We got to do it five days in a row – each service lasting around three hours and part of our mutual exchange as we encouraged and taught amongst the very hospitable people.
We were never bored – Shona worship is exciting and exhilarating.
Here, in Muuyu, the musical Mr Bunda motivates the congregation. Who would have thought that the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah followed this?
(Please excuse the 10 seconds of side-flip – I got carried away!)

There were more-or-less sedate but still exuberant songs mostly carried by the women, wearing a denominationally defining red and white ensemble worn on special occasions and the first Sunday of the month. I’ve attempted to learn the Shona words to this one (“Jesus keep me near the cross”).

Each day has particular memories of conversations and events that emerged as part of our mutual ministry together. The sounds of worship in these rural churches for which some of the congregation regularly make two hour journeys on foot will remain in our auditory consciousness for a long time, however.

… that’s how someone described a first time encounter with Africa.

I recall my first day in Bulawayo standing on the pavement outside a courier’s office where my colleagues were spending considerable time. They were hopefully negotiating the reduction of storage fees for a box of solar lights that had been mailed over to assist students in night time studies. I found the sights, sounds, smells and sights of the street rich and varied – a surprise for every time I blinked. Such was my fascination I had a hard time looking bored and nonchalant, trying not to stand out as I leaned against a verandah post. The shop facades across the road were grand and faded and with impossible names. A kaleidoscope crossed time and took me back into the fifties of my childhood when shops were called emporiums and mothers dressed up with hat, gloves and handbag for their buying expeditions. The chirrups of mobile phones brought the contemporary into the vintage street scene which now included donkey carts, high fashion and rustic personalities bearing heavy looking sacks on their heads.

I could have stood there for hours, just absorbing the street scene with its vibrant colours, its mixed aromas of spice, jacaranda and donkey dung – and the wonderful sounds of Shona speech and cowbells while an ox wagon trundled by.

Africa was getting into my blood stream.