29th January 2011

There has been an amazing amount of rain the last few days. We had 62mm over Wednesday/Thursday and another 42mm yesterday. The outside of the house looks like a swimming pool often! We have had a rather all over the place week. Went to Mutare (an hour away from us), went to our friends the Edwards (they have the most amazing shower, and always good food!) where we were able to collect a few more herbs for the herb garden and talk about our new additions to the Golden Harvest family – some rabbits. Yesterday on our way home from the Edwards’ we stopped at the Bonda Children’s home – 3kms up the road from us – and we were able to meet the Sisters there and chat about us being more involved with them. I am hoping to be there more full time – helping the children with homework, doing crafts, I even thought it would be quite fun eventually to start a little choir with them. It made my heart leap at the idea of being involved and doing what I love. It made all of “Love Revolution” come so alive and I just want to do so much to help them. They have so many needs just in the buildings that we can help with. The Sister we chatted with was kind of like of great you are welcome to come any time, and after asking us about 3 times where we stayed, she thought we were just visiting, we finally told her the road and she said oh ok we used to know the Hardy’s on that road – to which Matt was able to tell her that they are his grandparents and she was over the moon! She said she knew Mai Hardy and that the head sister was good friends with her. On our way out she told us that we were no longer visitors but family!!

Today the Edwards’ came to help with the ram pump (the pump that is at the stream below the house that used to pump water to the house) but part of the canal needed fixing (Matt was out there this morning with Moses clearing all the dirt out of the canal so the water can run down it properly again) so they couldn’t help with that but they did bring us our new additions – 5 rabbits and 3 chickens! It feels way more like home now! The rabbits are going to breed eventually and then we want to be able to sell them and train the people around us to breed them themselves – they are a great source of protein for people who hardly ever get to eat meat! The rabbits are our pest control – they are the kind called Bantam which mainly just wander around eating bugs – they can eat all the grasshoppers that are in the herbs! SO they are all housed and it feels very exciting! I was looking at the poor bunny rabbits and thinking there is NO way that I would ever want to do away with one of them – they are just so cute and cuddly. My friend said to me DO NOT name them! Then you are too attached!

The guys found a disgusting looking spider today as well. It was minding its own business in its hole but they felt the need to dig it out to view it closer. I think it is still in the cage they put it in. Man it was huge. What we call a baboon spider. Probably a cousin to the Tarantula but it’s brown. When they touched it with a stick it would rear up and start hissing. Gives me the creeps just thinking about it!

The most exciting part of today has been the HOT bath we just had. Now for those who now – we have been having bucket baths for the last 2 years – which was made more thrilling by an outside grass shelter that we were using for outside showers but when the weather is like it is today – misty, wet and cold – an outside shower is not that fun. The boiler out the back was redone a while ago but we have not been able to get the water into the house. (We now have a tank set up under the garage roof that will collect the rain water and send that too the boiler tank to keep it full). We had managed to get it coming into the kitchen but not the bathroom. So Darryl Edwards came to help with that to see if there was a blocked pipe somewhere, but Praise the Lord it turned out it was just the tap in the bathroom, so we lit the fire and we had hot water in the bath coming out of the tap! Wow!!! It was terribly dirty but it was HOT! You know that saying throwing the baby out with the bath water – well the baby would definitely get lost in that bath. I tried to disguise it with some bubble bath but it didn’t last long. But really I didn’t care today – I was having a real hot bath at Golden Harvest!