Monday, October 24

We have had a wonderful day! Weather was beautiful ... sky was clear, humidity was low (lower! Everything being relative!), and temperature was ... somewhere in the 90s. We started in the morning with an orientation tour of the farm and then the university. The campus looks like a typical university campus ... college students fretting about the paper they should have turned in on Friday and just remembered, the teaching assistant who didn’t show up for a French tutoring session, the crush and hurry in the dining hall.

We started in at the farm with Larry Kies as our tour guide. He told us that the farm raises most of the eggs and milk used in the dining hall on campus. The farm is self-supporting – they sell to the dining hall at market prices and also have a produce shop. Most of their work is providing training for the agriculture students at the university (they all have chores) and demonstrations of small scale commercial operations for farmers in the region. Zimbabwe has a two crop season – if you can irrigate during their winter (which is just ending). The farm is about to harvest the irrigated wheat that they grew, the field of potatoes are flowering, the maize has been harvested and the vegetable plots are flourishing. They also have pigs (farrow to finish), a dairy herd, broiler and laying hens, and goats.

After the farm tour and our presentation of gifts to the farm management team we took a general tour of the campus and then went to the dining hall for lunch. The menu was sudza (a white maize/corn dish – like cornmeal mush or polenta that hasn’t been fried) or rice with chicken or beef and a cabbage and kale vegetable dish. Apparently sudza is the staple zimbabwean diet. Jury is still out. (Although frying it and loading on the maple syrup would be great ...)

After lunch we greeted our drivers (Douglas and Mike) and boarded our trusty buses and headed to the Old Mutare mission station across the valley. You can get the story of how the mission station and later Africa University got started by reading the history section of the Wikipedia article on AU http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africa_University    The mission station is amazing – a 70-bed hospital, a ward for HIV/AIDS patients located in the former Babyfold Orphanage, the Fairfield Children’s Home (formerly Babyfold) (Advance special #11713T) with it’s cottage system homes for 80 children, Hartzell Primary (600 students) and High School (900 students), staff homes and so on. Didn’t see everything so we will have to go back. Two or three of us will be working with a couple of the primary school teachers tomorrow (they have 40-50 kids in classrooms that couldn’t possibly hold that many!!).

Then back to LaRochelle and another wonderful dinner from Simon and his crew.  Someone might tell you the rottweiler story -- beware! Then tea and coffee and a team meeting to sort out work assignments for tomorrow and now time for bed! God is indeed good!!

Bougainvillia in the foreground, jacarunda in the back -- blooming really well and smelling really sweet!