Blog entry 21 April 2012

This has been another exciting week here in South Africa.  I cannot imagine having more fun or doing anything else.  Our new team, which we have been calling our rotary team arrived and are having another good experience.  I took them to a rotary meeting on Thursday night and we are making plans with the rotary clubs here in Africa to join with a few clubs in America to do a large matching grant to help us feed and train the orphans and vulnerable children here in Africa.

Monday we will be doing an optical outreach with an agricultural high school in partnership with the Rotary in Polokwane.  They will have 7 Rotarians and their wives who will be volunteering to assist us.  It is an interesting coincidence to be doing an optical outreach with the rotary at an agricultural school at the same time we are trying to obtain a 1000 acre farm to expand our farming program to better enable us to feed the kids we are working with here.

Acquiring this farm has occupied a lot of my attention this last week.  It is a beautiful 1000 acre farm that has been given to a black South African who has little experience or knowledge of farming and no money or resources to develop the farm.  The farm has lots of nice housing to permit us to host about 30 people for training and help with the farm work.

We are planning to use some of those beds to establish a home for handicapped and elderly people.  The main farm house is 6 bedrooms and there are 3 bunk houses that would each sleep 8 people with nice toilet and shower facilities.

It was built by the previous owner for hunters to come and stay with him.  The farm is mainly grassland and has been developed as a game farm.  I would like to continue farming with game but add some cropland, a large vegetable garden and agricultural animals like cattle, sheep, goats and chickens.  I am busy this week developing a business plan and strategic plan to present to the government to see if we can get some government assistance in managing this farm.  We plan to use this farm as a training farm also to get produce to feed the kids we are working with and to employee several African workers and at the same time still make some money to sustain our ministry.

I have also spent lots of time with my friend Matome Makwela who is in management of the social development department.  I am enjoying his friendship and he is also helping me a lot in knowing how to best work with the African governmental programs.  In return I am helping several of his governmental programs to do better.

This week we had a wonderful time hosting the 8 ladies doing the sewing program in Mookgopong for a tea at our home.  It was the first time that they had been on a game drive and I expect for most of them the first time they had a tea in a white person’s home.  We really enjoyed it and so did they.  They sang during the entire game drive and we were able to see lots of nice game animals.

The construction of our Lodge of Dreams continues to progress well.  This week we finished the walls of the first 2 buildings, the block machine continues to work well.  We also got the concrete floor of the main commons building poured.  Adam DeJong will be here all of May while we are in America to help us keep this project moving forward.  My goal for him is to have all of the walls completed when we return in June.  We continue putting the finishing touches on the last 2 buildings of the Thompson Campus.  Maxwell has moved into his new office into one of the side offices of the sewing center building.

This is our last week here in South Africa and we have lots to do to get ready to be absent for a month.   Convoy of Hope representatives are coming for a site visit to check out our feeding program here.  They have been a wonderful unofficial partner with us and hopefully we can advance our relationship with them with this visit.  I wish that we were not so busy while they will be here but there is always lots going on here.

Our Cape Town connection let me know that they are now ready to receive containers to be one of our food distribution sites there.  We are working with a large church there and already have a network of about 30 churches who wish to be part of our feeding program there.

I am praying that our source of food from America, Meals from the Heartland and Convoy of Hope stick with us until we get our farming program large enough to feed all of the people here we are trying to feed.  We got 5000 cabbage seedlings donated to us this week and we have been busy getting all of those planted.  Our rotary team even got involved in planting some of them.  Each cabbage head will be valued at about $1 when it matures in 2 months so this was a nice gift from a farmer friend of ours.

I will likely write my next blog on the plane as we fly back to America next Sunday.  Thanks to all of you following my blog and for your interest in the work we are doing here.

My life right now seems to be metered out in 1 week time segments and that is the main reason that I try my best to update my blog every Saturday.  A day is too short and often not much happens in a day, a month is a bit too long and especially a year is way too long.

This week has been a change in pace as we have no teams here.  We love our teams but these weeks are a nice time to get lots more general mission work done.  The main activity of this week was that we had a board meeting with our SA board this morning and everything in our ministry is going well.  We are financially solvent but our cash reserves are running dangerously low.  That is the edge that God seems to like to keep us on.  As the years go by I am getting more comfortable living on that financial edge.  Around here we always say that funding follows ministry and not the other way around.  Thus we keep pushing forward and the money continues to roll in just in time, every time.

The walls for our second dorm building are being built as part of the Leroy Blessman Lodge of Dreams and are nearly finished.  We will be pouring the concrete slab for the main commons building for this campus this coming week.  We hope to be ready to start laying the blocks for the main building in May when Adam DeJong with Dwell Earth returns here for another month of consultation.

This week we finished sewing our first contract for the sports uniforms for 14 students at Northern Academy.  We paid the sewing ladies for their labor and we have paid for the material now we will see what we can sell the uniforms for and calculate our profit or loss.  I am not expecting much profit on such a small order but hopeful as soon as we increase our capacity this will all start to flow.  We have been helping the 8 ladies who have had a sewing shop in Naboomspruit teaching them how to run a business and make a profit.  One of the ladies has a farm with her husband and they are interested in seeing if we can help them to make money on their farm.

I visited the farm 3 times this last week learning as much as I could about the condition of the fences, the soil, water availability and general information about the farm.  The more I learn about the farm the better I like it.  We have a good farmer who could manage it with consultation from Pierre our farming God’s way specialist.  The farm has a nice home on it and also a nice lodge that could house some of our future teams.  The value of the farm is just over 5 million rand and the requested rent is just 120,000 rand per year.  By American standards this is very affordable but I must confirm what all is included in these rental payments.  Our board was agreeable for us to continue exploring our options to expand our farming program with this lease.

These are exciting and frightening times for our ministry.  We are growing so fast that it makes even my head spin and I am flying the plane.

Beth, with the encouragement of Dustin when he was here last month, has taken over as our fleet manager and director of vehicle maintenance.  She is doing an amazingly good job of contracting with a mechanic in Mokopane to properly evaluate and service all of our vehicles.  She got new shocks and tires on our Avanza, new grease zerts installed on our new 4 ton tipper.  There were several that had not been installed by the factory.  Dustin found this problem.  She also got our new van in for a thorough check up and service.  In summary, all 6 of our vehicles are now part of a regular service plan that assures me that they will always be safe and road worthy.  I was thinking that we needed a male to take over this role and I had no one.  I am so pleased that Beth was willing to take on this big responsibility.  We must be good stewards of all that God gives us and our vehicles are one of these big gifts.  Great Job Mamma Beth!

She is becoming more and more of a grandmother for Perfect.  He is with her nearly as much as with his own mother.  I can tell that she really enjoys his company as he reminds both of us of our own grandchildren who we miss a lot while we are so far away from them.

We have had some struggles this week as we tried to help a government supported vegetable project improve.  The director of the Social Development Department asked us to assist him with some of his failing projects.  After several trips to Naboom, about 30 minutes drive, we finally got all of the weeds removed from the large garden and covered the field with the cut grass.  We then got their irrigation system up and running but have been struggling to get 4000 seedling plants planted.  The people managing and working with this project have a poor work ethic.  A couple of days we drove all the way and could not even get into the property because the gates were locked never mind getting someone to assist us with the farm work.  I am near giving up on being able to change and improve this project.  The poultry project next to this is also a bit frustrating in that they are slow to listen to our suggestions.  If we lease the 1000 acre farm in Naboom, we will be in and out of there lots but our time will be productive.

Our Lighthouse Church continues to grow and do well.  I will be preaching there tomorrow for my first time.  I have always tried to tell everyone here that I am a doctor and a missionary but not a pastor.  It seems that I am the only one available to preach tomorrow so fortunately God has given me a message to preach about anger and forgiveness.  I will be using Joseph’s life as an example of forgiveness when we have been severely wronged.  All of us on our team keep getting stretched into new roles.  Beth as a business woman in the sewing microenterprise business and as our new fleet manager and now I am preaching!  God continues to amaze both of us.  Our cell groups at the Lighthouse Church continue to function and are growing in number and spiritual depth.

Winter is coming upon us here in Africa, we got our sweaters out this morning and we will be getting on the plane to come back to Iowa in 2 weeks.  We are starting to look forward to seeing many of our family members and former team members during the 4 weeks that we will be back in Iowa and Missouri.

I am reminded nearly every day just how dependent upon on God I am.  There is no way that I could accomplish much of what we are doing here in Africa by my own will, intellect or effort.  Only with God’s help are we able to continue to make progress here and make positive difference in the lives of thousands of orphans and vulnerable children.

Please pray with me that God will continue to send the right laborers and the resources to help us continue.

I am amazed at my thoughts today of Christ dying for me on the cross 2000 years ago.  He did so much for me and I can do so little for him.  My job as I understand it is to let people know about Christ and what He has done and what He is doing for all of us.  My calling is especially to the children here in Southern Africa.

This week we have a team here from Lutheran Church of Hope in West Des Moines and Johnston.  Somehow when the teams are here they always make me feel more spiritual and encourage me to keep pushing forward.

Construction progress: 

We are missing Adam DeJong this week but continue to move forward under Maxwell’s leadership.  We had a good meeting with our local architect to help him refine our drawings to reflect our change in plans to convert the commons building of our new team dorm in to a one-story building.  The walls of the first dormitory building are finished and ready for the roof to be thatched. 

The block-making machine continues to function well, but we do struggle with the mixer needing some minor welding now and then.  Just after I wrote this, the crankshaft of the machine fractured because they were putting too much dirt in the mixer at one time.  The men had been making about 600 blocks each day and on Friday (a public holiday here) Maxwell told them that they could go home when they finished making 600 blocks.  They amazingly finished by 11 AM, but the next day they were rushing too much and overloaded the mixer causing it to malfunction.

My friend Sydney Francis had brought 3 of his friends from Canada by to visit us and see our ministry here.  They had been working hard all week in Johannesburg building a new feeding center out of recycled shipping containers.  One of them is an excellent welder and the three of them were able to get our mixer repaired over the weekend.

God always knows who to send to help us just at the right time.  Without these men’s help our block machine would have been incapacitated for a few days.  The mixer broke last year and was out of commission for almost a year.

We enjoyed doing a safari with these Canadians at Entabeni and also enjoyed sharing stories with them.  Sydney always brings great people by to see us who are a blessing to us personally and to our ministry.  He is a great friend and board member for us.

Del Cramer Children Campus: 

We had a nice church service on Easter Sunday and Pastor Fritz Trost from Johnston/Grimes Hope Church gave them message and we enjoyed one of the nicest church services we’ve held at the Lighthouse Church.  The congregation is feeling comfortable and worshiping African style with us, which means lots of dancing!  Six new believers were baptized, three of them children.  It was Fritz’s first time to experience immersion baptism, and it was a joy to be present for this.

We served chicken and gravy and MFTH rice after church.  The Americans had the unique experience of helping us butcher 18 chickens on Saturday for the Easter feast.

I am frequently reminded that our church there is still in its infancy stage.  Fritz’s church is also new and it was good to discuss with him the things that we need to do to improve as we grow this church.

Fun stuff:

The team has enjoyed 2 nice game drives here at Shikwaru and a beautiful bush dinner catered by Conrad the chef at Shikwaru.   Most of the team enjoyed walking with the lions at the Ranch Resort.  On Saturday afternoon in addition to butchering chickens, the team was able to visit many of the neighbors of the church and invite them to our Easter service and dinner.

Farming God’s Way:

Early this week we took our team to Mookgopong, formerly Naboomspruit, to help with our farming project there.  We got all of the weeds cleared from the land and spread out the cut weeds as mulch.  We are assisting a small community cooperative in planting a large vegetable garden there.  This cooperative has some governmental support and with this they have set up a nice drip irrigation system that should help us to get a good crop.  We plan to go back there next week and plant some seedlings.  Just beside this vegetable garden is a poultry project.  We purchased 100 chickens from them to sell at Del Cramer because our chickens were all sold out.  Four of the chickens died in transport to Del Cramer but we butchered them immediately for our staff to enjoy and made a nice profit of just over $100 on the rest and at the same time we were able to help out the government supported poultry project.

Sewing project:

The ladies on this team also visited our sewing cooperative in Mookgopong that is also government funded.  They have state of the art machines there and 8 ladies sewing together.  We got a small contract to sew sports uniforms for Northern Academy School.  Assuming that we do well with this small contract, I am pretty sure that a much larger order for uniforms will come our way.  This small sewing cooperative was doing a good job with the quality of sewing that they were doing, but do not have the marketing/business skill that I think that we can bring to the table to help make this project a success.

Orphan project:

We also took this team to visit a nice 20-bed orphanage this week.  They loved interacting with the children there.  We were able to bless them with some nice gifts of toys and blankets.  The gentlemen on this team were able to patch some serious leaks in the roof of their building.  Even though there were some leaks in the roof, the building is nice and clean and spacious.  It is obvious to all of us that this is a well-run orphanage and the children are well taken care of.  This is another project that will be a blessing to the orphanage and at the same time a blessing to our ministry.  I love partnerships like this.

Access to large numbers of children this week for this team has been limited because the schools are on Easter holiday break the entire time that they are here.  We were still able to give them access to the children at our Del Cramer feeding center and one other center that was still operating during the holiday.

Even though the children were not coming to the preschool at our Abod project site we went there for a visit and do a workday to help with general maintenance and improvements.  Pastor Fritz has some contracting skills and was able to identify some major structure defects in the church there.  This church has been under construction for the last 4 years and is definitely a work in progress.  For the last 4 years they have been adding to it as funds are available.  Fritz noticed that their new roof was poorly constructed and at high risk for blowing away in the next big windstorm.  When they got to looking further, they also noticed that the brick walls had not been properly supported and it is also at risk for toppling over.  We were able to find 2 contractors in the local community who will come and do some major welding on the roof and and repair the brickwork.  They had also failed to put lintels above the windows and doors in their brick construction so the bricks over the windows were already bowing under the pressure of the bricks.  It was literally a disaster waiting to happen and had this church collapsed I am not sure they would have ever rebuilt it because they would have been so discouraged.  God always brings the right people at the right time for each of these mission trips.

Staff:

Please continue to pray for Heather, her parents continue to battle metastatic cancer and she is staying with them to comfort them and to care for them.

I have been searching for a PA (personal assistant) to help me to attend to all of the details that are necessary to manage our ministry now that it has grown to this size.  We have an excellent staff but it is currently too small for the amount of work we are doing.  This week I found what I had hoped would be a good PA but she failed to pass her 3^rd interview.  Good staff is so important in our organization; I was really disappointed when this person did not work out.  Please pray with us that the right person for this job will come along soon.

This team, like all of our previous teams, is reporting an excellent experience and we know that we are making many new long-term friends who will be supportive of our ministry long after they return to the States.  One of the beautiful things about our work here in Africa is that we make many new wonderful friends every week that we work here.

On Monday we did an optical outreach at Pastor Chauke’s church while Fritz and some of the guys continued repairing the roof structure of his church.  We saw 65 patients and enjoyed working under shade trees.  I enjoy this type of work environment especially with these small teams.

Tuesday will be our teams last day with us and we will take them by the Elephant Adventures Farm to enjoy interacting and riding elephants.  We have just one more team coming before Beth and I head back to the States for about 5 weeks to connect with our friends, family, and churches back there.  We are looking forward to seeing as many people as we can in a short time.

I posted lots of new photos on my Facebook page this afternoon.  If you are not already my friend on Facebook, please befriend me and check on my personal page to see them.

We had a great event at Lutheran Church of Hope on March 30 with Eric Hanson talking some more about his trip to South Africa and showing lots of video clips and photos of his trip with us.  If you still have not had a chance to watch this documentary please check it out at the link on our website.

If you are able and would like to sponsor one of our children in our feeding program please go to our website and donate online.  For just $1 per day per child, the child receives a hot meal, educational programming, training in religious studies and career training.  We are not waiting for you to sign up but are adding new children every week to the ones we are already serving and our coffers sometimes run critically low.  Please see if you can help us.

The main activities this week have been with our micro enterprise programs and with our new team who came in on Friday night.  We stayed up until about 12:30 AM getting them settled in.  Our new team is primarily from Lutheran Church of Hope and we are looking forward to working with them.  There are many construction experts on this team who will be a great help to us with the building we are doing.

Construction:  We have completed the walls of our first dorm building.  There are some nice photos on my Facebook page if you would like to see them.  We are busy getting our construction company registered as an official builder here in South Africa so that we can continue building even after this current project.  We sent eight blocks to Johannesburg to be strength tested with the thought that we may start our own company building blocks to sell after we complete our own buildings.  Right now it seems more likely that we will keep busy building small homes and churches with the earth compressed blocks.

The next two buildings that I would like to do is a small 2-bedroom home for William who is a welder who has been with us from the beginning.  Then next I would like to build a larger home for our future pastor at Lighthouse Church right on the Del Cramer property.  I am hoping that this could also become a foster home for several children to live in once we get our new pastor.  We will be continuing to put finishing touches on our sewing center building and 4^th missionary home to complete the Thompson Campus.

Adam DeJong with Dwell Earth has been a great help to me in getting our team dorm buildings off to a good start.  This last week I made the decision to decrease the size of the main community building of this project from a 2 or 3 story building to just a one story building.  We will still have enough bed capacity to sleep 24 people and feel that that is a good sized mission team.  We will save quite a bit of time and money with this simpler building design and it just seems to be better stewardship of our resources.

Micro Enterprise Projects:

This week we made some good strides at moving forward with our vision for farming God’s way.  We will be doing a joint venture with a cooperative government farming program that is not doing well.  The weeds were cleared and irrigation was set up on a 4 acre plot.  Next week we will dig the holes, put in fertilizer and plant seedlings.  We will be planting carrots, cabbage, spinach and beets.  I am pretty sure that we can have an impressive vegetable plot growing in the next 4 weeks.  The head of the social development department has specifically asked us to see if we can help get some of his government projects that have stalled moving forward again.  Since this is part of our mission statement to help with farming, it all fits well we how we spend our time and resources.   Right next door to the large garden project there is a chicken project that we can also help improve and make more profitable.

The third microenterprise program that we are involved with is sewing and right now that one is the most exciting. The Department of Social Development invested hundreds of thousands of rand to equip this sewing center.   There are 5 industrial sewing machines, a machine to do button holes, a machine to sew knits, and a machine to sew hems.  In addition they have a couple of interlocking machines, an embroidery machine and a quilt machine.  On the other hand they have developed high quality sewing skills and their projects are of commercial quality.  I am pretty sure that we can assist them in marketing their products and getting them sold for a good price and help them to make money, employ more people, and also help our ministry to make some money and employ some additional people.  They currently have 8 employees.  It is not entirely clear how our ministry will profit financially by helping these government programs but I have a strong sense that it is the right thing to do and that in the end we will be blessed.

Del Cramer Campus:

We had our first committee meeting at Del Cramer Campus where we also invited 2 representatives from the tribal community.  The meeting went well and I believe that these meetings will go a long way at helping us keep peace with the tribal community.  Several months ago we were told that we would be notified about the status of our registration with the social development department in March.  Since today is the last day of March I am hoping that we will find out something this next week.  We have intentionally kept the number of children that we are serving to just 25 children until we hear about our government funding.  Once we are officially funded I would like to double the size of our program immediately and grow from there.  We will also be hiring a couple of additional caregivers and a gardener to help Johannes.   Rene’ was a great help to me in improving our children’s programming at the center to help us to be ready to expand.

Wednesday evening we drove to a community near Johannesburg to attend another crusade put on by my good friend Sydney Francis and Adam Smith from Oklahoma.  It was nearly the same as the one we went to last week—an old fashion African tent revival. Many people get saved and healed at these crusades.  The Africans love them and come to them by the thousands

Today we had a work day at the Lighthouse Church to repair many broken or damaged toilet seats, lights and many other general maintenance type repairs.  The team also went from house to house to do some evangelism and invite many people in our neighborhood to church tomorrow.

I always attempt to update my blog every Saturday night so life here on the mission field is measured in small blocks of time.  The weeks just seem to fly by, we arrived back here in Africa on 24 December 2011 and here we are today 3 months have passed.

We had to say good bye to our kids Dustin and Rene’ this morning as they are headed to Johannesburg and then will fly by to the States on Monday.  Lord willing we will be seeing them again soon in early May but I became a bit teary eyed as we said goodbye.  I have enjoyed having them here so much this time.  Up until this visit we never saw much interest from them in working with our ministry but they now also have a passion for working with the beautiful African children that we are called to serve.  Especially Rene’ seemed to enjoy working with our children in our church and the Del Cramer Children’s Campus.  Dustin was also a great help in all things mechanical from keeping our vehicles running properly to using our dump truck to haul soil to make our blocks.  Both of them are much better oriented towards helping us set up systems to work with everything we are doing here with our ministry.  Beth is great with all of the relationship stuff, I am a pretty good visionary and now I see that our kids could possibly be wonderful at actually helping carry out the visions that God gives us.  Dustin got his flying credentials to fly here in South Africa and yesterday chartered a plane to get some nice aerial photos of the Del Cramer Children’s Campus and of all of the buildings and construction our ministry is doing here at Shikwaru our base of operations.  My friend Jacques is quite interested in getting a plane to help him with the ministry he does all over Southern Africa and would make a nice pilot for both of our ministries once he gets his instrument and commercial rating.  He actually told me a couple of weeks ago that if we got a plane here for him to fly he would be ready to live here full time.  We will have to see what God provides.

My mom has stayed healthy this week with no further problems with her recurring pancreatitis.  When she was in the hospital her doctors put her on some “happy pills” as she was experiencing frequent episodes of crying since my father died in August.  My sister told me last night that she has not had any further crying spells since she started taking her happy pills.  I used to tell some of my patients in my private practice that there is sometimes better living through chemistry.  This is not always the case and in my humble opinion many people in America take way too many pills.  I have noticed that the older I get the more pills I seem to be taking as well.  Most of my African friends take no medicine at all.

I just got a message from our realtor in Mt. Ayr that the home I had purchased for my parents 5 years ago finally sold.  It has not closed yet but everything looks promising.  Praise the Lord as it is not easy these days to sell a home in a rural community.   I had been concerned that it was taking too long to sell this so started praying for God’s help and almost immediately there were 2 buyers interested in buying it.  Too often I don’t ask for God’s help except in the big things like health issues but He is also faithful in taking care of the small stuff.

On Monday this week we did our second optical outreach in Johannesburg.  We have found a pretty good system of taking the team to Johannesburg on Sunday evening and staying at the GBS Foundation where we are establishing our Johannesburg base to store and distribute food.  We then do the optical outreach on Monday and get them to the airport for their evening flight back to the States.  This was another great team and we hated to see them leave us.  Every one of them seemed to have a high quality experience working with us.  During the middle of the week I was able to catch up on emails and a lot of office work that I had put off while the team was with us.

Pastor’s conference:

This week we have had Michael Vos, Ned Looney and David Russell with us leading training conferences with many pastors from Johannesburg and Polokwane areas.  We are using the BILD teaching model Biblical Institute of Leadership Development.  It is a highly effective leadership training model based out of each local church.  Several hundred pastors were trained in this model over the last week.  It is also helping us build our network of 1000 churches and pastors who work with our ministry in many different ways.  I think that if we can strengthen the local church improving the quality of their pastors and keep them interested in serving the poor, it will go a long ways in healing this part of Africa.

On Wednesday night I took our pastor trainers to a typical old time African revival meeting.  It was held in a sports stadium in Syabuswa where we did one of the pastor trainings last week.  There was an evangelist Adam Smith there from Oklahoma and he did a great job.  It was like an old Billy Graham crusade.  Many people gave their lives to Jesus and also many people were healed.  There were about 3,000 people attending the first night and by the end of the week nearly 10,000 people were attending.  One amazing coincidence was that we met another evangelist there from Oregon and I we got to visiting with him he told us that he had gone to Bible School with Dave Beroth our pastor at Des Moines First Assembly of God.  Here we are half way around the world in a small African village and meet someone from Oregon who is a friend of our pastor in Iowa.  It was one of those Godlike things that seems to happen a lot here.  We invited the two evangelists to come and stay in our home this Sunday night and they agreed to stay with us so I am looking forward to getting to know both of them much better.

On Thursday I spent my day with a good friend who is heading up the Social Development Department in our province.  He had several projects that his department is funding that were not functioning at a high level and was asking for my assistance to see if I could help.  The first project was a sewing business that the department has been funding for the last 6 years.  There were 8 ladies there sewing and they had all been working together for the last 6 years.  The quality of the product that they were sewing appeared to me to be quite good but after 6 years they were still requiring the government assistance to pay their salaries.  When I ask them what price they were asking for many of the things they had sewn they did not know what to charge.  They are pretty good at making the products but have no business skill in marketing or selling them.  I am pretty sure that this will make an excellent partner for us with our new sewing microenterprise.  The head of the social development department encouraged me to go ahead and put a business plan together to work with these ladies and see if we help them become profitable and at the same time provide some income to make our ministry more sustainable.  We also visited a chicken project that they are funding.  They had 1,000 chickens and were struggling to make a good market for them as well.  One simple solution that we are doing with our chicken project at Del Cramer is to have our chickens maturing every 2 weeks rather than all at once.  They also have a large vegetable farming plot right next door to this and were not sharing their manure with them even though both programs were funded by the same department.  The vegetable garden was actually in sorry state of affairs.  There were 3 workers there all sitting in the shade when we pulled up and the garden was full of weeks with essentially no plants growing.  There was a pile of rotting vegetables in a small room at the corner of the property.  It seems that these are post date vegetables donated by the local vegetable store but they were just going to waste.  The director who had brought me to the project seemed at first embarrassed then angry and at the farmer’s poor performance.  The next day I took our farm expert Johannes to take a look at this project to see if we could help them and we are both pretty sure that we can help them to get a good crop from this small plot of land.  It is about 6 acres and we should be able to put together a business plan to help them and then to share in the produce for our efforts and again to help keep our ministry sustainable.

One of the most pleasant things that I experience this week was when Mr. Mekwella took me to visit an orphanage in this same community.  As most of you know we have been struggling to start an orphanage at our Abod project for about 3 years and are not trying to convert that plan to a foster home setting.  The orphanage that we visited had 19 children living in it.  All of them were either orphans, abused children or children whose parents were unable to care for them.  I see lots of inadequate sad places that children here are living in or being cared for in one way or another.  This orphanage was a bright and shining example of how things should work to help these children.  It was located in a large beautiful building that used to be a train station where the train workers would sleep.  It was clean and had adequate and friendly care givers working there.   The children all seemed happy and well cared for.  I am hoping that we can start taking all of our American teams up here to let them experience interacting with these children.  We can always show them situations where the children are not being well cared for but this will be a much more pleasant experience for them.  I am sure that there are many ways that we can partner with and help this orphanage.   Most all of our American visitors will want to jump in and help out.  We left one 3 year girl with a new doll which she very much appreciated.  Even though she was only 3 years old she sang the national anthem for us.  Dustin, Rene’, Beth and I would have loved to been able to take her home with us.  It is easier to leave her there knowing that she is well taken care of.

Construction project:

Our building project for the new team dorm being built in honor of my father is coming along rapidly.  All of the foundations have been dug and poured.  The concrete floors are poured on the 4 smaller buildings and the block walls are nearly finished on the first of the smaller buildings.  We purchased soil from one of our neighbors to build the blocks and Dustin hauled the dirt for us.  We are getting it from a neighbor about 4 miles away.  It is perfect red soil to make the blocks out of.  Our sifter that we borrowing from Entabeni and the mixer that we struggled almost a year getting fixed are both working well.  We are able to make about 1,000 blocks each day.  Adam DeJong from Dwell Earth, an associate of Vermeer Manufacturing Company is doing a great job leading our construction project.  He will be with us the rest of March and then return to work with us all of May.

The Lord clearly spoke to me during the night last night that we are building this project too big and that we must scale it down.  The original architect plans had the large building in the center of the project at 2 stories and a loft above the second story permitting us to sleep 45 to 50 people.  The Lord let me know that the larger center building should only be one story high and not have the 4 suites and loft up stairs.  We will still be able to sleep 20 people easily with room for 16 bunk beds and 4 full sized beds for married couples.    We will be able to keep the nice commercial kitchen, dining room and large living room for devotions and team meetings.  We will also be able to keep our majestic fireplace in the center of the building and a nice balcony over the circle drive at the front of the building.  Usually with the Lord speaks to me He is telling me to be courageous and do bigger more scary things but this time He is saying pull back and I know that I must listen to Him.  This morning we had a family meeting with Beth, Dustin and Rene’ and we all agree that this is the right thing for us to be doing. There are many people letting us know that they would like to come and visit us on mission teams next year but I am still sure that we will have adequate, pleasant housing for them.

The newest team arrived over the weekend.  Beth’s cousin Dan Cramer and his daughters Morgan and Paige were part of this team and it has been a joy to show them around, especially the Del Cramer Children’s Campus.

The other team members are: Dave Russell, his sister Patty, John McBride and his granddaughter Shannon DeLouis, and Judy Kruse from Woodstock, IL.  Dave, John and Judy have all been here several times. John has been here since February working on the construction site.  Adam DeJong has also been here nearly a month putting in many hours at the site. His company is Dwell Earth and he travels all over the world teaching earth block construction.

Sunday, we all went to church and heard a great sermon by Johannes Chongani and then the whole team jumped in to help with cooking and serving lunch. After that, Paige, Morgan, and Shannon had the fun job of giving away 92 handmade dolls to 92 VERY happy children. Yes, there were exactly 92 dolls and exactly 92 children.  Only God could have worked that out!  Women in the Cedar Hills Community Church in Cedar Rapids, Iowa lovingly made the dolls.  Joan Walton and Rose Millis led the project.

This team is smaller than most and they are all servant-hearted people, which makes our job as hosts very easy. Monday and Tuesday we started out the week at Northern Academy doing an optical outreach.  We were able to see all of their 7th and 11th graders.  I continue to be amazed at the quality of education and life at this school.  We screened the vision for nearly 2,000 children and examined and gave about 250 students glasses this week.

The school continues to grow and has just over 3,900 students about half of them day students and the other half boarding students.  Their graduation rate for their 12 grade students is 100% and about 75% of them go on to study at the university level.  This is better than nearly any other school in Africa and also even in America.  100% of their students are black African students.  A good share of their success seems to me, to be the Christian moral values and high work ethic that they instill into their students.

While we were there we got our first order for uniforms for our sewing microenterprise.  They requested that we sew about 20 sports uniforms for them.  This is a nice size order for us to begin with to see if we can provide them with a quality product at a good price.  Beth, Rene’ and Hilda will begin working to see if we can find the proper material start making these soon.

Both afternoons we spent at the Del Cramer Children’s Campus.

On Friday morning we took this team for their lion walk experience.  Everyone on this team chose to participate and had a good time.  It is one of the rare places in the world where you can actually walk with a full sized lion.  It always gets everyone’s adrenaline pumping; they also get lots of photos that will soon be showing up on Facebook.

Following this time with the lions we went to Zebedellia where we built the Abod orphan homes nearly 3 years ago.  This is another favorite stop for our teams where they can interact with about 100 toddlers and preschool children.  We distributed nearly 100 black baby dolls that the children enjoyed.

I was happy to see the landscaping improvements that Pastor Chauke has made to this campus.  He has planted a lot of citrus trees, guava and mango trees and grapes.  In addition there are lots of vegetables and flowers.  I am hoping that I can encourage this pastor to come to Del Cramer Children’s Campus and help us plant trees.

The orphan project at his church needs some additional assistance in building some new playground equipment for them.  We will try and get some of that going with our next team.

On Wednesday Dave Russell, Sydney Francis, and I taught at a pastor’s conference in Syabuswa, which is a small town about 2 hours from here.  60 pastors attended and all of them signed up to be part of our Blessman Ministries Pastor and Church network.  Dave did a good job explaining how BMI works with BILD (Biblical Institute for Leadership Development) organization.  We also had an optical clinic for the pastors they could attend during break times.

On Thursday our teams spent the day interacting with children at one of the handicapped centers that we work with, especially by providing food for them.  In the afternoon our team went back to Del Cramer Children’s Campus where they helped feed the children and also assisted with their educational training.

Rene’ has been very helpful developing the programming and training at our feeding centers.  Each week we are adding hundreds of children to our feeding program.  Most of these are new churches in our church network, where BMI provides food packets to the church and they then distribute it to some of the most impoverished members.

On Friday night we led the worship service for 1,300 students at Northern Academy Youth Group.  The children loved hearing Paige Cramer sing a solo for them and our friend Sifiso Mabena did a drama about the Samaritan woman at the well.  Jacques brought the main message to them and was using his Fire Bible, which they loved.  When he opens the Bible to read real flames shoot out of it.  This 2-hour service with the Northern Academy youth group is nearly always the highlight and favorite experience of our American teams.  We do our best to get every team up there on a Friday evening.

Saturday was a fun day for the team.  I took them for a game drive on Shikwaru Mountain with our Polaris Ranger donated by Van Wall Equipment from Perry, IA.  It has been a great gift to our ministry and we have spent many hours transporting our teams on game drives with it.

In the afternoon we took our team to Bela-Bela where they enjoyed an encounter with elephants.  They learned a lot about these amazing animals and even got to go on a safari riding on an elephant.  Teams seem to enjoy this activity even more than walking with the lions.  Both experiences are amazing and can only be done in a few areas of the world.

Lighthouse Church:  This was a very special Sunday at Lighthouse Church.  We had our first baptism service, baptizing 23 children.  Our new baptismal is a converted 10,000 liter water tank.

All of these children were born again saved over the last few weeks and we have been teaching them what it means to be baptized.  We also got their parents/caregivers permission to baptize them and some of them attended.  Sunday was also the first day that we used our new tent.  We had 201 children in church today. I do not know the exact number of adults; probably around 60.

Our donkey cart transportation service is working better each Sunday but improvements are always needed.  At least 20 children did not arrive until church was over and we were already serving lunch.

Representatives from Christ Baptist Seminary in Polokwane visited church Sunday to explore the possibility of their seminary sending some of their seminary students to use our church as a preaching point.  Two professors and one of their recent graduates came.  I hope that they were impressed that we are doing a good job already with this new “baby” church and will want to partner with us.  Their group and ours will be praying about this possibility and meet together soon to discuss the possibilities.

After serving lunch at church we loaded up the vehicles and headed to Johannesburg to spend the night at the GBS foundation campus where we did a community optical outreach on Monday before taking most of the team to the airport to return home. Dave Russell and Judy Kruse are here for a few more days.

Farming program:  Johannes will be teaching our first program in the neighboring high school on Monday.  Our chickens and vegetables continue to do well and are even bringing in some profit for us.  Our maize/corn is drying in the field and we will start harvesting that in May.  We have 2 hand corn-shellers that we will use and will be purchasing a hammer mill grinder.

Construction projects:  The thatch roof on the final building of the Thompson campus is complete.  We now have to complete the tiling and kitchen fixtures.  The same with our sewing center building, it is looking good.  For the larger team dorm we got the concrete for two of the smaller buildings poured and will continue with the other buildings this coming week.

Some friends in Johannesburg are interested in exploring with us the possibility of setting up a construction business making and selling our earth compressed blocks.  I will be asking Adam to help me with determining the cost of us making each block and then, bring some blocks to them for testing to be sure that they are good and strong.  Adam DeJong with Dwell Earth consulting company has been such a great help to me in getting this project started.  I have already asked him to get us on his schedule to return to South Africa in May.

Staff:  Heather and her husband Josh have gone back to the States for her to be with her mother who is going through major surgery.  Her mother has metastatic colon cancer that has spread to her liver for the second time in the last 2 years.  Her condition is quite serious so we must all be praying for her.  Her father is also still suffering from metastatic renal cell cancer.  We are already missing her but know that she has a higher calling right now.

Family:  My Mom was hospitalized with pancreatitis last week but has fully recovered and is doing well again.

Dustin and René chartered a plane and tried to fly to Botswana to visit Rene’s father, but they flew into clouded conditions and had to turn back and drive.  Hopefully he will be able to get his instrument rating over the next several months and be able to fly in conditions like this.

Everything seems to be running smoothly in our other children and grand children’s lives.  It will be good to get home in May to visit all of them.

A Week of meetings:  When we do not have teams here I try to schedule lots of meetings to continue moving our ministry forward.  On Monday, Beth and I met with the rector/principal of Northern Academy to discuss the possibility of us providing them with school uniforms with our sewing microenterprise.  The meeting went well.

We have long since paid our dues with that school with all of the optical outreaches we have done there over the last three years and also all of the work we do with student conferences and counseling.  The rector was appreciative of all we have done with them so far and will do her best to assist us in being able to be their supplier of sports uniforms and possibly school uniforms.

The next big challenge we are facing, to get this and other contracts, is to get the proper fabric.  It has to be exactly the same color and quality that they are currently using, and it is not available from the usual material stores in our area.  I will start doing some research on the internet and even in the US and try to find it.  First we must pray about seeking the Lord’s guidance.

Lighthouse Church:  While we were in Polokwane, we met with Christ Baptist Seminary and explored again the possibility of their seminary using our church as a preaching point for their senior students.  We tried this same approach a year ago without success.  This week they again seemed quite interested and have scheduled a site visit with us for March 18.   We are planning to have our first baptisms on March 18 also.  We are hoping for around 20 people to be baptized. We were teaching on that in church today and will continue teaching on it next week.  I think that it is also time to put up our new 500-seat tent.  Next week I hope to add an additional 3 donkey cart drivers to help increase the number of children coming to church each week.

Farming God’s Way:  On Tuesday, Johannes, Pierre, and I had a meeting with the principal of the high school right next to Del Cramer Children’s Campus.  We proposed to them that we would start teaching Farming God’s Way in the high school.  The principal there was excited about the possibility and wants us to add people from the village to the classes.  I am hoping that we can teach our agriculture classes in the high school one day each week for the rest of the school year.  We will start small, for it will be a long slow process.  I do however plan for it to be a success.  If it is indeed a success we will expand it to other schools the following year.

This fits perfectly with our vision of helping the local people here provide food for their families and even some income through farming.  I am working on a business plan where our ministry provides the education and seed, and the school provides the land and tools and the students and community people will provide the labor.  We will split production of the crop at the school 50/50 with the school.  For the people in the village we will encourage them to tithe 20% of their crop back to our ministry to help us feed the kids we are serving.  After the 2nd year we will be encouraging the village people to purchase their own seed and then just tithe 10 % back to our ministry to help us with the kids.

From 6 years experience in Zimbabwe we have learned that only about 10% of the people we train to Farm God’s way end up being successful farmers.  That however is 10% more than we have now.  I am also hoping that some of my farmer friends from the States will come and help us with this teaching and farming and also help us improve our business model.

Our first crop of maize is beginning to dry in the field and we will begin harvesting it by hand in about 6 weeks.  We have two hand shellers and plan to purchase a small hammer mill to grind the maize to make food for our kids and some to sell.  I am also hoping that many of the neighbors who are raising small plots of maize in their yards will have us grind their maize for a fee of 10 to 15% of their product.  This is similar to what Joseph did in Egypt back in Biblical times.

I am having a meeting with our chief nearly every week to continue good relations with the tribal community.  It is sometimes difficult as some of the local people here see Americans as having lots of money and are always hoping that we will give them money.  Our ministry here is to do everything we can to help the children with food, shoes, medical care and education but, our donors do not fund our ministry to have us give it to individuals here.  We must be good stewards of it.  The chief and I have an excellent relationship and are working through this a step at a time.   It is such a blessing to have such a well-educated chief who has good communication skills.

I have been frustrated with the slow process of getting our ministry properly registered in South Africa as an NGO and nonprofit ministry.  We finally got the initial documents and registration numbers.   I believe that now we can begin approaching SA businesses and ask them for donations that they can deduct from their taxes.  The car dealer where we purchased our van a couple of weeks ago told me that their company would like to help us out.  I also have 2 rotary friends who have told me that their businesses would be interested in partnering with us in this way.  It has been a long time coming, but I think that we are getting close.  Our NGO will be having its first annual audit later this month.

On Thursday Beth and I went with Pastor Sydney Francis to a pastor’s leadership conference in Johannesburg at the Kenneth Copeland South African headquarters.  We met lots of new pastors and the main speaker was H. B. Goroh, an African man, from Namibia.  He gave one of the best talks I have heard on what pastors should be doing to be better leaders of their churches. He preaches on TV in Namibia and has written a few books.  We got one of his books and I am looking forward to reading it.

Construction:  We continue to make progress on the sewing center and the new home for Pierre and Rentia.  John McBride has gotten a lot done on clearing our land and digging the footings for our foundation of the new team dorm.  We had a nice dinner with Leon, a local architect friend, who is doing some final touch ups on the drawings that Doug Sharp did for us.  Adam DeJong, Founder and President of Dwell Earth, has been a great help to us getting ready to build the next buildings with the earth compressed blocks.  Our block machine has arrived and we are beginning to test it out.  We spent a couple of days looking for the best supply of clay soil to build the blocks and found just what we needed on one of our neighbors farm just 7 kilometers away.  We had lots of struggles getting our dirt mixer running, the drive shaft broke a year ago and we finished constructing the Del Cramer Children’s Campus by hand mixing the soil and concrete.    That does not give nearly the quality of blocks that we need for this larger team dorm building.  Our mixer has been sitting at the black smith’s shop for nearly a year, but he finally got the right part and got it repaired.  Dustin and the rest of our team built a motorized dirt-screening machine to sift the dirt.  I think that we have everything in place to start making blocks tomorrow on Monday March 12.    I will let you know next week how it actually works.  I am also hoping that we will be finished with all of our foundations by the end of the week and soon be ready to pour our concrete floors.

Family:  We are enjoying having Dustin and Rene’ staying with us and working with us.  Rene’ is a natural at helping us with the children’s programming at Del Cramer feeding center.   She is passionate about helping us make that program successful.  Dustin is great help in all things mechanical and he is excited to have passed his exams to be able to fly a plane and helicopter here in Africa.

I got some discouraging news about my Mom this week in that she is back in the hospital with another attack of pancreatitis.  This is about the 6th attack she has had of pancreatitis.  She went through a special procedure to surgically open the tube from her pancreas about six months ago and has done better since then.  I have said many times that one of the few sacrifices we make to live and work here in Africa is to be away from family and loved ones.  I often miss my mom, especially when she is ill, and my children and grandchildren.  I know that I will be with them for eternity when we all get to Heaven but for now I am missing them.

We are getting lots of encouraging feedback from the 30 minute documentary that KCCI TV did on our work here is Africa.  If you missed it please go to their website and click the link “as seen on KCCI” and watch it.  I know that you will enjoy it.

Our ministry is partnering with Lutheran Church of Hope, Meals From the Heartland and Des Moines Area Religious Counsel to show this video along with lots of other still photos and stories from Africa at the end of the month.  Eric Hanson who is the reporter who did this show has agreed to be there to answer questions about their story.  This event will take place on Friday March 30.  We will do our best to notify all of you of the exact details.

A friend of mine Dr. John Thompson who was the long-term dean at ISU veterinary medicine school sent me an email and is interested in seeing if we can set up a partnership with a veterinary school here in Africa similar to our arrangement with Des Moines University Medical School.

Quite a few people have also already contacted me to let me know that they are interested in financially sponsoring feeding some of the children that we are feeding here is Africa.  If any of you are interested please let me know.  One dollar per day will help us to feed and care for 1 child here in Africa.  We are on track to be feeding and caring for 10,000 every day by the end of the year.

On Tuesday Beth, Lisa, Randy and Carolyn Collier, and I spent the day with the Head of Department of the Social Welfare Department of the Limpopo province. The HOD showed us a chicken butchery, which was quite impressive. They are capable of butchering 500 chickens each day.

Many years ago I was the occupational physician for a couple of large packing plants in Iowa. One was beef and the other one was a pork plant. The one we saw yesterday was quite small in comparison, but I was still impressed at how it was able to create jobs and wealth in the community. It was also clean and well ran. We also toured some farming projects raising vegetables and chickens. It was interesting to visit with him about how each of them could be doing better.

Our new block machine arrived in country this week, and I hope to get it fired up early next week and start making some blocks for our new team dorm. John McBride got all of the footings dug for the building and early next week we should be pouring the foundation and concrete floors.

I am writing this blog from Cape Town, one of the most beautiful cities in the world. It is my third trip here, but I have always been here doing ministry and not much sightseeing.

Our first night here Beth and I have had a little time to recharge our batteries. The opportunity to meet pastors in this area came up rather suddenly and we only had a few days to make arrangements. We didn’t have to worry about accommodations because we are staying in an old hotel that has been purchased by a church and is now used to host ministry teams. We are blessed to be staying in one of the suites and it is very comfortable.

My first trip here was about 10 years ago, and I was working with a medical team in a township called Delft. We drove by it this afternoon on our way from the airport and many good memories came flooding back to me. I was ministering with Hill and Leslie Delarosario. They are a wonderful couple from Panama who were working here in Cape Town for a short time. I was staying in a beautiful hotel on that mission trip, but there was so much crime in the area that I was instructed to not walk outside of the hotel property. Ten years later it has the same feel. A beautiful city, but the crime in the area makes it feel a bit confining.

Dustin and Rene’ and Heather and Josh are, by chance, here in Cape Town at the same time we are, but they are on holiday and staying in a much safer area of the city and report that they are having a wonderful time. They were on top of Table Mountain when we spoke with them a couple of hours ago; they have had some wonderful bus tours of the area and also enjoyed some time at the beach.

On Thursday our first full day in Cape Town we spent touring some ministries that a large church, Lofdal Church is doing. They have a private school, are feeding about 500 people with their feeding program, and have started a farming program. The pastor who gave us the tour is interested in coming to Limpopo to learn about Foundations for Farming/Farming God’s Way that we are doing. Another interesting ministry they have is a safe house for abandoned babies. They also have a drug rehabilitation program similar to Teen Challenge.

The church tried to set up an orphanage much like the one we did in Zebedelia with the same results; the government will not let them operate it as an orphanage, so they are converting it to a foster parent program just like we are planning to do.

On Friday Beth and I met with 3 different groups of pastors who are interested in joining our church network. This evening we had dinner with a principal of a high school that has about 500 students. The principle has been with the school for only one year and has already made many improvements in it. Their graduation rate increased from about 19% to 30% during his tenure. He reported to us that many of the children are not getting enough to eat and he is sure that if he can expand his feeding program to include more children that their test scores will continue to improve. He is currently feeding about 100 of the students in a school lunch program, he would like to add some food for the children who stay for an after school study program.

Today, Saturday, Beth and I rode the train into the city to meet Dustin and Rene’. We had a wonderful day walking around the waterfront area and finally I got to go to Robben Island. This is something I have been wanting to do for a long time. I had lots of emotions as I envisioned Nelson Mandela being incarcerated there for 26 years for political reasons. Last year I read his autobiography “A Long Walk To Freedom”. I am impressed that he is a wonderful man and did a lot to reform his country in a peaceful way. It is difficult to understand how he kept from losing hope all those long years behind bars in a difficult prison.

In the US I have toured Alcatraz and in Cuba I toured The Island of Youth where Castro was incarcerated. They all have a similar cold hopeless feel to them. There were 4 separate prisons on Robin Island but now it is a museum to tell the story of what went on there.

Riding the train was a bit of an experience all of its own. Some of my new pastor friends discouraged us from riding it, but the station is just outside our hotel and Beth and I are pretty seasoned travelers by now. It is nice to be able to get by without renting a car.

I am hoping that we can partner with the Lofdal Church and store a shipping container of the Meals from the Heartland food on the church’s property and have them responsible for monitoring and distributing the food to churches and the school I mentioned. We have also wanted to find a way to get some food to Simon Estes’s music school here in Cape Town and that would also accomplish that.

Our network of pastors and churches is growing so fast that it is making my head spin. We added about 200 pastors and churches over the last 2 days. These 200 pastors are coming from the 4 different groups that we met with on Friday. Each of these 4 groups represents several pastors in their own area of Cape Town.

KCCI will be airing the 30-minute special they filmed here in South Africa on Thursday, March 8. Please plan to watch it. If you miss it, you can watch it on your computer at kcci.com.

President’s Blog – February 21st

As our lives here in Africa continue to unfold here we are often reminded we are not in Iowa any more.  Today I noticed that a hive of African bees have taken up residence on our barbeque on our deck.  They can be a bit dangerous but will deal with them after dark this evening before our next team arrives.

Yesterday, I had hired a neighbor to come with his bull dozer to help us begin clearing the land for our new team dormitory.  The neighbor lives about 20 kilometers away and rather that hire a low boy truck to haul the dozer he was driving in down the road.  Typical of life here in Africa, the dozer broke down on the way.  Also typical of life here in Africa I had to pay for the fuel for him to drive the dozer here.  If he is able to get it repaired today we will still have him do the work, otherwise I will be making a new plan.  My neighbor and good friend John McBride is here from America with our team tomorrow.  He is a heavy equipment operator and quite skilled at all things mechanical and construction related.  It is important to me to get this project started early in his time with us to take maximum advantage of his skill while he is here with us.

We have made good progress on our two new buildings on our Thompson Campus this week.  We should finish thatching the roof of our first building which will be our new sewing center tomorrow.   The second building which will be our Farming God’s way consultant’s new home will be ready for thatching on Monday.  It sometimes seems like things move slow here in Africa but over time we are getting lots done.  An example of slow and inefficient was yesterday the power company came and shut the power off at our Del Cramer Children’s Campus because we had not paid the electric bill.  We had not paid it because we had never received a bill.  It took Beth and two hours sitting at the Eskom office to get the power turned back on.  We also did our best to get the 500 rand fee for cutting and turning the power back on excused.  At this point we have not heard if we won that battle or not.  We did get the bill paid and hopefully will have power again today.

Yesterday I got a call from the HOD, Head of Department of the Social Development Department for Limpopo wanted to meet with me and see our Dell Cramer Children’s Campus.  The chief had introduced him to me last year before we started construction of the center.  I had requested his assistance in helping us get the center registered with the government so that we could access government money to help sustain the center.  I told him then that I did not want to build a “white elephant” that would sit there and not help the children.  He promised me then that it would not be a “white elephant” and that he would help us keep it running if we built it.  It is wonderful that he is keeping his word and now wants to help us push the registration through his department.   We submitted our application for registration on time in December of this last year and his department came by for a site visit on Wednesday this week.  So far everything seems to be progressing well towards official registration.  I am expecting an answer from them in March.  He also recommended to me that we hire our own social worker to serve our center rather than depend upon his department to supply us a social worker.  That way we will have a social worker at our site on a dependable regular basis.  If they came out of his department they would be spread too thin to be dependable to serve all of the needs of our children.  It should work well for us to have our own and he or she could serve a dual role of project coordinator and social worker.    When we designed the campus we build an office for a social worker.  We are keeping the number of children that we are feeding at this center small at 25 until we start receiving government funds.  Once government funds are available we will hire the social worker and expand the kids we serve up to about 200.  I plan to expand slowly starting with just 50 so that we keep the quality of service high.

The HOD who visited our site yesterday was quite impressed with the quality of our construction and programming that we are doing for the children.  He seemed even more impressed with our farming programs.  He wants us to come and help teach other projects how we are having success with our chicken, maize and vegetable production.   I am a bit excited that he mentioned that he would like to sign a MOU with us for cooperative purchasing of farm produce for feeding centers in his area of Limpopo.  He also is working with some other projects that are doing sewing so we may be able to work together in that area also.

The feeding program has been growing I contacted Meals from the Heartland and Convoy of Hope and fortunately they have a container ready to be shipped to us now.  It will arrive here in a couple of months.  I was able to arrange free warehouse storage in Johannesburg for this next container.  This will bring our storage sites to 4 here in South Africa.  We used our new 4 ton truck to deliver food for the first time yesterday.   Maxwell used it to deliver 120 boxes or about 25,000 meals to 100 pastors at a conference 150 Km from our Shikwaru base.

Our network of 1000 churches to help us deliver the 10,000 meals is coming together rapidly.  We now need to firm that network up with official applications from the churches and pastors.  Next month Michael Vos, Ned Looney and David Russell are coming to put on teaching conferences for many of the pastors in our network.

We have had lots of positive comments from the KCCI TV broadcast last week.  Hopefully that will help us recruit many more people to come to SA to work with us.  Also hoping many people will be encouraged to financially support our feeding program to help us feed our 10,000 orphans and vulnerable children.

Our Lighthouse Church is growing each week.  Last Sunday we have 150 children in children’s church at 40 adults.  We purchased an additional 100 chairs today and another 100 plates to serve them food each Sunday.  We also ordered a new 500 seat tent to have space for everyone that we expect to be coming to church soon.

February 6th, 2012

I turned 67 years old this week.   Several years ago that seemed quite old to me.  However today I feel young strong and full of vigor.  Three years ago Beth threw a surprise birthday party for me when I was 64.  Our home here in Africa was just finished and I had arrived here after a few months in America.  She invited  friends from Shikwaru to help celebrate our new home and my birthday.  It was the best birthday party anyone had ever given for me.  This week there was no party for me, but it has still been the best birthday celebration ever for me.  There was a tiny bit of sadness this week as Dustin’s birthday is January 30^th and my father’s birthday would have been February 3^rd.  For many years we always celebrated our birthdays together and this was the first time that my father was missing in that he now lives in Heaven.   I miss him every day but especially this week.  Enough of the tears though, this has been an incredible week of joy.

Last Saturday we celebrated the official open house for the Del Cramer Children’s Campus and the distribution of the 20 millionth rice packet meal from Meals from the Heartland.  Iowa’s largest news TV station KCCI was here to document this occasion and help tell the story of all that our ministry does here to many of our Iowa friends.  1500 children attended this celebration, many of them walking, others came by bus and many came in riding on donkey carts.  We had a really big party with jumping castles, music, lots and lots of games and food for everyone.  Our newest American team had just arrived the night before, so they were still in jetlag and a bit overwhelmed by the multitude of children at the event, but we were so glad they were here to help us with the event.

The next day at church we combined the adults and children into a family church service.  The donkey carts were still supposed to bring the children back to church, but due to miscommunication, only a few of them were working that day.  We will continue to work on this and we hope to have the donkey carts running each week to bring the children into church.  Our goal is to get 500 children coming to church each week.  Right now we are still around 60 children each week.  We continue to feed everyone who comes to church and they are blessed with a high quality children’s church led by my good friend Jacques van Bommel.

There are always a few struggles working here in Africa.  Our senior pastor, Pastor Jake has failed to come to church to preach the last 2 Sundays.  It seems that he is feeling caught between our struggles with the tribal authorities who have been asking us for bribes to continue working in their community and our ministry.  Jake has been on our board and has been a big help to me, but I know that a lot of pressure was put on him by the induna (head person) of our village for us to pay a bribe.  We have refused to pay bribes so not everyone here is happy with us.

We were tremendously blessed this week by having a member of parliament come to our rescue.  Beth and I met the head of the African Christian Party last month and he and his wife came to stay in our home on Wednesday.  After we gave him a tour of Del Cramer Children’s Campus he agreed to meet with the induna and I.  This man’s support would be like a congressman or senator from the States coming on our team.  The induna had never met him but told him she had seen him on TV many times.  He encouraged the induna and us to come to an agreement to work together to continue serving the children of her village.  We did finally come to a verbal agreement that our ministry will pay her 20,000 rand (approximately $2500) for the use of the warehouse building on our campus and that the chief will give us a 99 year “permission to occupy“ the land.  Blessman Ministries will also agree to have a representative of the induna attend our board or committee meetings when we are discussing matters pertaining to Del Cramer Campus.  I have a meeting scheduled with the chief tomorrow to hopefully finalize this agreement and put all of this to rest.    The most amazing part of all of this is that Mr. Kenneth Meshoe, the Member of Parliament, has agreed to be on our ministry board.   This came about when the induna stated that she did not want a bunch of outsiders coming into her village running things.  He told her that he would be an insider who would assist us. God has an amazing way of answering our prayers.

On Monday we took our new team to a remote rural Africa village where we did a full day of optical ministry.  To get to the village we traveled an hour North towards Botswana then another ½ hour down a rough dirt/mud road to this village.  We had been to this same village the week before traveling in our Land Cruiser and that is the only way we possibly made it.  This week the rains stopped so our regular vehicles were able to make the trip, but it was still touch and go in many places and a difficult rough ride.  When we finally arrived at the chief’s house he was not there but had scheduled us to work just down the street from his house.  There was no building to work in, no electricity, no toilets—just a nice big shade tree for us to work under.  I have distributed glasses in some pretty isolated places around the world and this is as basic as it gets.  Our team was amazing in their dedication to serve the people of this rural village.  We saw just over 100 people and gave nearly all of them glasses.  On a usual day doing optical we can see about 150 patients but under these conditions I felt we did good to see 100.  The people of the village were appreciative of having us come to work with them and they were a joy to work with.  We hope to go back to this same village in about a month and teach them how to farm God’s way.

The KCCI news team was still with us on the optical clinic and I am excited to know what our Iowa friends will think when they see us doing an optical clinic under a shade tree in Africa.

On Tuesday we took several of the team members to a Lion Park where tourists are permitted to walk with the lions.  We had six of us walking with 5 adolescent lions.  The lions seemed quite large and active when we all first saw them.  However after our walk they showed us some mature adult lions that each weighed over 700 pounds.  They are massive beautiful creatures.  Walking with them really gets your adrenalin pumping.  The TV cameras were also with us during our lion walk and it will also be interesting to see what our Iowa friends think of that.

In addition to the lion walk we were able to get this team on a beautiful photo safari at a big 5 game reserve.  They also had several safaris on our own game lodge, Shikwaru.  This team was especially blessed to be here while the film crew was with us.

The rest of the morning on Tuesday, we also visited the preschool where our team built 5 Abods 3 years ago.  There are about 100 preschool children being served at this site and our American friends always love interacting with these small children.   Our Abods were initially designed to be a small orphanage but we are still waiting for permission to occupy these from the social development department.   Our current plan is to have the pastor of this church get certified as a foster parent and then set this up as a group of foster homes.

Tuesday afternoon we took our team to visit a large feeding center that feeds well over 100 children over an open bonfire.  A few months ago, one of our team members donated a propane stove to this center along with a one month supply of propane. When the gas ran out, they returned to cooking for over 100 children over an outdoor wood-burning fire.   The cooks, caregivers, and all of the children seem happy in spite of their primitive conditions.  Our ministry supplies them with Meals from the Heartland food packets to help feed their children.  We are now supplying food for around 2500 children every day.

On Wednesday our team had a work day cleaning up the Del Cramer site.  After our big celebration on Saturday, we learned that our toilet facilities, as good as they are, will not serve 2000 people.  They do a great job serving our children and our church but future parties will need to be a bit smaller or we will have to bring in some portable potties.

On Thursday we took our team to a handicapped center that we also provide food and services to.  There are about 35 children who come every day, most of whom have cerebral palsy.  Many of these children have difficulty eating, speaking and playing, but they are always a joy for our American visitors to come and interact with and play with.  They always sing for us and it is amazing to hear them sing.

On Friday we took our team to Polokwane for their usual gift shopping tour.  This team were not big shoppers, but still enjoyed finding some souvenirs.

Friday afternoon we went back to Northern Academy, one of our favorite schools, to do another optical outreach.  This time we were there to serve the teachers and the staff and not the students.  We do go there every year to serve their students.  This school is where Maxwell’s son Perfect goes, and it continues to grow.  They now have over 3900 students with 2000 of them being boarding students.  In my humble opinion, it is by far the best black school in our entire Limpopo province.  It is now definitely the largest school.  Their graduation rate continues to be nearly 100% and their teenage pregnancy rate is much lower than any other schools in our area.

On Friday evening we attended the youth group services at Northern Academy.  They now have 1300 children attending their youth services each week.  They have this service in the largest building on campus and even then there is just enough room for all of these children.  To make room for them they must move all of the chairs outside.  The children stand or sit on the floor literally body to body for 2 hours.  They spend the first hour in praise and worship singing English praise songs at the top of their lungs.  It is the most beautiful sound I have ever heard.  It is what I imagine Heaven will be.  This particular week I was blessed to be able to speak with them and explain to them as a physician how to best take care of their bodies.  I covered things like diet, exercise, forgiveness and even gave them the “sex talk” that their parents likely have not given them.  I spoke with them about romance, infatuation, love, covenant marriage and homosexuality.  I was able to tell them many things that I would never be allowed to say in an American school.  They received my message well and appreciated being told the truth based on Biblical principles.

Mona Butters who just happens to be on this team, taught them about personal hygiene.  Mona is the top sales person for Mary Kay in America.  She is an expert on skin care and is also a great motivational speaker.  She taught them using a couple of rap songs that she had written.  They loved her and her presentation.

At the end of the service, one of our team members, Ed Hall, prayed with the children and spoke with them about some interesting things in the spiritual world.

I told the youth that is was my birthday in a few hours and they all sang happy birthday to me.  God has called Beth and I to work with these beautiful children and the love we feel in our hearts for them is so strong.  There is nothing in the world like the feeling we get when they return that love to us.

Next week I will report much more about our building project going on here.  It is coming along well.  On Monday we will start thatching the roof of our new sewing center on the Thompson campus.

Thank you for praying for our ministry and supporting the work we are doing here.  Please be watching KCCI TV these next few weeks to see how they tell the story of the work we are doing here.  If you miss it on TV you can see the video coverage on your computers at kcci.com.