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).
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).
Children playing in garbage next to the road. 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 :-)
The bill on top shows the condition of most $1 bills in Zimbabwe. 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.
Yolanda is refurbishing an old seat/cabinet that her grandparents used to own. She will also reupholster the cushions.
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These are the guys who have been rebuilding and repairing cracked sections of the outer wall. This section is half the total height that it will be.
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I'm taking an old fixture off the wall.
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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.
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