Dear friends,
Since the 8th of May we are back from our visits in Germany and Switzerland. We had a wonderful time visiting friends and received much encouragement. To take a boat ride down the Elbe river from Königstein to Pirna with our two grandchildren was certainly one of the highlights of our trip. During the first week in Germany, Christiane had some appointments with a cardiologist. Several ECG’s and other tests later, the doctor found no constrictions in her arteries that would have required a stint or other operation. She will continue with the meds, which the doctor here in Zambia had prescribed already. After some time another check-up may be useful.
Toward the end of our trip we spent a few days in Switzerland. Amadeus and his friend Daniel from Zürich had been working on a new web site for the Good Hope work here. However this site is not activated yet because it still requires some sorting, translations etc. to make it complete. This project has been in the making for a while but Amadeus and Daniel are so busy in their jobs that they just do not have the time regularly attend to our web site. So now Michael Fischer and Michael Friederici, both living in the Rhein-Main metropolitan area will work on completing this task and we hope to finish and activate the new web site in a few weeks time. I think Daniel and Amadeus have done a superb job which I am sure you will like once you see it. New Wells In our Nov 2018 news letter I wrote about the new wells we had been drilling. The pipes and pumps for that arrived just a day after we left for Germany in early April. Our employees here have done a good job in preparing the installations. So now we were busy from May 8 to May 17 to get the first of those two wells connected. It was quite a lot of work, laying down about half a mile of piping, installing the electricity to the well houses and then finally putting pumps down the wells about 240 feet deep.
This is simply wonderful because we will really need this water the next few months. This is a great gift for which we are truly thankful: fresh clean water.
The first test pumping. This amounts to about 2000 gallons per hr
While in Germany during April, we did receive some more rain here, but the total for the season is still very low. This rain certainly was far too late for the corn ( or as we call it here: maize ) but it was good for the grazing. The water situation will be on our mind for the rest of the year. Zambias electricity comes from hydro-power stations along the Zambezi and Kafue rivers. After a normal rainy season the peak water level is usually reached toward the end of April. However this year the water levels have been dropping already in March. There has not been an official announcement yet, but we expect the electricity to be rationed with periodic load-shedding beginning in June or July. So our three wells which operate with solar power will really come in handy this year. Although the solar technology has given us some head aches the last three years, I think that by now we have over come some of those growing pains and it will work reliably this year.
For today we sent our greetings
Yours Klaus and Christiane Müller