Matopo Hills

   The Matopo Hills are situated about fifteen miles from our home town, Bulawayo, in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). They are magnificent granite stone hills. We have seen trees growing out of massive rocks where a seed had fallen in a small crack, and with the wondrous work of  God, they have split the rock and grown into lovely trees. The power of our God's creation is too marvelous for our finite minds to grasp. Well, in the middle of these vast  rocks is one which is an enormous dome with a flat top. It rises way above the other rocks and was named "World's View" by, I believe, Cecil John Rhodes, after whom our country was named. In the centre of this magnificent rock
is  Rhodes' Grave. This Rhodes is the benefactor of the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. Another man who aided much in the development of this lovely little British colony was Lord Alfred Beit, after whom a lovely bridge between Rhodesia and South Africa, was named.  He was the benefactor of the prestigious Beit Scholarship, which is, acording to my research still used widely especially in the legal field. I'll insert a little personal information at this time. My high school in Bulawayo was Eveline High School, a girls only school (there were no co-ed schools at all at that time--the boy's school was Milton). My mother had attended the same high school as I and it was while there that I discovered something about her which she had never, to my knowledge, mentioned to us kids. On the right hand wall adjacent to the stage in the assembly hall was an enormous brown wooden board with names of about a dozen girls who had earned the prized Beit Scholarship. One morning I looked closely at the board and noticed two names of people we knew very well. The first one I noticed was of Elizabeth Greenfield  (later Elizabeth Wightman) and right under her name was Gladys Muriel Hadfield (later Gladys Muriel Claassen) my MOTHER! I did not tell a soul, but I shocked!