Looking beyond yourself...and seeing...

If you ask my parents they will tell you that throughout most of my life i have been a big dreamer... I have always wanted to achieve the seemingly unachievable, attain the seemingly unattainable and I always had something up my sleeve so the element of surprise is more the foundation of all things Rudo! :-) 

Now you may have heard earlier in one of my posts that I have been unwell for some time...what I have not  explored is the emotional and spiritual battle that comes with prolonged illness. I made two positive steps; the first was to trust God for my healing and choose to believe that He would bring me through. The second was to be honest with myself about everything and not do anything unless I had made an informed choice to do it....this for me was ground breaking stuff!

 I did very nearly crack up if I am to be honest because there were at least two cliff hanger moments where the doctors thought I had first bowel cancer then lung...Praise God that it was neither and the diagnosis was (non life threatening) Sarcoidosis. Now in my quest to discover 'who I am' and 'what is my purpose in the world', I did a lot of soul searching and self examination. The result was that my priorities were all wrong (trying to climb the corporate ladder and being a workaholic and all that...crazy in hindsight...) and that one ought to work to live not the other way around! 

The question was still looming...what am I meant to be going? The answer came to me in a sermon I heard about being God dreamers and fulfilling your God given potential as you realise your God given dreams...it moved me to tears and I started soul searching further back than my career and realised that the thing I seemed to natural do is help people... so it got me thinking that helping people must be my purpose in life...but how?  I was talking to my friend Rumbi about it one evening and she shared how she wanted to go back to Zimbabwe one day and start a free medical clinic to help people too! We had just heard about the Serenje project that the Kerinth Centre, Bracknell Family Church had started and we put the two ideas together, said why wait? and just like that Tekva Trust was born :-) 

ABOUT TEKVA TRUST

Tekva Trust was formed to with the sole purpose of giving hope in a 'practical way' to the hardest to reach people who are suffering in various ways from the HIV / Aids pandemic. We will achieve this  by helping them develop self-sustaining communities and ensuring their own food security, access to health services and education for their children.

 Tekva Trust is a Christian charity based in the United Kingdom that started in December 2009. The charity was set up for the specific purpose of reaching disadvantaged people whose lives have been adversely affected by HIV / Aids. 

HIV / Aids destroys life, diminishes communities, cripples societies and has changed the face of whole continents.The whole world has been touched and adversely changed in some way by this disease and the result is increased poverty, reduced life expectancy and higher mortality rates are experienced in the poorest countries of the world.  

Tekva Trust aims to help people living with or  adversely affected by HIV and Aids in three specific areas; Health & Social Care, Education and Agriculture with one simple focus, developing sustainable communities through aiding food security.

Share the love...

This is a lovely young woman called Rebecca whom I met in Southampton a year ago when  I was on an evangelistic impact team there with my church. She was on the high street talking to a friend whilst I was walking along praying for God to give me someone whom I could talk to and share my faith with and He brought her to my attention. I shared my faith with her and she responded to the gospel and gave her life to Jesus. We had a life altering meeting that Saturday afternoon and a bond of relationship was formed based on a love inspired by God.


I spoke to Rebecca a few weeks ago (a year on from when we first met) and she was was bubbling full of life and expectation by the end of the call. She has had a complete change in her life, she is back in school, doing a course that will lead her to university. Having seen her example, her mother and sister have both come to know the Lord as their personal Lord and Saviour also. She has a place of her own and is making positive choices that are based on her trust and faith in God, not a dependency on man which she said has saved her life, literally her whole life has been turned around. She was once in a place of desolation and despair in an abusive relationship, found herself to be a teenage mother with few prospects and little hope and now... everything has changed... :-)

Stories like this remind me why it is important to preach the gospel and to also have my own faith and trust in God because He truly is up in heaven cheering me on to live right and make it to heaven...what an awesome privilege to be the daughter of The King and to be part of that amazing experience of leading others to Him... So today I celebrate Love because God is Love and to share Christ is to share LOVE...

April 23rd

Uncle John is a lovely English Gentleman that has been a dear friend to my family long before I was born! He and his lovely wife took my mum under their wing when she first moved to England to study (when she was not too much younger than I am now; that is early 20's). They were there through most of her major life experiences and a few drama's and were like surrogate parents to her. When they didn't have to, they loved her and now I have the privilege of knowing Uncle John personally and experience that love (unfortunately his lovely wife passed away...).   So anyway Uncle John shares his birthday with a few other people / things and therefore this is a celebration of the date and all that is marked by it as well as the lovely man himself.


On this April 23rd uncle John turned 88! (Two fat ladies in Bingo language! Lol :-) Its not every day you can say you are two fat ladies...Lol!) Anyway At 10am on Friday (April 23rd) Uncle John called me to say he wanted to share his birthday with me (I was asleep at the time!) and boy did he get my attention! I quickly reprimanded him for not telling me sooner to which in true uncle John fashion he said he didn't want to make a fuss! So i made him a card (above) incorporating St. George and William Shakespeare because he mentioned them when he called, and sent it to him. I then jumped out of bed, sorted myself out and went down to Tesco (Sandhurst)to pick up a cake on the way to Uncle John's to surprise him. Whilst at Tesco I met this lovely lady called Sue at the customer services desk and she helped me find a flag and get my face painted! (which i was sure would amuse uncle John!) 

I then went over to Uncle John, cake in tow and he was completely surprised! 

So all in all it was a really great day and Uncle John was so happy ... a truly priceless moment that inspires passion and is what life is all about! :-)


So what else happened on April 23rd?
St. Georges Day

St George is the patron saint of England (Ireland, Wales and Scotland have their own too) and he is celebrated today (April 23rd) because he was thought to have died on this day in 303 AD 

England Day

St. George's Day is also used as a day for the English to celebrate themselves...a kind of non-official  English National Day. England is unusual in that it has no national day, no public holiday to celebrate the nation, therefore the English tend to use this day to fly their flag and celebrate who they are as a people.

  

William Shakespeare's Birthday

SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM (1564—1616), English poet, player and playwright, was baptized in the parish church of Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire on the 26th of April. Birth 1564. The exact date of his birth is not known. 18th-century antiquaries, William Oldys and Joseph Greene, gave it as April 23. April 23 was the day of Shakespeare’s death in 1616.

There you go, a great date all round! 

Happy Birthday Uncle John!!!!!

Title: Building Sustainable Communities through Adaptive Vernacular Architecture by Rudo Nyangulu

I have finally decided on my thesis topic and here it is:

Title: Building Sustainable Communities through Adaptive Vernacular Architecture: A pathway to providing access to adequate housing.

Sustainable communities develop as a result of each individual family units being able to thrive in all respects; and adequate housing is no exception.  A sustainable (community) society is one that can persist over generations,  that is far-sighted enough, flexible enough and wise enough not to undermine either its physical or its social systems of support (E.C.E, 1996) The problem is that in today’s society, there are approximately one billion people who live below the poverty line, the majority of whom do not live in adequate housing (Collier, 2007). The human right to adequate housing is enshrined in international law. The origins of one’s ‘right to adequate housing’ can be traced back to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was unanimously adopted by the world community in 1948. (Thiele, 2002)  “Essential to the achievement of this standard and therefore to the fulfilment of human life beyond simple survival, is access to adequate housing. Adequate housing must meet the following: fulfil physical needs by providing security and shelter from weather and climate, .fulfil psychological needs by providing a sense of personal space and privacy, fulfil social needs by providing a gathering area and communal space for the human family which is the basic unit of society” (H.R.E.A, n.d.). The poor fare worse than the better-off  almost everywhere and with respect to nearly every indicator including adequate housing (Gwatkin et al, 2007).                                                                        

Whilst the right to adequate housing has been established in literature and at law, it is still elusive to many of the world’s poorest people and as a result, their villages and communities are fragmented at best. In order to address this disparity it is necessary to make adequate housing accessible to this group of people. This paper seeks to address the issue of access by considering methods for achieving adequate housing for the poor by employing and adapting vernacular architectural techniques as well as sustainable construction methods to achieve this aim. Kofi Anan (n.d.) put it aptly when he made the following statement; ‘Our biggest challenge is to take sustainable development, an idea that seems abstract, and turn it into a daily reality for the entire world’s people.’

Background:                                                                                                                                         

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted in 1948) was the first point in which the world leaders made a united, public step towards addressing the very real issues of suffering and inhumane conditions in which a large proportion of the world’s population lived in and were subjected to. Poor housing is always associated with high rates of morbidity and mortality, yet housing generally is not high on the list of societal needs and governmental priorities (Novick). As Novick so aptly puts it, adequate housing has been on the ‘back burner’ for most countries when it comes to international debate and indeed taking action since the various pieces of legislation came into effect. . As is the norm, the ideals of provision of adequate housing were adopted by the first world, for example more affluent nations such as the United Kingdom (U.K.). The U.K. has put in place legislation in its domestic law namely the Housing Act 2004, to ensure this right for all is achieved and surpassed. In contrast,  the majority of developing countries, particularly in the ‘bottom billion’ (Collier,  2007) have a level of poverty that is so high that the right to adequate housing has been overshadowed by the basic need for food, security and a conundrum of health problems linked to poverty.                                                                                                  

The irony here is that many health problems have been known to be linked to inadequate housing. The World Health Organisation prepared, ‘Health Principles of Housing’ which states that housing acts as the environmental factor most frequently associated with conditions for disease in epidemiological analyses”(C.E.S.C). Thiele, (2001) discusses this issue in his paper,’ The Human Right to Adequate Housing: A Tool for Promoting and Protecting Individual and Community Health’ which states that, ‘housing conditions affect both individual and community health to a great degree. ‘He clearly shows the unambiguous link between adequate housing and health, thereby highlighting how important the housing issue really is for human life to be sustained.            

The question of adequate housing particularly in the ‘bottom billion’ countries can be addressed by relying on the dynamics of vernacular architecture and sustainability. The  reason for this focus is that there have been various studies relating to the viability of adapting vernacular architecture thereby providing affordable means for every man to have adequate housing. In vernacular architecture, sustainability is manifested in the design of buildings, use of materials, environmental and social consciousness. There are indeed many lessons to be learned from vernacular architecture in this area (Mahgoub, 1997). The various case studies that have been carried out in this field show progressively the significant impact realised from the adaptation of vernacular architecture and the introduction of sustainability. We will consider two environments from the Middle East and Africa to determine how housing is delivered in these areas and the impact of sustainability on traditional methods. Naciri, (2007) considers aspects of sustainability in vernacular and modern architecture in the Middle East and North Africa in his study. Van Tassel, (n.d.) shows in his study in Tanzania (Africa) that, ‘all over Mwanza, traditional architectural methods and techniques are rationalised, improved or adapted, and have led into new forms of architecture present today’ Both studies  focus more on architectural significance as they have been written for this discipline, however we can glean from their work and certainly set the scene in relation to the application of vernacular architecture and sustainability which will allow us to see how viable the concept of adapting and in some areas reviving these practices, will go a long way to achieving adequate housing for all in practice.