Into Africa – churches and farms

We landed without a work permit because the Diocesan secretary didn’t think it safe to send it through the post. You aren’t allowed into Zimbabwe without a work permit. Usually you are then sent out of the country till it turns up, but I think they took one look at David and took pity on us and let us in on visitor’s permits. Before we could do anything else, I had to get the work permit sorted out. Which was easy enough as it was waiting for us at the Diocesan Office.

As it had taken so long to sort out my recruitment by USPG and the work permit, the job at the university had been given to Sebastian Bakare, always more qualified than me anyway. I was then offered the parish of Banket and the job of examining chaplain.

I had left an English parish that I could ride around on a bike in half an hour. I went to 2500 square miles of African bush. Banket Parish is 75 miles long and 35 miles wide, with five main Anglican congregations. The We lived in Banket which is geographically in the centre of the parish next to an interdenominational church, St Andrew’s, where  English services were held. The  rectory was also midway between the town of Banket and the township of Kuwadzana.  There there was a church, St David’s, owned by the town council where services were held in Shona. I was supposed to have an intensive course in conversational Shona but it never happened and so I had to make do with what I could pick up as I went along.

In Raffingora, 30 miles north of Banket, is St Stephens, designed to look exactly like an English country church. At Darwendale, 30 miles to the south, was a church formerly owned by the Railway Mission with a small Shona congregation. At Muriel Mine, 20 miles to the north-east, there is a large Shona congregation using a Roman Catholic Church – St Mary’s. All the churches were used by different denominations at different times with occasional joint services. Lay leadership was also essential in a parish with churches spread so far apart. I could only get to three churches on each Sunday and the others had to look after themselves.

So one of my priorities was to train up the teams who did the work. Each church had its own leaders who took services, prepared people for Baptism and Confirmation and organised choirs. Congregation members were formed into groups to do the visiting. They had to cope without many resources to help them. They had few Bibles or Prayer Books (the Shona Prayer Book was always out of print) and no vestments. I tried to produce some of our own teaching materials locally, but the cassocks were extremely threadbare. We were surrounded by fields of cotton but didn’t have a spinning wheel.

St Mary’s Muriel Mine was the nearest we got to a Basic Christian Community. The leadership met with the people, visited, and prayed with the sick exhorted the lapsed, settled disputes and attended central training sessions all on their own initiative. The highlight of one year was the confirmation which St Mary’s hosted. 250 people attended from all over the parish and none was sent away without eating their fill of chicken, sadza and rice provided free by the congregation for their guests.

Gomo Farm had the smallest of the congregations. I started the church in traditional missionary style by standing on a rock in the farm workers village and talking to the people. Usually no more than a dozen turned up with maybe six communicants. The congregation, which had a service just once a month, was led by the cook from the farmhouse. The service was all in Shona, which I struggled through, except for the sermon which my catechist translated. We normally met in the tobacco grading shed and were surrounded by bales of tobacco ready to go to the sales floors and hands of tobacco waiting for grading. Like most Shona congregations, the emphasis is on the singing, which, with even a dozen present fills the shed.

Singing was a major feature of African worship and from time to time there were choir festivals where several churches would come together. One of the strange things about Anglican worship was that as I arrived at a church the choir would be singing and dancing but when the service started the hymns were Victorian standards to tedious tunes. But then when the service ended the singing and dancing would start again. I never did persuade them to liven up the services. They had learnt well from their Tractarian inheritance, that worship was formal and solemn.

I travelled about 350 miles a week around them; to start with in a Datsun truck, but shortly after we arrived the parish bought a Ford Laser (a Mazda 323 in all but name) and sold the truck to the school so that I could still use it on occasion. As we arrived petrol rationing had just been lifted although the rector was regarded as an essential worker and had access to petrol most of the time. Although the main roads were tarred – a result of fifteen years of war, most of my travel was on dirt roads. These were very variable in quality. At some times of the year they were as good as the tarred roads, but gradually as the seasons changed the surface would break up and it was like driving on ball bearings. Every priest in the history of Banket parish had written off a car. And I was no exception.

Driving between farms I took a corner on a dirt road too fast and the car rolled into the bush. Luckily I was unhurt and was shortly picked up and taken to the nearest farm to phone to have my car towed in. The one problem was that there were no new cars in Zimbabwe that year. So the car was just bent back into some sort of shape and given back to me. From then on you could fit your hand between the door frame and the body of the car. Not very helpful in the rainy season. The insurers weren’t too happy eitheras we had only just got the car back from repair after a friend had skidded into a post driving part of the congregation back from a confirmation.

About a year later we finally managed to replace the Ford Laser with a Mazda 323 which, although it was the same age, only had 9000 km on the clock. It actually cost more than the list price of a new one but as new cars are unavailable it was all we could get. The cost threw the parish into its first financial crisis for three years. Despite doubling the income in those three years we hadn’t built up enough in reserve to cope with the inflation of car prices. But with the tobacco sales going well the cost was soon covered,

The parish was principally a commercial farming area; tobacco, cotton, coffee, maize, oil-seed rape and even sunflowers are grown. There were something like 300 (predominantly white) commercial farming families in the district. And to a great extent the tobacco auctions decided the parish finances for the year; I almost felt guilty for not smoking.

The largest tobacco sales floor in the world opened in Harare in 1986 to handle well over a million kgs a day. The auction is a strange affair with long rows of bales of tobacco lined up across the floor and the auctioneer walking along the rows calling out prices continuously and to an outsider incomprehensibly. He is followed by the buyers who with the raise of an eyebrow or a twist of the mouth determine the price of each bale.

They rarely pause between bales but each bale receives a ticket on which the price is written. On those prices the country’s foreign exchange earnings were largely decided, as was the income of the parish.

One of the farmers made his contribution to the church by planting ten acres that he didn’t normally use – it was then up to God to supply the crop! The first year he planted tobacco and record prices that year gave us about £5000. Later he started planting soya beans on “God’s ten acres”.

There had been drought for a couple of years before we arrived which continued for much of our time in Zimbabwe.  Not only were there food shortages but water was also running short. We had to use water for washing ourselves in turn; then our clothes; and then finally to flush the loos: washing up water went onto the garden. Harare was in danger of running out of water and when its main dam began to spill when the rains returned everyone drove into Harare to see it. The churches and farmers were involved in drought relief.

When the rain did come it was often torrential. You could smell it long before it arrived and then if our house was on the edge of the storm one part of the road would have an inch of standing water and the other would be quite dry.

In 1985, the rains were 'normal’ for the first time for four years. Most dams filled and as the farmers cleared the harvest so they planting the irrigated winter wheat – the fields coloured emerald as the young wheat grows, in contrast to the grass dying in the bush.

In March 1986 we returned from leave in the UK from temperatures of -20^oC in England to +20^oC in Zimbabwe. After three years of drought the country was suffering from too much rain. Rural roads & bridges became impassable, and many crops were damaged by the wet weather. Maize & soya beans were particularly badly hit, but tobacco was also affected.

After the winter the dry season broke in early October 1986; again with a couple of weeks of unseasonal rain. Its main effect was to wreck the wheat crop which was almost ready to harvest.

The farming season ended with a return to the drought. Not only was there little or no rain over much of the country, but the temperature shot up to the high 30s and scorched many of the crops. As a result the harvest was poor. The last season had left the country with two years worth of maize which became unsalable when the world price dropped below production costs, so an appeal had been made not to grow maize that year. The call to cut back maize production wasn’t heard by the people who cut back the bush to plant a few illegal crops. So when the next year produced low yields there was plenty of grain in store. But the reduced tobacco crop and poor quality led to less foreign exchange at a time when many international loans were falling due. The auction price or tobacco was about half what it was the year before.

This time there was no water shortage in Banket but Bulawayo was already rationing and other places seemed  likely to follow.

The drought and heat dried up the countryside and the bush fires that we came to expect in August started earlier. In many cases they were started deliberately to clear land for cultivation or to catch game. But the annual destruction prevented the bush from recovering and much of the ground cover was lost with a consequent loss of top soil and fertility. The expansion of this informal sector continued unabated despite ministerial (both secular & clerical) injunctions. The loss of trees had an effect on wildlife as well as reducing the fertility of the soil and also ultimately rainfall. One of the farmers had a tree nursery and he supplied me with trees to take to the churches. I encouraged the churches and the study centre to plant trees, to replace any that they cut down, but I know that church members were still among those destroying the environment.

Locally there was some malnutrition which was largely due to changing patterns of life following independence and the minimum wage. Farm workers and domestic workers had never really been paid in cash, but instead given “rations”. Faced with a wage packet, some went straight to the beer hall and expected the “rations” to turn up as usual. At one point the worst malnutrition in Africa was among commercial farm workers children in Zimbabwe. Needless to say few of the white farmers were themselves malnourished.

In the late 1980’s the IMF were asked for help with foreign exchange to allow imports of fuel and fertiliser. They made it a condition of their loans that Zimbabwe started to charge for health care and education and also stopped subsidising power – the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP). This meant that children began to be taken out of school as the fees increased and weren’t taken to clinics for treatment early enough for it to be effective. And the fuel shortages after the price of electricity tripled meant that most people resorted to wood for fuel which led to deforestation on a massive scale.

Twenty years later the IMF acknowledged that the ESAP had been a mistake, but by then a generation had missed school and were in poor health.

Part of the deforestation was happening behind the Rectory. When we arrived it was a fairly dense patch of bush. After a couple of years it began to thin out. But we then planted a few trees to try to get people to see that they needed to replace what they were cutting, and that wood harvesting could be done sustainably. We continued to replant trees in the bush around us but while we were away large mature trees “disappeared” for firewood. But by the time we left, it had almost all gone.

There was then no shortage of firewood since the site of the Mazwikedei Dam was being cleared of trees ready for the lake which is one of the largest in Zimbabwe behind the largest earth wall in Africa. The lake is 19 kilometres long, just 20 kilometres north of Banket. The dam was built to provide irrigation, and to control the flow of water downstream. But it also became a focus for wild life and water sports.

It was an example of foreign aid at work. Originally planned by a local farming family, the project was taken over by the Zimbabwe government. They got the Italian government to fund it and an Italian company to build it. Most of the Italians working on the scheme were paid in Italy, with only pocket money given to them in Zimbabwe. But there were a lot of African workers employed on the site as well. The village built to house the Italians was simply left at the end of the project and the farmer turned it into a holiday complex, selling houses to people in Harare for water sports.

The process of teaching about agriculture and nutrition has to start early if it is to be effective. Yet for many their first experience, of education was a farm school where paradoxically little farming was taught. Some were little more than play groups to keep the kids off the crops. Taught in Shona for the first four years, they had little chance later of making sense of a curriculum which in government schools was taught exclusively in English. Some farmers began combining to provide better schools with fully qualified teachers but one condition of registration by the government was that there should be running water and that was just not there.

There were a variety of educational programmes trying to teach nutrition and child care and church people were involved in their local areas. Both Sue and I became involved in education. Sue had a group of the St David’s ladies once a week, teaching cooking, nutrition and handicrafts. I tutored some of the young people who were taking O levels at a study centre. Usually I had about 50 in the class, but as they got to know me over 100 would turn up. We started reading Shakespeare, which some were taking at O level. And I helped a drama group produce a couple of plays for festivals.

I took eight members of the congregation of St Andrews Banket on retreat to one of the nearby game parks and took over the lodges for two nights.  Another parishioner came to cook for us so that the retreatants could relax and only need think about my addresses. Being in a game park meant that we shared our surroundings with rock-rabbits, monkeys and squirrels including a squirrel which came into the communion service.

To help around the parish I had a full-time catechist, Weston Muringani. He had been confirmed by Arthur Shearly Cripps – one of the pioneers of the Anglican Church in Africa. Shearly Cripps had gone native; refused to speak English in synod at a time when there were only white expat clergy; lived in a traditional hut; and gave away everything sent out from England to support him.  Needless to say he was regarded as a saint by the black population.

With Weston I began to take services on some of the farms in the area sometimes with the farm workers, sometimes with the farmers themselves. There were also regular Bible Studies.  Some were general for anyone but two were geared to develop the local Church leaders so that they could cope with services and Baptism preparation when I was not in their area.  While the teaching was basically Anglican the membership was often mixed as other denominations found it difficult to provide study groups in the rural areas.

Away from the strictures of Europe, relations with other denominations were very close. All the churches were shared. And when it came to prayers for rain I joined with the local Jesuit priest. He invariable asked me to share the whole service including the mass and we shared communion together.

There was some tension between the followers of traditional Christianity and the followers of more modern 'born-again' groups, usually South African based. They would arrive in their own jet at Harare airport; hold tent missions for a week attracting thousands and then leave; taking the large collections with them. Some of those who attended saw spiritual renewal as possible only outside the churches and set up their own groups. In trying to get others to join them they threatened the faith of the whole congregation. Some were simply white congregations resisting integration and trying to find new ways of staying on their own.

But even some families were divided. Frank was one of the white commercial farmers who was a regular at the sports club, often needing to phone for one of the farm workers to come and drive him home. When he died his wife and children insisted on a Pentecostal funeral. This consisted of the preacher telling the congregation what a dreadful life he had led and that if they didn’t want to follow where Frank has gone they had better sort their lives out now. Naturally several people came up to ask if we could have a proper service for Frank. Sadly I had to decline as I was sure the family would not approve. So we had to make do with a lengthy wake at the social club.

As one of the Bishops examining chaplains I was responsible for clergy recruitment and training. There was a misconception that clergy would simply fly in as needed, but with problems getting work permits and the need for a self-sustaining church there needed to be a programme of local recruitment.

As jobs in the economy were opened up to black applicants fewer educated people wanted to work for the church, especially as the pay failed to keep up with civil service salaries. There was a constant stream of enquirers but usually they had few qualifications and little experience. At the same time the church tried to raise the minimum requirements to at least ‘O’ level standard.  This became increasingly difficult to achieve as the cost of secondary education spiralled. There was then no training centre and those preparing for the full time ministry had to go to South Africa for training. Problems of foreign exchange also delayed some training. Although there was the money to pay the fees we were not allowed to send it out of the country. There was a suggestion a hostel be set up close to the university to provide a base for ordinands to take degrees and live in an informal Anglican community.

When it opened it could be a focal point to encourage people to go into the ministry as much as to train them.  When we sent students out of the country for training, their training was not visible and so not really supported by the congregations. Now there was a place people could identify with. The theological course run by the university also created contact with the future leaders of Zimbabwe. When we returned to the UK I gave them all the theological books I had with me as the start of their library. After we had left, this moved to better premises and became Gaul House.

One of the youth workers in the parish, Vincent Zambara, put himself forward for training but he never managed to pass O level English. So we continued to employ him as a youth worker. Then he joined our staff as a full-time catechist, working in Raffingora visiting farms and encouraging Bible Study.

Getting the people together across the parish was a problem. The five churches of the parish led very separate existences, even the two in Banket itself rarely met unless I was away and combined the services with a visiting priest. Communities were divided in many different ways and their common belief seemed not to draw them together. The white commercial farmers mixed almost exclusively with each other; their workers and the workers at the mines never met them socially. Many of them still didn’t speak any African languages, even after four generations in the country. If I was asked to stay to lunch at a farm, my catechist was usually expected to wait outside – he was well used to it and when he saw the invitation coming would make his excuses and go off to the farm workers village. Only on a couple of farms was he received as an equal.

In many ways the congregations were isolated from one another and attempts to unite the disparate communities have not worked. Most have not yet indentified this as a problem and are only too happy to live with their own social group. Possibly only someone from within the community could seriously challenge this isolationism. Anyone from outside was too easily dismissed as “not having been through the war” or “not part of the culture”.

The annual meeting was about the only occasion when we hoped to see people from each church. The PCC were already elected by the districts so it was an opportunity to listen to what was happening in other parts of the parish. I also hoped that it would be a chance for the very different communities to learn something of each other. After four years of trying I persuaded the PCCs to meet away from the white led church at Banket and go to St Mary’s, Muriel Mine for a service and a meeting. At least that is what was expected.

When the service was over we were ushered to the back of the church where breakfast was waiting (at about 12 noon). Fried eggs, bread, cakes and cold meat washed down with hot sweet tea, which delayed the start of the meeting. For many on the PCC it was not only their first visit to Muriel Mine (a Lonrho gold mine) but also a first taste of Shona hospitality. After the meeting we were once again invited to the back of the church where the tables were full of chicken & rice, cold meat & salads. All paid for from donations from the black congregation. Zimbabwe is the only place I know where a PCC annual meeting is treated as a festival. Even Lonrho played their part and repainted the church for the occasion!

When I went back ten years later, I met Weston at the Bernard Mizeki festival and asked him if that had become the norm under my successor. He said it had never happened again.

One of the functions of the PCC was to try to get the churches to take responsibility for themselves financially. There was still an assumption that the churches got all their money from overseas but the message was slowly getting across that as a parish we were totally self-reliant, having to meet the full cost of priest, rectory and car; and also gave away 25% of our income to the diocese and others in need.

Banket's giving doubled in four years to a level which compared favourably with some in the UK. Muriel Mine’s income  increased ninefold. Many of the parishioners were agricultural or mine workers on less than £30 per month. But over half of our income still came from the annual appeal to commercial farmers.

 The extra income helped to make some improvements to the churches. St David's Banket erected a fence around the church grounds. They could then tidy up the area and plant flower-beds. The next stage was to clean and redecorate the church which had suffered from vandalism in the centre of the township. In line with our policy of self reliance, the congregation themselves have to pay for much of the work if they can’t do it themselves. The parish made up the shortfall.

St Cyprians, too, improved their image with new doors - metal this time to beat the termites, and a new altar on brick pillars. They also needed to re-decorate and replace broken windows but a more pressing need was a new roof. The second-hand asbestos sheets put on several years ago had broken and new (or newish) sheets needed to be found.

At the beginning of 1985 I was asked to act as Rector for a neighbouring parish until a new incumbent arrived. That gave me an area as large as England south of Nottingham. There were thirty-six congregations up to 330km (200 mi1es) apart. I drove up to 1000km per week. Luckily three of the congregations were in Kariba so I could combine business with pleasure. One of the church leaders was a waiter at a hotel so we discussed church affairs around the swimming pool. Another church member ran a tsetse fly control project, using flies imported from Bristol! Clergy should be warned that tsetses land on black shirts and can bite through them!

It also gave me access to the safari Islands of Lake Kariba. Technically they were a different diocese but the only real access to them was through Kariba. So I had an excuse to call them up and say I was coming on a pastoral visit and they would send over a speedboat for me. Most of the time there was little or no work to do and I was simply given a lodge for the week.

But on one occasion I was asked to take a wedding. A couple had flown out from England to have the ideal wedding on a safari island in Africa. They brought 40 friends with them who were put up in the casino hotel at Kariba the night before the wedding and then taken on a boat complete with champagne reception over to the island. But as with the best laid plans everything seemed to go wrong. Just as we arrived on the island the water heater blew up with a bang loud enough to make everyone suspect a bomb. The groom had been bitten at Harare Airport and was feverish, not really knowing what was going on. And behind the scenes the couple who ran the island were quietly in despair as a couple of weeks earlier their two and a half year old son had shot his six month old sister dead with his father’s gun. As the camp was unfenced there were always guns around to protect visitors from the game and it only took a moment for the toddler to find one. I spent the reception between mouthfuls of filet Mignon and trying to help the warden’s wife hold herself together.

There were two assistant priests in Makonde – one full time and one non-stipendiary, but there is still some resistance to black clergy amongst the rural whites which makes deployment difficult. On one Sunday I had arranged for a priest (black) to go out from the cathedral in Harare to take a service on the road to Mhangura. He drove the 100 miles and arrived to find a full church. But the wardens met him at the door and told him that the service had been cancelled as they didn’t think anyone was coming.

At Easter in1985, I was appointed Archdeacon of Harare North - not in place of the parish work but in addition to it. It was a two year appointment, so I was only temporarily venerable. With the way I seemed to attract new work I was known locally as the vulnerable.

As Archdeacon I was on the board at Langham School. The school is tucked away among a group of kopjes sandwiched between commercial farm land and the Chiweshe communal land. Most of its pupils come from the communal area where farmers scratch out a subsistence living on about 10 acres of fairly poor soil. About 200 girls study up to ‘O’ levels in a wide variety of subjects, living and working in pole & dagga huts, thatched with local grass. The huts were a reminder of the school origins as a homecraft centre to teach basic health & nutrition to the rural women over sixty years ago. Then they were adequate but by the 1980s they were bursting at the seams with leaking roofs and crumbling walls, witness to the generations that have grown up there.

Gradually the buildings were being replaced, but classrooms were used as dormitories - grants were available for classrooms but not for dormitories. The one dormitory which existed housed three girls in each cubicle built for two, with ablutions and Blair latrines some distance away. Money from a charitable trust built that one, but money was urgently needed for at least one more.

A brave new plan had been drawn up to develop the whole site at a total cost of £600000 but emergency repairs to the water supply and buildings had used up the limited funds available locally. Ironically the education provided is far better than that of better equipped schools elsewhere. The first girls had just completed O levels and there were high hopes that results would be good. The atmosphere at the school was always friendly and hopeful. The Rector of Mvurwi visited regularly and many of the staff were committed Christians.

In other sectors of education, gradually the white children were taken out of state education and sent to private schools which could discriminate by price. As the children left so the teachers saw the chance of extra facilities fading (bought with the parent’s money) and a downward spiral began. But this was not only at the expense of the poorer child for whom there can be no parental choice but it also affected the wealthier child who faced a new set of friends as well as new teachers and new rules almost every term.

One of my duties was to look after vacant parishes so I added another one, Mvurwi, to my collection. It had had a new priest, newly out from London, who had replaced someone who had been there for many years and been something of a hero in the war. It was an impossible job made harder by the fact that the newcomer refused to accept the paternalistic approach of the white community and very quickly alienated the main support for his work. I had felt the same tensions but recognised that I (and my family) needed a support base to work from. Even though I saw my primary focus as building the confidence and cohesion of the community as a whole, and spent much of my time with the impoverished black community, this was never questioned by the white farmers who provided me with the support and resources I needed. But Bill didn’t like driving around in an old Merc which he felt set him apart from “the people”. Despite the fact that it had 400000 on the clock and was built like a tank and ideal for dirt roads which is more than could be said for my Mazda. So after six months he returned to the UK and I was left in charge.

I stopped measuring the distances and got on with getting to know a new area. That gave me responsibility for Guruve with a few more schools and the Zambezi Valley below the escarpment. Including a church called Mzarabani which became one of my favourites. To get to Mzarabani you drive to the end of the tarred road and then just keep on driving. Past the village centre and out into the bush. After a bit, I never worked out how far, you turned right at a baobab tree. Making sure it was the right baobab tree, there were so many. And then you headed deeper into the bush for a mile or so until you could see the church about 100meters away on the left.

The people had heard that I was coming. Some had walked for three days to hear me so the church was packed. That evening we sat around the fire and told stories watching shooting stars in the sky. I stayed the night in a pole and dagga hut with snakes in the thatch.

Bizarrely, as Archdeacon, I was supposed to tell them that their church, also pole and dagga, was not up to the required diocesan standard. They needed to build in face brick, with a proper roof. At Bishop’s Council I had argued vainly that that was impractical 300 miles from Harare and 50 miles from the tarred road. And that the people were subsistence farmers who rarely had enough food to spare, let alone to sell. They helped their priest with food and he kept a few chickens and a couple of goats of his own. But there was no money around. I was told I was encouraging double standards, supporting “proper” churches in the towns and suggesting mud huts were good enough for the rural areas.

Needless to say I kept quiet when I was with the church people, though they did express a wish to have a “proper” church in the village centre one day. But the church in the bush, which could be rethatched easily enough and some more mud spread to fill the holes the termites had made, seemed good enough for anyone who recognised that the church was the people, the building simply shelter.

Few clergy seemed to want to work outside Harare which meant that the remaining rural clergy were stretched even further. Many churches had less than one service a month while Harare churches got up to three each Sunday. I tried to get my churches to handle all the routine work so that I could just step in when things go wrong.

Visitors to the country show a similar reluctance to step outside the capital. One man from the AA considered himself lucky to make it to Banket. Back in 1983 Matabeleland, which was about 250 miles from Banket, was under the control of the North Korean Fifth Brigade to prevent any challenge to Robert Mugabe. But they left after a couple of years and apart from the occasional break in there was little trouble when we were there. For 99% of the population over 90% of the area of the country life was, and probably still is, without incident. But perhaps it gave the visitor a sense of adventure simply to be in Africa.

We ended up avoiding the towns as much as possible although I had to go in to Harare for meetings about once a week.

In 1986 most churches had a programme of renewal as part of a Diocesan project to mark the 90th anniversary of Bernard Mizeki’s martyrdom. St Stephens, Raffingora held a lay witness mission in April run by Africa Enterprise. It had only a marginal impact on the Anglican community which tended to be fairly passive and conservative but it created waves in the district which I hoped would be constructive.

The St Andrew's, Banket congregation held dinner parties around the district to keep in touch with those on the fringe of church life. Two adults came forward for confirmation as a result. The dinners continued for another month or so, and then some continued as house groups for prayer and Bible Study.

Also at St Andrew’s a healing ministry began after one member, Anne, returned from a trip to South Africa to announce that she had cancer. I had never seen myself as having a healing ministry or particular gifts. But Anne was persuasive. I should pray with her and lay hands on her with anointing. I did as I was told and then began to learn more about the healing ministry. This uncovered a need for healing on a much broader scale and a monthly service began in church for healing at all levels - personal, family, community and internationally. Prayers with Anne continued until we left Zimbabwe and others took over. Though the chemotherapy was exhausting for her, Anne continued to work in a local craft shop until shortly before she died four years later.

I visited all the parishes in the Archdeaconry, though not all the congregations, I never did find out how many congregations there were. That may sound strange, but some churches were 250 miles away and only accessible in the dry season and even then it was advisable to use a four wheel drive vehicle. As it was impossible to get there and back in a day many priests still went “on trek” and would spend a month or two visiting churches before returning home. My visitation usually spread over a couple of days to try to get to know the people as well as to see to the business affairs of the churches. Most churches held up remarkably well under the difficulties encountered but some were little more than a couple of families meeting under a tree.

As Archdeacon I was on all the diocesan committees. As I was known to have close ties to the other denominations I was asked to write the Diocesan response to the WCC report on baptism Eucharist and ministry.

Just before we left a school trip went tragically wrong. The children had been taken to the top of Zimbabwe’s highest mountain – Inyangani. But when they came down one was missing even though they had been carefully counted at the top and paired off and a teacher had followed to mop up the stragglers. A search was started which lasted most of the week without success. But over 50 of the local farmers went up to the mountain to join the search and a local hotelier opened her rooms for them and provided food each evening. She was well known to the farmers as a bit of a dragon who had thrown most of them out of a hotel in Chinhoyi when she was landlady there. But for the search she could not have been more helpful. Then a group of children came from another school for a walking holiday. They were supposed to wear uniform for the evening meal but one child dared no leave off his tie. When the owner saw him she tried to throw him out of the dining room. But he looked across at us – just down from the mountain, muddy, wet and bedraggled. And he said, What about them? She simply replied, They’re not there.