our adventures and wanderings

As we have mentioned a couple times, we spent most of our time at Chidamoyo helping teach English at Dandawa High School. This was a new experience for us as we are both elementary teachers. We taught students in Form 1 and Form 2 in "small" groups ranging from about 8 to 20. Coming here, we didn't really know what exactly we were going to be doing. We just figured we would fly by the seat of our pants for awhile until we would figure it out, and that is exactly what we did. One of our "small" groups  Our very first lessons we just introduced ourselves and tried to gauge how well the students could speak English. The first couple days we were faced with a lot of blank stares and confused looks. We would soon learn that a big part of this was our accents. It was pretty tough for the students to understand us and they were also nervous to speak to us. After having them write, we found out that their English was better than we thought, and they just weren...

Dad, Amy, and Grandpa On Wednesday, July 8th, Major & I picked my dad, my aunt, and my Grandpa up from the airport in Harare. As I waited for them in the airport, I was filled with anticipation. I could not wait to experience everything with them. They hadn't been to Zimbabwe since 1978. That's 37 years! And yet, in those 37 years of being away, each one of them spoke often of Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe forever changed each of their lives and would always be treasured by each of them.  I was beyond excited to see them. We headed back on the long, five hour journey to Chidamoyo. Major introducing the family at the hospital The next morning, we woke early to eat breakfast and have devotions at the hospital. Dad, Aunt Amy, and Grandpa were introduced to the patients and the hospital staff. After that, we headed to Dandawa Primary School (which my Grandpa built, Chidamoyo's local primary school). We toured the school and then they put on a wonderful program for us. Ther...

June 30th Journal Entry: The Smoke that Thunders. Holy smokes. Most unbelievable part of creation I have ever been able to witness. It dwarfs Niagara, and the land around it has been respected more. The first part you see when you walk up is the Devil's Cataract, which is the fall in the corner and it just roars powerfully along the edge as it banks the water down to the bottom. From this viewpoint, you can also see part of the main falls which are clearly huge, but you don't realize how wide they are until you keep going. Multiple viewpoints later I was still saying, "we still cant see the end of it," stunned. There were baboons everywhere along the paths. They do not fear humans one bit. At the second or third lookout there was a little mist, but I felt some more water hitting me than just mist. I looked up confused and saw that a baboon was peeing from the top of a tree. Seriously... a baboon peed on me. He got Rileigh too. I was disgusted but thought it w...

Mom and Dad Giraffe On Thursday, June 25th, Michael Mereki drove John, Rachel and I to Harare. We needed to renew our visitor's visas and pick up a new guest, April, before we flew to Victoria Falls. While we were in Harare, Michael needed to run some errands for Chidamoyo. But, there is another car in Harare and Kathy graciously told us we could drive it (thankfully, an automatic, so John could drive). So, on Thursday, when we arrived, John and I decided to check out a place called Mukuvisi Woodlands that Michael had told us about. So, after Michael gave us some directions (which I was not sure we would be able to follow), we headed out. Thankfully, we found the place. We thought it was going to be a drive around a game park. But, when we got there, we were told that you could either horse back ride, walk, or check out the animals from a platform. Since we didn't know anything about the place, we decided to just look at the animals from the platform (plus, it was only $4)....