2. In Africa they call it yOHghurt

I thought it would be nice to introduce the family, starting with Daniel and his wise words.

A couple of weeks ago he was telling his friend about our Africa trip: "What language do they speak in Africa?", said Matthew. "African!", said Daniel, in a tone of such authority that I swelled with fatherly pride. "Wow! And do YOU speak any African?". "Well, I really only know one word in African: in Africa they say yOHghurt, but in our country we say yOghurt."

Daniel's like that all the time. He's 4-and-a-half, sharp and observant. When we got hopelessly lost in a hedge maze a few months ago Daniel was so insistent he knew the way out that we finally humoured him and let him lead the way.  We were out within two minutes. He knows what a quetzal is. And a triceratops. And he uses words like 'dehydrated'. Mind, he also uses words like "Can you come and wipe my bottom?" at least three times an hour so it's not all Proust.

Next there's Reuben. He's our younger son, 20 months old and just starting to talk. He's not said quetzal yet but he has said "veuf" (that's the French for widower, by the way), which made me very proud. He's incredibly cheeky and has a smile which would melt the heart of the Ice Queen. I guess it will come in handy in Africa if we ever need to store any butter: we'll just get Reuben to put it in his mouth. It will never melt. He can get away with anything and he knows it.

Claire is the brains of the operation, she's 34, smart, and hard-working. And I mean really hard working. She has a couple of degrees in environmental science and works for a consultancy. She's very methodical and detailed, and where I take a shotgun approach to life, she's a sniper rifle. We complement each other perfectly. She has a head for figures and plans, and knows where she's heading. She's like the tether on the hot-air balloon of our lives - absolutely critical to keeping us the right way up with our feet on the ground. At work she's a project manager, and she's good at it.

Then there's me. I'm 35, two metres tall and I get mistaken for Louis Theroux. I'd have preferred Daniel Craig, but you have to play the hand you're dealt. I'm a life-long engineer: even as a kid I was always fixing things and my folks used to joke that there was nothing in the world I couldn't mend with hot glue and Lego. I still use a record player I once fixed with hot glue and Lego. I own two hot glue guns in case I ever need to fix one of my hot glue guns using hot glue. I use about ten percent of my degree, but all those years spent forming interesting scars on my knuckles with molten goo and extracting danish plastic from down the back of the sofa using a ruler covered in Sellotape seem to have stood me in good stead for a career in engineering.

Ever since we've been married we've wanted to do some mission work which used our combined skills of engineering and project management: we lead incredibly privileged lives, in common with so many people in the West, and we feel that we are obliged to give back the things given to us: to use our skills and our resources to help others. So over the eleven years we've checked out a lot of organisations; Christian Aid, VSO, Engineers Sans Frontiers, Habitat for Humanity, and others. In 2006 we went to Bulgaria for a week as part of a mission team but didn't get the feeling that it was our calling. By 2010, after pushing on so many doors and never feeling a strong pull towards any of them, we'd started to think that our "mission" was to teach and equip Daniel and Reuben to serve when they grew up.

Then J-Life happened.  As I said in the last blog post, I did a short stint with them in 2010 and really got caught up by their vision. I don't remember this but apparently in the airport on the way back I said to a friend "you know, I could go and work for J-Life for three years". If this teaches you anything, it is that you should be careful what you say in case someone or something takes you seriously.

So it may seem crazy to quit two very good jobs and move a settled family to a different continent with an unknown culture to do something enormous with no money for an organisation we are just getting to know, and on the face of it, put like that, it is. But we've been planning and praying for this for a long time and we trust God's got it sorted.

So, yeah, it's mad as a box of frogs and scares the life out of us at times, but at the end of it, in three years or thirty, we'll have impacted a few lives, we'll have left our comfort zone to see what is on the other side, and we'll have a good story to tell. That's worth the risk.

1. It's sunny all the time and there are pretty butterflies

It's sunny all the time and there are pretty butterflies.

So said our four-year-old when we asked him why he wanted to move to Africa. Fair enough. It's as good a reason as any.

Our reasons are slightly different. Now I don't want anyone to imagine that I don't like butterflies: I do, I enjoy their colourful flitting as much as the next man, it's just that I don't regard them as a tenable reason to move to a different continent.

So, while regarding the sun and butterflies as something of a bonus, we're actually going to Africa to work for a charity called J-Life, an opportunity we've been seeking for a long time.

The story started ten years ago. Claire and I are coming up to our eleventh anniversary, and for most of that time we've been looking for a mission opportunity: a chance to use our skills to serve people. We have, so to speak, pushed a few doors over the years but always had the feeling that it was "not this and not now".

In 2010 I went to South Africa for two weeks to project manage a small renovation for this charity, J-Life. During that fortnight I spent time with John Abrahamse who, amongst other things, is the leader of J-Life and also the most pursuasive man in the world. You might be able to talk the hind legs off a donkey, but only John could pursuade it to go for a walk afterwards. And, by the way, if you recognise the origin of that quote then you're a geek and you know it.

One day John and I took a drive through a township. Faced with the endemic poverty I asked John if it frustrated him that he couldn't change the world. His answer was "I can. I am. I'm starting with Africa". Oh.

Skip back a bit for an explanation: J-Life is a Christian charity, and they train youth leaders. They're not a church, they're not a theological college, they're not evangelists. At least not directly. They simply take seriously Christ's call to discipleship, and so they train and disciple young people from African communities in leadership skills. Those people then go back to their own communities and start youth initiatives: sports ministries, schools work, youth clubs, the list goes on.

J-Life's idea is simple: in order to change the world you change its youth. Look at the events of the "Arab Spring" - multiple revolutions in the Arabic world, and youth movements played a big part in all of them. Conversely if you neglect the youth, you perpetuate a cycle of hopelessness and decline.

J-Life is not about westerners telling a bunch of Africans about Jesus then leaving them to it, far from it. J-Life is about investing in youth, then supporting them as they invest in their communities. J-Life trains leaders in the leadership skills Christ modelled - and whether you believe in him or not, you can't fault his leadership style. Whoever or whatever you think he was, his message started with twelve uneducated guys and spread to two billion Christians in two thousand years.

Stretching that into a pithy statistic in a manner which would make Ben Goldacre weep tears of frustration into his cappuccino, that's a million people for every year since Christ died. Not bad for a movement started by a carpenter from northern Israel.

For J-Life, Christ is the method, as well as the answer.

So it's about social change on the grandest scale. I'm not an evangelist, and I never will be. But I am a project manager, and so is Claire. And project management is what we have been called to do: J-Life are building a new training centre in northern Zambia and we are going in as project- and operations-managers for about three years. We'll be getting the centre finished, getting it running, and getting it financially self-sustaining. Along the way we'll be growing maize, training youth, and hopefully starting to build a school. Exciting times.

We're leaving in January 2013, and taking our two boys, Daniel and Reuben, who'll be 5 and 2 when we go. We've got six months in South Africa for our own training, and we expect to be in Zambia around June 2013.

Naturally we're worried about it: Zambia is a very poor country, Malaria is endemic, and you can't drink the water (not even if you're Zambian). But it's politically stable, the crime rate is very low (nobody has anything to steal), and the people are lovely. We'll be living in Ndola, a largish city, and we have each other. If we were completely calm about the whole affair I'd suggest we should be incarcerated for our own safety, but we do have a huge amount of peace. We're certain we're doing the right thing despite the risks.

At the very least it will be an interesting ride.

So this opening post sets the scene. We'll update regularly as we prepare and while we're there, and over the months we'll put in more about our family and the journey we've been on. We'd love you to connect with us as we start this new chapter of our lives.

Jason, Claire, Daniel, and Reuben.