I wanted to write a blog on Sunday, but the electricity was out. We have not had electricity 3 of the past 4 days. We have power today, so I finally get to write now :-)

In a previous e-mail, we sent you Shasta's (our Forward Agent) e-mail address. She has moved, and is not able to use that one in her new location. So [email protected] is the one to use if you need to contact her for anything regarding donations or receipts. It is changed on our contact page on www.jm2z.org as well.

Another new address is our new post office box here in Chinhoyi. Feel free to send us notes or letters! We have received a postcard from the Chicago area, and it took just less than 3 weeks to arrive. We would be excited to hear from you! Even though we paid for the post office box last month, we still don't have our keys. Every time we go back, they tell us that they are still being made. Although it's hard to believe it takes that long to make keys, all we can do is wait :-) Our mailing address is,

Andrew and Yolanda Burgess
                                                                          P.O. Box 348
                                                                          Chinhoyi
                                                                          Zimbabwe
                                                                          Africa

We went to the immigration office in Harare last week and handed in the paperwork for my (Andrew) spousal permit. A spousal permit will give me the ability to reside and work in Zimbabwe, based on the fact that I am married to a Zimbabwean citizen. All of our paperwork was in order. However, we were told that one document that we handwrote had to be typed. Thankfully, there was a place in the building where we could do that. We gave the man our paperwork, and then went downstairs. We found the computer that we could use. There was a woman who we could dictate our document to. It took quite awhile though, since she was only typing with her index fingers! After about 20 minutes, we went back upstairs and waited in line. When we got to the front, we went to hand in our document, but the man said that he could not find our paperwork because it was already in process. He said that we had to come back in a couple days. Needless to say, we plan to go back on Friday, and hopefully they will be able to find our papers! The process is supposed to take 3-6 weeks, but we know people who have gone through it, and it took them 6 months. So we shall see. Please can you be in prayer as we wait during the application process. Our goal is for it to be completed during the next few months, while we are still here.

We have been in Zimbabwe for nearly 2 months, and have not gotten a chance to see any of Yolanda's family yet. It is disappointing, but with all the work we are doing, we have not been able to get away from the house. Last Friday, Yolanda's mother arrived from England. She is spending this week with us, and then on Friday, we will take her to Yolanda's brother's house, about 6 hours south. We will spend several days there, and celebrate Yolanda's nephew's third birthday. Then, the following week, we will spend a few days at Yolanda's father's house, which is about 3 hours away.

We are excited for all that has been accomplished already in just under 2 months! The two items we haven't accomplished yet are getting a Shona (the main language in Zimbabwe besides English) tutor and building relationships within the community. We just have not gotten enough time away from the house to be able to do these things. However, once we return from visiting Yolanda's father, we will do what we can to find a tutor or teacher so that Yolanda can brush up on her Shona and I can learn it. Because we have had workers at our house most days doing repairs and such, we have been building relationships with the ones who are here on a consistent basis. That has been positive.


If you ever have any questions about us or JM2Z, please don't hesitate to ask us. Send us a message via the Contact page on the website or send us an e-mail at [email protected]. We would love to hear from you and will respond as soon as we can. We appreciate your interest!

Last week, we welcomed July, the coldest month of the year in Zimbabwe. As you can see to the left, Yolanda and I had our own mini 4th of July celebration. The electricity was out from 6:30 am to 9:30 pm, so the flash from the camera is the only light for this picture. Yolanda set a red, white, and blue table, and made a great dinner of hamburgers. Of course, there were no fireworks to attend around here :-(

Some good news is that we finally received our appliances a month after purchasing them. Who knew a refrigerator would be such a welcoming sight? We have been using a cooler with ice. We have just been buying enough food at the grocery store for a day or two, which is obviously more expensive than buying in bulk. Now, we can shop for groceries more effectively. We also got a chest freezer. We have been vegetarians most of the time lately, because we couldn't freeze anything. Again, the few times we bought some meat, we could only buy enough for one meal. With a big freezer, we are able to buy 1/4 cow or 6 chickens from a farm. Doing it that way will last us several months and is much cheaper. Our washing machine was also a welcoming sight. We have been fortunate enough to be able to take our clothes to other people's houses twice to wash them there. For some reason my wife was not ok with me wearing the same clothes every day without washing them :-) We have done 3 loads of wash so far, but do not have the plumbing hook ups yet. We had to manually load the water, so including the 2 rinse cycles, we had to pour in 21 buckets of water for each load.

We drove to Harare twice last week. We needed to pick up some supplies, as well as get my passport stamped at the immigration office, which is something I need to do every 30 days. We try to work it out so that we leave in good enough time, to drive back to Chinhoyi while it's still light outside. The highway gets crazy in the dark. Many cars only have one working headlight, while others drive with their brights on the whole time. Since there isn't a shoulder, you need to be very careful when a semi-truck goes by. If there is a truck with a "wide load," it will take up both lanes, and so you need to go off the road. So that you can see what I am talking about, below is a video clip of the highway between Chinhoyi and Harare. It is sped up, so you can see more in just 2 minutes, but notice that 49 seconds into it, there are baboons crossing the road on the right. On the picture of the video (before you click play), you can see them ahead on the road (one on the white line).

Of course not all places are like this, but when we were driving by this spot (picture, left) in Harare, we saw children playing in the garbage dump. One boy was using whatever the pink item is for a kite. Just as in the U.S., some places are more rundown than others. In this particular neighborhood, there were rows of people lined up, some trying to sell goods out of little homemade booths, others just hanging out because they have nothing else to do, and a few others who were trying to cause trouble. In fact it was in this area that an omnibus (15 passenger taxi van filled with usually more that 20 people) zoomed past us and clipped our car on the side. It was very minor and happened so fast, but it left behind a small little dent and a couple scratches in the car. There's no point in calling the police and of course they never even stopped, so we just put it down to living in Africa :-)

As many of you know, the Zimbabwe Dollar used to be the going currency here, until 2009, when inflation here was the highest in the world.  At one point, $3 trillion could only buy a few eggs. Now, the U.S. Dollar is being used, which helped stabilize the economy a bit. However, there are no U.S. coins here. This makes getting change tricky. Some places will give you South African Rand for change (US$1 = R10), while others will give you small items to make it up. For example, at a hardware store, they owed me 50 cents, so they gave me two rolls of plumbing tape. Something that I find interesting is that $2 bills are very common here. They are not just old ones, we have seen quite a number of new ones in circulation. Almost all $1 bills in Zimbabwe look like the top one in the picture on the right. People don't always have a wallet, so they keep them any number of places on their person. We usually try to save them for tolls on the highway, which are all $1. In the U.S., I rarely carry cash, partly because of the germs, but that doesn't exactly work here, where you need to use cash most of the time.

Finally, last Sunday, we attended a memorial service for Dale Marshall. He and his wife, Linda, were missionaries in Zimbabwe for 47 years. They were based in Chinhoyi and planted a church here, as well as several other churches in surrounding areas. Dale preached at one, which is where the service was (just a couple miles from our house). When Dale died in June, he and his wife were in Boise, ID. One of their supporting churches was Santa Clara Church in Eugene, OR. A few years ago, when Dale and Linda retired and returned to the U.S., Santa Clara Church became JM2Z's first supporting church. During the time of the eulogy, they gave an open time for anyone to say something, which is a part of the Shona culture. The first African evangelist who Dale worked with spoke for quite awhile about how much the Lord did through Dale and Linda throughout the area, as well as in his own life. It was amazing to hear from the perspective of the community here, how well loved and influential for Christ he was. It was quite thought provoking hearing about their 47 years of missionary life, as we are just beginning our own in the same town. We pray that God would use Jesu Ministries 2 Zim for His purposes and His glory.