Happy Easter!

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Counting the Easter egg haul!
Easter egg hunt
Easter Brunch
Sunrise Easter Sunday
Sunrise service Easter sunday
Blowing out the candles!
Dr. Cheryl Kellert--Birthday Girl!
Major opening the container

Easter is always a 4 day holiday here in Zimbabwe. So Friday-Monday over Easter is holiday
time. That means we work like our usual Saturday—go to the hospital by 8 or 9 a.m. do rounds, write discharges, do any procedures and see patients who don’t know it is a holiday and forget Out-patient department is closed, and hopefully get home by 1 p.m. and not go
back in the afternoon.
Friday we got to the hospital at 8 a.m. as a team was going out for ART outreach clinic and we got them ready to go. Seth went as the driver and helper. Then I saw some patients who “forgot’ it was a holiday and did discharges. Then I went with Major to open the container which arrived the day before. We opened to find so many wonderful and needed things. We only got a couple of barrels and some other things out and by 1p.m. I was home to get lunch ready. My cook and
maid are off the holiday and so we are on our own for meals and clean-up. Seth and Cheryl are eating with me.
After lunch we got ready for a surprise birthday party for Cheryl. Her birthday was on the 4th of April—but that was the day she returned from Chinhoyi and we had no time to celebrate. So we cooked lasagna and invited the doctors and Mereki family to celebrate. We have a tradition here of wearing the birthday hat, glasses, sash and blue gloves!

I gave her my birthday scrub top to put on too. We had a great celebration and at 7 p.m. we
were joined by others for our prayer time and a movie afterwards.

Saturday morning we went to the hospital and had planned to do a hysterectomy. Saw a few patients and then went to theater. I put the spinal in and we started the surgery thinking we would remove the uterus because of fibroids and got in and found out there was a mass all over her bladder—so we took a sample and closed her up and will see what the biopsy shows and then treat from there. Looks like a malignancy. We were home by noon in order to get lunch ready.
Major had left about 10 a.m. to go to a church meeting at Chivakenenyama about 1 hour towards Karoi from here. He preached and stayed for lunch and then came back to another church meeting at Jinga (about 40 minutes from here) to preach that night and Sunday morning. He
brought the tent to spend the night but only got about 2 hours of sleep. Everyone was singing and dancing and preaching all night until sunrise when church began. He said there was over 300 people there!
Saturday night we had the 2 doctors over for a movie. We started with my generator and then ZESA came back. It had been on straight from 9 p.m. Wed until 6 p.m. Saturday night.
We just started the movie and ZESA came back—wow! So turned off the generator and enjoyed the rest of the movie. I started making some food for Easter brunch and went to bed at 10 p.m.
Sunday morning our church was at 6 a.m. We met outside on benches and faced the hill
the sun rises over. Today it was a bit cloudy and a cool 69 degrees so I had a jacket on! We had a good service that ended with 2 baptisms and home at 8 a.m. to prepare brunch for 9 people at noon.
Got everything ready and started to put the last things in the oven to cook and got called for a C/Section at the hospital. So Seth, Cheryl and Dr. Kajese and I went off to do that. We postponed brunch until 1 p.m. and the Mereki family came over to join us! We had so much food and everyone ate so much no one wanted dinner tonight!

We went for church at the hospital at 5 p.m. and came home to relax and catch up on email and ZESA went out at 7:00 p.m.! Oh well we are all very tired so gives us an excuse to go off to bed early.
Tomorrow is Easter Monday so we are unsure what excitement awaits us! One thing that happened on Wednesday is that our phone service just started working again out of the blue! It had been dead for 2+ months and they got a generator going up near the tower and so now we have 24 hour service! It has been working straight through since Wednesday. Major was shocked when I called him in Harare Wednesday—he thought I must have driven to town! No more phone shop on the rock! My number from USA is: 011-263-772416270—we are 9 hours ahead of Pacific Daylight time

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