We picked up all the uniforms we ordered for our sponsored children, including shirt, shorts, socks, shoes & a hat for the boys and dress, socks, shoes and a hat for the girls.  We also purchased satchels for two of our girls going to secondary school.  Along with uniform we have also purchased exercise books, maths books, pencils, pens, book covers & rulers, so that next term every child has all they need.  We will be handing these out to the children before they start school again on May 3^rd after their holiday that started at Easter. We also bought a box of chalk for each school, just a token gift, as they mentioned how they were struggling to even afford that.

We travelled to Harare early Thursday morning to renew my visa – how can it be a month already?  It also gave us the opportunity to sort out the backup power for our incubator.  The few trial eggs we put in failed as power was off for 4 days, we knew it might happen hence we really needed to get the backup power sorted so that we can start using the incubator properly.  A solar battery and gas tank does the trick.  When we have electricity, the incubator charges the solar battery as well, when we don’t, we already have a solar panel to charge it by.  The trip to Harare also enabled us to buy a few essentials that are hard to find around here, insect repellent & sun-cream being the main two items.  On our way back from Harare we also visited a chicken farm to purchase some fertilised road runner eggs for us to incubate as well.

On our return from Harare we loaded 196 quail eggs & 28 roadrunner eggs into the incubator.  The quail eggs take 17/18 days and the roadrunners around 21 days.  We look forward to seeing how many babies we get!  We are planning to load quail eggs every 7 days, which will be around 150 eggs at a time.

Our guinea fowl that had been sitting on her eggs suddenly appeared and behind her two chicks.  Apparently guinea fowl stop sitting on their eggs once the first few hatch (learning new things every day!), so we quickly put the remaining 8 eggs into the incubator.  It was amazing as you could hear the chicks chirping in the shells.  The next day 5 chicks had hatched and one more hatched this morning (Monday 18^th).

Talking of babies our pregnant goat hasn’t dropped yet but is certainly looking bigger.

Our vegetable garden also got a gift from Harare as we managed to buy more seeds and have sown cauliflower, carrots, onions, spring onions, butternut, cucumber and peppers.  The tomato, rape and cabbage we sowed earlier has come up and will soon be transplanted from the seed beds to growing beds.

This week we are hoping to visit as many of the families who have started projects as possible and also to hand out the school uniform but this will really depend on the car as it is still playing up.