Why bother? (Part 1)

In the next couple of blogs I want to highlight one of my daughters, Blessing. As I’ve gotten to know her better through the past four years, her desire to grow and mature in every area of life has inspired me. As her name says, I couldn’t keep the blessing to myself and asked her to share with you some of her journey.

I was born in Harare, Zimbabwe. When I was around four years old my granny decided to take care of me so that my mother could pursue another job. I grew up with my grandmother in a small town called Mount Darwin. During the school holidays we would go to the farm. I believe this was the time that I went through different experiences that made me feel the freedom and pleasure found in associating oneself with the natural environment. Some people like to call it a connection with nature, but I don’t think this captures exactly the feeling I had. If I explain it in terms of spirituality, I think my understanding of Genesis 1:28 and God’s love for creation developed when I was a child. This verse, “Then God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth’” became a reality to me.

Some of the vivid pictures I have of those childhood years are walking into the paddock with my cousin Simbarashe after it had rained the previous morning. We went to a big flat rock (we call it ruvare in Shona). There were several rock pools on this flat rock and we stopped at the first one to wash our small faces to remove the sleep, then at the next one we washed our hands, then at the next one we drank from it and at the last one we played with the water splashing it on each other’s clothes. When we got tired we sat on the rock basking in the sun and watched the brown and white robin birds (a type of bird in Zimbabwe) swimming in the rock pool in front of us.

I refer back to this time as the most amazing moments when I fell in love with the Creator. Biology was my favourite subject in school. This love for creation prompted me to want to do further studies that would equip me to take care of plants and animals. Because Zimbabwe had limited tertiary and career opportunities in this field, I decided to see if educational institutions in South Africa offered such programmes. I received a booklet from Cape Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town and when I scanned through the countless degrees offered, my eyes fell on the name of a certain programme - Nature Conservation. At that moment I could see how the love God gave me for His creation could now become my career.

Since I grew up in such close contact with nature, concepts like ecosystem services that include products like clean drinking water and processes like decomposition of wastes were not difficult for me to understand. Indeed the theory taught at University was like breathing in and out. It was fascinating to discover that what my cousin and I had witnessed as children when the brown and white robins splashed in those rock pools was meant to refresh them in the heat. This was called thermoregulation! All the dots were starting to connect into a more complete picture…