It's been a long time...

Where to start!!!! Sorry this update has taken so long to sit down and write! I think the last 3 months have been the toughest months since our return to Zimbabwe. Times of doubting our return to Zimbabwe, whether we were making the right decision going ahead with the scholarship programme when the funding isn’t in place, the stress of moving house twice in a month etc. We are riding the rollercoaster ride of living by faith and learning lots of lessons along the way. Our house has been full of people since the end of January and this has been fantastic, as this often jollied us along – they have had to muck in with all that was going on but good fun too!! Often hitting rock bottom with doubts and fears and then God sending a little golden moment for us to cling to and know we are not alone! When we are in the thick of it all and in survival mode we often have lost sight of the bigger picture and what God is doing – when we do finally see sense and do look back we are amazed at what we have accomplished and can see God moving and what a privilege it is to be a part of that!!!!! To those of you who have held us in your prayers, phoned to encourage us or just been people we can laugh or cry with – thank you!!!! We are truly blessed with very special friends, even if a lot of you are miles and miles away!!!!! So I hope to update you as briefly as possible with where we are at and the exciting A-level Scholarship Programme that is running.

General Family News
We’ve had a wonderful run of visitors and have had people staying since January when Mark’s mum was here. We so loved time with her and she got to stay our last few nights with us in our Bush house!!!

Grace arrived in February for a few weeks – one of Mark’s ex-students from Benenden. She came at a very busy manic time but we thoroughly loved having her around, squeezed into our temporary little cottage!! We took her away camping for a weekend and was able to share our work out at Turf with her – the lions got out the night we stayed at our old bush house – bit scary!!! Grace was also able to be part of some of the testing and selection process of students for the scholarship programme. Grace is now serving on a project in Tanzania for a few months. She also got an article printed in her local paper about her trip and experiences in Zimbabwe.

Rachel arrived just after Grace returned to the UK – she lived in the local village where we lived in England. Rachel stayed with us for 3 weeks and slotted into family life so easily. She volunteered at a local orphanage and helped us with the initial running of the boarding house. We had a really fun 1st games night with the 15 students with her. I was also able to take her out to Turf and she got involved with the primary work I do out there. Her little nursery school in England – Mr Noah’s raised an amazing amount of money and we were able to buy some much needed stationary for Grade O, as well as get an incredible wooden play frame made from wood – swings, slides, tunnels, house, sandpit! It gets fitted this next week!!! So exciting. Rachel also got taken on an Albertyn family camping trip!!! We have now done two camping trips as a family since being back in Zimbabwe and we are converted – we love camping and the kids love it too!! These two young ladies were incredibly brave to travel on their own during their gap years before Uni and we so loved sharing our lives with them. We love them both so much and miss having them around!!!

The Mansfield’s were our next visitors – they are a family of 4 and Steve, Amalia and Mark taught together for 5 years. They are good friends and it was soooooooooo special to have them in our home!! The kids all played so lovely together and we just enjoyed time with people we felt very comfortable with – we laughed and laughed! They were here 3 weeks. We jam packed their week with doing workshops at the boarding house and sport with the scholarship kids, we took them out to the rural areas and a day out at Grade 0 in Turf and even managed black board painting at rural schools, which Grace and Rachel enjoyed doing too. They so embraced everything in Zimbabwe and were so keen to try all that they could. They also had a wonderful holiday around Zimbabwe. Four days of which we joined them in the mountains of Zimbabwe. So amazing for us to get away to such a beautiful place, but also such fun being on holiday together. It was so hard saying good bye to them but Zimbabwe has left a permanent mark on their lives and we hope to welcome them back here again!!! We have many, many happy memories!!!

The kids have settled into their new home. We love being their parents. Matt chats endlessly and has an incredible imagination – he plays with his Thomas trains endlessly with elaborate story lines!!!! He is a cuddly little boy, who has a very sensitive heart!!! He was a little unsettled after our last move and kept checking that we were in this house for a long time but seems incredibly happy and loves riding his bike up and down the drive way!! He loves chasing visitors cars down the drive way shouting ‘Bye’ and waving furiously – Zoe joins in too!!! Zoe is a typical toddler into everything and fearless!!!! A real adventurer who doesn’t think before acting!!!! She has permanent scrapped knees!!! We have named her Miss Congeniality from the scene where Sandra Bullock is walking out of the warehouse and takes a tumble – it is so Zoe – she is pigeon toed and will be walking along confidently and then next minute hits the deck as she trips over her feet!!! Zoe has an eccentric way of sleeping – with every single soft toy in her cot and no room for her!! We are not allowed to move any out!!!!! It’s very sweet!!!


Poor Zoe had a nasty fall from a chair that broke and looked like she had decapitated herself – it was so scary but thank goodness she is so young and her bones so soft the x-rays show no damage and all she had was a sore stiff neck for a few days!!!! I had all these terrible thoughts running through my head on the way to the hospital – thank goodness we were confronted with none of them!!!

A Matthew Quote: Driving along in the car one day with Rachel, “Mummy, the clouds are dirty, God needs to wash them and send some rain!”

We have also welcomed another nephew into the world – Samuel West!! We can’t wait to meet the third addition to Pete and Jo’s little family!!!

So now onto some project updates!!!
February was a frantic month with two house moves and the setting up of the Scholarship Programme. We were madly renovating our rental house so we could move into it (it had had chickens living in it and we temporarily lived in a tiny cottage on the property), doing up the boarding house, fundraising with local companies, starting up my own business, sorting out school uniforms, teachers, text books, going through the gruelling task of selecting just 15 scholarship students from 150 applicants etc. It’s probably the hardest we have worked in months, working till 2am most nights and trying to juggle kids with all that was going on. We look back and wonder how we survived that month!! Grace was with us during this time. She was great, she saw us at our worst and just loved us and helped out with the kids. We also had great fears of actually committing to the A-level Scholarship programme without full funding in place for the first year and this was something we wrestled with during the selection process – will we mess these kids lives up more if the scheme crumbles around us! But God was faithful as during this month he gave us little glimmers that this was right. One of those instances was when Mark was in a very hustle bustle crazy part of the city looking for cheap school uniforms. In the craziness of the traffic and very few road rules a car stopped where Mark was walking on the pavement and out hopped a student that Mark taught 10 years previously. Mark and him chatted and he was excited by what we were doing and took us into the crowd and into the back of a little shop where he introduced us to his Mum. She heard what we were doing and as they make components for leather shoes she said they would donate all the school shoes!!!

So the boarding house is set up and been running since the 1st of March. We have 15 incredible students – you can read more here about their personal stories, a wonderful House Mother who has a passion for these precious kids and they all call her mum now, my business is running – all be it rather slow and we are in our new home. Mark is teaching all the Physics and Maths lessons, as well as coaching sport and we have a Chemistry teacher and two Biology teachers.

To give you an idea of how a day runs

8am - Breakfast
Mornings - spent either at the boarding house for personal study time or sport or a lecture on something different (i.e. a language, craft etc)
12noon - Lunch and then catch a bus to the school which we use their facilities for teaching during the afternoon
1.30-5.30pm - Lessons
7pm - Dinner

They are weekly boarders, arriving at 5pm on Sunday night and leaving Friday afternoon after lessons.

This 1st term has been a steep learning curve for us in running a boarding house and school but we did it and we know this next term will run much smoother!! We have run games nights, language workshops, History of Art workshops, played volleyball, tennis, basketball, football and golf with all 15 kids and hosted a BBQ at the house with some of our friends. We are setting up a more structured co-curricular programme for this term. Sport on two mornings a week, one morning of fun lectures on varied topics (to expose the kids to different things) and then the other two mornings are free for study time.

Mark and I have adjusted to Harare life and finding where to find the cheapest food etc. We do a two monthly shop at this crazy wholesale place where you queue for two hours just to get in the door in a very dodgy part of town. But we have learnt that if you go on the last Sunday of the month it is not too crazy!! All fresh stuff is bought from a local supermarket. I have learnt the art of catering for 15 kids without wastage. Though have had a few laughs along the way – one being I taught the house mum how to bake cakes for them once a week and made a slight mistake when I wrote the recipe out. I wrote 3 tablespoons of baking powder instead of teaspoons and I got this frantic call saying that the cakes were exploding all over the oven!! We did have a good laugh about it!!!

They have an incredibly smart uniform – which you can see in some of the photos and they all wear it with such pride! They made us laugh, as they chose their uniform and were so particular about what they wanted!!! We are so proud to have each one of them on this programme.

As many of them are orphans or have very tough family backgrounds we have been impressed with how they have adjusted to a structured ‘normal’ family life!!! They all have responsibilities around the home, which they participate happily in. Edwin walked me to the car the other night and told me that this is the happiest he has ever been and he now has people he can call family!!! This obviously brought a tear to both Mark and my eyes – this is defiantly worth fighting for. Peter (who we have blogged about before) is also part of the programme. He came and stayed with us for a few days to see if he wanted to be part of the programme. He did and started a little late but will be rewriting his A-levels and learning English! House rules – no Shona during the day!!! We have got to know Peter’s family well and I pop in and visit them every time I go out to Turf. Peter has adjusted well to living in a western house (lives in a mud hut village) and we have been very proud of him. All the kids work incredibly hard and their motivation is unbelievable. The Chemistry and Biology teachers all teach at private schools and they have said how refreshing it is to teach these guys, their passion and zeal to learn is amazing!!! Amalia did a Spanish workshop while she was here and the kids drank it up and were speaking Spanish all week and asking her for more and more stuff they could learn – she said that she had taught them more than she would be able to do in 8 lessons in the UK!

Matthew and Zoe also slot into boarding life well and Zoe has spent a few evening in a camp cot in one of the bedrooms sleeping while we do stuff at the house in the evenings. They have got to know the 15 kids well and it is lovely to see how comfortable they are just hanging out at the boarding house! Matthew had us in stitches the one games night when we played twister – he was calling out the moves and kind of got stuck on Left foot Yellow!!! I feel privileged to be exposing them to different cultures but also different class structures in Zimbabwe. I love kids as they are oblivious to the normal barriers that we see and embrace everyone so openly.

It is holiday time and time for us to catch up with life and get systems in place for next term.

Mobile library update: it is happening!! Mainly with our own books and kids from the boarding house but it is getting off the ground. Thanks to those of you who so generously donated books!!

Mark is an incredible man!!! There are moments in our 15 years together that I have been overwhelmed with pride – one of those being the birth of both our kids but these last few months I have again been blown away by him. The demands on him from every angle – fundraising, teaching, setting up a boarding house and school, personal financial pressure etc. We have had moments of complete exhaustion but have pushed through and I am so proud of Mark!!!! What an amazing man – striving for the best for these kids, as well as trying to provide a happy secure environment for his family!!!! I love you babe – we can do this!!!!

A quick update on the Zimbabwean Trust – KST – sadly this trust has gone totally bankrupt and in essence we are on our own! We are in the process of registering our own trust here – Makomborero Zimbabwe. Even though all we had returned to Zimbabwe for is totally different to the reality, we continue to believe that God has brought us here. It has been tough at times as it feels like we have done 180 degree turn and have nothing concrete but our hope is in God!! Chatting to Dave and Liz Holden (our pastors from England), they reminded us that we are living our dream of over 13 years and what we are living now is closer to our dream than what our lives out at Turf would have been!!!! So, funding is in place for 8 kids through the grants from Makomborero UK and various other sources and we trust for the rest! Keep knocking on doors, doing presentations and hoping we stumble across all the funding we need!!! Personal funding has been tough too but God is faithful!!!!!

Hope waits but does not sit. It strains with eager anticipation to see what may be coming on the horizon. Hope does not pacify; it does not make us docile and medicore. Instead it draws us to greater risk and perseverance. Dan Allender

See I am doing a new thing!! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wastelands. Isaiah 43:19

Thank you to those of you in the UK who are so generously fundraising for us for the scholarship programme. We have been humbled!!!! To our friends who continue to support us – thank you, thank you – words are not enough!!!!

Well, I will endeavour to write more regularly on this blog and share moments of joy and heart ache more openly!!! Thank you for being patient enough to catch up on our news!!! The next update won’t be soooo long and a little more regular!

Elephants come to visit on our camping trip




Sunset on our camping trip


Zoe helping with Laundry


These photos are for the benefit of the lovely ladies at Darrick Wood - these flowers are what you buy at Christmas in little pots!! I used to tell them they and were trees in Zim - well here is the pic of one of the ones in my garden!!! I miss and love you all!!