Under his leadership, the mission has grown from a center providing basic services for needy people into a cutting-edge laboratory for economic and educational development.

A rural settlement in a remote area of eastern Zimbabwe near the Mozambique border, the community served by Dendera Mission was largely ignored by government, churches, everyone, according to Jokomo, who heads the United Methodist Church in Zimbabwe.

The denomination supported a church building, a medical clinic, an ambulance and a school at Dendera, but the children there didn't have much of a future, according to the bishop. Some might make their way to Harare, the nation's capital, but without advanced education, they would likely join the ranks of the city's poor and homeless.

Through Methodist Rural Industrial Development (MRID), a ministry of the Zimbabwe Annual Conference's Council on Ministries, Jokomo has opened a sunflower oil-processing plant, a demonstration farm and a reforestation project at Dendera Mission.

The projects expand the capacity of the local economy and offer Dendera's young people an alternative to fleeing to the big cities to find jobs.

Before the sunflower oil-processing plant opened two years ago, Dendera farmers had no choice but to ship their sunflower seeds into Harare, more than three hours away, to be processed. The extracted sunflower seed oil from Harare would then be sold in Dendera's stores for Z$120 per two-liter bottle (the equivalent of $3.38 in U.S. currency and about four days' wages for a school teacher in Zimbabwe).

Now, Dendera farmers sell their seeds to MRID's plant at the same price paid by Harare processors, but they and their neighbors can buy the oil for only Z$65 a bottle, cutting their cost almost in half. Other benefits from the project include the employment of a dozen men and the production of a cake left after the oil has been squeezed from the seed that is excellent feed for livestock on the demonstration farm.

At the reforestation project, workers such as Grace Nyakasaka and Netsai Saragado start trees from cuttings and sell the potted plants. Many of the plants are fruit trees.

"The idea is that people who have lost trees can remake the forest, but at the same time we want to feed people," Jokomo said. "Lime, lemon, and mango trees -- these are good ways to get vitamin C."

The bishop is proud that women are among the workers at the reforestation project.

"Elsewhere in our culture this would be man's work; women would be carrying firewood," he said. Because of the AIDS epidemic, which is killing at least one-fourth of the Zimbabwean population, it is especially important that women be economically independent in order to protect them from sexual predators, he said.

Jokomo hopes to initiate other development projects at Dendera, such as a plant for recycling scrap metal.

But right now he is building a post-secondary vocational school at the mission that he intends to open in March. "In order to break the cycle of poverty and lack of opportunity, school is very important," he said.

However, it must be a school where children learn how to raise goats as well as how to add one plus one, he said. It must be a school where children learn about photosynthesis by doing projects at the demonstration farm rather than by watching a plant grow in a paper cup on the windowsill, he said. It must be a school where students learn how to make a hoe rather just than how to count out bus fare to ride into Harare to buy one.

"What good is it if children know how to spell but can't recognize a mango in a tree?" Jokomo asked.

The school will train students to farm and to participate in MRID-appropriate technology industries. "It will include all the traditional high school subjects but with a clear focus on doing things with your hands, doing things practically," the bishop said.

The campus, which currently has several half-finished buildings, will open in March, whether the buildings have roofs or not and whether electricity has been run from the main road five kilometers away or not, he said.

The school's initial class will have 70 students, most of whom will be girls, the bishop said. Eventually, it will grow to 600 students.

"The needs here are great," Jokomo said. "We are not going to hand out money. We are going to give them basic skills. If you want to destroy a bishop's morale, have him come here to preach a revival and see all these women and children who have nothing."

Jokomo hosted a visit to Dendera Mission by Bishop Felton Edwin May and a busload of Baltimore-Washington Annual (regional) Conference leaders on July 1. Jokomo presented the Zimbabwe Conference projects already in operation there and asked for the U.S. conference's partnership in opening Dendera School.

The school is Zimbabwe's primary project in the Council of Bishops' "Hope for the Children of Africa" appeal. The appeal is a denomination-wide effort to raise $12 million and to send 100 mission workers to Africa for projects that help children.

May and a 39-member delegation from the Baltimore-Washington Conference were in Zimbabwe to lead an annual pastors' school as part of a partnership between the two conferences established three years ago.

May, who first visited Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia, 25 years ago, called the Dendera Mission project "one of the most exciting efforts in Zimbabwe since the founding of Africa University."

He pledged the Baltimore-Washington Conference's support in opening the school by March. "We are not erecting buildings," he said. "We are molding and shaping lives."