Day 39 - The First Farewell For The Lollypop Bandits

Today was a really miserable day with poor weather and our first farewell for the trip (with many more still to come).

Devine and I

The other half of the Addison crew arrived sometime in the last couple of days and today they all wanted to go out to Willow Park and see what the SJC is all about.  We left fairly early as we also needed to do some shopping afterwards.

We arrived at Willow Park at about 10ish and went straight to the see the babies downstairs.  As usual, the kids jumped on us as we walked in though the doors and were all full of smiles and giggles.  The Addison crew had the chance to take lots of photos during the hour that we were there (it felt like much less).

Before we went upstairs, Auntie Deb gave the other guys a quick pep-talk about what the SJC is, the sort of situations that the girls are from and what was going to happen when they went upstairs.  Going upstairs, the girls sung Kumbayah and played Hakuna Wakaita on the guitars.

We've been here for almost five weeks now and tomorrow we leave for a two week holiday up north at Victoria Falls.  Because of the timing of our trip and the starting date for school next year, today was the last day with the girls going to boarding school next year.  One of those girls was Devine, my adopted sister.  Saying goodbye was hard...really hard, and this was just one goodbye with many more to come in a few weeks.

The front of Hotel Rio

After we left Willow Park we stopped by Hotel Rio to see where the SJC want to be.  Hotel Rio is a hotel that is closing up because of the lack of people staying there.  It has not been doing well financially because when the new highway was built 15 years ago, people stopped driving past the hotel and thus stopped staying there.  The hotel is estimated to cost USD500,000 and is in a 'walk in' condition with furniture, linen, kitchenware, etc all included.  The benefit of owning the hotel is that they would have more space compared to Willow Park, everyone would be able to stay on-site and the SJC would be able to start putting programs in place to begin generating income for themselves.

Our supplies for the next two weeks

Leaving Hotel Rio we headed into town to fix a puncture (again), visit the bank and buy some lollypops (a.k.a. suckers).  We visited four people sitting on the street corner that were selling suckers.  At R1 each, we purchased every sucker that the four had with them - 138 in total.

We endeavor to keep the blog going over the next couple of weeks, however if we can't get mobile reception, please forgive us for our silence.

Thanks for reading,



Alex