Online now is a web-exclusive story about Tawee Donchai, a Christian in Thailand. Donchai, a member of Cheung Doi Church of Christ in Chiang Mai and a scientist researching HIV, grew up in the village of Chiang Rai, an impoverished community that has one of the highest rates of child prostitution in the country.

I always enjoy finding the “hidden gems” at conferences — the presentations that don’t have top billing or well-known names but are extraordinary nonetheless. Take Tebogo Ramatsui and Machona Monyamane, for example.

The Atlanta-based nonprofit Global Soap Project recently donated 10,000 bars of soap — made from recycled hotel soap — to The Sudan Project, a mission outreach of the Mt. Juliet Church of Christ in Tennessee. For families living on the equivalent of $1 per day in South Sudan and other African nations, soap is a luxury they can’t afford.

On Sunday we worshiped with the Niteroi Church of Christ in its newly-painted meeting place. Members of our team spent a day painting the walls of the facility (off-white, including a dark blue, highly-touted “accent wall”) and cleaning the building. We also walked the neighborhood and handed out invitations to church and to a Bible study course offered by the congregation.

A small group of us dressed up like Israelites and reenacted the battle of Jericho from Joshua 6. After reading our lines in Portuguese (and getting some giggles from the audience) we led the children of the congregation around the “wall” (which looked a bit like a bed sheet) blew paper trumpets and watched it fall. I’m in Vitoria with a mission team from my home congregation — the Memorial Road Church of Christ. Our church’s young adults minister, Terry Fischer, and his wife, Kelli, are leading the mission. The Fischers were part of a mission team here for 12 years.

New on The Christian Chronicle’s website, the latest installment of our award-winning Global South series. First up, a report on the need for church elders and deacons in Latin America. This was a recurring topic during my trip to the Baxter Institute in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, for the ministry training school’s annual seminar.

In front of Makanisa’s chapel, I interviewed Abebe about the role Churches of Christ played in famine relief during the drought that devastated Ethiopia in the mid-1980s. I was moved to tears when Abebe told me that the warehouse used to store food during the famine is now the church’s meeting place. I love the symbolism of a place that once used to sustain physical life now is used to give spiritual life.

During Sudan’s long civil war between the predominantly Muslim north and Christian and animist south, thousands of Sudanese fled to refugee camps in neighboring countries — Uganda, Ethiopia and Kenya. African evangelists established Churches of Christ in the camps, and now their converts are coming home. Christian Chronicle assistant managing editor Erik Tryggestad reports from Juba, Sudan — soon-to-be South Sudan.

New on The Christian Chronicle’s website, you’ll find a multimedia blitz from my reporting trip to Malawi. Words alone cannot describe this country in southern Africa — home to more Church of Christ members per capita than any nation in the world — so I did my best to fill our website with expanded photo galleries, audio recordings and videos.

I got an e-mail from Kent Marcum, a longtime missionary in the South American nation of Ecuador, asking for prayers for his daughter, Jenny Reyes. Jenny and her husband, Erik, serve on a mission team in Sucre, Bolivia. They have two children — 4-year-old Zion and 2-year-old Mia. Jenny, 28, was diagnosed recently with Liposarcoma, a malignant tumor in her left leg.