So today I leave to Zimbabwe for ten days. There is a team of 5 of us going with the purpose of training some key leaders from Zimbabwe and Mozambique (I’ll talk more about that later on but needless to say I’m the hopelessly unqualified member of the team but will be learning from some true masters in this in Levy and Emily with Fortunate and Audrey alongside them).
A few days ago I was speaking to someone here who was visiting Hands at Work and when I mentioned I left for Zimbabwe on Saturday they asked “Did you ever think 10 years ago you’d be saying ‘I’m off to Zimbabwe for two weeks’?”
So I’ve given the question some thought (I bet when she asked the question she had no idea how seriously I’d take it) and here are my answers…
So firstly, yeah I probably did think ten years ago that at some point in my life I’d be travelling and visiting countries like Zimbabwe, in fact I’d even go as far as saying ten years ago I knew that at some point in my life I wanted to be working with the poor, the orphaned and the widowed. So in that respect “no” it doesn’t feel at all strange.
Secondly however, what does feel strange is how normal it feels and more than that how at home it feels. This will be third or fourth time to Zimbabwe and in 2009 we stayed there for three weeks with our friend Farai. I genuinely have a sense of excitement to be seeing Farai , Mildred and their kids again. I last saw them back in March in Zambia and Mildred was quite pregnant. She’s since popped their fourth child out and are proud parents to a little boy (they have three older girls so cue the constant challenges of “go on try for a fourth it could be a girl!”). I’m of course going armed with bags of our old baby clothes. Farai co-ordinates our work out in Zimbabwe and feels like a big (he is very big) older brother.
So does if feel strange? On one hand not at all but on the other hand I catch myself and think, “I’m not sure I ever thought I’d be visiting family in Zimbabwe” but that’s exactly what I’m doing…
