An update direct from Dion and Rebekah :)

I am not totally sure where we left our last email it does not seem like long since we sent it. However we are on holidays in Cape Town so we thought we would make use of the access to the internet. Aside from that our friends Rob and Liz who kindly welcome us into their house each month to use the internet are having a baby at the end of October, so we have decided not to bother them this month.

As I said we are on holidays in Cape Town for a week while a good friend of ours from Australia is here attending a work conference. We head back to Zimbabwe on the 9^th and Bek’s aunt and uncle arrive the following day. They are with us until the 14^th so we look forward to showing them the place we have been calling home for the last 7 months. We both went into holiday mode about a week before we were actually on holidays. Thankfully we are always being told that we are too busy so no one minded that we had slowed down.

Three more children received letters from their sponsors in Australia. They were so happy and could not stop smiling. One of the girls, Tafadzwa, was particularly overjoyed and expressed how happy she was to be known by someone in Australia. What so many people here want is to know that they have not been forgotten and for a child to receive a letter from a total stranger is such a HUGE thing for them. If you sponsor a child through any organization I encourage you to regularly write to them. It makes such a big difference to them that it’s hard to express in words how it makes the kids feel.

The children were also very happy to go back to school much sooner than expected. The teachers did not get their pay rise and are trying to negotiate with parents for them to subsidize their wage. This has not gone down well with families as they are already struggling to pay fees. Another good thing is that the children are having extra lessons in the afternoon to catch up on the missed work. This is a tad bit sad for us as we don’t get to see as much of the children these days. It makes the days a little boring without them around.

In last month’s email we mentioned the soccer goals that Dion had made. Since our last trip to Harare they have not been used much as the children have been doing longer school days, so we have been working on nets for them. This has not been a quick task at all but in fact a series of over 500 knots to hand make the nets. But hey it only cost us $15 for the giant ‘ball-o-string’. We had hoped to have both nets completed before we left for Cape Town but sadly it was just too big of a job.

Despite the fact I said we slowed down a lot leading up to our holiday there was still a lot happening around VANA. Our store room has had a major clean out. This was very very exciting for us as there was stuff everywhere and now just maybe it can be a working storeroom rather than a junk yard. I think I (Bek) made a comment along the lines of ‘oh my gosh the storeroom does have walls’

I think we mentioned in the last email that ZESA (Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority) came and connected the distribution box for the VANA houses. If we did not mention it, we are now. Anyway a trench had to be dug from the box to the houses (not a small job). This was done about 3 weeks ago. You would think that our electrician would have come and run the cables to the houses but alas it took the bore pump being fixed before they ran a cable (a temporary one). It was a bit like oh the pump is being fixed we must connect the power, in the mean time we were like hellooooo people over here.....:) If you are not aware we were running off power from the church. This meant we didn’t have a full power supply and any item with an element in it like a kettle or toaster or stove drains a lot of power and we could only use one at a time. After 6 months we have become accustomed to cooking dinner one thing at a time. This often included the fluro which would randomly turn off when you had the stove on. The funny thing was (and we were not at all surprised) when Thomas came down to tell us they were turning the power off so they could run the cable, the power for the whole town went off and we could not benefit from it till the next day. Let’s just say we were both jumping up and down in excitement the next morning when we had 3 elements on at the same time!

Moving on. VANA purchased two 5000 litre water tanks this month. This was really important as the existing setup was not going to be enough to supply all 3 houses. We had two men come and build the stands for them then another two come and fix our bore pump and connect the tanks up. It took quite a few days to get it all done and it was a very amusing sight watching them get the tanks on to the top of the 4mtr high stands. The guys who came and did the work were very friendly always referring to Bek as Madam. We went up one day and found they were cooking muputi (roasted maize) in a shovel......lol. During this time Dion and some of the local guys also made use of the truck and did a few trips out to a farm owned by Thomas’s (one of our guards) mum to collect fire wood. We should not have to buy any for a very long time.

There was a baptism service at church on the 20^th of September. This was a massive affair for the church. Basically how it worked was the week before the pastor asked everyone who has not been baptised to come down the front and they filled the front of the church. He then explained that they were to come to bible study for a teaching on baptism and then the following week be baptised. It was not so much ‘who wants to be baptised’ but ‘if you are not’. I am not sure how many were baptised my guess would be about 30-40. It was one person after another for probably about 45mins. Three of our older children from the feeding programme were baptised which was exciting to see. We both decided that it was not our style of baptism with a wave of water going up with every forceful push under, we were surprised no one came up coughing and spluttering. It was defiantly the most people I have seen baptised in one service, exciting to see so many making that choice.

I think that pretty much covers the last few weeks. Aside from us both feeling pretty worn out and run down I think the most difficult thing we faced was our coffee crisis. We tried to re-supply last monthly shop but the only coffee available was the super expensive stuff US$20 for 100gm, simply not in our budget. Thankfully we had a little stash of Gloria Jean’s that had been sent to us. Still, we had to limit ourselves to one cup a day until we got to Cape Town! Maybe this accounts partly for our feeling run down, LOL.

Till next month

God bless from

Dion and Bek