wfn.org | Dendera Mission offers hope for children of Zimbabwe

[NewsDesk <NewsDesk@UMCOM.UMC.ORG>]

July 12, 1999    News media contact: Tim Tanton*(615)742-5470*Nashville,
Tenn.   10-31-71BP{370}

NOTE: Photographs are available with this story.

A UMNS News Feature
By Dean Snyder*

Dendera Mission is Bishop Christopher Jokomo's pride and joy.  

Under his leadership, the mission has grown from a center providing basic
services for needy people into a cutting-edge laboratory for economic and
educational development. 

A rural settlement in a remote area of eastern Zimbabwe near the Mozambique
border, the community served by Dendera Mission was largely ignored by
government, churches, everyone, according to Jokomo, who heads the United
Methodist Church in Zimbabwe.  

The denomination supported a church building, a medical clinic, an ambulance
and a school at Dendera, but the children there didn't have much of a
future, according to the bishop. Some might make their way to Harare, the
nation's capital, but without advanced education, they would likely join the
ranks of the city's poor and homeless.

Through Methodist Rural Industrial Development (MRID), a ministry of the
Zimbabwe Annual Conference's Council on Ministries, Jokomo has opened a
sunflower oil-processing plant, a demonstration farm and a reforestation
project at Dendera Mission.  

The projects expand the capacity of the local economy and offer Dendera's
young people an alternative to fleeing to the big cities to find jobs.

Before the sunflower oil-processing plant opened two years ago, Dendera
farmers had no choice but to ship their sunflower seeds into Harare, more
than three hours away, to be processed. The extracted sunflower seed oil
from Harare would then be sold in Dendera's stores for Z$120 per two-liter
bottle (the equivalent of $3.38 in U.S. currency and about four days' wages
for a school teacher in Zimbabwe).  

Now, Dendera farmers sell their seeds to MRID's plant at the same price paid
by Harare processors, but they and their neighbors can buy the oil for only
Z$65 a bottle, cutting their cost almost in half.  Other benefits from the
project include the employment of a dozen men and the production of a cake
left after the oil has been squeezed from the seed that is excellent feed
for livestock on the demonstration farm.  

At the reforestation project, workers such as Grace Nyakasaka and Netsai
Saragado start trees from cuttings and sell the potted plants. Many of the
plants are fruit trees.  

"The idea is that people who have lost trees can remake the forest, but at
the same time we want to feed people," Jokomo said. "Lime, lemon, and mango
trees -- these are good ways to get vitamin C."

The bishop is proud that women are among the workers at the reforestation
project.  

"Elsewhere in our culture this would be man's work; women would be carrying
firewood," he said. Because of the AIDS epidemic, which is killing at least
one-fourth of the Zimbabwean population, it is especially important that
women be economically independent in order to protect them from sexual
predators, he said. 

Jokomo hopes to initiate other development projects at Dendera, such as a
plant for recycling scrap metal.

But right now he is building a post-secondary vocational school at the
mission that he intends to open in March. "In order to break the cycle of
poverty and lack of opportunity, school is very important," he said. 

However, it must be a school where children learn how to raise goats as well
as how to add one plus one, he said. It must be a school where children
learn about photosynthesis by doing projects at the demonstration farm
rather than by watching a plant grow in a paper cup on the windowsill, he
said. It must be a school where students learn how to make a hoe rather just
than how to count out bus fare to ride into Harare to buy one.

"What good is it if children know how to spell but can't recognize a mango
in a tree?" Jokomo asked.

The school will train students to farm and to participate in
MRID-appropriate technology industries. "It will include all the traditional
high school subjects but with a clear focus on doing things with your hands,
doing things practically," the bishop said. 

The campus, which currently has several half-finished buildings, will open
in March, whether the buildings have roofs or not and whether electricity
has been run from the main road five kilometers away or not, he said.  

The school's initial class will have 70 students, most of whom will be
girls, the bishop said. Eventually, it will grow to 600 students.

"The needs here are great," Jokomo said.  "We are not going to hand out
money. We are going to give them basic skills. If you want to destroy a
bishop's morale, have him come here to preach a revival and see all these
women and children who have nothing."

Jokomo hosted a visit to Dendera Mission by Bishop Felton Edwin May and a
busload of Baltimore-Washington Annual (regional) Conference leaders on July
1. Jokomo presented the Zimbabwe Conference projects already in operation
there and asked for the U.S. conference's partnership in opening Dendera
School.

The school is Zimbabwe's primary project in the Council of Bishops' "Hope
for the Children of Africa" appeal. The appeal is a denomination-wide effort
to raise $12 million and to send 100 mission workers to Africa for projects
that help children.

May and a 39-member delegation from the Baltimore-Washington Conference were
in Zimbabwe to lead an annual pastors' school as part of a partnership
between the two conferences established three years ago. 

May, who first visited Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia, 25 years ago, called the
Dendera Mission project "one of the most exciting efforts in Zimbabwe since
the founding of Africa University."  

He pledged the Baltimore-Washington Conference's support in opening the
school by March. "We are not erecting buildings," he said. "We are molding
and shaping lives."

# # # 

*Snyder is director of communications for the United Methodist Church's
Baltimore-Washington Annual Conference.