Wednesday Aug. 9th -- 09/09/09

Hi everyone, Just a quick update. We are selling some vegetables from the garden now - 2 cabbages/$1.00, Tomatoes $.80/kg., 8 onions/$1.00. The restaurant down the street buys all the spinach and now a place called "Hamburger Hut" buys a lot of the tomatoes. (Note: the hamburgers are gross but they have some other things that look tasty).

Last evening we went with Wellington to the Celebration Center to a meeting of different church leaders and some others as well I think. They talked about uniting in the cause for Zimbabwe. They talked about what we can do for the destiny of the nation and feel that men
of God can change things. It was mentioned that if people would pay their tithes the Lord would bless them. One speaker said, "Zimbabwe used to be the bread basket of Africa but now it is the basket case of Africa". Their goal to to try and feed the nation in 2009 & 2010 regardless of the President and ministers of the country. The main focus is on "Farming God's Way" which basically means to teach the people to stop burning their fields etc. and compost instead. Instead of digging/plowing the fields they dig holes, put in some compost material, put a little dirt on top and then plant their seeds. All this is generally done by hand and this new method would be less back-breaking work as well. The yield from this method increases dramatically. They don't seem to know much about composting here and think they need someone to give them fertilizer all the time.

They showed us a movie they had made about it. It was in Shona with English subtitles but it was hard to read the words as the background was too light. We got the idea though. I think it would be good to try and teach it to some of our rural pastors who are going to be planting corn maize next month.

Today we went out and checked on Emmanuel's little family. We took them some rubber gloves (that mom sent with us) and 4 candles. She is going to have the baby any minute!! He is staying close to home. The wife doesn't know a lot of English but Emmanuel's is really good. We hope they may want to hear the gospel one day.

The weather feels warm today - almost hot. We decided it is time to take the flannel sheets off the bed and go back to regular ones. Beauty is at the flat today doing that. She even irons our sheets (we told her she didn't need to but she still does). She does a good job. We did get a hose pipe (garden hose) for her as neighbors were not letting her always use the communal one so now she can fill the washing machine with that instead of having to haul the water in buckets. (The washer and dryer are outside, on the side of our flats, enclosed in locked cage. The water comes from the borehole (well) since we have no municipal water still (well we did get enough for 2 toilet flushes this week). We aren't complaining though because we have not had any power cuts for 8 days now and that is really great!!!

Yesterday we took some school kits out to two primary schools that don't have a lot of kids (as we don't have enough school kits to hand out at a large school). Pastor Sikyani took us. He is one of our favorite pastors as he is so humble and honest. He asked if we wanted to arrange to go with him by ox-cart one day to take some things to some of his people that cannot be reached by vehicle. I think I want to more than Elder Bullock but we are going to do that. :) He said
it is about 45 - 60 minutes one way. There are 60 children there that could use some clothes and school kits or whatever we can take. We will try and do that late in the month after our Marondera Branch conference is done. Should be an interesting experience!!!

Sikyani's primary school by his house

I better get back to work. Hope everyone is fine.
Love, Elder and Sister Bullock