reporting back on the mission to the kingdom of Swaziland, or as they call it now, Eswatini. Swaziland is a very small mountainous kingdom, sandwiched between South Africa and Mozambique, so it's in the far east of South Africa. Their neighbor to the west is South Africa, their neighbor to the east is Mozambique. And I first went to Swaziland back in 1982, and entered at the very... top of the country at Pigs Peak, which was up a very high, steep, mountainous dirt road, and on my off-road motorbike, and my first experience coming into Swaziland was not very promising, but it was funny. My first time ever crossing into a black-run country in Africa, after being brought up in Malaysia and living in South Africa for years, was crossing into Swaziland, which spent the night staying in at the Baptist Church, and the next morning, a 250cc off-road motorbike climbed this very steep, precipitous mountain road to Pig's Peak, and on entering there, heard the sound of somebody being beaten up, and there was a door open just behind the customs counter, and there were four policemen walking around, kicking and hitting someone with truncheons. Now, I never found out what he had done, I'm sure he's a criminal, he probably deserves it, because my experience with the Swaziland police officer, that was only positive. But they never felt the need to explain it. At one point I was wondering, are we in the wrong place, should we turn around and go back to South Africa? And then when the police spotted me through the door, came out, asked for our passports, stamped them, and gave a big broad smile, welcome to the Kingdom of Swaziland. and that was our first intro. We then drove in on our motorbikes and stopping at the first village one of the people decided to start preaching and we soon gathered it seemed like the entire village and when we gave the altar call it looked like a hundred percent response and I think we got a bit deluded thinking we were super-duper, Holy Spirit-inspired, anointed preachers, you know, entire village getting converted. But as we start to learn about Twasiland, we realize that just respect to the Gospel, anyone could have got that response. The people, you ask them to commit their life to Christ, there's such a great respect for Christianity, they do immediately respond. And that's a good thing, except it It also means there's a wide open door to cults and false prophets, too, because obviously if the people are that open and receptive, it can be abused. Manzini is the biggest town in the country. It's the economic center, but it's not the capital. The capital's in Burban, which is in the high felt, but this is in the middle felt. We drove all the way down to the Lofelt. This is on the road to Big Bend. And you can see lovely roads. When I first went over these roads, they were mostly dirt, bumpy, potholed, rocky. It sort of bounced all over the place. But the infrastructure's been phenomenally better built up, and our good friend, of course, is Leo Bond, and he's Literature for Africa's distributor in Swaziland. His Jesus Messiah books are a wonderful and tremendous resource. You can see he gets into all the schools. He said, in all the years in Swaziland, he's never found a single school that didn't welcome him to present the gospel and distribute gospel booklets. So the country is wide, wide, wide open. And he stays in Josland, which is Shick Cane Estate. So there's security at the gates, and he lives basically in a gated community, you could say, because although there's only four other houses in there, His amounts of literature for Africa stocks are quite impressive. You can see back there when the cat's coming in to check there's no rodents. So he's invested in more shelves. As I said, there's no such thing as too many books, only not enough shelves. They've had black mambas in their living room. This is under the settee. And these are one of the most deadly snakes in Africa. You've got four minutes to live if they bite you. So he's got eight cats, and their primary mission, I think, is to protect him from the snakes. He's very concerned about the snakes, and these cats are, of course, a lot faster than the snakes, and the snakes don't stand much chance against eight of these guys. very lovely kittens, they're living in a cat world. On the way to his home, we saw a truck burning, and I don't know why this chap's using a hosepipe, because it's an oil fire, and every one of these Penteclicans need to have proper fire hydrants to be able to deal with fuel fires. But water on a fuel fire, by the way, doesn't actually help, because fuel, petrol and diesel, floats on the water and all water fire does is spread the fire further. So I wouldn't recommend ever using a water hosepipe to fight a liquid fuel fire, which obviously this must have been originally. Now that wasn't right, that was just a normal kind of vehicle fire you can see anyway. Peter McCubbin, the leader of the Pastures Valley, and his lovely family, Michelle, and their daughter and son. Their daughter at the moment is in Switzerland, their son right now studying in the United States, but they're looking forward to him returning. It's a dairy farm, lovely area, beautiful farm, and they are a home for AIDS orphans. And so they've got a children's home. They first, when they were asked, could you help with some of the orphans, there's a lot of AIDS orphans in Swaziland. The average age in Swaziland is 22. And they've got one of the lowest life expectancies in Africa. They're down to 58 is the average life expectancy. So Nick and I are past that if we were living in Swaziland. But that means they've got hundreds of thousands of orphans. A lot of the older people have died. They've got a very high, something like 28% of adults have AIDS or HIV. And they've adopted now 50 children who are living on site. And there's another 300 they feed and help with school fees, more or less, in the community. But imagine that. They started off with two children. Next thing, they've adopted another 50. And they're looking after another 300. So we had passed a seminar, and we had fortunately pre-positioned a lot of good material, and we were able to do quite a lot of good distribution. I did children's evangelism, introduced the youth to EE and Way of the Master, equipped them with World Mercenary Press Gospel Booklets and Saswati, and very enthusiastic group of people. This is their catering outside of the Education Center, where we're at the seminal, and they find it's very important to actually dish up for people because it's amazing how much people can load up on their plates. So they found that they wouldn't have enough for everyone if the people dished up for themselves. So it's an important, they'd rather see everyone gets fed and then whoever wants to get seconds, that's fine. And they, of course, have to have dogs because it's a farm and These are some of the pastors who got to the very end of the seminar, because in the middle we had a rainstorm, electric thunderstorm, where everyone got quite paranoid, everything was unplugged. I came and I wondered why everything was unresponsive or everything had been turned off at the plug sources. But at the end, we gave everyone a New Testament survey. They all got Kingdom of God booklets as well. And then this is the new project of Michelle, and that is the coffee shop. It's a big one. The main road is on the other side there. And they can have an upper room. They've got enough space for a wonderful upper room. But at the moment, they've only got one staircase to the upper room area. And Health and Safety insist they've got to have these stairs on the other side as well, and they can't afford that right now, so at the moment they're only using the lower area, but the kitchen You can see they've got scripture verse on the wall as you come in, and all ready for the men's breakfast on Friday, and a real feast, phenomenal amounts of materials. Already they've got the bookshelves on the back, waiting that they'll be able to have both a library and a bookshop, so lots of opportunities. Men's breakfast, I saw the need was to deal with worship and worry, you can't do both. We do not need to be worried. We don't worry about anything. You pray about everything. And we had a good amount of young people there for the breakfast in the morning. I was amazed how many farmers there are from religious and South African backgrounds. They've got a large amount of farmers. The prison, they've got four prisons in the country, and this prison at Big Bend, which is the most South western part of the southeastern part of the country. This was almost Leoban's second home. He preached there every week for seven years. But since the COVID times, he hasn't been back there. So I encouraged him that we went, and we got in at the gate, even though we didn't have an appointment, because we're Christian missionaries and I remembered and loved Leoban. Unlike the Salafi prisons, I wasn't so much a searched. I thought that they would, like before, they would have taken away my MP3 audio recorder, which Barberton prisons didn't want me to take in. They didn't mind me taking anything. They just trusted us because we're Christians. Very interesting. All the wardens we met seemed to be Christians. There was a lot of enthusiasm for the gospel. And when I asked the people for a response, it seemed like the vast majority of the people in the cell block we spoke to made public commitments and wanted to pray the prayer of commitment along with me. A wonderful opportunity for distribution of gospel literature. We must ship as much world missionary press, Bibles, Sunday school materials there. Get Saswati Bibles for the prisoners. The schools are all done in English, so they actually request the Jesus Messiah books in English. They prefer English in the schools. Even the youth will ask for Bibles in English rather than Saswati, but the older people all still want them in Saswati. The kingdom has a very high literacy rate, very good respect for law and order, murders almost unknown. The farmers don't even bother to lock their doors. Forget about prepare for war like the South African farmers do at night. So I would say this is a... a little island of peace and tranquility, also of sanity, because when some group wanted a gay pride march, the king said, pride's one of the seven deadly sins, why would anyone want to march for pride? There's only two genders in Swaziland, and there's no place for gay pride. So imagine if the English king had that kind of sense of humility. So I think the Swazi kingdom's doing better than the English kingdom right now. And it's really a place of peace, harmony. I didn't encounter a hint of racism. There was such good race relations. There's respect for the police. Apparently, the EFF invaded back in 2022, hoping to organize a revolution. It didn't work. Nobody in Swaziland was interested. And the king got a private telephone security company called Bastion, I believe it's all, reconnaissance commando and paratrooper guys, and they just came in and wiped out the communists. Apparently, no communists can live in Swaziland for long, they'll end up dead or in prison, normally dead, so they've got a... No political party is allowed in Swaziland policy. They've got a parliament, but every parliamentarian must be an independent candidate representing their constituency. No political party is allowed at all, which I think is actually quite a healthy system. It works much better. I think we can pray for Swaziland and supply them with good resources. They've got good missionaries there. We should especially be praying for Peter and Michelle McCubbin. They've become a real hub for so many ministry activities around their farm. And I must say, also having drunk real fresh milk that comes from the dairy farm, it makes you dissatisfied with what you get from the shops. It's so much better. It's so much fuller. You can just taste the difference. Just like when you get home-baked bread, you can't compare it to the things they have on the shelf in our shops. So what a wonderful, wonderful country and there's a lot more pictures one could share but that's what I managed to put together between yesterday and today. More will come out later but Praise God for Swaziland and for Leo Barnes' work, the Jesus Messiah books and whatever we can do to help them with their web and promoting the need to get more Jesus Messiah books available in other languages throughout Africa. But a country where every single school is open to the gospel, every prison is open to the gospel. And one of the projects now we hope is that we can get Anthony Stunder there to speak in the prisons. Considering he was converted in a maximum security prison, he can speak their language, and I think the prisoners will respond even better to him than they did to me. Although, I must say, seldom come across people who hang on every word, who are so respectful of the gospel, so responsive. So Swaziland is doing very well, and the economy is healthier, there's people who've moved there, and they say, after living in South Africa, with all the tensions and so on, the farmers there feel like they're in a free country. Imagine being a farmer and not being afraid that you're going to be murdered every night and every day. So, the Swazi kingdom's doing quite a few things right. Not to say they're close to perfect, not that there isn't false religion there. On the... The day that I entered in, the first people I got to witness to were American missionaries. I asked what were they doing there. They said they were coming as eye surgeons. Where do you come from? Utah. I said, don't you have a lot of Mormons up in Utah? I said, well, we're Mormons. So I encountered a Mormon mission team coming in. And there are a significant amount of Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventists in the country. And you must expect that Christian cults, or cults from a Christian background, could easily slip in because they're respectful of all Christianity and therefore it means it's even more important for us to be giving good Bible teaching and making sure they have Bibles in their hands that they can check what they're being taught against the Word of God like the Bereans who were more noble than the rest because they studied the Word of God daily to see if these things are true. But the Swazis, they are Nguni. They come from the same language group as the Zulu. And in fact, there's a lot of good relations between the Swazi royal family and the Zulu royal family. At Uncle Lolo's funeral, I saw there was a big delegation from the Swazi royal family. So Eswatini sends people to Kwasamantu regularly. I expect to see quite a few of them at the minister's conference and youth conference. So the Swazi and the Zulu are cousins, in a sense. I think there's a very close link. And even if they can't get Saswati Bibles, they understand the Zulu Bible. And so Zulu and Saswati are very, very close. And King Meswati III has an interesting background. His father, King Sibuza, was the longest reigning monarch of the 20th century. He reigned well into 70-something years, more than even Queen Elizabeth II, and therefore the longest reigning monarch of the 20th century. Probably one of the longest of all time. But there's a vision of King Shlomholo So one of the early founders of Swaziland, a contemporary of King Shaka, he had a vision on his deathbed, and he related it to the people he said he saw. People coming out of the sea with skin the color of pigskins, hair as straight as the tails of cattle. In one hand, they held indalinga, a metal coin, a round coin. Reject indalinga, it is death. In the other hand, they have ungpulu, a scroll. except the Umkulu, for it is life, and never shed these people's blood. So when King Shlomholo died, his son, I think, was King Meshwati I, and he sent out an impi of about 500 warriors to find the people of the book. And they came to Grahamstown, 1923. Sorry, 1823. Now, remember, the 1820 settlers came to East London, and Port Elizabeth on 1820. And so they had only just really gotten settled in Grahamstown when the Empire arrived, so the timing was perfect. They found a Methodist minister, Reverend Allison, and told him, our king commands you, come to Swaziland and teach our people the book. Well, it took a while for Reverend Allison to convince his wife. But a couple of years later, they got in the ox wagon and went across the Felt and ended up at the Kingdom of Swaziland, where they were given land, cattle, and escorts to translate and to ensure that they were treated with respect. And the word went out, listen to these people as they teach you the book. This is the Umkuru of which our ancestor King Shlomhollow spoke. And the Swazis embraced Christianity wholeheartedly, enthusiastically. In 1881, The British came along and offered them to be a protectorate. The British had just conquered Zuland, and they were doing everything they could to encircle the Boers. And while the Swazis had a very good relationship with the Boers, they let the British turn them into a protectorate. The King continued to reign, but they were under the Union Jack, and it was part of the settlement of Africa back at which was settled in 1885 at the Berlin Conference, which drew the present boundaries of Africa, and the Swazis were recognized as an independent kingdom, which is why they were never incorporated in South Africa, although there were attempts to do so in 1910. They wanted to see if they could get Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland in the Union of South Africa. which fortunately was rejected, and they maintained their independence, and they got full independence in 1968. 1968, King Sir Bruce II started out independence with the Westminster form of constitution, like what the British have, but he annulled it a few years later and took to ruling as a sovereign king. He has all the authority, and while it is a parliament, he gets to appoint a number of the parliamentarians. They have a senate, he gets to appoint a majority of the senators, and they tend to be traditional leaders, so effectively the Senate is the Council of Chiefs in many ways, and the people get to elect their House of Parliament, although the King has ten seats that he's reserved for his prerogatives to appoint to represent communities that may not be well represented otherwise, which could include the farmers, disabled people, and so on. also appoint some people there. The Queen Mother has some serious powers as well, and so the Queen Mother also must be consulted, the Council of Chiefs must be consulted, but the King effectively has the final word. He is the sovereign power, the executive in Swaziland. And it seems to work much better than what we're getting in Britain right now, because they respect Christianity. The kingdom is officially Christian, and you can see they really respect the gospel. So, any questions? I didn't see litter. I didn't see graffiti. It is amazing. It's a very clean, neat country. And a lot of forestry reserves, a lot of game reserves, which is very encouraging. I saw impala regularly. Apparently, there's kudu living around where Leo Barnes stays as well. Of course, a lot of snakes. But the reason for the snakes is these Sugarcane plantations attract a lot of rats, and the snakes like to eat rats, so the sugar attracts the rats, the snakes are attracted to sugarcane plantations, it's a good feeding ground for the snakes. So because they're living in effectively a sugarcane estate, that's why snakes are coming into the living room and why the cats have essential duties there to keep them safe. But yes, it's a surprisingly neat and clean country. And because it's a kingdom, the king doesn't want people littering in his kingdom, so they don't tolerate that. I think the police were very, very polite and friendly to us. In fact, every roadblock, the police would just Oh, Brother Leo, do you have the Bibles for me? They've all gotten Jesus Messiahs, now they want more for their friends and family and relatives. So every roadblock stop was just an opportunity for literature distribution. And plainly, Leo is well-loved and known and respected throughout. But the local people say the criminals don't like the police because the police are actually very rough with them. That makes sense, you know, don't be rough with the law-abiding people, be rough with the people who law-breakers. So, in Swaziland, the criminals get very quick treatments. They don't tolerate that much at all. Unlike our country, where it seems the criminals are in Parliament. Yeah, so... I also saw a lot of people very positive about Donald Trump coming to power in America. They thought that was a good thing because he's friendly to Christianity. So that's a lot of the attitude of the folks there. I also saw Queller's very popular. And most of what I drank while I was in Swaziland was a Queller. So obviously they have made a good inroad on the kingdom. Any other comments? Transworld Radio is based in a broadcast about seven, sorry, not seven, over 70 languages, but I think they have a potential audience of 700 million people in their shortwave range. So, Transworld Radio based near Manzini. I've actually had interviews there years ago, but I believe they're still operational.