Home Jones

The trip home is always long and bumpy and it's great when it's finally over. I’ve blogged about Mozambique’s EN1 (National Highway #1) on other occasions, and every time we travel it, I can’t help but include at least one photo of the event. Every trip on the EN1 is an event because:

1. The bad and deteriorating asphalt can be downright dangerous.
2. The trip from Chimoio to Nelspruit is a 2-day marathon with few facilities along the way.
3. Every trip here is an adventure in itself.

You know the highway is bad when vehicles straddle the asphalt and the dirt shoulder in an attempt to find the good spots.

Passing slower traffic ahead of you is always very tricky because at the last minute, the car you’re passing may swerve to miss a huge hole. A “beep-beep” warning is advisable!

Negotiating a road like this is like picking your way through a life-sized maze. It’s a constant challenge to calculate where the deepest holes are, then to weave to and fro trying to miss them in order to minimize damage and stress on the tires, on the stuff we’re hauling that gets jostled around, and on us too ☺

Oddly enough, there are parts of this trip we rather enjoy, like the captivating scenery along the way or just seeing how time changes things. Or, in the case of the potholes, how it doesn’t!

Some of the exciting changes back home are:

The arrival of the floor tile for our house! The ceiling is up in our bedroom and still needs to be put up in the rest of the house. Door and window frames are going in and several of our homemade doors are ready as well. There’s lots of other work going on around here, so progress on the house is rather slow. But hey, progress is progress!


We have a growing number of guinea fowl, both for distribution to needy homes as well as for the mission’s own breeding stock, which will be used for the same purpose—distribution. Several of the guinea fowl hens are already laying eggs and I now have a broody chicken hen whose job is to hatch them. 

I called her "Chiquinha" because she's small. She could be a pretty busy lady since the average guinea fowl hen will lay 50-150 eggs per laying season! I'm presently looking for other, preferably larger, hens to help her out. 

The guinea fowl eggs are rather cute. They’re a bit smaller than chicken eggs. The chicken egg is the one on the far left.


I’ve decided that we need a proper pen now to keep them in, one with a good roof, perches and nests. So that has been one of this week’s projects for me, and a fun one at that!


This is the new A frame pen. Nice thing is, we can roof it with the twisted and otherwise useless  sheets of tin roofing that were torn off an orphan home during a storm a few weeks ago. 

Here's Liria's house with a new and improved roof. Our sincere thanks to all who have given to help those whose homes suffered storm damage.

So the orphan home gets a new roof, and the birds’ home does too. I love it when a plan comes together. 

P.S. "What's with the 'Jones' in the title?" you ask. It's just one of those little family sayings I picked up from, most memorably, mom Lagore, and it basically meant "Time to go home." It may have its origins in "Bring home Jones", which I think is a baseball term that is synonymous with a home run. Don't quote me on that though. I know much more about going home than I do about baseball.