Wow - we did it!!!

We are nearing the end of our Upper Sixth's time with us and we can't believe God's faithfulness to us! 

This is my favourite time of year!!!  Spring is in the air – it is still very dry and getting hot as the rains are only due in November but the trees are blossoming and the most beautiful to me – the Jacarandas – they still fill me with such awe at their beauty and I love finding streets that take my breath away!!!  I am thankful for living in Harare and not the rural areas where we were this time 2 years ago as the heat was unbearable!!!  I have got my veggie garden beds ready in anticipation for the rains and wait to plant my seeds!!!  Our garden is brown and very dry and blowing red mud everywhere!  I long for the rains to water our red mud and to see grass come to life again!  I anticipate the smell of the rain too – oh the joys of Zimbabwean rain!!!  Until then – we wait and enjoy the flowering trees! (since I wrote this we have had a glorious thunder storm)

We ended the term and then began to prepare for the Revision Schools – we had arranged to run revision classes at 3 township schools.  The month of August was a busy month.  Phew!!!  We had boxes of stationary and textbooks for each school.  A box of calculators to loan for the lessons and various other resources.  We would load the cars up the night before and head out early in the morning.  The revision schools were a huge success if you look at is positively.  Unfortunatly there were a few glitches along the way which were just purely frustrations that kind of limited us a little and were not what we were expecting but having lived back here long enough and this being our 4^th year of revision schools we went with the punches!!!  We really felt we were able to bless a couple of hundred students and was lovely to hear their appreciation.  Our 23 students all served over this time giving of their time to help other students.  It is always special to see them giving back – especially if it was in their former schools!  I took our 3 kids out to each school to visit for a few hours and to feel a little bit apart of what was happening.  They also love to be included and spend time with our students.  Matthew blew me away at his depth of understanding – ‘Mummy our students are blessing people too because they have been blessed’ – this needless to say reduced me to tears and I realised he too had got it!!!!  Thank you Lord!  Driving into the high density areas is always a good teaching opportunity for our children – seeing the little homes that up to 5 families live in, kids playing in the streets etc.  Always ample things to speak into and help them have compassion and passion for what we are trying to do!!

We welcomed a wonderful lady from the UK – Denise!  She is a retired Maths teacher and came out specifically to help at our revision schools and to teach the Upper Sixth Further maths.  What a blessing she was to us – she taught tirelessly and gave 200% of her time.  She kept telling us that she had come to serve and that is exactly what she did.  She came with resources and sat up late each night with Mark preparing.  Here heart was incredible and we so enjoyed having her in our home.  She was also so incredibly adaptable with the unpredicatableness of Africa sometimes!!!  Thank you Denise!!!

 

Hope and one or two volunteers have visited 50 township schools distributing application forms for places for next year.  We will then collect the forms mid October and start the hard testing process in November.  It is the 3^rd year now we are doing this exercise and Mark has been a little sad not to have been so hands on in the distribution process but will obviously be very involved in the selection process.  What a big responsibility!!!  Well done Hope for all the school visits!!  If you visit our charity website www.makomborero.info you can find our application form and brochure.

The term has felt incredibly busy as the students all prepare for their final exams and Mark works madly to get his Hellenic and Makomborero Zimbabwe students ready!!  I have felt quite emotional the last two weeks as they write their first exam on Wednesday 10^th October!!  We have all 23 of our students writing this Maths exam and Mark has 30 Hellenic students he teaches – so a total of 53 students writing this exam that he personally teaches – eek!!!  Needless to say he is a little nervous too.  I find myself on the verge of tears as I look back and see how far we have come to get the students to this point – proud of Mark, proud of the students, proud of our house mum, administrator etc – we had nothing to start with and God has been so incredibly faithful!!  It has felt like a marathon at times but we have done it!!!  I am also sad as I know we have to let these guys go too!  So tearful I entrust them to God – knowing that our season of feeding into their lives are nearly over and we have to let them fly!  We are working on University applications at the moment and slowly getting scholarships trickling through!

A former student of Mark’s from Benenden visited us again!  She came out at the infancy stage of the project when we had just moved into Harare from the rural areas.  It was wonderful to welcome her into our home again – our children love her and she them!!!  We were able share our lives with her!  She helped with the distribution of application forms, visited an orphanage a few times, interviewed our students, did a fun Greek lesson with the students and they taught her a little shona, took part in Bible Study, invigilated exams, shopped at the market etc!  We think she had a great time and appreciate her visit and heart for the work we do!

This term has been quiet in the sense of co-curricular stuff due to the students studying but our Lower Sixth have been very busy still at their schools.  Lisa took part in the combined schools choir – which was a wonderful evening.  I have enjoyed my bible study evenings with them and love the beautiful singing that takes place in the boarding house – such wonderful harmonies!!! 

The Upper Sixth Students had the opportunity to visit Kutsaga.  This was an amazing opportunity for them to see a lot of the theory they have learnt in Chemistry put into practice.  Mr Muchoko their Chemistry teacher took them. 

Our Lower Sixth have been paired up with a Global Citizenship Course in Finland.  This has been a great opportunity for them to learn about another culture and share about their own.  Mark and I hosted a Finnish evening at our house and cooked Finnish food and had some special goodies for them to taste - one of our Makomborero Trustees is out from the UK and they were brought with them!!!  It is great to have Nicky here to see what we actually do!!!

So we enter the exam season and have had the privilege of going to all three schools Prize Givings that our 8 Lower Sixth Students attend.  So proud of all their achievements!!  We will hold our own Prize Giving ceremony once the exams are over to celebrate our Upper Sixths achievements and have a good send off for them!!  We also hope to do a big group trip to Mukuvusi (a local game park) with all the students before the end of the year and of course the all important Christmas Party!!!

 

Family News
Matt's sports day was at the end of the 2nd term - what a fun day it was.  We were very proud parents!

Mark worked crazily all holidays and we did not get a break but I took the kids away for 3 nights to a little dam just outside town – we had a fun few days together. Though the night before I left we had another burglary – we saw them this time and it wasn’t a very pleasant experience – thankfully we were all ok – but this totally threw me and I then proceeded to leave most of the essentials for Ella at home – thankfully I packed nappies!!! We missed Mark but enjoyed quality time together just the 4 of us and Mark joined us for the last night!!

 

Mark's folks came to visit for 2 weeks - it was very special to have them around.  They are always so generous to us and we love the time we have with them but especially seeing our kids bond with them!!!

 

Our 3 kids are all doing so well and growing up way too fast.  Ella is 9 months and nearly crawling!  She is a delight to all of us and so wonderful to see how Matt and Zoe play with her.  Her name means 'Shining Light' and we often hear Zoe and Matthew telling her that and reminding her that that is what she is to us!  So precious!! 

We celebrated Zoe’s 3^rd Birthday in August – which was a Sleeping Beauty party and thanks to Debs (who sent out a Sleeping Beauty dress up outfit) we had a wonderful day!  She is such a girly girl and I love my mornings with her when Matt at school.  She has a wonderful imagination and is incredibly caring but also has a very, very strong character!!!  Just can’t believe she is 3! 

Poor Matthew has a big hernia in his groin and will need to have surgery on it – sadly not a day surgery op and will have to be in over night!  He is being very brave about the whole thing and sometime I think he has more of an adults brain than I do! 

Both Matt and Zoe are back at swimming lessons – we can’t wait till they are confidently swimming – so sweet to see them improve and gain confidence each week!!  I’m often sitting on the side of the pool in the mid day heat wishing I could jump in with them!!!

We took the opportunity while Grace was here to enjoy time out of Harare at Paradise Pools.  We went with a few other families and had such a lovely day.  It was very hot and no shade - but wonderful to have the pools to cool down in!  Grace enjoyed the outing too!

It has taken our precious little boy to kick us up the butt to learn Shona!  Matthew declared the other day in the car that he was embarrassed to live in Zimbabwe and not know how to speak Shona and that we need to learn it!!  (Something Mark and I have often said but done nothing about).  So the wonderful lady who has recently come to clean our house 2 days a week is teaching us - after Matt asked her to help us!!  She is a huge blessing in our lives in so so many ways - not only the way she is like a fairy in our home and makes everything sparkly and shiny but how she has become a good friend.  So when she is around the kids learn a few more words and so does their mummy!!!  Thank you Sekai!!!!  She is an inspiration with the obsticals she has overcome.  We are also the first job she has ever had - she is an orphan, who is married with two precious boys and her husband and her have struggled for years to make ends meet as neither have had a proper job in their lives.  She is an incredible entripenour who has managed to provide for her family against incredible odds.  I am blessed by having her in our home and inspired by the way she has fought for her family.  She is beautiful, inside and out!!  She is so lovely that she now is working for 3 different people over 5 days on my recommendation - able to support her family better!!!

Amazingly water has been flowing through our pipes – be it every now and then and only a very little trickle at night but this means we are not asking for as much water from our next door neighbour.  I do wonder when the under ground water supply below Harare will run out as so many people no rely on it as their only source of water.  You hear of boreholes drying up all the time now!!  Also we have just had an incredible week of power – no power cuts for a week – normally have no power every day!  Sadly the boarding house has not been so lucky!!

A very close friend from South Africa who I had not seen for 3 years visited for a day last week – what a treat!!!  A day that will stay with me for a long time – shed tears together, laughed, talked, did kiddies together – God is good when He brings special people into our lives!!

Mark is weary and I am so blown away by his capacity this year.  I honestly do not know how he has done this year – God’s grace boy!!!  He is exhausted and looks it too – so trusting there will be some time out over Christmas even with all the recruiting for the new students next year!!!  We are thankful this hard year is nearly over and look forward to next year with half the work load for Mark and adjusting to being able to spend time together as a family!!!  And hopefully build some special friendships.  Mark I am so very very proud of you!

We still miss England and our friends terribly!!  Friendships are the hardest part about moving – leaving friends and making new ones!!  There are a few luxuries I miss most of all – humus, being able to do all your grocery shopping under one roof and not drive all over town getting this here and that there, cheese, chocolate, NHS, fresh pasta, goat’s cheese, fruit pots, cream cheese – I could go on.  But just over 2 years here I can say we are slowly beginning to feel like this is home!

Thanks to all of you for the continued love and support!!  We could not have done these past two years without you!!!! And God of course!!

A few more photos:
The kids love Rosie our dog!

This is the way the lady rides - with three on my lap!

 

 This is what a pile of building sand is for!

  

 Cuddles with my best friend!

 
 Enjoying cuddles with Granny Alison

There were four on Matthew's bed for story time

Oh mum please can we go in Ella's cot!

 

 

Ella at 8 1/2 months

 

 

Fun in the paddling pool together!