Zimunya at last!

On Tuesday, July 28, we finally made it to the Zimunya Skills Training Centre to do some work. We had gone there Monday afternoon, after a marvelous lunch at St. Peters United Methodist Church in Mutare. We had met the builder and contractor and reviewed the situation before heading back to Mutare.

On Tuesday morning, we arrived ready to work. Work was primarily the relocation of bricks. The skilled labor was being done by those hired for the purpose. The five of us were there to provide unskilled support, supplemented by enthusiasm and good intentions. We were joined by several local residents who turned up to help. Amazingly enough, we had just enough work gloves for each of us to have at least one--and for most of us to have two!

There is a paved road almost all the way to the Skills Training Centre site. It is situated on sixty hectares (about 150 acres) of land donated for development and use by the Mutare District of The United Methodist Church. The Skills Training Centre is just the first step in a long range process. It has been under construction since the year 2000. Steady progress had been made year by year until 2008. There was some concern that the project had stalled, perhaps permanently, but there turned out to be renewed enthusiasm for moving forward.

One of the things that impressed me immediately was the size of the structure. It is much larger than I had imagined. I was pleased to see that work was being completed on the two gables. This was needed before the roof could be put in place. So too was the addition of some rows of brick on the two side walls.

Our principal task at the Skills Training Centre was the moving of bricks. Each of the bricks had been made by hand--three at a time. There was a pile of them at one end of the building that needed to be a variety of other places--some of them inside and others outside the building. Skilled workers were laying the bricks in place. We provided the unskilled labor needed to move the bricks where they were needed.

We tried several different ways of moving the bricks before settling on a solution. We started out--perhaps in a typical American fashion--by carrying the bricks ourselves. I could carry four or five bricks stacked up in one hand and one or two in the other hand. Others used the wheelbarrow that was available. Both of these approaches proved to be rapidly tiring Another segment of our work team tried brick tossing, but that didn't seem like a long-term, viable solution either!

The idea that finally took hold was to work together, and so we did. It was hand-to-hand and brick-by-brick. It wasn't complicated, but it worked. We tried singing, but nobody came up with anything that seemed suitable. "I've been workin' on the railroad" was the closest, but it didn't gain much of a following.

Instead we visited--some in English and others in Shona--and enjoyed one another's company. It didn't matter that we didn't always understand the language others spoke. It didn't matter where we came from or where we were going. What mattered was that we found a way to work together, making the work lighter by sharing it with others.

It was good to be in Zimunya at last!