Its 26 deg & sunny. Can't say that i'm missing the gloom of London one little bit. We're 4 days in at our time here & things are going well. We've found out that we need to do our own cooking (here were we thinking of a big community kitchen) and that night time means going to bed (yes, asleep by 9pm, but loving it). This a bit of a long post, but i'm getting it all down so that I can remember what it was like when we first arrived.
After having a bit of a freak out over how much stuff we had ended up bringing (a 46Kg limit does nobody any favours & thank god we left the bikes at home) we got on the plane for our night time flight to Nairobi. We had an unexpected transit (it was scheduled, just no-one told us) in Lubumbashi in DR Congo where we sat on the runway for an hour. Flying over the city was pretty interesting - the only tarmac in the whole place was on the runway & it was the first time I've seen people walking their cows along the side of a runway!
On arrival at Harare we were happy to see that our Oz passports got us a $25 discount on our visas compared to UK passports; then when we got our bags back I found that someone had kindly nicked my phone from one of my bags - my own fault for leaving it in there I guess!
We arrived at Kufunda in time for a large lunch of beans, salad and saadsa (sp?) that is the staple carbs over here - coarse maize flour cooked in water that forms a sticky dough and beautifully soaks up stews.
We are sharing a 3 room house with a family of mum, helper & 4 lovely kids that are really starting to see how much attention & use of our cameras they can get out of us. They're also teaching us some Shona, in particular the little 6 year old Molline who has us on about 10 new words a day.
So far we haven't got started on any project work; the first week is about meeting all of the Kufundees and finding out about their different work areas and deciding where we can fit ourselves in. Additional to that we are invited to think about what skills we have that we would like to share with the community (of about 30 adults & and an evolving number of kids). There are a big number of projects going on here - construction, permaculture, medicinal herbs, mushroom cultivation, children's education, community outreach and using their facilities to host workshops and courses run by other organisations.
When we got here an organisation called Tree of Life was running a 2 day healing workshop with victims of political violence and torture and had a really interesting conversation with the workshop facilitators that evening, and they have invited us along to one of their future workshops that will be in english.
We have met with a few of the teams running the different projects; the mushroom cultivation project with David is really interesting. Kufunda are constructing a new mushroom shed to expand his work, and he is running training courses with other communities on how to do it. Maize, bean & other crop wastes are inoculated with oyster mushroom mycelium and left in the dark to colonize. After 2 weeks they are ready to start producing mushrooms of high nutritional value & costing only several hours work each week. Ali & I are going to help David put together a training manual that he can leave with his participants, as well as some short how-to films that can be uploaded to the web for other training organisations to use.
The permaculture gardens are suffering from a lack of water as the electricity transformer here has broken, meaning that their electric pump is out of action. Although the soil is sandy & the ground rocky there is still a fair amount of potential for getting things going here using raised beds and appropriate plantings. The Permaculture guys were pretty stoked with all of the info that I had brought over to share, which made those 2am download sessions worth it!
Our days are pretty domestic at the moment - waking up with the sun (around 6:15) and cooking maize porridge for brekky, then hanging with the kids, doing some gardening & reading then cooking for lunch and maybe a walk in the afternoon. Ali strangely seems to be enjoying a bit of domestic duties - making bread & saadsa, cooking & even cleaning! Very strange ;)
David took us on a walk around the larger farm's boundary yesterday afternoon. He is an amateur ornithologist and showed us an amazing nest of the drongo bird, and we also saw 3 eagle owls. An sunrise trip is planned to get some better photos, if I can get Ali out of bed, ha ha.
Looking forward to settling in this week on some of the existing projects and getting one or two of our own things going. Ali is already ahead of me, holding a boxing session yesterday for a couple of adults and about 10 kids. They've been requested 3 times a week, so that's going to keep us busy!
Some pictures soon!
Trans Flores Highway......
14 years ago
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