘Perpetua’s Diary’ and see for yourself what this amazing young woman actually wrote at the time she was imprisoned. There are various translations online. Tertullian said that the blood of the Martyrs is the seed of the church; there was certainly a lot of blood spilt here. The huge, intact amphitheatre at El Djem is chilling underneath where you can still see the cells and tunnels where the wild beasts and prisoners were kept. I am happy to send you my talk if you would like to see it!
:  The amount of Roman stuff here is beyond belief, much of it still to be excavated! We were in Nabeul the other day on our day off and were sad that the Roman site there was closed but we found a working, deserted archaeological dig on the other side of the road, which was fascinating! We then went on to the beach and found little Roman tiles in the sand!! I think our grandsons will be fascinated! Instead of hunting for fossils on Lyme Beach they can hunt for Roman tiles on the beach at Nabeul!
:  I am having to be careful not to over-commit myself as there are so many possibilities! I tend to be kept busy making coffee and tea for the various electricians and builders! I like to be available here, and also to be free to go home and see the family from time to time; plus we have a lot of visitors in the next few months, apart from Sarah and Andrew, two lots of good friends are visiting in March and Bishop Mouneer is visiting in Feb, plus we have visitors in April! I still want to keep free the time to experiment with painting as well! I am committed to music at church, a little of youth teaching and being a communicator or ‘Congregational Catalyst!’ for the Mobilization Team. We do a fair amount of entertaining, as there are always new people coming to Tunis and others leaving! So I do value your prayers for wisdom day by day.
:  Well I add my thanks to Bill’s for your love and prayers for us and return ours to you all! We do love hearing from you, too!
from Hilary

Prayers please for

: folk in Tunis on staff at St George’s – Bill, Kwame, Emil, Khaled, Yessine, Souad – for a joyful working together.
: visas for Rev Vasihar and his wife to join the ordained team in Tripoli.
: the church in Algiers, and especially future leadership there; visas for all of us who visit/stay.
: pastoral ministry amongst different groups of people at St George’s.
: the impact of the work of members of the Africa Development Bank throughout the continent of Africa.
: vision for the Lord’s emphases for 2010.           

Many blessings to you all and lots of love.

Bill & Hilary

Bill & Hilary Musk are mission partners with I.C.S. (Intercontinental Church Society: registered charity no. 1072584). If you would like to contribute financially to their support, please go to www.ics-uk.org and follow the link to “Make a donation”, then select “Tunis­–St George’s–Musk” from the drop-down list. Thank you.

Congregation social after Sunday morning service, Tunis

Congregation get together after Sunday morning service, Tunis.