THE BUSH BUNNY UP TO HER EARS IN CORN!

June 2nd, dawned as the first day of legal corn buy­ing in Mozambique.
Like a race horse in the start­ing chute, our trucks left at 5:30a.m. to grab the first 400 bags of corn in a near­by village.

The state gov­er­nor came out on June 1st to warn peo­ple to guard their food this year, as many will go hun­gry all over Mozam­bique due to a poor har­vest.  Some coun­ties had a fair har­vest while oth­er coun­ties had lit­tle to none.
The locals are call­ing this the YEAR OF HUNGER.
The Lord has told us to BUILD a new barn and fill it up to help feed the chil­dren who will suf­fer this year.
Our Melu­co orphans are in grave dan­ger as there are less than 20 tons of corn in that whole coun­try for sale. (Our orphan­age man­ag­er, Sylvia, is liv­ing in a tent this week in a remote vil­lage in order to buy as much corn as he can in the only area that has any corn in Melu­co coun­ty).  Our 400 orphans and wid­ows in that area require 44 TONS/year, so you can image how this short­age will affect the oth­er 20,000 chil­dren in that area.  We will do all we can to give to ALL the chil­dren in that area but the needs will be overwhelming.

The 42 sup­port posts for the barn’s walls have been set in con­crete.   Clark Stid­ham, retired fire­fight­er from Col­orado Springs, spent all Sat­ur­day morn­ing cut­ting 100 4X4’s into 2X4’s with our elec­tric cir­cu­lar saw (run by gen­er­a­tor), cut­ting 2 weeks off the con­struc­tion time.  BY HAND, it would have tak­en our car­pen­ters 1 hour per 4X4 to do the same work.

From Wed. to Sat­ur­day this week, Clark, Louis (18 year old from San Mar­cos), and our 60 barn work­ers sprayed, bagged, and stored 55+ TONS of beans.  We man­aged to buy over 90% of the avail­able beans in this coun­ty before oth­er buy­ers showed up.
Each bag weighs about 120 lbs, mak­ing it no lit­tle job to move them one bag at a time to the bean warehouse.
This 60 man crew moved 15–20 TONS PER DAY by hand and com­plet­ed the bean pro­cess­ing in 2.5 days.

Corn pro­cess­ing moved at a record rate on Sat­ur­day when they processed and stored 27+ tons in 5 hours!

Eric with his 6 ton truck crew and our trac­tor with its 5 ton trail­er are busy haul­ing in the corn.  They trans­port­ed 46 TONS of our 300 TONS to our barn in 4 days.
God is answer­ing our prayers by speed­ing up the whole process, leav­ing lit­tle for the export buy­ers to send to oth­er countries.

SNAKE SCARE for our new visitors.
Clark and Bar­bara Stid­ham went to Eric’s house to check e‑mails at dusk one evening this week.  As they opened his door to leave, they found a 2 foot ADDER (rat­tlesnake with­out the rat­tle), STRETCHED ACROSS the door­way!  This has hap­pened a few times before at Eric’s house as they are look­ing for warmth on his con­crete steps that get the late evening sun.
Severe weath­er changes over Africa this year are mak­ing the tem­per­a­tures MUCH COLDER than usu­al.  It is 55 degrees F (15C) INSIDE MY HOUSE this morn­ing as I write this.  Nor­mal­ly this type of weath­er only comes in July.  There is no way to warm our hous­es, so we have to dress warm.  Nev­er has it been this cold in June dur­ing my 20 years here.
When the temps cooled off in May, I knew it would be a cold June/July.  I sent Pas­tor Fred with funds to buy heavy sweat­shirts this year to make sure our kids kept warm.  We also gave out blan­kets to over 800 orphans in our pro­gram who didn’t have one.

Know we appre­ci­ate your prayers and love gifts very much as we con­tin­ue to haul in the corn that will feed the hun­gry chil­dren in our area till the next har­vest in April, 2011.
GOD’S BLESSINGS TO ALL OF YOU, and THANK YOU for mak­ing it pos­si­ble for us to FILL THE BARNS of our Joseph Program.

Bush Bun­ny Bren­da and all the Moz. staff