28 Oaklands, Elton Road, Clevedon, North Somerset, BS21 7QZ, UK, 01275-463868 20 May 2021 Dear Friends, We hope you are reasonably well, and finding reasons to rejoice and be thankful to God every day? We’re writing this because, of late, some have been asking if we are OK: as one couple said, they have ‘not heard from ‘4H’ HQ recently….’ In fact it is only 7 weeks since our last Quarterly Prayer / News Letter, but it will be another 6 before the next, so we thought we had better send a brief summary of ‘where we’re at’ just now – aware that in every previous year since ‘4H’ began in 2003 we have sent ‘mid-term’ updates to prayer partners on our emailing list, indeed often two: namely an advance Mission trip schedule, and a report on our return from Eastern Europe. So thank you for noticing something seemed to be missing, and for your concern for us and our work to ‘help Hungarians’! What follows is a brief summary of the present state of play. WHAT’S HAPPENING IN ‘GREATER HUNGARY’ Sadly, the countries we visit – Hungary itself, plus parts of Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Ukraine – have all suffered far more with CV-19 this year than they did last year. Many of the churches we visit have had members who have been ill, and some pastors and their families whom we love have been ill too. Some, though happily relatively few, have died. The whole of the Carpathian Basin has been in even tighter lockdown than in 2020, so travelling there has been completely out of the question, even though welcoming church leaders said they would have gladly given us invitations as ‘business visitors’ to secure our entry to those Hungarian-speaking countries. Why, then, have we not gone? The first reason is that we would have to quarantine for at least 10 days on arrival, in what would be in effect a government detention centre, something we could not countenance on a normal-length 12-15 day trip. To make matters worse, on an unpredictable basis, we would expect that some key people we wanted to see would not be available because of their own CV circumstances, and most usual functions into which we often input would not be taking place. More happily, we can say that the Lord’s work has been continuing ‘out there’, as it has been in the UK, though with some different emphases, and sometimes in different ways from usual. It has been our privilege to be in daily touch with Hungarian friends, via emails, text messages, telephone, Zoom and YouTube – all facilities effectively unknown or unavailable earlier in our lifetimes, but now such vital tools in the Master’s service! SO, WHAT HAS BEEN HAPPENING IN THE ‘4H’ OFFICE? We’ll say, and show, more of this in our Summer Prayer / News Letter at the end of June or the beginning of July, so here is just a very brief list of things and projects we’re involved in at this very moment, and for which your prayers are specially requested. Some of them are very time consuming and effort-intensive indeed: ● Book formatting: our colleagues in the Hungarian mission, Örömhír Alapítvány (the Good News Foundation), have asked us to prepare and print a new A4 edition of the ‘4H’ children’s story and colouring book, Countryside Tales, that we first published in an A5 format in 2016 under the title Árkon-bokron át. It would not work well if we simply photo-enlarged each page to the times-two bigger format, so every page has to be reformatted individually: an hour’s worth of work for every one of its 96 pages. This is on our ‘number 1 computer’ as we write. ● Reprint negotiations: there is a call for a (large!) reprint of Csoda-krumplik, the Hungarian version of Angus Buchan’s acclaimed autobiographical work, Faith like Potatoes, that some of you may have read. ‘4H’ published the Hungarian translation in 2006, and our contract with the English originators, Lion Hudson needs renewing. Because of CV-19 affects on company offices and procedures, this (like a number of other things recently!) is proving much more time-consuming than we had hoped…. ‘4H’ Magyar Misszió A MAY 2021 UPDATE from ERIC & ROSEMARY BARRETT [email protected]