Tuesday's Ministry Sites

Lots going on today. First we travel to school site #1. A long and bumpy road. Bumpy is an extreme understatment to be sure! We regularly looked out the rear window to see if we had left any parts laying in the road, and in fact had to stop after one of the vehilces quit running. A bit of duct tape and Tom and we were back on the road. It is truly a miracle those poor trucks made it to the school and back again and to run the remainder of the week. At the school sites we are greated in an assembly fashion and go through the group introduction. Jaye performs some magic tricks with the kids and we do a song and skit. This was the same for each of the school sites. The students sang for us as well. The photo is the entire school body trying to cram into the shade of one tree. Personal note...there is no personal space what so ever here (here being Zimbabwe).
Then we break into 4 groups (which with 300-1000 students at each school our groups were rather large). In our smaller groups we share about ourselves, sing songs and present our sanitation and hygiene training, the gospel message and then each of the students received pencils and toothbrushes (for my age group - the older kids received carepacks). For the team I was on, we also gave away stickers and balloons and finger puppets. Marilyn and I, along with Pastor Jeffrey had the grade 0-1, the youngest of the children at each site. We use glitter to illustrate germs and for that age group focused on hand washing and teaching them to cough and sneeze into their elbows instead of into their clean hands or not covering at all. After leaving the school site, we visited a village that supports 53 people. These two women are the Chief's wives and the matriarchs of the village. We were able to witness how these people live everyday and see how slowly time moves here in this area in regards to changing of traditions and rituals. It was a culture shock for most of us...the women and men are very much separated and have their distinct roles. They demonstrated for us grinding of cornmeal and we even got to give it a try. Those women have arms of steel, not to mention the abuse their knees get! The Chief told the men how he would protect his village from lions. We installed/left a water filter with the village and demonstrated the difference before and after water quality. Water samples were taken from both before and after and tested for bacterial contamination. The photo is water before and after the filter. It was a truly amazing sight!

Being in the village left us with a feeling of being in an episode of National Geographic. After that unique visit we traveled back to the school site where our lunch was brought in and then were off to visit the community at the church near the school.
At the church visit our team leader, Jaye, spoke and shared with the people why we were there and two of our team also spoke, sharing their testimonies.