The cover photo shows a milestone. We finally got the roof on the poultry building Wednesday just in time to capture the African sunset. Our farm location is actually really beautiful, in a rustic sort of way. There is a really picturesque mountain range off in the distance, and rolling hills all around. We are about 20 minutes outside of Chipata, but when you leave the city of 200,000+, it can feel like you just drove back 150 years in time.
I had a couple of really fun experiences over the past 24 hours. I try to protect my stomach on these trips, so my food options are pretty limited. There is a dining area that we use at our hotel, but the choices are fairly limited and I try to find dishes without African spices that might turn my stomach sour. So for the first 4 nights I enjoyed chicken stir fry and rice. And honestly, it is very good.
But by the 5th night I decided enough was enough, so I took the team out for pizza (deja vu, did I already mention that?). Anyway, we had a great time, and the pizza was pretty good. The garlic cheese twists honestly tasted almost identical to something you might get at Papa John's.
But that gave me the idea to take pizza out to the work site to surprise our Zambian guys. So I did just that. We have a team of 25 local Zambian workers, they are all members of the church that is sponsoring our S2S farm. Realize these guys all live within 30 minutes of the place where I purchased the pizza. But not one of them had ever tasted pizza before! When you are fighting to find food for your family every day, there certainly isn't any money left over for luxuries like pizza. Anyhow, it was a blast...the guys loved it!
At the end of the day when we were cleaning up and getting ready to leave the site, there was a group of 10 or so guys laughing it up loudly and having a great time together. I couldn't understand what they were saying, but Pastor Jonathon came over to me and said, "They are still talking about the pizza!"
I've decided I'm going to make it one of my jobs to see what other little joys I can give these guys over the next few days. They have worked incredibly hard. You can only imagine a work site of 3 1/2 acres with 25 guys plus our S2S team of 9, all working on various projects broken up into the 3 primary building sites. So much cooperation, so many laughs and smiles. I haven't heard a cross word from anyone so far, and we just completed our 5th day of close proximity work.
Anyway, I'm writing this one at night, so time to get to sleep. A 7 hour time zone difference really creates some serious jet lag. About 10:00 am every morning I have been incredibly exhausted, I can hardly keep my eyes open when I get in a vehicle, and that is a main part of my job so far. My body thinks it should be in bed, cause it seems like 3:00 a.m. So if you are praying for us, please pray for great sleep and for the jet lag to be done. Thanks for doing that.
Here we go...
