Wednesday began with the Rev. Kalaba Chali preaching at Africa University's morning chapel service. He preached about keeping the main thing the main thing as college students at AU. He asked them to continue to ask themselves, "Why are you here?"
He reminded them of the Pan African mission of the university, the personal investment faculty make in students, the support received from the United Methodist Church and a host of other pluses of AU life.
He also reminded them of the distractions, calling for them to continue to keep a vigil on maintaining their goals and aspirations for the sake of their futures, the families and the future of all of Africa.
Following chapel service, it was almost like another day at home in the office with the exception that my office was located on the beautiful Africa University Campus. I stayed at Africa University to meet up with and train Lloyd Chaukura on how to place content about the Chabadza partnerships on the Great Plains Conference website. (The main chapel can be seen behind Lloyd as he talks on his cell phone in the picture on the left.)
Africa University was our chosen location because we thought we'd have access to excellent Wi-Fi there. Wesley Kuture, from the information and public affairs office, extended hospitality to us by giving us a space, a desk and access Wi-Fi.
Turns out that we'd get bumped off the Wi-Fi about every 20 minutes. In addition, the website console itself was not as cooperative as it could have been with error messages coming with greater frequency than usual.
I'm not sure what the cause was, but we achieved in an eight hour day what is normally able to be accomplished in half a day. However, all-in-all it was a valuable time as Lloyd caught on quickly and we achieved about 85 percent of what we set out to do.
We resized photos, discussed format, a website approach for Chabadza and placed the two partnerships for which we already had partially written and edited plus photos to put in place.
We are not quite ready for a big unveiling, but it won't be long.
We ate lunch at the commons which is equivalent to our student union.
I had a hearty plate of sadza, chicken in a red sauce and fresh vegetables.
I walked with Lloyd to the district superintendent's house at about 4:30 when the University's offices closed. (The path leading to the road that goes to the district superintendent's home is pictured at right.)
Others in our group returned from their partner churches today with many stories to tell of God's work in those places--also gathering at the district superintendent's house.
Additionally, a neighboring district to Mutasa-Nyanga hosted a dinner in the group's honor to which many attended.
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