Naison Hove has found getting water in a dry place harder than expected

Naison Hove is working to make life a bit easier for his home village in Zimbabwe, but it is turning out to be harder than expected. To relieve the severe shortage of water, he has raised funds and managed a project to sink a new well but, since it started, the change in climate has put their water supply further out of reach than ever.

Before coming to the UK as a missionary in 2001, Naison was a minister in the Uniting Presbyterian Church of Southern Africa. In three years, his congregation in Bulawayo had grown from 30 to more than 300, so he came to serve the UK in Shepherd’s Bush in London, and then in and around Worthing, West Sussex.

Visiting his home village of Murambi-Musindo in 2019, Naison was moved by the sight of two young girls bringing home water. ‘They were about six or seven, carrying water from 5km away, in 20L buckets, on their heads,’ he says. ‘They ripped out my heart.’ He discovered that they were fetching it for their siblings after their parents died of HIV/Aids. The 600 households of the village all face the same predicament since the river they depended on in Naison’s youth dried up, and their current water source is not clean. Zimbabwe has been in severe drought since the cyclone of 2018, and suffered three years without rain. ‘I felt a need to do something,’ Naison says. ‘I wanted to give something back to the village where I grew up.’…

Naison Hove is Minister of Emmanuel United Reformed Church, Worthing; St Andrew’s URC, Rustington; and Little Hampton United Church. He was talking to Stephen Tomkins

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This is an extract from an article published in the March 2021 edition of Reform

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