Greetings from Chinhoyi, Zimbabwe!
I have a new team for the continent of Africa! At the end of August at our month 8 debrief in Sofia, Bulgaria, we were arranged onto new teams. Meet my new team:
Emily, Maggie, Sylvia, Malia, me, Leah
God gave Emily the word fearless for our new team as she was praying for us. We decided that the word fearless was a great word to speak over ourselves for multiple reasons as we headed into Africa: a) Spiritual warfare is huge in Africa with witch doctors being very popular, and b) we want to step into bigger things that might scare us as our time on the World Race wraps up.
Team Fearless arrived to our ministry site here in Chinhoyi, Zimbabwe, on the night of August 30 after 58 hours of travel! We are partnered with Youth For Christ this month and ministry has looked different every day.
This was a mural we painted at one of the old folks home we visited! We visited on Monday to cook, clean, sing worship songs and pray over the residents. And then Malia, who loves painting and utilizing any blank wall space wherever she goes, thought to ask them if they’d like a mural on their dining room wall. So we returned on Thursday with paint in hand and completed the project in 6 hours!
We took pictures of the finished mural and before we left that day showed them to some of the women who were in their rooms. We showed a women named Dorcas, who has asthma and usually eats her meals in her room and her eyes lit up and a huge smile of delight spread across her face!
We also made sure to bring candies when we returned on Thursday! When we arrived earlier in the week and introduced ourselves, one of the women held out her hands to us expecting us to have “sweets” with us. When we handed out candies to everyone later that week, I thought about how special this simple gesture was to them. All their diet consists of is sadza (a staple meal made out of cornmeal) or rice with a small side of vegetables, like beans. To have something other than that is a real treat! With my big sweet tooth, I cannot imagine not having anything sweet for weeks at a time.
The second old folks home we visited on Tuesday was heartbreaking. I hadn’t visited any nursing homes before on the Race so I didn’t have anything to compare it to besides the home from the previous day. Although both old folks home were not First World standard, the second one was a lot more run down and obviously lacking.
At both homes the elderly would be just sitting like statues outside on the ground in the sun, not really talking to their neighbors. No activities, games or television to entertain them like you would see at a nursing home in America.
Unlike the first home, this second home did not have a garden where they could grow their own vegetables, due to lack of water. If they wanted vegetables in their meals, they would have to buy them from the market which costs a lot more than growing your own. They also didn’t have electricity so they couldn’t use the indoor kitchen and had to cook over a fire outside.
Maggie helping to stir sadza which is really thick!
I talked to one man in a wheelchair there that had stomach and digestion problems and just wanted some vegetables that would help his health.
The staff showed us an area where they would like a garden and with two janky garden tools we tilled the soil. The soil was super dry and hard, with lots of rocks and weeds which has prevented them from making a vegetable garden. We used fallen down banana tree stalks to outline the shape of a garden bed.
We pray that the old folks home gets access to water so that the soil we tilled will soon become a garden and help people like our one friend mentioned above. Can you imagine not having the access to vegetables that your body needs to function properly? In America, we have all kinds of varieties of vegetables that we grow and are available in our grocery stores.
We learned that the problem in this area is that the government purifies and regulates the water that goes out to the towns. Once the clean water runs out for the day, they turn off the water so that dirty water does not get distributed.
This has been true at the house we’ve been living in. The water is turned off for about 19 hours a day. It is turned on around 4 in the morning and goes back off around 8 or 9 am. There are many buckets that have to be filled with water every morning so we can use them throughout the day for the bathrooms and the kitchen.
We found the same problem at the Good Shepherd Children’s Home we visited on Wednesday. They had dug three wells on their property without finding water. They had two gardens but they were all dried up. The purpose of one garden is to grow vegetables for themselves to eat and the other garden was a project to sell vegetables to the community so they might receive an income.
Tymone who works at Good Shepherd told us the children’s home is run solely on donations which is not what he wants. He told us all about the projects that they have done in the past and the ones they would like to do to help sustain themselves. Keeping chickens to eat and sell the eggs was such a project.
During our time at Good Shepherd we led games and songs with the kids. We also asked them to share some of their favorite worship songs with us. That’s always our favorite thing to do — to have others teach and share with us. We don’t ever want to make ourselves seem superior by coming in with the attitude that we’re just there to give like they don’t have anything to offer us in return. And we also told the story of David and Goliath using one of their very tall teenagers and a very small preschooler, which turned out rather comical.
“David” and “Goliath” at Good Shepherd Children’s Home
The children’s home has about 60 children altogether. These are just the kids we got to play games and sing songs with! Tymone, mentioned above, is on the far left. He had a lot of fun running around with us in his business attire!
The places we visited last week care for vulnerable people in Zimbabwe (the young and the old) and they need our prayers! They need resources and provision that can only come from the Lord. There’s such an alarming difference between the seemingly unlimited resources we have in the United States (and how easy it is to make a garden, for example) compared to countries here in Africa. All the resources are at our finger tips as long as we have the money. Here in Zimbabwe, its not just a matter of buying power, but accessibility.
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We have a leadership development weekend at the end of the month before we head to Swaziland to see our parents for PVT and month TEN!
Check out the blog I wrote about PVT here: What is PVT?. I get to see my mom in two weeks from today!
