Hello Everyone,

I would like to quickly give you all a description of Murundu Village and fill you in on a couple of statistics that I found very interesting. Murundu is a collection of small, one room houses. On average I would guess that they are about 150-200 sq ft. That is one room that is 10'X20' and there could easily be 7-10 people living in one of them and sleeping on the dirt floor. The homes are constructed from bricks made from clay right there in the village, and the mortar is also mixed right there as well. The roof is either thatched or made from corrugated steel. The cost of building one of these is less than $75 for materials. Once built, one of these homes should last about 20 years before the bricks break down. Few of the homes have electricity and almost none have their own plumbing. Bush toilets are pretty standard and are made by digging a hole and surrounding it with a wall made by tying bunches of reeds together. (Our girls are not real big fans of the bush toilet...and for that matter, neither are our guys.) There is a good public water supply, but there is a small charge (literally pennies) for that water, so many of the locals get water from shallow wells that are tainted from all of the aforementioned bush toilets.

Murundu is home to about 20,000 people. 50 people in the village have formal employment. Yes, that is correct. The remaining 19,950 survive through subsistence farming and selling charcoal. They make the charcoal by cutting down trees and burning them partially, then putting the fire out, cutting it up and carrying bundles of it in to town on their backs or on a bicycle. There is pretty serious deforestation in populated areas as a result of this. Whatever approach they take to earning a little money, all of them are just barely getting by. Many cannot afford to send their kids to school. The public school fees for elementary school for a year are about $17 and the school uniforms cost $9-$15. There is a school in Murundu that is not government sponsored that was started by the community about 9 years ago. I visited there today. There are 514 students and 5 teachers. None of the teachers is paid a salary. Two of the teachers live in Mufulira (about 5 miles away) and they pay their own transportation to and from Murundu each day to work for free. The school was started by the community so that they could eliminate the requirement of uniforms and reduce the costs to parents. Many of the kids attending there are barefoot and their clothes are really torn up. The up side is that just recently they administered the Zambian 7th grade standardized exam and 100% of their students passed it. Today, there were only three teachers for the 514 students because the two in Mufulira did not have the $1 to pay for transportation.

The guy we have been working with here, Pastor Joseph has 56 orphans that he is currently feeding. Today, I went with him and paid the school fees for 21 orphans. Thanks to all of you who made it possible for that to happen. I was also able to give some money to the community school to help with supplies and transportation costs for the teachers. Tomorrow we will be purchasing material for Joseph's wife to uniforms for the kids. We should be able to cover school expenses for all of Pastor Joseph's kids through December. One of the things that has surprised me is that almost all of these kids has somewhere to stay at night. (By the way, in Murundu, population 20,000 there are between 3000 and 4000 orphans.) I asked Joseph on our first day there how many of the kids were sleeping on the streets and he said there were 3 that he knew of and had taken in. They were all teenagers. One of the really cool things about African culture is that there is a sharing mentality and most of the kids are at least given a roof to sleep under. Now, I should tell you that they may be sleeping on a dirt floor with no blanket, but so are most of the people living in Murundu.

While I was running around and doing that stuff, the team had their hands full with the kids playing games and sharing the gospel with them. When I got back, we went and had lunch and after lunch had hygiene 101 with a bunch of the orphans. The first lesson was bathing and the use of soap. The second lesson was first aid for cuts. Basically that consisted of telling the kids not to shove a handful of dirt in a wound to make it stop bleeding (a common practice). Last, how to make a toothbrush from the branch of a type of tree that grows in the area. Pastor Joseph did the last bit, because I have no idea how to do that. Following the lessons, we had bath time for anyone who wanted one. Sarah and Kelly took the girls into the house and helped them and us guys stayed outside and had quite a wild time. We had a 10 gallon bucket, a washcloth, four bars of soap, and suddenly a bunch of naked Africans. The kids were overjoyed at the whole procedure and made the most of it. Our intention was to kind of just facilitate the thing, but their intention was for us to fully administer the bath...which we did, with the exception of insisting that certain areas were not going to be washed by us. They were really dirty and I have no idea how long it had been since their last contact with water, let alone soap. Washing their feet was really sad. Their skin was so dry and cracked that the only thing I can compare it to is an elephant's skin. It is the product of walking around in clay and dirt with no shoes on and never bathing. They were thrilled at the attention and being clean. I can't imagine being 3 or 4 and not having someone to do that stuff for me. One of the boys came back for a second bath right after he dried off from the first one. Another little one, after his bath, took his clothes and put his socks and shoes on and that was it. After a little while he surrendered and added the pants and shirt. Tomorrow we are going to give them their very own soap.

That is all for now. It is late and I should get to bed. Keep us in your prayers. It is hard to know where to start sometimes when the problems are so big and overwhelming, but just about that time, one of the little guys grabs your hand and motions for you to pick him up and you have to realize that whatever it is you were trying to do, it isn't nearly as important as you thought. So, you grab his hands and spin him around until you both fall down and then five others jump in the mix and for just a few minutes, no one is thinking about whose parents are dead or which one of the kids might have HIV or where dinner will come from and the laughter is pure and sincere and begins to grow real good things in everyone's soul.

Sendemenipo (goodnight),

dave