Glorious Days & Moonlit Nights

Tuesday 30th March

Early evening is a glorious time here. The air is cooling a little and the bright sun sheds beautiful colours through the scattered clouds, as it sinks towards the horizon. Today have been a lovely warm Zambian day and this evening even better than usual. The promised heavy showers never arrived and yesterday's rain never amounted to anything.

I awoke at about 5.20 am this morning and knew that I was meant to attend the 6 am service at the other end of town. The roads here (as in Monze) follow the points of the compass. The main road running North to South and the roads past the project and back to the Lusaka Road junction, running East to West. So as I headed West towards the main road the sun began to rise behind me as the full moon sank in the sky ahead of me. It is obvious here why there is a full moon, because this always seems to be the picture. Its as if there was a metal bar though the Earth with the moon at one end and the sun on the other. As the Earth turns the fixed sun and moon rotate on opposite sides. For just a brief moment both objects are in view with me in the middle! And of course the sun is shining directly at the moon. The bible reading that says God made the Sun to guard over the day and the Moon the night, comes alive as I see the Sun take over from the moon as it disappears beneath the horizon.

I have realised that at the church here, I have not seen any instruments. All the music is just sung – but of course in wonderful rich harmonies.

I am busy trying to tidy a few things up before I move the next stage of my visit. So I spent most of the day working from room with the computer checking the database and copying all I need to keep onto my flash drive. (my computer will not come with me to Monze.)

At lunchtime I arranged to give Andy a call. I wanted to see how well 'Skype' would work with the modem. I want to encourage Justine to keep in touch and this is a possibility. In fact it worked OK – the video was slow and fragmented, though I could recognise my son. The sound was fine and Justine and Moses, who had chanced to drop by, spent a few minutes chatting. Barby my daughter tried to join in but unfortunately didn't sort out her system before I ran out of talktime. We were able to send a few messages however and she told me she could hear me even if the conversation was uni-directional!

It has always struck me how rarely the clouds block the sun here in Zambia. In August and September it isn't surprising because there are often no clouds. However, today the sky had a lot of scattered clouds and yet I cannot remember going out when a cloud covered the sun. It then dawned on me that clouds are very much three dimensional objects and probably their height is often as much as their length and breadth. In England the sun always comes at low angle and therefore is likely to be obstructed by depth of the clouds. Here of course the sun is often almost vertically above and therefore is not affected by the clouds height! There is a very large field of view at Kaliyangile so the clouds I see, all gather on the horizon.

Enough of my Physics lesson. Tomorrow is my last day in Chisamba for a while and I will be heading for Monze and Easter. I look forward to meeting my old friends there but will hardly have time to say hallo before I say goodbye again. This phase of my trip has gone very fast – as I expected – I think it has been worthwhile. I have certainly got to develop my relationship with the people here on site and have come to know the new staff and trainees. I hope that we will get to know each other well as time goes on.

In case I don't get to post another blog before Sunday I wish you Peace and Joy this Easter.

With Love and prayers

Chris