Life is precious

I often think about how precious life is when I'm crossing the streets in Harare. Crossing the streets is a bit of stressful experience for us here! We're still always looking the wrong way for oncoming traffic, and pedestrians definitely do not have the right of way here. In fact, it almost seems like there is strange live-video-game culture of try-to-speed-up-and-hit-the-pedestrians! We're trying to be careful.

Tuesday night John and I went to a youth service at our corps (church). This is a week of prayer for at-risk children, so the youth are gathering each night to pray. I was humbled as one girl got up and spoke about the fact that life is such a risk for Zimabwean youth. She talked about how with HIV/AIDS and other infections and vehicle accidents are claiming so many young lives, that it can be stressful just to think about how long one might be able to stay alive. I think the life expectancy is down to 34 for Zimbabwe now. Crazy!

On a lighter note (sorry! my last couple of entries have been quite sobering!) we had home-made lasagna at the Wards last night. Oh my gosh - yum! It was especially nice in contrast to the lasagna I bought as a treat last week that used sugary ketchup as the tomato base. Right.