Last weekend was our first St Mark's Quilters monthly workshop for the year, and guess which half of Team Di had flown away to Africa leaving the other one to do all the work. Never mind, the ladies were in capable hands with Di B in charge.
I thought I might just share with you a selection of the quilts we made for the children of families affected by these devastating Blue Mountains fires late last year.
So how did you spend your Saturday? Mine was quite nice, thank you.
Who am I kidding? It was amazing!
It began with a morning visit to Wendi's quilting group in Bulawayo, and ended several hundred kilometers away sipping 'sundowners' in the bush and photographing giraffes.
Note yours truly standing in long grass. Aren't I brave?
It's always fun seeing what quilters in other places are making, and these were a few of the cute Show and Tell pieces on display at the Bulawayo Quilt Guild
Sourcing a range of good quality quilting fabrics hasn't been easy for these ladies for many years. Even mail order is difficult, so I think they do exceptionally well.
Those little frolicking sheep are all cross stitched.
Wendi had been asked to do a demonstration of the Disappearing Nine Patch Block, which she broadened to include even more aways to use charm squares.
Finally, to many 'oohs' and 'aahs', she inveiled her latest quilt top, the As Time Goes By quilt, where she used charm squares to make all those pinwheel blocks.
Inspired by the patchwork quilt on the bed in the TV series, "As Time Goes By", Wendi has spent months creating her own variation, with an exquisite feathered star medallion in the centre which she's going to dab with weak coffee to mellow the whiteness of the background fabric to tone in more with the reproduction fabrics.
The drive north through intermittent rain provided some stunning skies.
Our destination, Ivory Lodge, near the Hwange Game Park, was another 'pinch me' moment.
That's my kind of camping!
We had yesterday's activities all worked out, but God, it turned out, had other plans.plans to open my eyes.
Somewhere between the visit to my hosts' biscuit and sweet factory (amazing, fun and very delicious!), and coffee with one of Wendi's many friends, she and I found ourselves sitting in Debbie Brennocks' office at the Sandra Jones Centre, tears welling in our eyes, listening to stories of young sexually abused black Zimbabwean girls.
Several years ago Cathy Smith, an online friend from Quilt With Christ NZAU, encouraged some members to make quilts for children in the Sandra Jones Centre, an orphanage in Zimbabwe. Debbie Brennocks, the Director, is an Australian who has spent 25 years in Zimbabwe, and Cathy, a fellow Queenslander, had heard of her work through her church and wanted to help.
At the time I wasn't in a position to become actively involved, just made a donation towards the cost of posting the quilts to Zimbabwe, and that was that. I had no idea where in Africa Zimbabwe was, hadn't yet met Wendi, and certainly never dreamt I would one day travel to Bulawayo!
I've never met Cathy face to face, but when she saw on Facebook that I was in Bulawayo this week she reminded me that the Sandra Jones Centre was right here. Thinking we might just drive past and take a picture, I asked Wendi if she knew where to find it. She did! And she insisted that we go in.
What we saw and heard touched our hearts in the most extraordinary way.
Debbie welcomed us with open arms, and dropped everything to show us around. It was so heartwarming to see the rooms where the girls sleep, their beds covered with bright quilts lovingly made by Cathy and her online quilting friends.
Most of Debbie's young charges are girls, and the shocking fact that brought us to tears is that most have been orphaned or abandoned after being sexually abused or raped, generally by members of their own family.
Apparently one in three girls in this country will have been sexually abused by the age of 18.
Through an open door we glimpsed a young girl, a rape victim who had been brought to the centre the night before, huddled on her bed.
Every new arrival at the Sandra Jones Centre, an old hotel purchased a couple of years ago, is given her very own quilt to keep. These quilts are absolutely treasured by the girls who often come to the centre with almost nothing. Debbie told us of one who even arrived wearing a hessian bag and no underwear.
Here they sleep in spotless ex-hotel rooms, in bunks sleeping 3 or 4 to a room, receive ongoing counseling from qualified counsellors, and go to school or receive vocational training.
The grounds are beautiful, and in such an oasis the children are helped to heal their deep hurts and turn their lives around.
The property stretches over many acres, and Debbie has planted a huge vegetable garden which feeds the 80 or so residents who range from the little 18 months old poppet you see at the top of my post to young ladies of 18 studying for their O Levels.
Their need is great, not only because the Sandra Jones Centre is a charity dependent on donations, but because there is so much bureaucratic corruption in Zimbabwe.
Even basic medicines can run short, with tragic consequences. Debbie lost a little 18 month old orphaned boy from pneumonia purely because the hospital where he was being treated had no paracetamol to bring down his temperature.
If you're interested in helping, even a tiny bit, please take a look at the Sandra Jones Centre web page where Debbie has listed some very concrete and practical ways we can make a difference in a child's life.
And if you can't help, please pray for them. It's a long way from Australia and if I hadn't seen the work here with my own eyes I would never have had them opened to the shockingly widespread problem of child sexual abuse among the black population.
The message on the wall is true. There is so much love in the Sandra Jones Centre which, by the way, was named in memory of Debbie's fellow Australian colleague who died of cancer several years ago.
As the sign at the gate says - "Save the life of a child today and you change the world tomorrow."
Its Friday in Bulawayo and In the pitch black pre-dawn I'm lying in bed listening to the soft, steady rain falling. The ground-shaking rumblings of tropical scale thunder first woke me, like the sound of someone trundling a huge wooden cart down the bumpy road, and the light bulb flashes on the palm trees seemed to go on for hours before the first, gentle drops of rain finally splashed onto the tiles outside my window.
This, I'm told, is how it's been for weeks here, since the drought broke, with torrential rain falling day after day.
Until Wednesday when I arrived to this glorious dawn in Johannesburg.
My first full day here in Bulawayo was the same, sunny and warm, perfect for a bit of bush-bashing in the Matopo hills.
So off we went, my quilting friend Wendi and I, a couple of chicks in a 4 wheel drive, with our cameras, a picnic lunch and a healthy sense of adventure. Wendi is a local so I was in good hands.
This wasn't quite the adventure I had in mind, but roadblocks are a fact if life in this country. We were stopped three times in my first 24 hours here.
The rains have greened up the countryside and filled the dams, but made some of the dirt roads impassable, so there was a fair bit of backing up.
We eventually made to the Rhodes Matopos National Park where we climbed the huge granite outcrop of World's View.
Wendi tells me those grasses have sprung up from the crevices in the rock just since the rains.
The view from the top was spectacular and well worth the climb.
Cecil Rhodes is buried here, his grave surrounded by nature's own sentinels, huge marble shaped rocks that seem to balance precariously.
I haven't edited the colours in these photos so the rich, warm tones of the splashes of bright yellow and orange lichen that you can see covering the rock are true to life.
World's View is home to these amazingly coloured lizards too! I think he's known as platysaurus intermedius rhodesianus, the Matopo Lizard.
Later we sat under a shady tree by the overflowing Maleme Dam and ate cold chicken in our fingers.
Heavenly!
We were blessed to have such perfect weather for going bush yesterday, but now the rain is back. Never mind, it's all part of the rich African experience and I'm relishing every moment.
Have I seen any wild animals yet? Of yes! But that will have to wait for another day 😊
Well, my year has started on a reasonably (for me) productive note, with a growing stack of Economy Blockalong blocks waiting to have their bunny ears trimmed off and be cut down to size.
I like to chain stitch them, first pinning the triangles in place and stackng them beside the machine ready for the assembly line.
Then on a bright a summer's day last week it seemed appropriate to use some of my very favourite, sunny Kaffe Fassett fabrics to make these padded coat hangers.
Speaking of hang-ups (how's that for a segue?), have you seen this woman lately?
She used to be so adventurous, hugging tigers in Thailand, riding camels in the Middle East, roaring through the Arabian desert on the back of a clapped out ute following in the steps of Lawrence of Arabia...
But after seeing a precious life extinguished in seconds, she's so conscious of the fragility of life that she's becoming afraid of her own shadow.
You've probably realized by now that I'm talking about myself, a bit of a 'cowardy custard' these days without my man.
So when blogging friends started writing about their Word for 2014 and asking me for mine I felt it was time to take a good hard look at myself and decide on a characteristic I'd like to embrace this year.
COURAGE
That's it. My Word for 2014. And I'm going to need a humongous dose of it.
As I write this I'm sitting at a departure gate about to embark on a huge adventure, I'm on my way to Africa to visit my friend Wendi, a quilter, in Zimbabwe for a few days, and then I'm Botswana bound, to see Sarah. She lives in a country where, as far as I can gather, deadly snakes, spiders and scorpions abound, rhinos charge, baboons will abscond with your groceries, and roaring lions prowl the bush at night. I'm not sounding very courageous yet, am I?
On my way, traveling alone for the first time, I have to negotiate airports I've never been to before, and learn to cope with take-offs without anxiously grasping the arm of the surprised stranger seated beside me.
My phone is loaded with recordings of some of Boak's sermons, so I can listen to his wise words, and Di B has made me some pretty luggage tags.
Another friend has given me a new jacket in my very favourite colour to keep me dry in the tropical downpours Southern Africa is currently experiencing.
I have my hand sewing packed in a gorgeous Korean quilted satin bag that my daughter-in-law's mother gave me.
And Sarah and Wendi are forming a texting cheer squad to encourage me on the journey. I feel surrounded by so much love!
Best of all, I have this promise...
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