Saturday, February 13, 2010

orphan care support

Hazelbank Presbyterian Church in Coleraine, Ireland, is supporting two community based orphan care centres, which is a really great project that I think is pretty cool. Here are some pictures from this week of the kids there (44 photos).

drought

In our newsletter we wrote about "who's keeping the rains?" Well, we've had a few rainfalls since then but also another 2 week dry spell, which at the cobbing stage of maize is really not a good thing. In some places the rains arrived at just the right time that even though the maize is only 3-4ft tall, it produced some decent size cobs. But in other places the maize is just small and dry. I visited Chingale on Monday, which is an area that's in the rainshadow of Zomba Mountain and suffers from chronic food shortages and food distributions every year. We found some pretty pathetic looking maize gardens in some areas there that definitely won't be producing much maize. But you really don't need to go far. Here in Zomba we've had more rain than in some areas just outside the city. You only have to drive 10 minutes to see fields of shriveled up maize 3 feet tall -- it's really depressing, and alarming too because people are surviving the hunger gap right now and counting on a harvest in March that won't be there. I hear the central and northern regions have been getting enough rain so hopefully the country will produce a surplus in those parts to feed the south. Please pray for rains so that some of the maize can still produce something. (13 photos)

the VanWoerdens in Malawi | Emmanuel International