The Good,The Burned, and The Roasted!!!

Dear Ones,

 

August started beautifully!  The cold season making way for the warm, but windy and dusty season!   At the Village of Hope, the children have been out for the school break! We were also hosting visitors from a church in Wisconsin. 

For some time now, the missionary families have been praying about reaching out to the neighboring villages and also introducing our children on how to share the message of Christ to others. We decided August was a good time to begin this effort. Our outreach focus was going to be the neighboring Aralussa Farm village, with plenty of time on our hands, we all decided to prepare and rehearse for the outreach!  

Rehearsing for the outreach

These involved skits, games, choreographed praise and worship dance music, setting up and tearing down of the various activity stations for the big day!!! It was such fun and we were all excited because this was the first time that we were taking our children to another village for outreach.

David and Sharpie came to watch the rehearsals, but they were deeply involved in their knitting!

Finally the big day arrived! We loaded up the tractor with all of us wearing bright yellow shirts and made the short drive to the Aralussa Farm! It was such a delight to watch our kids witness as they shared the message of the sower and the seed through the skit and narrative!  There were about 80 children who attended from two villages.  Many had never seen anything like this and especially done by their fellow kids!   They were very orderly and heartily participated in the various activities.

Annette and Tereshina enjoying themselves!

Please pray that God’s word which was sowed in their hearts will take root and awaken a desire to know him more!  We would also like to follow up and disciple the children on a regular basis and we hope as the invitation is extended, that this will become a reality. This is was the good part!

Dick Mumba leading a praise and worship time

Shadrach Paul and Nelson with balloons!

Children attending the event playing one of the games

Now for the challenging part! 

Wednesday August 24^th began just like any other beautiful Zambian day! Little did we know that before the day was over, we would be stretched and confounded in more ways than one!    A little after 1:00 pm; someone noticed smoke rising from the neighboring farm close to the highway, before we had sufficient time to organize ourselves, a gust of August wind kicked in and the little flame very quickly became a gigantic inferno that furiously ate up everything in its path and spread into our farm. It reached the chicken coop where we have our layers and those of us who were at the village fighting the fire did not know until after the fire what had really happened.

 The fire then headed towards the school; we quickly drove there and to our relief found that although the fire was very close, the little fire guard in place would protect it. Because of the tall elephant grass, the fire was several feet high and propelled by the wind, it very quickly got into the village!  We fought it using branches as no water was readily available!   We prayed and asked the Lord to please bring the fire down and cause the wind to cease!   After a while the fire burned itself out and we now could pause and assess the carnage! 

Mr. Bwanga removing chickens from the scorching debris

We soon found out that of the 265 layers, 247 had completely burned up! The 18 which had survived were scattered near other buildings.  We salvaged what we could and were appalled by our loss but grateful that no people were hurt and that apart from the chicken coop, no other buildings had been damaged.  I realize for those of you who have never been to Zambia, you may perhaps be wondering, why did you not call the fire brigade? I wish it were that easy!  But we live in a rural setting and for many of us a fire truck is something of a novelty.

We were all standing around stunned by swiftness of the fire and the damage it caused.

Some of the surviving chickens, no doubt traumatized by their harrowing experience!

We decided to give away the burnt chickens to the staff and sell the rest to a neighboring village.

Where there are chickens there are rats!!!  They were weak and disoriented from the smoke and fire, which made them easy to exterminate!

It goes without saying that roasted chicken was on the menu for all of the Villages of Hope and the neighboring Nyrienda Village.  Actually, we believe that those who had acquired the chickens that we sold were so busy eating them that we didn't even hear blaring music from the taverns that night!  Hey! that is a good thing!

Grateful to our Lord,

The Kamaus