Mud and Ministry

Our last post was about water.  Well, all that rain is making a lot of mud for us to play in.   It also makes it harder for Steve to do ministry.

On Sunday morning we set out for Chupa village.  We haven’t taken the new road since the middle of January.  It is only made by men with hoes and shovels.  No rock or dirt was hauled in.  So the road going across the dumbo (swamp) is just swamp mud piled up to make a road.  It is very slick stuff.

The way we go now is a more direct route, but it is through the bush and less traveled.  This means it is very slow going.  At one point in this little two wheel track a spring runs out onto the road. On Saturday we had some heavy down pours.  This little spring was a rushing creek.  It washed away sections of the road going down the hill.

Steve just went kind of fast, afraid he might get stuck.  If I was driving I would have stopped at each section trying to figure out the best way to go.  I just watched the side of the road and noticed that water was coming out every-where the whole way down the road!  The land is too saturated and the water is just running off.

We came to a corner in the road that is usually dry and got stuck. I could not open my door as it was in the mud!

The guys climbed out and Steve got the high-lift jack down off the roof.  Jimmy went down the road to the farm and came back with a hoe.  Three men were on the corner talking when we got stuck right in front of them.  Three more rode up on bicycles. So we had help.

They jacked up the back corner and got some cut pieces of timber to put under the tire. Then because of all the water and mud the jack didn’t want to go down. Steve got it part way down, but it was also going side-ways. So they had to move the boards and then they rocked the car, which still didn’t work.

Clement and Jimmy (who took off their shoes to save them) went running sock footed down the road and came back with some long pole like tree branches.  They positioned this behind the back tire and four men used the pole like a jack to lift the vehicle.  Thus  “African Jack.”  It worked!!!  We got our jack out. 

We jacked up the front and went through the whole same process again.  Jack went up but not down.

We finally had boards under two tires, and lots of sticks laying sideways for Steve to drive over.  He backed it right out of the mud hole.  Thanks to a logging truck that got stuck earlier in the week on the other side of the road we had lots of wood to use and didn’t need to cut any.  But we do carry an axe in the car.

At this point, one and a half hours has passed. Steve had been laying in the mud.  I figured we would turn around and go home.  Nope, Steve was determined we were going to church.  Steve also didn’t think we could make it back up the hill.  I’m thinking we can’t get through this mud hole!

Steve drove on the other side of the road where all the sticks were from someone else getting stuck.  The back tire did get stuck again, but it was easily fixed.  Sticks were placed around it and out he drove.

A little side note.  Every time we are out in the village, when we get back in the car we all use germ-x.  This has rubbed off onto Clement our Zambian ministry partner.

We thanked they guys and they road off.  Steve, Clement, and Jimmy tried to wash off their hands and arms in the mud puddles.  Clement smiles and asks, “Can you please pass the germ-x?”  We all had a good laugh.

Just down the road is Stanzia Farms.  They are harvesting their Eucalyptus trees.  They lay them down right across the road and we have to drive through the field. Steve and Clement decided to walk that before we tried to drive through it.  It ended up being solid, so we drove through it and on to church.

At church we asked about the rain and which way we could possibly go to get back home.  They all tell us a lot of rain has fallen that side (pointing).  What about crossing the swamp to Mulunda?  They all shake their heads NO.  What about going to and crossing the end of the swamp which is up near Kaseshya and then we could take that main road back.  Again heads shake NO.

The only other way out is to continue down the walk path to Landula village which is 7 kilometers away. After that it was another 5 km out to a main road. They said the buses are still running on that side, so we should make it out.

I, Rita, have been on that road once maybe two or three years ago.  It crosses another part of the swamp and was bad.  Steve was on this road just a year ago and it was very bad then.  The Zambians described our vehicle as dancing as it went down this road!

We were in for a nice surprise. The road has been fixed properly.  No mud, rounded up ditches away from the road, and rock hauled in. The swamp was full of water, but the road was dry.

Once we got to that road it was a pleasant trip back. The way we have been going to Chupa is the most direct route.  It is about 22 km to get there from our house but takes about 45 minutes. The fastest way takes about 35 minutes but is 28 km.  The way we came home after church ended up being a 38 km drive.

It was a nice drive though.  I, got to see the village Steve and Clement want to start working in this April. Steve also got to experience the newly graded road. This will be the best way to get to that village.

On Wednesday, Steve and Clement went to Chupa for Bible Study. They drove the fastest way and parked the car at the headman’s house near the swamp.  Then they got their bikes down off the roof and walked /biked the rest of the way in.  When they got home there were more muddy clothes that needed to be washed.

Steve was in Kasama that Thursday and Friday.  It was a supply trip and our vehicle needed its 100,000 km check-up. Steve found rain suits (jacket and pants) for him and Clement.

So that Sunday they again parked the car and biked the rest of the way in.  This time wearing gum boots, rain pants, and jackets.   All of this may seem extreme, but it is a small price to pay for the Word of God to go forth in life changing power!

Water

Water - we need it in so many ways. We drink it. We use it to wash our clothes. We use it to wash the dishes. We use it to clean our house and vehicle. We use it to water our garden.

Right now we are in the rainy season. The rainy season officially starts at the end of October, but it doesn’t rain a lot then. By December it is raining on a regular basis, as in everyday! Sometime in the middle of January the rain steps up its pace. I call them gully washers. A lot of rain is falling most everyday. In February there is usually about a 1 week break from this rain. This February that didn’t happen. Although, the first week of March we had a whole week where it only rained once.  We had sunshine and blue skies.   We are loved it. This must be our late Feb. break. We are also loving the green grass that all this rain is giving us.

Like some of you in the States, we are on town water. But unlike you we cannot just open the facet and get water anytime we want. The water is sent most of the time twice a day, around 6 AM and again at 6PM. So you have to store your water so that when you open the facet you will have some.

We have a dry erase marker board on the kitchen wall where I try to keep track of the water on a four week cycle. Did it come or not? When the water comes for two weeks straight, you start to forget to go look. Also, Steve looks when he comes back from morning exercise. If he doesn’t exercise one day, then I need to remember to go look. Keeping track of the water coming helps us on our usage. If it didn’t come, maybe I will not do the wash that day. Also, we limit the amount of water on baths.

In the middle of January the water didn’t come for 5 days. We also spent the week leading up to this dry time forgetting to check up on the water. So we were not as prepared as we could have been.

The Thursday of that dry spell was a nice sunny day. So Steve and our worker, Clement, built a rain gutter to catch the rain at the shed next to our water storage well. It drains right into the well. Thursday night we had one of our gully washer rains and it almost filled the empty well. When this nice rain came, we were at the point of going the next day to our friends outside of town to fill up 55 gallon water drums.

Once the water company got the part to fix their pump we had great water for two weeks. Then something happened and no water for 5 days again. Five days seems to be a magic number for water not to come.

This time we were better prepared. We have four barrels with water stored in them. By limiting our water and with the help of the rain we didn’t need to load up the barrels to get more.

Whatever the problem, it was fixed and water came. One day later Steve had all the barrels full again for the next time. We now have 6 barrels. So if we manage to keep track of the water coming, we will be prepared for the next water outage.

The blue pipe / rain gutter on the shed.  In the foreground is our mud brick, cement plastered water storage well.  A piece of plywood and a truck bed cover keep the leaves and dirt out.

Cooking in Zambia

I’m uploading some newsletters to the blog for those who don’t get them.

While on stateside we were asked how cooking is different in Zambia than in America. This person doesn’t like using the internet and so instead of addressing this on the blog, I will attempt to write it in the newsletter. Steve does the newsletter and it is usually full. I’m going to just write my own version of the newsletter and try to send it two weeks after his. So maybe you will hear from us more often.

Cream of Mushroom soup is what I’m going to talk about this time. Delicious Chicken and Tuna Noodle Casserole are two recipes we love. I double the recipes for our family of six, so that means I need two cans of cream of mushroom soup.

We can buy condensed cream of mushroom soup in Lusaka which is 13 hours away. But when I open the can the stuff just runs out. In America is it a thick lump and stays in the shape of the can. I then wonder if this is going to change my recipe.

If I use two cans a week, with 52 weeks, in a year that is 104 cans a year. That adds up. We only go to Lusaka 3 or 4 times a year. That is a lot of cans to stock up on .

In America you have garbage pick up and recycling. Here in Zambia I have this lovely pit in which to throw all of my garbage. We use to need a ladder to get down into the pit and light it, not any more. It is a little scary at how fast it is filling up. I do buy things in cans, but cream of mushroom soup it not one of them.

So when I make Delicious Chicken or Tuna Noodle Casserole I have to add a step and first make cream of mushroom soup. Following is the recipe.

Condensed Soup Substitute

3 Tbsp. butter or margarine

3 Tbsp. flour

1/4 tsp. salt

1 cup milk

Melt butter in heavy saucepan. Blend in flour and salt, cooking and stirring until bubbly: Using wire whisk to prevent lumps, stir in milk a little at a time. ( like a white sauce) Cook just until smooth and thickened. Makes slightly over 1 cup and is approximately the same amount as one 10 oz. can.

Using this recipe you can add 1/4 cup chopped mushrooms and 1 Tbsp. finely chipped onion into the melted butter before adding the flour and you have cream of mushroom soup. You can also make cheese soup, tomato soup, celery soup, onion soup, and chicken soup. I actually make cream of nothing soup. I don’t even add the mushrooms although we do have those over here. I just don’t bother buying them in the store or in the bush. You can buy huge ones along the side of the road here in Zambia.

I leave you with “The Jumper” a braver soul than I am.

This is off the end of a boat into Lake Kariba!

Kalwa Farm

We now break our trips to Lusaka into two days.  We stop at this lovely farm.  The house was built in the 1920’s.  We use the wood stove to heat up our supper that we bring in the cooler.  It is a perfect stopping point and doesn’t cost us an arm or a leg.

Fire for hot water.

Tobias stays in this room.

Heather stays in this room.

Lane, Seth, Steve, and I stay in this room.  The nice thing is these three rooms share one entrance.  Great for families.

The back entrance.

At the back facing away from the house.

Road Trip

The Adair’s are team members of ours, but we have never been to their house.  So we decided to take some vacation time and go and see them.

We left to visit them on a Monday morning in June.  It ended up being a 10 hour drive from our place.  Only about one hour was on a paved road.  That was on our end of the trip.  The rest of the way was all dirt roads.  On the way to Lusaka, I read or crochet, but not on this trip.  Those two pass times were impossible.

There is a road close to us that is a much more direct route to Kaputa.  But there is no bridge across a pretty good sized river.  So we went south towards Kasama,  Then drove mostly west and a little south, before we could go straight north.  But then you bump into a lake that we have to drive east and then north to get around it.  Then we again drove west to their place. 

This lake we had to go around has a lot of swamp around it.  Twice we drove on a road right through the swamp.  I was quit impressed with the elevated road.

When you are driving through the swamp it feels like the water goes on forever.  We also were wondering what  happens when you come across a vehicle going in the opposite direction.  The road was only one lane wide with hardly any places at all to pass.

We had a wonderful time visiting with them and their three little children.  Steve got to go out with James to his Bible studies.  One place James goes to, it is faster to ride a bike there than to drive the vehicle because the road is so bad.

I have always loved my cement block wall around my house for many reasons.  After being at their house I have added a new reason to my list.  It keeps the fires out of my yard.

One night I heard a new noise and asked, “That isn’t rain is it?”  Nope.  About a block away a lot was burning.  It turned out to be one of their church plants.  We walked to the Bible study the next afternoon.  The insaka was gone.  It was like it was never there.  They build them with wood and grass.

The next night we are sitting in the living room and again I hear the same noise.  This time the fire was in the lot right behind them.

Thankfully, James had the foresight to train his yard workers to dig a fire break around his fence on the outside as soon as the dry season begins.  What looked big and bad came to a little patch of dirt and that was then end of it.

I didn’t get any pictures of the children playing.  I’m not sure why I can’t remember to do that.  On Friday morning we drove home. 

God bless,

Rita

 

 

Electrical Problems

When we got back to our house in Mbala after stateside our yard worker informed us that the gate lights do not work.  He had taken the light bulbs out and checked them in another light socket and found that they work.  So we were not getting any electric at the gate.  We put this on our mental check list of things to do.  At some point we would get to it and fix it.

Well, a few Saturdays later Steve was up early, in the shower getting ready to go to a funeral for the day when all the lights went out.  Now this shouldn’t have happened.  We have our lights wired that when the electric goes the battery automatically takes over.  We don’t have to do anything.  In fact, we hardly know it has happened. 

Steve goes out to the electrical box and something is buzzing.  He ends up turning off the outside lights and then all seams to be working fine.  He also unwired the battery.  We don’t want to ruin that fine equipment.  He then is off to a funeral and ends up being gone until dark.

Now, you have to know that I call Steve – Johnny on the spot.  If something needs fixing he usually is fixing it right away and will not stop to eat until it is finished.  One time just in the past month or two he comes out of the kids toilet room and asks, “How long has the toilet flushing knob been broken?”  It had only broke that week.  But I want him to come home and sit down to supper with us, so we can have a meal as a family.  I knew if I told him right away, he would fix it and we would be eating alone.  Then of course it just slips my mind and I forget to tell him.  So knowing all that it was very hard for him not to fix this on that Saturday.

So on Sunday afternoon he starts digging up the wires starting at our gate, as we have no idea where on earth it comes into the house.  At one point I went out to check on him and noticed which way he was coming to the house.  It dawned on me where he was going to end up.  There was this pipe above the ground that I have noticed before, but didn’t know what it was for.  Sure enough it was the buried electric for the gate, just not so buried beside the house.

Steve started messing with things.  Turning this off or unwiring that and then turning  the outside lights on to see if they still buzzed.  Then we couldn’t get any lights to come on.  The goal then became to just get the inside lights to work for the evening.

Monday morning we put our yard worker on the job of digging up the rest of the electrical wire between the gate and the house.  Steve got on our ladder and started checking out all the sockets and wiring on our outdoor lights.  We had a light switch outside that the bugs kept getting into and shorting it out.  He was thinking maybe this happened to one of the lights somewhere.  He cleaned them all our and tightened them up so that maybe the bugs will stay out of them.

In the end the problem was in the wire going to the gate.  Where it bent to go up the side of the house was worn away causing a short.

A missionary kind of needs to be a jack of all trades.  Steve wore his electrical hat for three days trying to fine the problem and then fixing it.

 

I’m not sure if you can see this well enough, but this was the wire. It basically just crumbled!  Thankful that my husband has a little know how in the electrical department.

God bless, Rita

ACM–Annual Cluster Meeting

Usually, once a year our cluster gets together for a meeting.  A short-term mission team from a church in  the states comes to help us out.  They bring enough workers to take care of our children and do VBS with them.  

We start each day out worship God in song in English.  This is a wonderful blessing to us missionaries.  Our Sunday services are in another language.  As missionaries we know and expect the Sunday service to be in another language, but after a while this gets tiring.  You just want to worship God in English if that is your mother tongue!  In the three meetings we have been at the pastor has picked one of the short books in the New Testament and preached through it.

After an hour church service we launch into the meeting agenda. The cluster leader speaks to us as well as sub-cluster leaders.  The teams each give a report about what they are doing and what is happening in their area.  This is wonderful to see what other missionaries are doing.

We also have a late afternoon worship service before supper.  This time our country leaders preached instead of the pastor on the team.  This was wonderful! 

We are very thankful for the Lottie Moon Offering that makes these meetings possible.  It gives us, the missionaries a time of renewal.  We then head back to our posts, spiritually fed, more on-fire for God, with new ideas as how maybe we can do things better.

Tobias and Lane hanging out with other MK’s at meal time.

Seth relaxing and visiting at meal time with MK’s.

Heather on the boat.  We went on a sunset cruise one evening on the Lake!

Seth pestered the Captain until he got to pilot the boat!  He decided it wasn’t that much fun.  When you turn the wheel the boat didn’t turn very fast.  But the boat was a two story boat with roof, it wasn’t made to turn on a dime.

 A view from the boat back at the bottom end of the resort. 

God bless, Rita