Happy Wednesday! Today has been yet another interesting day in Zambia. The moringa team started by waking up at 6am to travel to Emma's Kids, an orphanage in the area. Emma's Kids has about 300 street kids and houses 50 there full-time. They were all sweet and kind and happy to see us. We participated in their morning worship and I (Holly) got chills throughout several parts. Zambians pray out loud, and when they prayed individually we couldn't help but open our eyes. They got louder and louder until it was a cacophony of people almost shouting prayer. Some were on their knees, others standing with their hands folded, and some that looked like they were preaching. A 4-5 year old girl prayed so that she was almost screaming. It was very different from the prayers that we are used to, but very moving. Afterwards they sang and danced. And let me tell you- Zambians have beautiful voices! That was chill moment #2. We wish that we could have recorded their songs. Afterwards we got a tour of the orphanage, which was quite well run. It ended up that they had 5-6 grown moringa trees; a few were moringa oleifera (what we are planting) and others were moringa africana. The moringa africana has larger leaves and upon tasting it we discovered it was quite bitter. Several of us ended up spitting it out. Although they had the trees already producing pods and seeds, they did not know how to use them. We ended up teaching them how to process it and incorporate it into their diets and within a few hours they were able to make moringa powder. We headed out to their farm in the back of a truck, along a long incredibly rough dirt road in the bush. It took about 45 minutes, but we were able to take pictures of bush huts and see a few bush people. They were all very friendly, happily waving. At the farm we took a look around and spoke with them about building a lake for irrigation. The farm is very primitive, with no running water, but they were working on adding some plumbing to newly built buildings. They make their own bricks out of termite mounds. Kinda crazy! They plan on building a moringa forest, with about 1000 trees on 2000 acres. They have the seeds, and plan to plant them and incorporate the leaves and powder into their food. We caught a ride back on the back of a corn truck. It was funny riding through town; all the locals were laughing at the crazy muzungu girls sprawled out across maize, which is a type of corn. Many people laughed at us, as I'm sure it is not a sight that they see every day.
The trip to Emma's Kids took the whole day. We all thought that we'd accomplish more within the time period, but we were captive to the African way of moving at a glacial pace. People would hang out a while, talk a little bit, hang out some more, then talk about doing something before hanging out some more... I was fine with the slow pace, but some of the others were tested. As Carol put it, "I didn't ask God to test my patience, but he sure is!" It probably had a lot to do with the fact that we were all sweating like pigs, dirty, and starving from no lunch.
Tomorrow we will be going to the bush again, in Murundu. Hopefully we will get more accomplished, but it is sure to at least be another exciting adventure.
Something I forgot to mention yesterday that was funny. We asked the local boys what their favorite music is and they said R Kelly and Lil Jon. Apparently American music (or R&B/rap at least) is really cool here.
Until tomorrow.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment