Patrick and Town

 While Cory will do a more extensive introduction of our new agricultural worker, Patrick, I wanted to praise the Lord that he arrived and has enthusiastically started work and learning new things from Cory.

His English is very good even with our non-British accent and he has already done translating for the agriculture class.

Our routine is stabilizing with the start of the Bible College term and less travel for us.

Students seeing grafts at the nursery and field tour

We did travel to Choma on Monday to say good-bye to friends moving back to the USA.

We were up and loaded at 7 a.m. I have a list that we run through before heading out which includes things like: internet router, lists, bags for shopping so we don't have to buy more, cooler, school work and books, plants to share....

It takes us just over 30 minutes on the dirt road to reach pavement, the main road between Lusaka [Zambia's capital] and Livingstone [tourist capital due to Victoria Falls]. 

We passed a few homesteads, kids walking to school, two ox carts, this time a few storks, lots of goats and cows.

Once on the main road it is just about one hour South to Choma, depending on if we get behind big slow trucks or not. 

There is one toll booth on this stretch of road that costs us about 75 cents.

We tried to fit in as many stops before lunch as we could. 

I counted them this trip and we made 15 stops before 1:30 p.m. which included: 

• multiple ATM machines only getting money out of two of them, ATM's busy from recent end-of-month payday
• Airtel for over an hour while Cory stood in line  and then tried to get our required internet registration updated for government regulations and be reconnected [A couple hours in Lusaka only had our phones registered apparently despite Airtel telling us the router was fine]; 
• open air market; 
• propane; 
• Zambeef for dairy, their freezers and hamburger were empty due to shortage of electricity; 
• hardware shop for door parts; 
• fast food place for meat pies; 
• agricultural store; 
• two Chinese hardware stores;
•  plant nursery to drop off promised apple bud-wood for grafting;
•  lunch pick-up for us and our friends; 
• and then to their house.

After enjoying the meal and a bit of visiting , loaded up a large chair we bought from them, prayed and said our good-byes. 

The main reason we wanted to have all our errands complete before lunch is that we decided to re-home one of their cats and wanted to limit her time in the truck.

She did well in her cat carrier only meowing a few times for a little bit. 

We did stop a couple times along the way to buy fruit and vegetables because the main grocery store in Choma was closed due to putting in a new generator. 

We praise the Lord that during the ride back it was not just cloudy but we passed through a few drops of rain and saw harder rain in the distance. 

After a few days of temperatures in the high 90's the cooling air was very welcomed along with a short drizzle of rain. Not enough rain to do much more than clean the air of the hot dusty smell and rinse off the plants but it brings HOPE of an early rainy season. 

This morning the church district overseer had about 15 workers organized for a field day clearing tree sprouts in the mission fields to prepare for planting.

Old mango trees where mission started more than 100 years ago.

The workers were scattered among the fields so that all the fields would be at least partly prepared, showing they would be farmed by the church/mission this year.

Several of the people that have been using the fields for free for years showed up wanting the work to stop but they have had a couple years to prepare and have other land they can farm.