Rene speaking here. I don’t write much, but this week something was stirring my heart to share.

We all feel that pull of the dull sometimes which then can turn to the stress of the mess on a turn of a dime! Every job has admin, schedules, computer time, and even sometimes still (believe it or not, paper and pen). That rule doesn’t miss a ministry either

This week, I’ve been feeling like I have an exceptional relationship with my computer! I’ve sat hours on end writing emails, back and forth, setting up calendars and documents to share. Let me tell you, working with one foot in South Africa and one in Iowa can be tireless and a job alone just to keep everything straight! Let alone trying to work through a growing “to do list” that include important things like goals for feeding distribution, team schedules, special visitors and policies. Needless to say, I’m feeling somewhat overwhelmed by all the tasks!

So as I felt the pressure, I decidedly took time to think about why I do this.

A little bit more than a year ago I spent an afternoon at Del Cramer. The goal – double dutch rope jumping.  If you’ve been in South Africa, you know they know a thing or two about jumping rope and it always seems like they enjoy it so I decided to get in on the play time.

I can admit, we looked nothing like the above! Of course at first we tried two ropes and we couldn’t even get the ropes to spin right! So we ended up just using one. Everyone was enjoying it and laughing. Even the cooks came and joined the fun.  There was so much laughter going around.

The whole group tried to participate and although some of the kids struggled we were all okay with it.  It was a wonderful time to encourage and teach that we all have different talents – and yes, jumping rope is not one of my talents, but it didn’t matter! I loved how the kids even started doing tricks during their turn.

As I looked at the fun, one girl stood out to me. She was beautiful, but in her eyes I could see sadness. She was so thin and had a skin condition. She was one of the children struggling with the jumping, but I could see that she wanted to jump really badly. I stopped the ropes and asked them to go slow. I took her hands and we jumped in together.

She smiled with tears in her eyes.

Administration will always be part of my ministry, but every once in a while I get to jump rope…

Easter in South Africa

We are down to our last few days in South Africa for this season, and this seemed like a good time to reflect upon the last 3 months of our time here.

Easter Morning: It is a beautiful day here in South Africa. We have 2 medical students staying with us this weekend and they just headed off to Entabeni to fly to the top of the mountain for the Extreme 19th whole experience. René’s father and his friend Gloria are also with us and they will also get to fly in the helicopter and enjoy the unique experience. Louis and Gloria are currently living in Botswana but are originally from South Africa and know our culture here well. He is also quite skilled in construction and knows lots about farming as well. I am sure that he will be a great help to our ministry and to Dustin and Rene’ once they start working here more.

Picture by Jacob Sharp

The opening of our Lodge of Dreams, which was built in honor of my dad, is one of the more significant happenings of the last 3 months. We just hired a lodge manager to assist us in marketing and managing this lodge. So far, we have had 4 teams, and 68 Americans come and live in the lodge for a couple of weeks at a time. They all reported being pleasantly surprised at the high quality of the lodge. We still have a few minor finishing touches to complete this project but it is up and running well. While we are back in America for the next couple of months,  the laundry setup will be completed,  and the rebuilding of the chalet that burned down December 26^th will begin.

Last night at 8 pm, Beth and I were over cleaning rondoval number 4 so that we could have guests sleep there tonight. We received a call from one of the professors at Christ Baptist Seminary that he would like to come and go to church with us and stay overnight with his family. We have invited him to come many times and did not wish to disappoint them even though we had not planned on their visit this weekend. I was especially distressed as we were cleaning the shower and found that the drain was blocked. I am certainly not a plumber but managed to get the drained cleared. The joys of running a lodge are not always fun but certainly rewarding.

Our first 4 teams of this year have been quite successful. Each team has taken part in the build of a new little community of 5 Abōds at our Del Cramer Children’s Campus.  We now have 5 families living in the Abōds and they all report loving their new homes. Later this year, we hope to build another village of 5 homes near our base campus at Shikwaru for some of our staff to live in. I am anticipating that this will mainly be the ladies that are helping us with our sewing micro enterprise.

The 5 families living in our Abōds are still satisfied with their housing. The older ladies are asking for a toilet near their homes. We have a nice flush toilet about 70 yards away that our church and feeding center use, but they would like something closer. At first I was distressed by this request because I had explained to them before moving into the Abōds, that they must be healthy enough to walk to the nice toilet we had already built. As we clarified their request, we came to understand that they would simply like an outdoor toilet near their homes to use during the night. Although I do not like the image of an outdoor toilet sitting there I decided that we should go ahead and build them a nice one out of our blocks.

The gazebo in the center of their homes is coming along very nice and will soon be finished. My friends at the social development department have also told me that they are happy with the Abōd homes and are especially pleased with how they are helping the elderly ladies who are living there with their grandchildren.

Since we are down to our last few days here in Africa for a while I have been working extra hard to get some good photos of what our life here is like. I finished the photos of our home and lodge yesterday and hope to get some good ones of the Abōds, church and farming activities today.

I am quite pleased at the growth in our Lighthouse Church. Last Sunday we had just over 500 people at church. Our infra-structure is not yet ready to care for 500 people each Sunday, but we will get there, hopefully before we grow any more. We had a productive church board meeting this week and some conflict arose between our 2 pastors and some of the lay leaders. They were small issues, but I sense it to be healthy for these issues to be coming forward into the light where we can solve them. I hope that we can get our infra-structure firmed up over the next 2 months.

We had what I like to call, a “come to Jesus meeting,” with our pastors and Johanney, our only deacon at this early stage. Our meeting was coordinated by Jacques and lasted 3 hours. By the end of the day we had everything sorted out. Our new senior pastor Jonathan who is still in seminary and has only been with us for 1 month will be the head of our church but will submit to Blessman Ministries board for supervision. Our pastors and one deacon will have 2 staff meetings and pray for each other each week and send full email reports to Beth and I. I look at this early conflict as a healthy sign of growth and if we continue to deal with issues like this properly I look at it as a good thing. Both of our pastors are strong leaders, but every ship needs a captain.

Our Del Cramer feeding center continues to grow and do what it is designed to do, feed children and develop their hearts and minds. We have still not received our official registration, but we have had some productive meetings to move that forward. I have been told by the social development department that they will be sending out the environmental inspectors next week to determine how many children we can be certified to care for. Then the next step is registration which they assured me will happen this quarter. My good friend Matome Makwela, who is head of that department, is pushing for us to get registered soon. He has personally visited our center recently and is happy with how it is operating.
I have started to finalize the budget for a memorial play ground at the orphanage in Naboom where the 3 orphans were murdered a few months ago. Our plan is to purchase some nice commercial jungle gym equipment and then place some tire fence around the playground and make a nice memorial sign for it. This will be a project for 2 or 3 teams to work on as they come from America over the next few months. The trial for these murders is getting international attention from the media, so hopefully we can get some good help with funding this memorial. Funds have already started coming in. I also know that teams will love working on this. We have 4 additional teams scheduled to come and work with us in June, July and August when Beth and I return.  Our newest ambassadors of God’s love, Mark and Jenn Bettinger, are reporting great success in the early raising of their funds and hope to be moving over here soon.

Our farming micro enterprise continues to be strong. Johanney loves his new truck and is using it to get his produce to market. People are purchasing his spinach, beets and chickens as fast as he can grow them. He is busy planting more and we soon will be building a nice new chicken house. I hope that by the time I come back in June that we will have our new farm cooperative registered. Like everything else our plans for that continue to change. Right now Rene’ will be part of that cooperative along with 4 African women who are currently doing our farm work. The goals of the cooperative will be to empower South African women, raise food for our orphans and vulnerable children, make some money for our feeding program and of course make some money for the members of the cooperative. We hope to access some government funds to help with fencing, irrigation and building a couple of greenhouses. The cooperative will hire Johanney to manage the farm operation. It will also be hiring our bookkeeper to manage all of their financial records.

Our sewing micro enterprise continues to grow slowly. They successfully sold their first contract to our electrician for work uniforms. In June, when our first Iowa State textile intern comes, and we anticipate lots of growth. I am hoping that she can assist us with developing our business plan and possibly the setting of a cooperative for this as well. I would like to once again include Rene’ in this cooperative, along with another South African lady, Ann, who is the wife my rotary friend in Polokwane who also owns the large sewing factory there. In addition, we would select one of the ladies who works at the sewing center in Naboom, as part of this cooperative.  For this cooperative, I am thinking that we could approach the mining businesses in the area and ask for a loan for expansion and also ask for their business to sew uniforms for their employees. The business plan should also include a plan to sew uniforms for the school children in our area.

Our water project micro enterprise is also moving along well. As soon as I get back to America I will be speaking at a large district rotary conference in Iowa asking them to support a major matching grant to rehabilitate existing non working wells and drill new wells in villages here in Africa. My rotary club here in Africa has already pledged $25,000 towards this project. If the matching grant is done properly we should raise about $100,000.

This week, I met with one of my South African neighbors, and it turns out that he is also related to René. He has been in the well drilling business for the last 60 years and has some nice heavy equipment. I was telling him about the manual drilling machine that we have been looking at and told him that it is capable of drilling 6 wells per month. He then told me that his machines will drill 3 wells per day. Each day, I find that I have so much to learn. He is willing to work with Maxwell and Dustin to teach them his business and drill wells with us. It looks like this new little company can be operational in October. Hopefully the money from the rotary will come in about that same time.

Our construction micro enterprise is continuing to make progress. In the last 2 weeks, we had an order to deliver 8000 blocks to another mission building a school in Johannesburg. We will also soon be busy rebuilding the chalet that burned down.

We failed to have an African board meeting the last 3 months as I had hoped to so will have to do that in June or July. We will be having a board meeting for our American board soon.

My new book has been submitted to the publisher and printer this week so it should be ready for our “Shining Light in Darkness” Fundraising Gala, which we will be hosting on April 25th. I am excited about this event and the promotion of my new book. The event will be held at the World Food Prize building which is a perfect venue for us to use since a major part of our ministry is feeding orphans and vulnerable children. Simon Estes and Eileen Denner both beautiful opera singers have agreed to provide entertainment for us. Governor Branstad has written the forward for my book. The book is dedicated to my mother, who will be there to receive the first copy. For many years now she has encouraged me to write my story. I believe that one of her main reasons for desiring me to write the book is that she thought that it might keep me in America and not half way around the world where I currently spend most of my time.

As I sit here in the airport this evening on my way back to America, I am excited to get back together with friends and family. I sense that we have had another successful season here, and I am especially filled with thankfulness as I remember that today is Good Friday, the day that Jesus suffered and died 2000 years ago. I have been feeling a bit tired and overwhelmed lately, but remembering what Jesus did for me on this day makes my journey seem like a pleasant walk in the park.

This team is helping us prepare the way to apply for a memorandum of understanding with the department of education here in Limpopo. If we can get the MOU it will make working with all of the schools in this area easier and much better organized. The optical ministry is still one of the best outreaches that we are able to do with our teams. I am praying that one or actually several optometrists will soon be partnering with us to carry on this ministry.

I heard from Samaritan’s Feet ministry this week and they are ready to ship us our first container of shoes to use for shoe distribution.

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From Beth March, 22nd: 

Thank you to all who packaged meals! 

Yesterday was a public holiday here in South Africa–Human Rights Day. It wasn’t a normal programing day at the Del Cramer Children’s Center, but as we were working on projects around the campus over 20 children came by and stayed all day as they had nothing else to do in the village. They helped us where they could and then played on the playground and we got out the books, games and puzzles. I was so happy that I could easily fix Meals From the Heartland for them for lunch! I was in the kitchen and when it was ready I sent a 7 year old to tell them to wash their hands and prepare for lunch. I wish you could have heard the cheers!!!

Three brothers in particular touched my heart. They had not had anything to eat all day. They were so serious and did not join in with the other children. Thanks to you, these boys as well as the the other children left the campus with smiles on their faces and bellies full and feeling very loved!

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We also took this team to Pastor Chauke’s preschool and to the orphanage in Naboomspriut. All of our teams love to come and interact with the children in places like this. It is also a big blessing to the children in the orphanage and preschool to have all of these Americans come and love on them. This team was also able to go to the youth group at Northern Academy and worship with 1200 beautiful children their first Friday evening with us.

Last night they helped us with the first ever youth worship night at Lighthouse Church. Friday night, we had 30 young people come and meet with us. We were able to have a meaningful discussion with them on questions that teenagers have about relationships, sex, and marriage. I was amazed and pleased at how open the young people were with their questions and discussion. It is such a blessing for them to have Godly adults to discuss these issues with. Our problems with teenage pregnancy here is far greater than it is even in America. I know that this will be the first of many good youth group meetings on Friday evenings. Last night we had just teaching and discussion, no music or dancing. Once we add some high quality music, I know that the group will grow rapidly.

I am hoping that we can set up an outdoor movie theater to give the children in our village some wholesome activities that they can participate in.

This team has also had 2 productive days doing manual tasks around Del Cramer Children’s Campus. Helping us build shelving, painting and finishing up on the gazebo that we are building for the Abōds. The Abōds and gazebo are looking really nice. This week we bricked the floor of the gazebo and ran concrete sidewalks up to it from their homes. We are also painting the walls of the gazebo and putting in electricity so that they can have a refrigerator and propane stove for cooking. I am wishing that the team who helped us build the Abōds could see all of the nice improvements we are making to them with the gazebo.

This week we got our farm truck to help Johanney deliver his produce to market. So far we have done a good job of developing our market and we are having calls for more spinach and tomatoes than we can grow. This week we are planting an additional 2,000 tomato plants and Johanney already planted additional spinach plants. Our beets will be ready to go to market in 1 or 2 weeks and Johanney assures me that they are much better quality than available anywhere else in our community.

We have outgrown our initial chicken coops and are busy planning to build new larger and higher quality coops. Once we do this we will add a building to raise laying hens as well to provide eggs for our children and for sale. We have a large group of chickens for sale for the busy Easter weekend.

Our new lodge manager, Doris will be starting with us today. For a while I was under the misperception that we could manage the lodge with just our core staff, but it is obvious to me that our core staff is already spread too thin. Doris will manage all of our bookings for mission teams and coordinate with Shikwaru to permit them to book some of their overflow with us. She will also be quite helpful in training all of our staff in proper lodge management. If we run our lodge properly it should generate some income for the ministry as well as provide excellent quality housing for our teams. Doris will also be responsible for booking all of the side trips like lion walks, game drives, and elephant rides for our guests.

We are missing Lisa Berry who has been back in the States for about a month now. One of her favorite jobs was hosting our medical students. This week I was able to get a small group of rotary wives to help with this hosting activity. I know that they will do a good job and be blessed by getting to know a group of American medical students. This will take a lot of worry and work off of Beth and my plate as we are over a one hour drive from where the students are living and work while they are here with us.

Tomorrow, on Sunday we will take this team out into the community surrounding Lighthouse Church to do some community evangelism and invite children and adults to come to church. We will go around the streets with a bullhorn in the back of our farm truck. We will decorate the truck with balloons and the team will wear colorful interesting clothing inviting people to church. This will be Palm Sunday so we are busy getting ready for a big Easter Celebration as well.

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Doc’s Palm Sunday Post: 

Record attendance at Lighthouse Church this morning for our second ever Palm Sunday. 428 children and 87 adults. Our goal has been 500 children by the end of the year. I think that we are going to make it. We will have to go to 2 services to have room for everyone.

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I have been promised that our Del Cramer feeding center will finally be registered with the government on Monday. There have been so many delays in getting this, but I do believe that we are getting close. God has placed many influential people in high office to help us with the work we are doing here.

Next weekend we are looking forward to a visit from Rene’s dad and his friend. Louis is an excellent businessman who understands the culture here well. They currently live in Botswana. I hope to run all of my micro enterprise business plans by him to gain some of his wisdom.

We will be heading back to America on April 3rd so we soon will be home!

In just 2 more weeks we will be packing our bags to return to America for 2 months. Our time here is flying by. We have been getting lots of good things accomplished. Our newest team from the Des Moines area arrived on Thursday evening. One lady gets the record for our oldest team member yet, she is 86 years old and this is her 7th trip to Africa. She is an amazing lady, loves missions, is healthy, and young looking as most people in their 60s or early 70s. Beth and I have known her for many years and we are so happy she is back here working with us again.

Our first day with this team we visited Pastor Chauke’s Church and preschool. He has about 70 children under 6 years old that our teams always love interacting with. When we drive up they always start chanting, “the white people are here, the white people are here” in their own tribal language. In the afternoon we went to Northern Academy to visit their youth group where 1200 middle school and high school students praise and worship for about an hour. They had a visiting pastor preaching to them and he gave an excellent message on sexual purity and childhood innocence. They also spoke with the young people about the importance of missions even for young people.

Last evening we celebrated Maxwell getting his first car ever. He found a beautiful used Mercedes sedan. We are all so happy for him to have reached this milestone in life. Today he is traveling to Botswana to meet Rene’s father to pick up the truck we have purchased for Johanney to use to deliver our  farm produce. This morning at 7:30 AM I received a call from the Park Hotel asking me if we were working today, as he wanted to order a crate of tomatoes. Shikwaru Lodge also ordered a crate for their restaurant. So far our farm is not even covering expenses, but the future is looking bright for this micro enterprise.

This morning I attended the board meeting for Reaching A Generation which is the ministry that owns Shikwaru Game Lodge. It was good to hear their report of how well RAG and Shikwaru are doing. During our devotion time, we discussed the difference between good ideas and God’s vision for us. Often we get good ideas, but they are not a directive from God for us to take action. Discerning the difference is so important in ministry and in life in general.

Earlier this week I met with Chief Kekane again and he gave me the application for forming a farm cooperative. He suggested that we have Dustin and Rene’ as part of this cooperative. I would also like to have Annah, one of the ladies living in our Abods, be part of it along with Sheila our Bookkeeper, and Pastor Simon our children and youth pastor. We will set up the cooperative with goals of teaching South Africans to farm, raising some food for our orphans, and also funding to help support our feeding program.

Our construction micro enterprise has also had a good week as we received an order for 8,000 earth compressed blocks. I am hoping that we will make about $500 profit on this order. However we are so new at this, only time will tell us our actual profit. We also got what seems to be another good business opportunity for our construction company and that is to build a small 15 unit apartment building in one of the tribal villages here. Only time and lots of prayer will help us to discern if these are good ideas for visions from God.

This team brought me the first draft of the book I am writing. It is a long ways from being perfect, but I always say that perfection is a tool of the devil. I especially enjoyed re-reading a tribute that Christy our oldest daughter wrote for me 5 years ago at Christmas time. I did some minor editing of it over the last 24 hours and sent it back to the team helping me put it together. We hope to get it to the publisher in the next week or so in order for it to be printed and ready for our fund raiser April 25th.

Planning for the fund raiser is also coming along well. We have a sponsor to fund the cost of the event. We also have a donor who will match all gifts up to $100,000 and 20 people to each sponsor a table for 10 people at $150/person. We will be having this event at the World Food Prize building and Simon Estes will be singing for entertainment.

My mother who is 90 will be staying with us most of April so I am looking forward to some quality time with her. I know that she also will enjoy this event.

This week we got the chalet that burned torn down and removed all of the rubble. It was good to hear that the blocks were quite strong as we were tearing it down. With each new team we find a few things that still need to be repaired in the Lodge of Dreams, but it continues to serve us well. We continue to struggle with some plumbing issues. This week I hired a new lodge manager to help us manage the lodge efficiently.
We are finally on the verge of improving our internet system. One of my friends from Rotary has a company that looks like will be a great improvement for us.

This week we will be leading a pastor’s conference and 3 days of optical ministry. My good friend David Russell was planning to come and help teach at this pastor’s conference, but had to postpone his trip when he learned that he did not have any blank pages in his passport. He now plans to return in June to work with us again.

Photo by Jacob Sharp

This has been a relatively quiet week. Beth and I spent 3 days in Johannesburg learning about undercover farming. It was not really my cup of tea, but Johanney found the conference much too his liking. I found all of the technology that they are using to grow flowers and vegetables amazing. We visited one farm here in SA that is specializing in grafting the root system of one plant to the leaves of a second type of plant. The grafts are manually done by skilled ladies. Their research is showing much stronger plants with more fruit or flowers/stem.

 
The farm we visited that is currently doing the plant grafting was a large farm. It has been owned by the same family for 3 generations. It looked like they were making lots of money, a bit intimidating to me with our 10 acres of vegetables. I expect that they also started small 50 years ago.

Photo by Jacob Sharp

Photo by Jacob Sharp

The second farm that we visited was a bit more like ours. They just started farming 7 years ago. Before they took over this farm it was planted in all sunflowers. They started farming cucumbers in 10×30 meter greenhouses and started with just 4 houses. They now have 20 houses and also appear to be thriving. Although the husband stated that he has to have a job in town to support his wife and their farm. The wife is doing all of the farming and appears to be doing a great job. It was on their farm that our large bus carrying 40 of us got stuck in the pasture. It reminded me of when our truck carrying the Abods got stuck at Del Cramer. We all got out of the bus and started pushing, next the farmer got a couple of Land Cruisers and pulled on the bus while we all pushed. Finally after lots of discussion by all of these farmers we decided to attempt to pull the bus out backwards down a slight incline. Finally we were free after about an hour delay. The delay was long enough that we had to skip visiting the 3rd farm on our schedule and headed back to our hotel followed by a 3 hour drive back to Shikwaru.

A picture recap of our first missions team getting “stuck in the mud.”

Photo by Jacob Sharp

Photo by Jacob Sharp

Photo by Jacob Sharp

Photo by Jacob Sharp

One afternoon of the conference I skipped out and took Beth shopping, out for dinner, and to visit a large bird sanctuary in Johannesburg. They had lots of beautiful and interesting creatures there. The most amazing to me was an 18 foot python. Also many beautiful birds that Beth enjoyed feeding.

On Monday I was able to meet again with our Chief and head person. They are telling us that they would like to give us some additional land adjacent to Del Cramer to farm. They are impressed with how well we are using the land they gave us 3 years ago. The two largest hotels in our area are purchasing fresh produce from us. Our biggest customers are still the neighbors living near our Del Cramer project. The quality of our vegetables is already excellent and I am thinking that if we purchase a couple of tunnels or greenhouses our yield will be even higher. I am thinking that for just under $20,000 we can get two nice greenhouses set up complete with irrigation. It will not be the high tech system that the Dutch are using, but still a big step forward for us.
We are still exploring setting up a small farmer cooperative that could likely access some government funds to pay for the greenhouses. There are a lot of experiments with helping the black Africans to become effective farmers, unfortunately most of these programs are failing at present. I am thinking that we can present ourselves as a small, but proven program and access some funding to enlarge our programs, employ more people, and feed more of our orphan kids.
Many nights I lay in my bed awake overwhelmed that we are in over our head with our farming programs, our well drilling program, our sewing program, and our computer learning center and internet cafe. After praying for awhile, God’s peace returns and I fall asleep and wake up the next day ready to push forward.

A few years ago I was praying the Prayer of Jabez and finally had to stop because God expanded my territory to such a frightening level. I am almost there again, but tremendously enjoying the journey.

We are looking forward to our 4th team of this year to arrive next Thursday evening. This one is smaller, at about 10 people and should be fun to work with.

Our second container of Abods has been stuck in customs for the last few days and is causing considerable anxiety. Hopefully by Monday we will be able to get it released. Our first 5 Abods have been well received. All 5 will have residents living in them in a couple of weeks. Progress, who has worked with us for 3 years, will be moving in with his wife and child. He will be good to have there for additional security and helping Johanney with the chickens. Even the chief seemed impressed that the Abods are working well for his community.

We still have a bit of difficulty with 2 of the Abods leaking water under the walls when it rains. Maxwell and Johanney will sort that out soon.

From Beth:

 “Last night we had another big thunder and lightning storm with a lot of rain.  I laid in bed praying that we wouldn’t get hit. Our power went out and I think we were dozing off again when around 2 AM a knock came on our bedroom door.  My first thought was fire, luckily it wasn’t that, but ­still scary–It was Max, Hilda and children.  Perfect was having chest pain, rapid heart rate, fever and breathing very fast and shallow.”

Doc:

I was sleeping poorly because the storm and our power had gone out. At 2 AM I heard a knock at the door. This is never a good sound here in Africa. It turned out that it was Maxwell and Hilda with their 2 kids. Perfect who is 7 years old was ill with a fever and chest pain. I checked him out clinically and also became concerned about him. Although I did not have a thermometer (I am a doctor, not a Mom). He felt quite warm to touch, his heart rate was 155 and pulseox was 91. He had also complained of a headache, but no stiff neck. I decided that we needed more help that I had available here on the farm so we got into our Land Cruiser and headed for the private hospital in Polokwane.

I remembered that it was low on fuel.  I had broken my own rule of not bringing vehicles home with less that 1/2 tank of fuel in case of medical emergencies like this one. I had broken the rule because we had a high level government official guest with us the night before and I did not want to delay them. We prayed as we got into the vehicle and headed for Polokwane stopping by Mokopane for fuel. Before we left home I had given Perfect some Tylenol for his fever and kept the pulseox on his finger. By the time we got to the hospital his fever was a bit better, his heart rate had slowed to 135 but his oxygenation remained low. As the doctor there asked him to take some deep breaths he began coughing for the first time. The physician there and myself agreed that the fever was likely caused by pneumonia and that the fever was causing his tachycardia. We started him on antibiotics and decided to treat him at home. The next day he was obviously quite tired and lethargic, but his fever stayed down. He did cough up a small bit of blood, but generally looked better. His oxygenation is still a bit low and his breathing too fast, but I am praying that by tomorrow he will turn the corner and be fine.

Beth:

Jim really liked the doctor and it turned out his practice was in Mokopane, he just covers the ER on weekends at the private hospital in Polokwane.  He trained in Toronto, Canada and interned at Mokopane Hospital.  At the end of the visit, he realized Perfect was a “private pay” patient, which means he is not on a government or private insurance plan and he said if he had realized that, they usually do more tests like a blood test and chest xray, but Dad was happy with the doctor’s approach and if Perfect gets worse then we will get an xray.

Doc:

This whole situation made Beth and I ponder and pray for all of the thousands of families with children who get sick in the night and do not have friends like us with some medical skills compassion and access to safe efficient transportation. They understand well what it is like to be dependent upon God to heal their children. I am pretty sure that is why we see so many more miracles here in Africa that we see in America.

Beth:

“I thought the ER would be like the ER’s in Des Moines on a Saturday night–busy with car accidents, fights, sick kids…so I came prepared with entertainment for Privilege (a new toy from Vian and Arnu), a bag of fruit, and a book, but he was the only patient there and it was very efficient.  The doctor’s fee was R600 which we had to pay in cash and thankfully had it, and the ER bill we were able to put on our card and it amounted to about $40 US dollars – all in all very affordable at $100. Hilda and I and the kids stayed home from church.  I haven’t seen her this morning to know if their electricity came back on. Our problem was a thrown fuse but Maxwell hadn’t found a problem with the fuses over there.  Shikwarus and Hannie’s was out because we heard their generator.”

Doc:
Our church this morning was excellent even though I was tired from our late night emergency run. I am still struggling with getting the people to come to church on time, but the pastor is supportive of working on this and we will see what happens. It is likely not all that important in the whole scheme of things, but I do like order. Our adult pastor continues to impress me that he is the right person for the job. He is now living on campus and doing home visits and the quality of his preaching is excellent and culturally appropriate. Our children’s pastor was off in Pretoria for a training conference but he provided a good replacement in his wife and another couple who did a good job for us.

An extra from Beth:

The monkeys have had the campus under surveillance this morning and I wasn’t too worried since all the windows are closed and I was enjoying watching them, but then they got in the garbage! Luckily since I heard them they didn’t make too big of a mess!

The guys finished the gazebo at Del Cramer. It is in the center of the Abods and looks great. The chickens were running around loose when we went by, we hadn’t seen that before. I was amazed that Bravo, the Great Dane, and Tiger, the mutt, were leaving them alone. However, when a black rooster who does not belong to us got too close to the chickens the dogs ran it off.  How do they know what chickens belong and what doesn’t?? They are pretty smart dogs.

Holy Spirit Camp

The weeks of my life are flying by. It seems like just yesterday that I was an intern back at Broadlawns Hospital. I have committed to take a few moments each weekend to document our activities here in Africa. I am always thinking that when we do not have teams here that we will have more time to catch up on everything.

The team up teaching about the gifts of the Spirit. at Holy Spirit Camp

This week we have had time to focus more on developing Lighthouse Church. The seminary student Jonathan moved into one of our Abods. It will be nice to have him living on campus so that he can focus on home visits to all of the people who visit our church. He will also be helping strengthen our cell groups that are already going. He seems as excited about his new role with us as we are about him coming. He still has a little over a year of his studies but will also have lots of time to work at our church.

Holy Spirit Camp

Since he is coming from a strict Baptist Seminary I was a bit concerned how he would get along with all of us Pentecostals. At our children’s camp last week several of the children and even a few of our team members received the baptism of the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues. When I told Pastor Jonathan about all of this he was excited and supportive of all of this activity. I believe that he and Pastor Simon our children’s pastor will work well together. My vision was to have 500 children in church every Sunday by the end of the year and I believe that we are on track to see that happen. I am not sure where we will fit everyone but God knows. Our adult church will likely have similar growth. Right now, we are still running about 60 adults and 175 children each week.

Holy Spirit Camp

On Sunday morning we had a family church service rather than separating the children and the adults. We did this because we had invited all of the parents of the children who came to camp last weekend. Fortunately, several of them attended and seemed to enjoy the service. Both Pastor Simon and Pastor Jonathan preached to a packed house and 30 people got saved.

Mark Bettinger teaching at Holy Spirit Camp

It is a big goal of mine to start raising funds from within South Africa.  Pastor Simon came to me this week and would like to start doing some fund raising calls to local businesses for BMI. I am hoping that in the next week or so we will have all of our documents in order for businesses to get tax receipts. He is also helping me write a proposal to the municipality to purchase some farm land near our Del Cramer site. I believe that we are getting a staff working with us who love our ministry and are passionate about the work we are doing.

Holy Spirit Camp

Team members can’t help but play with the kids on the playground.

Dr. Bruce Ricker screening a lady for glasses.

Bruce rounding up the kids.

 
We have enjoyed working with Rene’ this last 3 weeks. She has gotten so much done to help us strengthen our Del Cramer feeding center pilot program. I see lots of people who work hard, but when Rene’ works she does it with passion and gets lots accomplished.
She and I had a good lunch meeting with our tribal chief this week and he now seems ready to allocate some additional farm land for us to use. He seems impressed with how we are using the land he gave us 3 years ago. In addition to working with the chief with some additional farm land, he has some land that he would like to see developed into home building sites. I am hoping that we can also interest him into working with us to build some additional Abods and block homes.
At my rotary meeting this week I met with a fellow Rotarian who is going to help me improve our internet and phone service at both our home base and at Del Cramer Children’s Campus. Shikwaru has had an internet provider but they keep dropping the ball and getting on service back after our lightening strike in December. I usually try to be a patient man, but even in Africa, 3 months is just too long to have to wait to get phone and internet service. This will also help us to set up a computer learning center and internet cafe at Del Cramer.

Next week I am looking forward to going to a 3 day conference on farming in Johannesburg with Johanney. He continues to do very well with our farming program. We are harvesting lots of maize, tomatoes and spinach. We even have the Park and Ranch Hotels purchasing from us.

It is enjoyable this week to watch all of the Facebook posts from our last team. They are doing the best job yet of communicating to the rest of the world all that they were able to do here in Africa. It is so important that we get our message out to all of our friends back in America what is happening here. I have been busy this week working with our office in America on a fund raiser that we are having in April. I am excited about this event. It will be at the World Food Prize building which is a perfect venue for our event with all of our interest in feeding kids here in Africa. We have asked Simon Estes and Eileen Dener to sing at this event. We are also hoping that Governor Branstad and Ambassador Quinn will speak.

The World Food Prize building will hold 200 people for a sit down dinner. We will have 20 tables each seating 10 people. I am amazed at the overwhelming support that we are receiving as we ask people to sponsor a table. We have 19 of the 20 tables already sponsored. We have a donor who has agreed to fund the entire evening as well as another donor who will match all donations up to 100,000. Therefore all of the donations given that evening will go directly to Africa. 
Our medical student program continues to do well. We enjoyed having our 2 current students at Shikwaru last weekend. They also report that they are having a quality experience. I was also notified that we will have our first 2 Iowa State Interns coming in June and July.
This week we started tearing down our lodge that burned and hauling away all of the construction rubble. About 6 weeks ago we planted about 3000 plants for our landscaping. Since then we have had lots of good rain and the plants are looking beautiful.

2013 Ringgold County Missions Team

Like many of our teams this team has also done three days of optical ministry. Optical ministry always gives the American team members a good opportunity to speak one on one with our African friends and to pray with them. The last day of our optical outreaches we did at an elderly care center in a rural village, near Polokwane. Most of our patients did not speak English so communicating with them was a bit slow and difficult even though we had a few good interpreters. Since they were all elderly, almost all of them needed reading glasses so the clinical part of our work was relatively easy. We did this outreach in partnership with my rotary club in Polokwane. The people were appreciative of our visit and gifts of glasses to help them see better. I am quite sure that they have never had so many white people come and serve them like we were able to on this day. The area was so rural that there was no running water and no good toilet facilities for our team, but they tolerated this inconvenience well. The rotary helped us by bringing some tables and chairs but we primarily worked under a couple of trees for shade. Some of the team got the people in the waiting line to sing and dance. It was nice to listen to them and watch them be so active while we did our exams.

This team has had several people wanting to hunt and they were able to harvest five African wildlife: a zebra, a wildebeest, a kudu, an impala, and a warthog. I think that they were a bit surprised at just how much fun they had hunting. There was even one lady hunting and she is the one who shot the kudu a beautiful trophy animal. When our guests hunt at Shikwaru, it brings in some money to help our ministry and in addition they provide lots of meat for us to help feed our orphan children.

On Wednesday evening, we were blessed to have the local tribal chief at the Lodge of Dreams for dinner. He brought along his wife, their 3 year old daughter, his mother-in-law, and sister- in-law. Our relationship with the chief and tribal council continues to improve the longer we are here. The chief’s sister-in-law works with the government in the department of agriculture and was interested in learning about our farming micro enterprise. She pledged her support to assist us in forming our farm cooperative. We have four ladies who have been assisting Johanney with our farming at Del Cramer Children’s Campus. I am thinking that since they are all South African nationals we can form a cooperative with them and access government funding to purchase land and farm implements. Also, these funds can help to develop the farm with fencing and irrigation. The chief also seems to be warming up to the idea of helping us to access some of his additional land as well. In addition to or instead of land from the chief I also found a 200 hectare plot of land near Del Cramer that is owned by the Mokopane municipality. In summary, I am getting much more excited about the real possibility of us being able to expand our farming operation near our Del Cramer Campus. When I was in the municipality office yesterday, they were complimenting us on the quality of our corn crop and asking if we could help teach them to farm better.

The main activity of this team has been preparing for and doing a children’s camp for 81 children who spent Friday night, all day Saturday, and Sunday morning having fun and learning about the Holy Spirit. It has been quite interesting to me to see so many Americans actually sleeping in our tribal village. We work here several days each week, but it has an entirely different feel to it after dark.

The first night of the camp I sat for several minutes on the stoop of one of our Abods visiting with the 2 grannies living in the Abods. There was a roaring campfire nearby where the children were being entertained and trained. I think that the ladies were actually flirting with me. They told me that I looked so young and that they did not recognize me.

On Saturday, we had the local induna (head lady) visit our camp. I had visited her home earlier in the week to let her know what we would be doing. When she actually saw it for herself, she was amazed at all of the activities and how so many Americans were volunteering to help with the children of her village. She started singing and dancing to the music and greeted all of the Americans and children. While she was at the camp she also called the chief to see if he would also come by and see what was going on. She came back to the evening service and also came to church on Sunday morning. I am thinking that she really appreciates all of the good things going on at Del Cramer Children’s Campus.

This will be Lisa’ s last week with us so we are planning a big going away celebration for her at church tomorrow. She is a wonderful missionary and we are really going to miss her. She is also going to really miss working with our African children.
We have Mark Bettinger here with us on this team from Champaign, Illinois. He and his wife have been feeling called by God to come to Africa and work as missionaries. After just 3 days here with us he told me that he is sure that this is the place for them to come and work. He preached at the children’s camp several times and also this morning in our adult church service. The people here already love and appreciate him.

There have been several people in each of these first 3 teams this year, who have told us that they are hearing from God that they should at least pray about going into missionary work.

The work on my book is coming along well and it should soon be ready to go to the publisher. We are doing a large fund raising event at the World Food Prize building April 25th and I am hoping to have it finished by then.

God has given me a large vision that He wants to accomplish here in Africa. It is such a joy to see His vision for this place unfold. As this fund raiser is approaching I am sensing a need to able to communicate His vision for South Africa with our ministry in a concise appealing way. Nearly everyone who comes here on a mission trip gets a good understanding of the vision that He has given us. I pray that soon I will be able to do a better job of communicating clearly what that vision is all about so that friends of our ministry and potential supporters will be excited to join our team and financially support the work we are doing.

If you would like to support our fundraiser by sponsoring a table for you and eight of your friends, contact my office for details.

Picture from Mission Trip to South Africa from Ringgold County Misssion to South Africa Facebook

This week has been so busy that I am getting to my blog at the end of this weekend. I was hoping to meet with Howard Buffett Foundation in Bela Bela mid week, but had to push the panic button on that one because of too many other commitments.

We are really enjoying having Rene’ our daughter-in-law with us. She is doing an excellent job of managing our feeding center data collection system.

We spent 3 days meeting with a consulting company from Pretoria who works with the University of Pretoria. They were teaching us about forming cooperative groups here in Africa. They are mainly interested in forming financial cooperatives and I don’t think that we are ready for that, but I have high interest in forming a farming cooperative as well as cooperatives with our sewing and construction projects as well.

I am getting more and more interested in developing a computer learning center at Del Cramer Children’s Campus along with an internet cafe at the same site. One of my rotary friends will be able to help us get internet service into this village. I am hoping that he may also be able to help us improve our internet service at our home campus.

Picture from Mission Trip to South Africa from Ringgold County Misssion to South Africa Facebook

Our new team arrived. Most of them are from Ringgold County in Southern Iowa where my parents lived. It is great to be working with them. We had a good first day of doing optical ministry in Johannesburg at the GBS Foundation. Today, they all enjoyed walking with the lions and also our church service at Lighthouse Church. I preached today on the book of James, my favorite book of the Bible.

Picture from Mission Trip to South Africa from Ringgold County Misssion to South Africa Facebook

We had a good meeting this afternoon planning for our children’s camp next weekend, teaching the children about the baptism of the Holy Spirit. We are planning to have about 100 children sleep over at Del Cramer Campus on Friday and Saturday night. With our American team sleeping there as well. It will be the most white people who have ever stayed overnight in the tribal village.

This week will be Lisa Berry’s last week with our ministry here in Africa. She is planning on getting married in October and will be moving back to the States. We will dearly miss her here. She has been a faithful missionary doing great work with us for the last 4 years. Amazingly on this team is Mark Bettinger, who feels that he and his family are being called by God to come and work with us full time. So God is providing this wonderful family to fill the gap as Lisa is leaving us. Mark, his wife Jenn, and their 3 young children will be a great addition to our staff.

Our new Lodge of Dreams is getting better each week and is serving this team of 18 people quite well. We are struggling a bit with our irrigation system that we installed. It is quite important that we get in up and running soon as we spent lots of money on landscaping and we don’t want any of our plants to die because of lack of adequate water.

We have been so busy and struggling with our internet service that I had not spoken with my mom on the phone for several days. I got a nice email note from her today letting me know that she missed hearing from me so I must try harder to call her regularly. Many people on this team knew both she and my dad. So they are especially enjoying their stay in the lodge that is built in their honor.

Picture from Mission Trip to South Africa from Ringgold County Misssion to South Africa Facebook

Photo from Mission South Africa Hope Lutheran Facebook

I celebrated my 68th birthday in Africa this last week. I missed some of my family back in America, but cannot imagine anywhere else that I would rather be right now. At Lighthouse Church they celebrated my birthday in a big way. They got us chair covers on all of our chairs, balloons, and 68 candles. It was so many candles that I was concerned we might catch the thatch roof on fire. We love this church and it is obvious that they love and honor us.

We have been quite busy this week with a large team of 21 people from Lutheran Church of Hope. We have enjoyed bonding with them and working with them. The team has been large enough that we were able to split into two groups with one working on construction projects around our campus at Shikwaru and our Del Cramer Children’s Campus and the other team doing optical outreaches and working with the children. Both groups seemed to be enjoying their stay with us.

The entire team got to experience an optical outreach in Johannesburg on their first day with us last Saturday. On Sunday we kept them really busy getting up at 4:30 AM for a walk with the lions, church at 10 AM, and finally an Entabeni game drive in the late afternoon. Many of them expressed that it was the best day that they could have imagined. They are also all impressed with the comfort and quality of our Lodge of Dreams. On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday about half of the team did further optical outreaches with us at Northern Academy. Also, on Wednesday we went to a handicapped school where 350 severally handicapped children are cared for.

Photo from Mission South Africa Hope Lutheran Facebook

The school was originally a leprosy colony until the late 50’s. It was a nice, clean, handicapped accessible group of buildings and it was obvious to all of us that the children there are well cared for. About 70% of them were in wheel chairs and had significant medical issues often making it difficult for us to correct their visual problems with a pair of glasses. I think that it was a difficult day for the team to see such severe abnormalities in children, but at the same time I believe that they were all blessed by having this experience and offering a bit of help to these unfortunate children.

Photo from Mission South Africa Hope Lutheran Facebook

Photo from Mission South Africa Hope Lutheran Facebook

The construction team has been finishing up the remodeling of our new children’s church building and building a children’s store in the church. This is where children will be able to spend their “big bucks” that they get for coming to church, memorizing Bible verses and bringing a friend to church. We will be selling donated items that come to us with the teams in the children’s store. The construction team also worked on finishing up the Abods and building a gazebo in the central area for a kitchen for the ladies and also some storage for them. We also had a big rain this week and found that water ran in under the walls of the Abods. So this team did a nice job of caulking all around the buildings to make them water tight. All of our teams have been excellent but this one seems to be the most productive at getting projects finished.

On Thursday, Beth and I started our marriage enrichment ministry with the staff at Shikwaru and our own staff. We did a training with Gary and Barb Rosberg in leading these marriage seminars and have been wanting to get started over the last few months. It was not a coincidence that at 7 AM one of our African couples showed up at our doorstep for some marriage counseling. They had been in physical fight a few days before and the husband had hit his wife and she threw a pan of hot water on him causing him to have to spend 2 days in the hospital. We opened with a showing of the movie Fireproof. After our counseling and the movie the husband asked his wife to forgive him and also asked Beth and I to forgive him. We all prayed together and this little marriage was restored. What a great way to start the day. All of our team also attended the movie and found it quite moving and an excellent demonstration of how much we care about the families of all of our staff and neighbors.

Also on Thursday, Beth and I went to the University of Pretoria for a Skype video conference with the ISU veterinary college. There were also a couple of professors from the textile college present for the Skype conference. We are making excellent headway towards having students from ISU colleges of veterinary medicine, textile, and farming to come on internships with our ministry.

On Friday, Dustin who is the praise and worship leader at Ankeny North Branch Church, had a great time preaching to about 500 high school students at a school assembly. Our American visitors are always so amazed to hear the African students praying and singing Christian songs at a public school assembly. Several of our team members went to this school with Dustin and they all reported that he did a great job.

While the team was busy doing the school assembly, I traveled to Polokwane to meet with Dean Mbokazi, who is dean of the medical school, to check and see how our physician assistant students were doing. This week, our first group of physician assistant students is here along with one of their professors. The Dean thought they were having bit of a rough start not being as well accepted as our medical students; however, the group reported to us that they are having a good experience and seeing lots of diseases that they would never see in America like AIDS and tuberculosis. In fact, they said they appreciate that they are being honored and treated the same as our medical students.

It seems like this will be the first of many groups of physician assistant students coming to Africa to work with us. We are also praying that the physical therapy students will likewise start coming and help us with physical therapy at the handicapped school. Our medical students stay for 4 weeks and this group of students are only scheduled to be here for 2 weeks. Especially for this first group, 2 weeks is just not a long enough time.

I was also speaking with the dean about the possibility of bringing medical and surgical residents to work at the provincial hospital. He was not particularly helpful in helping me to expand this program. I do have some other physician friends here in South Africa who will hopefully be able to help me get this program up and running as well.

Friday evening we took our team back to Northern Academy for their youth group meeting. 1,200 children were singing at the top of the lungs in a small auditorium. It is the most beautiful and loud singing that our teams get too hear. It is always one of the highlights of a team’s time with us here in Africa. Friday the construction team got the remodeling on the children’s church finished and it looks great. I will be excited to see the response of the children when they first see it on Sunday morning.

We spent all day Saturday volunteering with my rotary group from Polokwane. Thirty-three of us worked the food and beverage concession at a large professional rugby game in the new stadium built in Polokwane for the World Cup. We worked in the concession stands for 4 hours then got to enjoy the main game between the Blue Bulls and the Cheetahs. It was the first live professional soccer game that I had got to see after 8 years of living here in South Africa. Our whole team seemed to enjoy the experience and it was good to be able to help my rotary club out with this large fund raiser. They have been good to help our ministry with lots of donations and it was good to be able to be of some assistance to them as well.

Late on Saturday night after we got back from the game we heard of a tragedy that happened to the family of a couple of our team members. A twenty year old young man suddenly died and his grandmother and uncle are on this team. I have often told people that the main sacrifice that Beth and I make living here in Africa on the mission field is being away from friends and family in America. It is times like this where it really hits home. We all desire to be close to our families during family tragedies. We have asked all of our ministry friends to be praying for this family. They live in Overland Park, KS.

This team has one more game drive this evening and a nice dinner in the African bush-veld. It is always a hit with our teams with light from a bonfire and lanterns with a nice dinner cooked in the bush. Tomorrow morning they will be leaving at 6:30 AM for a two hour experience with elephants including a photo safari riding on the elephants.

This will complete their mission trip which has been packed full of ministry work and lots of fun things. This team has played harder and worked harder than any team we have ever had. 8 of them had scheduled to play the extreme 19th hole of golf at Entabeni where they take the golfers to the top of Hanglip Mountain to tee off for the 19th hole. The green far below is beautiful and in the shape of the continent of Africa. If anyone gets a hole-in-one, they win one million US dollars. Unfortunately, the weather was a bit bad and the helicopter could not fly. Those 8 people were a bit disappointed but overall this team is giving us an A+ rating on their experience here in Africa. Most of these team members report that they are already planning for their return trip soon.

Children at Del Cramer Campus – Photo by Michelle Rothfus

I am just retiring from an inspiring church leadership conference taught by Willow Creek Pastor Bill Hybel. It is great to get his quality of teaching right here in South Africa. Some key points that I learned from him when evaluating new staff or even volunteers, is to look at character first then competence, chemistry, and finally cultural computability with our ministry.

He also taught on how to do effective staff evaluations which I will adapt into my system. His process involves looking at 3 areas: what the employee is doing well and needs to keep doing, what you would like the employee to start doing, and what you would like the employee to stop doing. He suggested doing these evaluations every 6 months and giving them a grade of A, B or C. If they get 2 Cs in a row they may not be the right employee for your organization. He mentioned a concept that I will try to work with; hire slowly and fire quickly if things are not working out.

They also had some good wisdom on how to minister to unbelievers in any congregation. One message came through loud and clear for us to focus specifically on Jesus. Jesus came before the New Testament. People can become Christ followers before they read or really understand the Bible. I took 4 leaders from our Lighthouse Christian Church to the conference and we all enjoyed it. The conference was in Johannesburg and there were about 300 church leaders in attendance. I only knew 2 other missionaries that were there from Rustenburg.

Our newest team from Lutheran Church of Hope in West Des Moines, arrived safely and did an optical outreach in Johannesburg with Beth and Lisa while I went to the leadership conference. There are 21 people on this team and we plan to work them hard and also to help them play hard. They only saw about 60 patients today in the eye clinic, but that was plenty having just arrived last evening. The flight can really wear people out, but I have found that mission teams are happier if we keep them busy.

They will travel from Johannesburg to our ministry base at Shikwaru this evening, then tomorrow we leave at 4:30 AM for a walk with the lions, always a favorite activity. They we will have church at 10 AM and a game drive at Entabeni at 4:00 PM another favorite fun activity.

Just finishing up with their Walk with the Lions. Photo from Hope Team: South Africa Facebook

Monday through Wednesday we will do additional eye glasses outreaches at Northern Academy and a handicapped center supported by the rotary in Polokwane. Since we are ministering in Polokwane the first 3 days of the week, we will have about 3 hours each day in the vehicles which is a downside of working there, but it is where God has called us to work.

Photo from Hope Team: South Africa Facebook

Photo from Hope Team: South Africa Facebook

On Thursday and Friday the team will focus their work in helping us around Del Cramer Children’s Campus with the farming and finishing the construction of the Abods. We also have some construction projects to finish with the remodeling of our children’s church there.

Children’s Church. Photo by Michelle Rothfus

We were able to get most of our staff issues sorted out this week. We gave the 4 ladies volunteering at the feeding center an increase in the volunteer stipend. I was hoping to not have to do that until the government began their funding of our project, but that is seemingly taking forever and the ladies certainly deserve a raise. I am encouraging the feeding center to increase the number of children to 50 soon. We will need to recruit one additional cook/care giver as we care for more children. I have been told that our program will soon be registered with the government, but even then no government funds are expected for a couple of years because the provincial government is broke. We are in great need of finding some additional financial sponsors to financially support our feeding program as we patiently wait on government funding.

Three ladies have moved into the Abods this week and are excited to be living there. This week I would like to build a thatch gazebo over the central area for them to use as a patio and kitchen area. We will also add some cupboards for storage in the gazebo. I did get them a 2 burner gas stove this week to cook on whenever the main Del Cramer kitchen is closed. All 3 of the ladies came to church last weekend and I am hoping to see them in church again tomorrow.

We found a lady to hire to be our new lodge manager for the Lodge of Dreams, she will start to work on March 1. We also hired a man to take care of all of our new landscaping and one additional domestic worker to help Esther with all that needs to be done with the new lodge.

I am pretty comfortable that by the end of the year we will have 2 additional missionary couples working with us on a long term basis. That will help lots especially since Lisa is planning on moving back to the States in March – although she does plan to continue working with us as she can. One of the couples will help manage the feeding centers and our micro enterprise businesses other than sewing which Beth will continue to manage. The other couple will help with managing our church and pastor training programs and also help do some fund raising for us here in Africa. There is also a good possibility of a third couple joining us in 2014. God is providing all that we need just in time. It still seems to me that we need lots of additional funding, but I trust that He will also provide that as well.

I am still looking to hire a full time fund raising person to help us raise funds here in Africa, keeping with my goal of having 75% of our funds raised here in Africa by 2017.

I had a good meeting with Christ Baptist seminary this week to discuss ongoing pulpit ministry for our adult church. They have found a seminary student from Zambia who we will be trying out to see how he does. He will live in one of the Abods for a few days each week when he is not busy with his studies in Polokwane and preach most of the Sundays. There is some risk that he will not be accepted by our village since he is not South African, but he is a nice man and certainly deserves a chance to see if the village will accept him. It is discouraging that this kind of thing happens here but there are still some hard feelings and actions called xenophobia that still goes on. Often black people have killed black people over stupid issues like this all over Africa in the past and it still goes on even today.

Beth and I had a good meeting in Pretoria with the Textile College at the University of Pretoria, moving our agreement with Iowa State and UP forward. On February 12, they will be sending some of their staff to our place for their 2nd site visit with us. They also seem excited to work with us with a couple of our other micro enterprises.

Johanny describing our farming techinques and program to the Abod Team. Photo by Marilyn Sharp

Our farming program continues to look good. I am excited that there are some farmers on this team who can hopefully share some of their wisdom with us in developing a larger market for our crops and also how to add value to all of the crops we are raising. Rene’s dad in Botswana found us a small truck for Johanney to use in getting his crops to market.

January crop – Photo by Michelle Rothfus

January crop – Photo by Michelle Rothfus

January crop – Photo by Michelle Rothfus

Our Lodge of Dreams is looking better and better. This week we got the fountain running and our elephant statue was delivered by the artisans who made him. He is a life sized elephant and came on a trailer in 3 pieces. The two artisans worked for 3 additional days after their arrival welding and hammering him into proper form. It is beautiful and along with our fountain will be the central point of our landscaping. These same artisan’s made a life sized giraffe family for me a couple of years ago and a Cape Buffalo last year. I am excited for the team to arrive and see their reaction to how nice it is coming along. I know that they will love it. I am also excited for them to see the growth in the church. Some of them have been with us before.

Lodge of Dream entry – Photo by Jacob Sharp

I have a new micro enterprise that I am looking at working on. About 4 years ago God gave Beth and I the vision to start a coffee shop and internet cafe. We made some plans to do it but the right doors just never opened for us. I am now thinking that developing a small and basic internet cafe and computer learning center at Del Cramer Children’s Campus will work well for us. We are quite close to the high school and grade school and there is no place nearby for the young people to get on the internet and get their printing done. Moiria’s son Drew is quite skilled in IT activities and can help us get our internet service set up. I am pretty sure that we can get several donated computers from America and possibly even here in SA. Beth and I were separated last night and I could not sleep; however, that is usually when God gives me visions of things that He wants me to do.

Tomorrow, February 3, would have been my father’s 89th birthday. It is good have the Lodge of Dreams nearly finished to honor him.