Emily’s Time in Zim 2016
Hello Readers,
Sorry to disappoint but this is not Greg, Sophie or JT writing, My name is Emily. I normally live in England, but have had the privilege of staying with Greg and Sophie for the past 5 Weeks (with one more fun filled week to go!).
During this time I have mostly helped out at One Way School Harare, which they set up 4 years ago and is only growing stronger with plans for new classes coming into play shortly. Here I have helped to plan their first ever Science Week, which was a great success, and also the annual Sports Day.
We have also been able to visit some other projects in the local area. For example, we went to the new school that has opened in Mandebvu, where we cracked on with some painting, administration, and most importantly playing! Sophie also took me on a little walk around the actual village, where we met the most amazingly happy and playful children who showed us their games and even tried out some Yoga with Sophie as the teacher.
Another project we visited was Hatcliffe. This was much larger with many schools in that we went to look at. It is truly incredible the work that the people do there and you can really see how the children love and appreciate their schooling.
Amongst all this hard work we have had some fun, mostly in the form of visiting other places around Zim. The first of which was when we visited Pamuzinda, a safari camp, where I took part in an Elephant ride after Sophie and I went on a game drive to see the wildlife. It was a stunning place with amazing animals and meeting the elephants was a dream come true! A while after this Sophie, JT and I took the morning to visit Kuimba Shiri bird sanctuary. Here we saw a huge array of rescued and rehabilitated birds including eagles!
Our most recent adventure (and possibly my favourite) was to Victoria Falls. Sophie and I flew out Wednesday morning and took a taxi to the Shoestrings backpackers lodge. From here we had time to do a little sunbathing before we were taken to The Lookout Cafe where we jumped, flew, fell, screamed and dived over the Zambezi river. We took part in a half day of activities including: the Flying Fox, the Zip line and 2 Gorge Swings (which I had misunderstood completely and was not prepared for!!) . It was such an incredible experience and the scenery was beautiful!
We got back and met our dorm mates. One of which was a Norwegian guy can Oyvind, who accompanied us to dinner and out to Vic Falls visit the next day. Dinner was had at The Boma, a restaurant with a difference! As well as being an all you can eat African buffet complete with Warthog steaks and Eland meat balls (which were delicious) it was also an interactive show. So after we had been given native clothing to wear, eaten more than our fair share of dinner, including the infamous Mopani Worm (which we got certificates for) and watched the dancers do their thing, the waiters came around with drums for everyone and we had a traditional Djembe lesson. This was shortly followed by dancing and finally an all male acapella group that sang to our table. This is absolutely somewhere I would recommend a visit to!
The next day we made the walk down to Victoria Falls themselves. I was in awe at the power and beauty of the water and so thankful to God for his glorious creation (and this is only one small part of one country in this huge wide world!). The water level is really high in this season, so there was an astounding amount of water rushing over the cliffs and therefore the spray was huge, so its fair to say we got a little wet…. We were sad to say goodbye on Thursday evening, but knew we had even more to on our return.
Having come back to Harare we have run the annual school Fun Day and Kids church all in one weekend, so its all go here!
We are very much looking forward to sports day later this week and going to watch the cricket at the national pitch where Zimbabwe play India. It will be interesting to see what Zim are better at having already watched the Football team in their national stadium last week.
I am so thankful to Greg, Sophie and JT for their flawless hospitality, Love for life and allowing me to have this crazy amazing experience.
Emily 🙂