The US Team : )

Saturday June 4th was a happy day as we received the team of 10 from a Church in  Florida. What made this group even more special was that not only did it consist of 5 returning team members but also Amber’s brother Josh and new sister-in-law Katie. We got to camp early Saturday evening, and on Sunday, while Jako was busy helping to get Amber evacuated to Livingstone for her foot injury the team got to experience their first day of local “village” church. While Buff, the pastor of the team, got to preach, several of the team members helped to organize a children’s sunday school lesson, and all participated in vocal worship, regardless of the language of the songs being sung. For many it was a sweet welcome back into the culture while to the “newbies” it was a great immersion into the culture and people that they came to serve. Sunday afternoon was spent getting to know the orphans, house mothers, and Charles, gathering firewood and other “camp” duties and catching up from several days of travel.
Monday through Saturday were spent in a flurry of different activities. The team worked hard at all they did whether it be loading, unloading, and transporting bricks, working on the education center roof, or digging a big deep drainage tank for the orphanage run off water (often having to dig/chip through thick layer of difficult barash/solid rock conglomeration). They were also busy doing lots of small “one-day” projects as we call them (one day – meaning – one day I hope we can get to this….) such as filling in the trench all around our house (still there from the building process), clearing the orphanage soccer field, fixing our annoying ankle-twisting small front step, hanging up an extra swing for the babies at the orphanage, organizing all the wonderful donations that they bought (clothes, medical supplies, baby toys and kid games), and chopping the tons of firewood needed for all the bush cooking and nightly campfires where we would have debrief in the cold winter night air.
Steve, one of the men on the team, a welder by profession, was able to build Jako a nice solid metal work table (his old temporary wood one was barely standing due to termites). Another exciting project that got tackled (mostly the women) was to finish organizing and labeling the books in our community library. The guys were able to help add additional shelves, make wooden book ends so that the books didn’t keep toppling over, and finish the task that was started more than a year ago. Just cleaning the library from all the dust and rat “evidence” that had accumulated over the past year was a huge job. Thanks ladies for being willing to get “down and dirty” here in Zambia for us and the sake of the gospel (many of the books are Christian and preaching resources/references).