Not Yet Settled...Free to Go

White and Nerdy

I think that I work with this guy!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOHkF4rCIxc

JZ

posted by JZ @ 6:45 PM Comments: 0

Zimbabwe Tonga Challenge Pictures

I have uploaded the pictures that I took while I was in Zimbabwe. There are a number that I took with the intention of trying to stitch them together and some where I took a bunch of the same thing. I simply uploaded them all, as is. With trying to settle back into life here and preparing for my next Berlin trip, I don't feel like sitting at the computer all night. Sorry.

Here is the link: http://s68.photobucket.com/albums/i6/jeff_zekveld/Zimbabwe/

Peace and blessings,
JZ.

posted by JZ @ 11:53 PM Comments: 0

Zimbabwe Report

Sorry that it has taken me so long to write a report on my trip to Zimbabwe, but knowing how long this report was going to be made it difficult to begin. I’ve got a little time to sit down and write about it now though, so here goes!

I left on Tuesday, August 8 for the two-day excursion to get me to Zimbabwe. The trip involved 4 planes in 4 countries on 3 continents, and over 22 hours in the air. That’s not a whole lot of fun when you’re in economy class and you’re 6’3. But I made it safely into Harare and didn’t have any problems with connections or anything like that. I even missed all of the chaos that happened in London Heathrow. I learned about that when I landed in Johannesburg, so it all happened while I was in the air from Heathrow. Thankfully I missed that because there was another guy that was supposed to be on our team who got stuck by that and had to cancel.

When I finally got to Harare I ran into some trouble though. I went to the desk to get my VISA before I cleared customs and was told that I needed to get the address of where I was going, which I didn’t have, so I was to go out into the lobby area to meet the people who were picking me up, who I didn’t know, and find out an address. Then I would go back in and pick up my VISA, passport, and luggage. So I go out into the lobby and there is no one out there waiting for me. In fact, there is almost no one in the airport at all. It looks like a ghost town. All of the shops are even closed. So I start to freak out a little bit. I had a couple of numbers of people who I had been dealing with, one in Zimbabwe and 2 numbers in the US, but I had no idea if they could help me. To make things worse, the one number for the person in Zimbabwe didn’t even work. So I find a phonebook and get the address of the Zimbabwe OM office and take that address into the VISA person and am at least able to get my belongings back. Then I go out into the waiting area and try to figure out what to do.

I had my cell phone on me, so I tried calling the US OM office and since it is about 6am eastern time, I get a machine. As a part of the message there is an emergency number. Unfortunately, my reception is really bad, so it takes me about 5 times of calling and listening to that message to finally get the emergency number. I call it, and after about 4 attempts of doing that because of the bad reception I have finally been able to explain to the person on the other end what the problem is. Then I just have to sit back and wait. Eventually the airport pages me because someone has reached the person responsible for picking me up and they called the airport to let me know that they were on their way. The whole ordeal took about an hour and it was pretty frightening to be in a strange place with no clue as to whether they even know you’re coming. Advice for anyone else if you even do something similar, find out who will be picking you up at the airport and talk to them before hand!

Anyways, I got there safely and stayed in Harare at one of the staff members houses the first night. After sleeping straight for 12 hours I was ready to go. In the morning the few of us that had stayed there loaded up into a small pick-up truck and drove about 100km up to Banket to where the Zimbabwe OM ministry center was. This ride was my first, but not my last, extended trip in the back of a truck while I was there.

The ministry center was a fairly nice place. It was an old hotel that had been converted into a training base for OM staff and also as the base for the ministry of the Zimbabwe staff who had all sorts of ministries to the people in Banket, most dealing with orphans or people with AIDs. There was no shower there though and the water and electricity were both not working when we first got there. Both would frequently just turn off, sometimes for days at a time, and there was no warning for when.

It was here that the rest of our team assembled at. In the end there were about 20 of us total. From the US there was myself and a woman from West Virginia, there was a young couple from Wales, and then the rest of the team was from Zimbabwe including 6 OM staffers. It was a good team, and God answered prayers for team unity as there were no major arguments or problems with the team over the course of the next 2 weeks.

From Friday until Monday we had orientation and training there in Banket. We had times of worship, prayer and fasting, and lots and lots of lectures hearing about what we would see and be doing once we got to the village of Siabuwa. We also started what I would eventually find out would be 15 days of basically the exact same meal. Breakfast was either oatmeal or else a millet-meal porridge that I had a lot of difficulty eating. Lunch was either PBJ sandwiches or macaroni with carrots or SPAM. Dinner was a really thick version of that millet-meal stuff called sadza and also rice, a vegetable stew, and a relish made out of a leafy vegetable called rape. The food was all very difficult for me to eat and I don’t know how nutritious it was. Some people back here have told me that I lost weight while I was away, which is pretty likely.

After an intense several days of training, we were ready to head to the village. At 4am on Tuesday we got up and by 6 we had all loaded onto the back of a 5 ton flatbed truck and were headed out to Siabuwa. The village was about 350km from Banket and the trip took about 8 hours to make. The last 32km were down this washed out sand road that took about an hour and a half. I was picturing that the place would be remote, by I didn’t even know that there were places as remote as this. There was no electricity, no water, and not even any cell service. It was completely isolated. About once every week, on a seemingly random schedule, a bus would come to the village. That was about all of the contact to the outside world that there was.

The rest of that first day we just set up camp and then had dinner. The guys slept in tents, 3 guys to a tent and 3 tents. The women slept in a little concrete walled building. The married couple had a little wooden cabin. The nurse had her own camping trailer that she stayed in, and one of the other OM staff people had a trailer of his own too because he goes up there every month for a week at a time to teach the local pastors.

On Wednesday we started our ministry. The first thing that we had to do was to visit the village chief and ask his permission to do our ministry. It was important to get there early because apparently he is a bit of a drinker. We made it in time and I think we actually woke him up. So after waiting for him to come out for about 5 or 10 minutes we met him, asked him if we could meet with the villagers, and got his permission to do so. The entire meeting lasted about 2 minutes. Then we walked back through the increasingly hot African sun back to our camp.

At 2:30 we started our afternoon ministries. Some people did a program with the children, others went to the marketplace to talk to the women, and myself and a few other guys went to the soccer field (ie. A big open area of sand with cow pies all over it and goals at either ends) and we started kicking a ball around. After just a few minutes, a crowd of 30 or 40 teen guys had gathered around and we started to play with them. Through the rest of the time in the village we did this every afternoon, developing relationships with some of them and even being able to present the gospel to them a few times over the next couple of days.

The next morning we started our hut to hut ministry that we would do every day (except for Sunday and our day off Monday) while we were in the village. For this we broke into 4 teams and each went a separate direction to meet people at their homesteads and talk to them. The first morning I went north. I became quite discouraged that first morning. The group that I went with were good people, but I just didn’t feel a good connection with their ministry style or with the homes that we went to. Things just didn’t flow well.

Thankfully, on the second day I was shifted to a different group and found that the connection was much better. On the first day, my new group went to four homesteads and introduced who we were and started to tell the people what we believed. They also found that the people were very open and were especially interested in hearing about the love of God and through that my group was able to share the gospel with them. On the second day, we reiterated what was said on day one and proceeded to find out if the people had any questions about what they had heard and made sure that they understood everything that we had told them. We then asked them if they wanted to accept Christ as the sacrifice for their sin and live for him. At the first homestead, the woman there said that she would. The leader of our group asked me if I would lead her in that prayer, which I did. She was the first person that I had ever led to Christ. It was a neat experience. Her name is Lynnette and I will never forget her. Over the next week and a half I had the opportunity to lead 26 more people to Christ through the hut to hut part of our ministry, including an opportunity to lead an entire family of 22 people over 3 generations to Christ. That was also amazing. The remainder of our days in hut to hut we continued to visit the same four homesteads and disciple the people who had come to Christ, teaching them about prayer and the importance of accountability with other Christians at church and worship. We also gave their names to the pastor of one of the good local churches so that they would follow them up. It was important that we plug them into one of the good churches because there were many in the area that had confused what the bible teaches and had mixed in some of the local ancestor worship teachings.

I wanted to talk a little about the fourth homestead that we visited. It was the home of a family of 5 and the grandmother as well. The mother’s name was Belita and her toddler daughter’s name was Cipo. We only knew Cipo’s name until the last day because in their culture it is common to call adults as their children’s parent. So we knew the mother as Cipo’s mother. Belita was a Christian and from our conversations we knew that she had true faith. She also attended one of the good churches in the village. I enjoyed visiting her each day because I could see the joy in her eyes that came from knowing Christ. She had so few earthly possessions, but she still felt blessed because of what she did have, especially her family. Her husband did not know Christ though. Belita told us that she had been praying for him for 5 years. After meeting with her for 3 or 4 days, we showed up on one day and he was there. We started talking to him and he told us that Belita had been telling him that she had been spending time talking to us during the day. This sparked his interest, that a group from outside of their village including a few white people from overseas would go all the way there to talk to them. So he wanted to know what we were talking about. After we spoke with him for quite a while he decided that he wanted to give his life to Christ. That was a powerful time, knowing that the family as a unit were now complete in Christ. We spent time praying with him and the family and encouraged Belita to continue to share with her husband what she already knew about being a Christian. It was a neat experience.

Those are pretty much all of the stories that I have in regards to the ministry of our trip. Like I have said, we were busy every day in just talking to people in developing relationships and discipling people in the hut-to-hut and in our afternoon ministries. We didn’t tally results or anything like that, but I know that a number of people gave their lives to Christ and hopefully God is continuing to strengthen them now that we are gone.

One other thing that I wanted to talk about in regards to the ministry was the AIDs crisis though. I had no idea what to expect when I was going into the village. I had heard all of the stories about how many people had AIDs and how many orphans there were and things like that, but I still didn’t know what to expect. What I found was quite heartbreaking. Of the 4 homesteads that my group visited, I suspect that 3 were directly affected by AIDs. At Lynnette’s homestead we learned that she was taking care of her children on her own because her husband died of AIDs within the last couple of years. She was also taking care of the children of 2 of her sisters, 8 children in all, by herself. To make matters worse, we suspect that she was sick with AIDs as well because she had a wound on her leg that was typical of someone with the disease. At our next homestead, there were several families and lots and lots of children. We think that one of the mothers may have had the disease there, but we weren’t sure. She asked us to pray for some pain that she was having but didn’t get more specific than that. At our third homestead there was an older woman who definitely had AIDs. She was the second wife of a man and she was really sick when we saw her. We prayed with her each day to ease the pain that she was suffering though, but she was in the later stages of AIDs. Infact, on the second last day that we were there she had to be taken to the hospital and when she returned on the last day that we were there she was so weak that she couldn’t speak or eat. We continued to pray for her, but I would expect that she has succumbed to the disease by now. The only healthy homestead that we visited was the one of Cipo’s family.

On the Sunday that we were in the village we split up and went to 3 of the different area churches. I was assigned to go to the Assembly of God church that was pastured by a man named Kenny who had been helping us with our ministries. It was an interesting experience to say the least. They started with a lot of singing and dancing. They were all singing in Tonga, so there was very little that I could make out, but all of their songs were to the same tune. Every once in a while they would use words that were English, so there were times that I could sing along. I recorded a short video of one of them on my camera so I will see if I can upload it. It was a long service though. After worship, there was the morning message. This was followed by announcements, more singing, more announcements, and then the afternoon message. All in all it was a 3.5 hour service. But it was alright because we had nothing else to do on the Sunday anyways.

On the Monday we had a day off to rest and to have some fun. As a result, some of us decided to climb the mountain that was to the north of the village and try to find some elephants. The elephants would come over it in the night to drink at the creek by our camp and we could hear them and find their…evidence…the next day. But we never did get to see one. We wanted to see where they went on the other side of the mountain so we climbed up it. It took about an hour to get up, climbing and scrambling through some dense brush and thorns. On the other side was a game park, but it looked pretty similar to what was on our side. There were some good views from the top though and I did get some pictures from there.

On Wednesday we bought a goat. It cost $6000 Zim….or $10 US. That night they ate all of the innards and the next night they put the meat into the stew. I tried a little bit of the meat, but it was a little strange tasting and I figured that it was such a treat to all of the national members of the team that I gave up my portion to some of them.

On Saturday morning we were all loaded back onto the truck and set out for Banket again. The trip back was equally long and hot, but it was a relief to be heading out. The entire experience was a challenge, to say the least. I stayed in Banket through Saturday night and Sunday. On Monday morning I was taken back into Harare where I got the chance to go to a market and buy some souvenirs and then I went to the airport to fly home. At the market I bought 30 stone carvings for my supporters and friends here in Wichita, for $300 Zim each. With the remaining $3000 that I had I bought a couple of maraca’s and a carved giraffe for myself.

So, that was the plotline to my trip. It really found it challenging to be there. Dealing with the food, the heat, the language, the culture, the stresses of daily life, and all of the other things, it was really difficult. Of course, I dealt with all of those things and relied on God to strengthen me each day to just get through that day, and I was used by him mightily as I have described above. There just wasn’t that excitement that I think would be there if I was called to something like that full time. I needed to be there to know this for sure, but it was clear as day. In fact, while not feeling great excitement and passion about being there, I was also reflecting upon my life here and what I have been gifted in and led to. I like where I am headed in my job and with my place in the church. The whole Berlin thing is a little blip that I am enjoying but that I hope will stop soon so that I can settle down, but I know that will happen soon. This experience in Zimbabwe was something surreal. It was a once in a lifetime event and one that I will forever be thankful for and that I will remember. It put things into perspective for me, which is exactly what I had hoped would happen.

So, that’s my recap. I will post pictures as soon as I can and feel free to ask me any questions. This report is a little bit shallow, so there are a lot of things that I am sure I can still talk about.

Thank you to all of you who have been checking in on my blog and to those who helped to send me to Zimbabwe through prayer or finances. I couldn’t have made it there or survived there without you. Thank you so much!

Peace and blessings,
JZ.

posted by JZ @ 9:27 PM Comments: 1