Esther Simmons

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I grew up in a family where missions and missionaries were part of our lives. We went with our parents to missionary meetings and often had missionaries at our home. Some children play at being teachers; I played at running missionaries meetings!

My first contact with ECM was in the 1970s when Poldi Storfer, an ECM missionary in Vienna, came to visit New Zealand. My mother took on the role of distributing Poldi's prayer letter in New Zealand. That sparked my interest in missions in Europe. In 1987 I had the opportunity to visit missionaries in Spain and Italy to see some of the work there. I was on the New Zealand ECM Council in the 1970s and 1980s when I lived in Auckland. I now live in Christchurch with my husband, Paul, and we have a peony business exporting some flowers, but mostly selling plants.