Gillian Vine reports.
From running a major mining company in Zimbabwe to managing Camp Columba in eastern Southland has been a long and winding road for Kristian Jensen, his wife Grace and their three children.
When Kristian Jensen and his wife, Grace, arrived in Christchurch from Zimbabwe in October 2004, a friend lent them a car. “We went to four service stations in a row and put in $10 at each for the pleasure of being able to get petrol,” Kristian (46) says.
When they left Zimbabwe, once one of Africa’s most affl uent countries, getting petrol meant travelling into Botswana in a truck modified to carry extra fuel. Black and white farmers had had their farms confiscated and in the increasingly harsh regime of Robert Mugabe, corruption and violence ruled.
“Until about 1998, things had been going along smoothly,” Kristian says. He sees the rise of the union movement as the catalyst for change, a shift which saw him praying for guidance. In 2001, he left his job as chief executive of a steel manufacturing company, planning to go to the United States but an Old Testament verse – “why are you rebuilding your house when the House of the Lord is in tatters?” – persuaded the Jensens their role was to stay in Zimbabwe.
Kristian, an electrical engineer who has a business management degree, joined a Christian trust called Let the Nation Grow (or Tears of a Nation), based in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second-largest city. The trust, whose special focus was on widows and orphans, was established in partnership of the Churches, including the Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist. The aim was to educate farmers and make them selfsufficient by supplying ostriches, chickens or sorghum. After six months, produce was collected, sold and profits returned to the farmers.
“From [hatching] to six months, the mortality rate of ostriches on commercial farms, which would have 10,000 birds, is 15 to 18 per cent,” Kristian says. The trust gave each small farmer 50 birds. “They looked after them like their own children, mortality rates were about 9 per cent and commercial farmers took them on [as contractors].”
The phenomenally successful project was supported initially by the Mugabe regime, “then things started going quite sour” with “tremendous persecution, trucks impounded, drivers beaten up”. The Jensens battled on, increasingly concerned for the safety of their three teenage children. The catalyst was probably the gun battle in their street in July 2004. Two people were killed, one a corrupt policeman.
“We felt the Lord saying it was time to move on and a season had closed,” Kristian says. Initially, they planned a holiday in Australia, where Kristian had worked in 1994, and on to New Zealand. Camping was all they could afford because of the lack of hard currency in Zimbabwe.
Surfing for campsites, Grace found Camp Columba, at Pukerau in Southland, and saw they were advertising for a manager. “She sent my CV off and when I got home, told me what she’d done. We laughed and thought that would be the end of it.” A week later, the job was his.
“We arrived in New Zealand with almost nothing. Suitcases, that was it,” Kristian says.
Southland welcomed them with “such amazing hospitality” and he enjoys running Camp Columba, which caters for 4500 children a year from Oamaru to Invercargill and across to Queenstown. In just 5ha, there are abseiling walls, high ropes, a boulder wall, purpose-built motorised climbing wall and kayaking facilities.
Kristian loves New Zealand’s peacefulness and opportunities for his children although there have inevitably been some regrets. “You do leave behind your heritage and we’ve still got family trapped there, by choice or for financial reasons.”
Camp Columba has a website at www. campcolumba.org.nz and for more about Zimbabwe, go to www.zwnews.com