Day 7 – 20th January 2023
Our original plans to visit an individual fell through so we fell back on our alternative plan to head back to the church property and find the seventh and final corner marker. This would give Mabasa a better idea of the layout in the real word so it will hopefully be easier to visualize the placement of things. After school Christal join us to see the land like she had before. Unfortunately it rained in the afternoon, but fortunately it stopped as we arrived.
I had planned to try and go live on YouTube from the plot, but the clouds and rain again disturbed the cellphone network signal so I couldn’t even try. By the time we got back to the house and everyone was settled, we all decided to call it an early night since we had to be up and out of the house early the next morning. That meant no live Bible study in Zimbabwe on this trip.
Everything seemed a little different after the rain. The trees and bushes were more full of leaves. The darker greens seemed to stand out more under the cover of the clouds. As we drove along the road we could tell that the grasses had already grown out further than they were just a few days ago. The sandy ground was a little softer. The frogs were quite a bit louder.
We started in a familiar corner near where the main entrance will one day be. Then we headed just up the road to where the neighbor’s fence meets our property. I again tried taking pictures of each of the markers (I forgot two, but took a picture of one of the markers from a neighboring plot to make up for it) so I could go back and check the location from my photos. I’m hoping I can trace the perimeter on a satellite image. We’ll see if it works.
We actually found the seventh market fairly quickly after walking along the fence line. On our last visit to the plot I had guessed where I thought it might be and I was almost exactly correct. After walking past the last marker to where one fence ends and another begins, we found another marker that we thought might have been the one we had sought after. But if that other market was ours the property would have been larger than we thought. Mabasa knows the dimensions and was able to call the surveyor to help verify the actual corner marker. He also backtracked along the fence line, counting meter wide steps as he went to estimate the distance from one marker to another.
After verifying the marker I decided to walk across the southern end of the property in the opposite direction than I had gone before. By that time I could almost see the water from the grass passing out of my shoes. Thankfully I packed a second pair of shoes to wear on the Sabbath. I walked all the way across and Mabasa and Christal followed after we triple verified the location of the seventh marker. Everything was lining up with the shape on the survey’s map.
Before we headed home for the day I decided to take a few minutes and walk to the big tree that’s nearly at the center of the property. It’s a beautiful tree which really makes the land picturesque in the rain or the sunshine. I’m not sure what kind of tree it is, but hopefully it’s the type of tree that grows for a very long time. We’d like to keep it around. To the northeast of the big tree is a stand of trees that seemed to be surrounding a small hill. I decided to try and walk up the small hill. It turned out to be a termite mound and I decided it might be disastrous to try and walk up the side of it. There’s always the chance that other creatures such as snakes might also have made their home near such a mound.
We climbed in the truck and headed home where we had a chance to dry off just before Chisomo and Layla got home. This time we didn’t watch cartoons in the afternoon. We attempted to make masks and butterfly wings from cardboard. Layla proudly proclaimed that she was going to sleep in her wings and wear them to school next week. As the sun was setting and the Sabbath beginning, we sat down for a meal together. Once dinner was finished we chatted for a little while, went over the plan for the morning, and called it an early night.
– Lewis VanAusdle
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