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Read Lisa's blog entry, "Watching Africa Blow Away" at her BLOG

We Harvest the Beans :-)

The April/May rains failed in parts of Kenya and Tanzania, leaving many of our friends struggling as the dust blows where grass should be growing for their weakening herds.

With this reality close to us, we don't take for granted the rains that we received on Wild Hope's acreage outside of Arusha. For whatever reason, this general area was blessed with quite a decent rainy season and we have been harvesting the first fruits off of the land.

What a precious thing to be involved in the rhythm of the earth as dry ground softens under the rain, nourishing the hidden seeds and encouraging them to sprout and grow. What a lot of fun to watch the plants mature and produce and then to finally bring in a harvest.

Our bean production (grown amongst the maize and replenishing what maize depletes) wasn't on a very large scale but we're pleased with it none-the-less. We celebrated the good gifts of our Creator as we enjoyed our first meal with home-grown beans in our burritos.

This is a beginning for us. We look forward to years of multiple types of harvests grown in sustainable, environmentally responsible ways. With hunger and the degradation of the land being ongoing concerns in sub-Saharan Africa, we hope to work together with our neighbors to see these issues decrease.

We sure wish you could stop by for a plate of beans and rice with us :-)

A Delightful Light... A Kind Gift... A Changed Life

Perhaps the biggest blessing for our recent visitor, Tehur, was the relationship she developed with Josephine and Eva. Jo and Eva are the ladies who produce all that lovely dry fruit in our kitchen. Earlier posts will have told you about how they are generating income through this small business venture. We are delighted for them!

Though Tehur doesn't speak Swahili and the ladies don't speak English, the 3 of them just hit it off across the language divide. Tehur was touched by the joy apparent in their lives, despite dramatically challenging circumstances. Their lives were one of the ways that God spoke to Te while she was with us.

As Tehur's time came to a close, she felt led to give a gift of a hundred dollars to Wild Hope. She could feel in her gut that this gift was hers to give, even though she knew she was returning to no job in Portugal and this literally was the last of her cash. We didn't say anything either way, knowing that sometimes people need to follow the promptings that God gives them, but also knowing that people need to weigh emotions against good sense.

A few short days before Tehur's departure, she arrived in Byron's office with her gift. "I really want to give this," she said.

Then Byron had a thought. Why not take this gift and get something really useful, a true blessing, for Josephine and Eva? They had been such a light to Tehur... How could she bless them?

Enter the D.Light. This wonderful little solar light was developed by a former Peace Corps volunteer who saw how dangerous, expensive and un-green kerosene lanterns are. With its own little solar panel to charge it up, this light has 3 brightness settings and can run for 20-200 hours, depending on which setting you use. It also has a little jack that can used to charge up a cell phone. How cool is that?

The ladies were overjoyed. They literally laughed and danced around with their neat new solar lanterns.

We love these little lights! They are safe and clean and efficient and cool :-) We're hoping to promote them in Tanzania through sales and strategic donations to raise awareness and profile these money-saving sources of light.

And PS 24 hours after Tehur and Byron decided on the lights, Te found out she had a job waiting for her back home in Portugal. A stretch of faith and a kind gift gave Tehur an experience of God's faithfulness.

Win! Win! Win!

Baby Steps toward a Better Earth

In his helpful book, Serve God-Save the Planet, J. Matthew Sleeth makes the following comment:

"God's beautiful earth will not be saved by words or good intentions. It will be saved by humble, anonymous acts like turning off the lights..."

At Wild Hope, we’re taking steps in our attempts toward better stewardship of the earth. While we can’t stop the terrible environmental degradation going on in all corners of the globe, we can begin by taking baby steps of our own that lead to better Creation care.

In our household, some of our baby steps include the following...

We’ve changed several highly used light bulbs for energy saving ones. We plan to change more.

We turn off lights. If we’re going to be out of the room for more than 60 seconds, we hit the switch on our way out. We don’t light up rooms we aren’t in.

We turn off fans in the morning, and often turn the fans to a lower setting once the kids are asleep in their rooms at night.

We often do one load of laundry at night because there is less machinery running in these hours while businesses are closed and this reduces drain on the system.

We don’t have a dryer but hang our clothes in the African sun.

We’ve stopped buying liquid hand soap because we can’t justify all those plastic bottles any more. We’re back to old fashioned bar soap at our sinks ☺

We’ve stopped flushing the toilet every single time it is used. Closing the lid, we save all those liters of water for flushing after the second or third time.

We encourage our visitors to bring their own water bottles when they come to Africa and we fill them from our filters because we don’t want to add more plastic to the environment.

We carry our own bags to the shops and the market.

We reduce our meat consumption because we know that it takes more resources to raise meat than it does to raise vegetables, grain and legumes.

None of these things that we’ve listed require huge transition or dramatic lifestlye changes from us. They are not particularly impressive or noteworthy. They are baby steps and they remind us that we have a part to play in healing the earth. Romans 8 says that Creation is groaning and waiting for the sons of men. We are just taking steps to ease her pain.

How about you? What has your family found that you can do together to care for this wonderful world we share?

Caring for the Lovely Land

Out on our Wild Hope land, large areas have been plowed improperly in the past. A big rant about the damage done all over Africa by poor plowing practices won't help here and the question remains as to why small farm owners plow up and down the slope? Don't they know that the topsoil is being stripped off their farms? Don't they realize it is eroded by wind and water, poured into the streams and eventually dumped into the ocean where it kills the coral reef and puts all other marine life at risk?

Possibly there is no concern for marine life so far away. Few local inland farmers would have had resources available to travel to the coast and be impressed by the warm Indian Ocean. Understandably then, there may be little regard for her, but aren't they driven sufficiently by their own desire for successful farming to keep their topsoil?

But it's just not always as simply as that.

Plowing properly requires that you move horizontally across hilly areas instead of creating furrows that run straight down. And while this seems obvious, the actual size and shape of your farm plays a big role in whether this is an easy task to accomplish. To plow along the contour and not up and down may seem like a simple task. But if your farm, like all your neighbors' farms, is a skinny strip of land that was divided out for you by family, it's quite possible that your skinny strip is short on horizontal and long on sloping hill.

To plow properly you will have to manuever the tractor in tight turns that are difficult to accomplish while pulling a plow. It's so difficult that the whole idea starts to feel way too complicated to be worth it.

"Topsoil shmopsoil. Reef? What's that? My kids need maize and beans NOW."

This weekend, Wild Hope is taking a few friends to a seminar that teaches biblical care for the earth as applied to farming. God's heart for the earth is big and passionate and we are thankful that we can begin planting the seeds of that heart among some of our friends here.

We're also thankful that we can be a blessing to the Wild Hope property.

Last week, Byron sat on a tractor with a local neighbor and corrected past damage that was done through improper plowing of land on the land we now oversee. He just didn't want to watch another rainy season come and channel any more of the topsoil away. So Byron and our Tanzanian neighbor worked together to re-shape the land, restoring her natural lines as best they could.

They were pretty satisfied with the result.

And here's a little secret: when the job was done and the land was returned to her naturally protective shape, Byron says he thinks he heard the earth that he was standing on let out a soft sigh of relief.

It's just a small start, but it feels good to bless the very ground of Africa.