Last time around we looked at how Mozambique is really like youtube, google, twitter, and ebay. This time we’re going to look at the rest of some of the most popular uses for the internet (no, not porn).
ILLEGAL MUSIC / MOVIE DOWNLOADING
Similarities: I've found that many people listen to music on demand via youtube, using it like a magical digital jukebox. Youtube is great if you only want to listen to, like, every song that has ever been recorded. But as soon as you want to slap that song on your iPod and have it portable you’re going to need to download those sweet rhythms to your hard drive.
But never fear. Go ahead and download that, because you aren’t going to pay for a whole CD worth of the one or two songs you really want.
Movies are kind of the same thing. Places free internet video sites are okay, but don’t have a ton of stuff.
Luckily, you live in Mozambique, so there are plenty of options, For music, I’ll have to refer you back to the principle of Youtube. You can just ask anybody to sing anything and they’ll do it, even if they don't know the song. For movies, as much fun as it was to watch the kids act out all 4 hours of “Lawrence of Arabia”, you need to be a little more brazen. Brazen enough to walk to literally any street corner and pay about 30¢ per title. Thanks to illegal movies coming in from China, I have access to a library of titles big enough to make Netflix jealous. About a month ago I got my hands on every Pixar film, all four Indiana Jones movies, about 9 Will Smith action movies, and every Jack Ryan/ Tom Clancy movie ever. There were a total of 29 movies. The sum I paid for them? A whopping $8.60. And the kids love the Pixar films. Well, anything would be better than the alternative.
3.5 hours of wandering around and 30 minutes of fighting wasn’t that hard to direct. Finding eyeliner, now that was hard
Differences: Every now and then I get a movie that has these “English” closed-captions that often make the movie much more complicated and sometimes change the entire plot of the movie.
“Luke, I had sex with your mother!”
In my never ending quest to paint a picture of Mozambique for you, the reader, today I will explain to you Mozambique using terms you most likely are familiar with. How so? By comparing Mozambique to the internet! By the end of the post I’ll have shown you that anything you can find on the internet you can find in Mozambique.
With a few exceptions.
Lets start with something that most of you internet users are pretty familiar with:
YOUTUBE
Similarities: I don’t know what YouTube has turned into now, but when I left America I vaguely remember it being mainly a collection of videos of cats, stupid accidents where somebody gets hurts put people think its hilarious (like a monkey punching an elderly gentleman in the crotch), people that aren’t good singers imitating professional singers (that aren’t good either), and people doing Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” dance. Well, its not that much of a stretch to consider that as a slice of Mozambique: People doing the single ladies dance, people imitating professional singers, and monkeys punching people in the crotch. Combinations of any of the are also very acceptable.
If you liked it then you should have put a ring on it.
Differences: The main difference would be instead of funny videos that your neighbor keeps emailing you of his cat chasing a laser pointer, your neighbor keeps emailing videos of his goat chasing a laser pointer. And instead of emailing you, he actually just comes over to tell you all about it.
Growing up in America there is a certain requirement for young boys to have certain aspirations for when they are older. These aspirations usually include wanting to grow up to be a baseball player, a dentist, a firefighter, a G.I. Joe, or a NASCAR driver. That last one was probably just me.
Growing up I never knew what little girls wanted to be. I always assumed they wanted to be married to baseball players, G.I. Joes, or NASCAR drivers.
We try to get our kids to aspire to high goals around here. When they say things like, “One day I want to be the governor” we don’t laugh at them at tell them to be realistic. They get encouraged to study hard and excel in school and know about what is happening in the world today. Lately, because school just started back up and with all the kids we sent to vocational school I’ve been asking the kids what they want to be when they grow up.
One day last week all the kids came up to me after school laughing at what Jordao did. Jordao is in second grade and when his teacher asked him what he wants to be when he got older he replied by saying he wants to be an appacho. That’s slang around these parts for guys that hand out in the industrial part of town and carry 100lb sacks of cement on their heads to the trucks of people that purchased the cement sacks. Its one of the crudest forms of work around here and all the guys that do it are illiterate, uneducated, and often crazy (from all that weight squishing their brains). They are lucky to get paid about a dollar a day for work.
It was actually pretty funny because he’s only in second grade and probably just got nervous in front of the class and couldn’t think of any other occupation, but it underscores a more serious point. A lot of the kids come in off living on the streets or roaming about in the jungle. Until we start explaining to them that (most) jobs don’t depend on your uncle being they mayor they have no idea that there are jobs here meant for people with a high school education and a knowledge of what the alphabet it. After explaining to Jordao that if he studies hard enough and passes school he could be anything - a banker, an electrician, or a teacher - he changed his mind. He decided he wanted to be an airplane.
The currency in Mozambique is the meticais, commonly called mets. What does 1000 mets look like?
There’s a little bit of a catch to this. A while back the economy of Mozambique was in such a tailspin from just plain old printing money that inflation was out of control. After some strategic debt restructuring (Mozambique saying we’re not going to pay it) the country knocked 3 zeroes off the end of its money and fixed it to the U.S. Dollar. I still don’t know how you can just fix currencies like that, but I’m sure that’s better left to the experts that are currently flushing the world economy down the proverbial toilet.
All this happened in 2004, which is about 2 years after Zimbabwe (a neighbor) should have done the same thing and about 4 years before they actually did. You probably heard a lot more about Zimbabwe because the people there were paying like 16 trillion for a carrot. For once, I’m not exaggerating. It also helps that Zimbabwe has a slightly crazy and outspoken leader in Mugabe. And goodness knows that the news loves it crazy and outspoken leaders, no matter what country they're from.
[Insert picture of Vladimir Putin doing just about anything]
As a result, everybody traded in their old currency for the new ones, with the exception of the coin in my picture. They just kept using that and its now equivalent to 1 new met, even though they say 1000 mets on them. They are the second smallest denomination of coin here next to the old 500 met coins still floating around, even though they are not really used.
So, what can you get with that little coin? Not a lot. With 2 of them you can get a roll. With 10 of them you can loaf of bread. With 12 you can get a coke. It’s a good thing that Dr. Evil didn’t hold the world ransom for one million of these, otherwise he would have gotten about enough money to get half a tank of gas.
This summer we got ourselves some interns here at the orphanage. “Summer?”, you ask. Yes, because it’s the southern hemisphere in Mozambique (don’t make me draw a map again) and school break is Nov-Jan. “Interns?” you ask. Yes, because we sure needed the extra hands on deck they were halfway through Bible School and looking to do something kind of Jesus-y for the summer.
Daniel grew up in the orphanage here and we sent him down to Bible School last year after he finished 10th grade. He’s probably 21 years old, give or take, and of all the kids here he’s probably the second hardest worker when it comes to helping out with chores and asking for more responsibility. He returned this summer not to stay with us but to come and intern for us. He and the other two guys all lived a couple clicks away at Victor’s Dad’s Church because it has guest housing. This was no little adjustment for Daniel, who wasn’t commuting from home to work, but was more like going to work and home. He always arrived hours before the other two and was busy helping out with chores and his tasks for the day.
Silmone is a kid from our church and his mom is one of the two women that cook for us on the weekdays. He is definitely the most passionate and emphatic public speaker of the bunch and a very hard worker just like Daniel. He’s a little more on the side of “If this isn’t completed in two minutes Europe is going to explode” kind of hard worker, whereas Daniel just gets it done without complaining. I asked Silmone to grab my wallet after I left it in the car. You’d have thought we got pushed to DEFCON 1 because he was so serious and urgent to get back to the car and fetch my wallet before the Ruskies nuked us.
Vincent is from Malawi and we had no idea who he was until Victor and Christina went down to pick up Daniel for Summer Break. Turns out that, to make a long story short, Vincent is from Malawi, orphaned, and putting himself through Bible School. When Daniel and Silmone met him they were so taken by his story and how arrived there that God moved them to start supporting him and help pay his way out of the money we were sending them to go to school. Because learned Portuguese from spending a few years living in Mozambique, and otherwise speaks “English”. I put it in quotes because I have an easier time understanding him in Portuguese because of all the differences between his and my English.
We had these guys do a little bit of everything for us. We gave them bits of pieces of administrative work so they could see that around here its not all fun and games.
We also got them helping with a lot of my responsibilities, meaning I got to just sit back and relax and wait for them to bring me coffee and go pick up my lunch order. Just kidding. But they were working in the kitchen, serving every meal, leading devotionals at night, going out and buying our food for each month, turning in paperwork and reports, and so on.
Among the other things they got to do was to preach and teach every Sunday in church. Before the service, on would teach Sunday school for the kids, and the second would teach the adult class, and the third would get to preach. They’d rotate every week. We’d figured on giving them as much practice as they wanted as this is all what they are going to be doing hopefully in the future.
Each kid that enters the Bible School has an interview to both consider their character, so the instructors can begin to get to know the kids, and so they can see what remedial reading they need to do to get their basic level of theology up to par so they aren’t raising their hand in class the second week and asking who this Jesus guy is the instructor keeps mentioning. Daniel and Silmone were two of the small handful that passed the theology benchmark and were told their knowledge is up to par. That’s a good reflection on us and Victor and his preaching/teaching. Unfortunately, it didn’t mean that there wasn’t a few theological bumps along the way.
One Sunday in Church Daniel preached about how how our church is deep in sin because we don’t have restrooms or enough benches for everyone to sit in. The point he wanted to make was that not tithing is a sin and that’s why our church is without these things. He probably just got excited and confused in the rush of things. Silmone condemned our church and chastised us for not washing each other’s feet, something that Jesus commanded of us. Unfortunately for Silmone, his sermon prep stopped just before reading the verse where Jesus actually explains what he was doing. And the biggest “What?” of all came when Vincent started teaching Sunday school one week by saying “In this week I’m going to teach about the three circles of hell.” This resulted in about 40 hands shooting up in the air in confusion.
I refrained from asking, “What in hell are you talking about?” partly because it seemed too easy, partly because it was way too crass for church, and partly because I really wanted to know what the three circles of hell were. I still don’t know…
As we talked about it, all these gaffes resulted from them just being too excited and too in the moment to fully realize what they were talking about. Except for the circles of hell. I think that resulted from Vincent walking in to catch the last five minutes of a lecture at Bible school, it sounding really interesting, and then running with it because it just seemed too interesting to pass up.
Except for a few small goofs here and there, the three of them were a tremendous help to us here and all the kids loved having them around for a few weeks. Hopefully they’ll be able to have as great an impact where they end up working/serving after they finish Bible School.
Regina is the senior gal her at the orphanage. She, like her brother Lazaru, has been here for a looong time. Everybody, guys and girls alike, they look up to her, seek out her advice and will generally just hang around her if not much is going on. For me, she’s usually the one I go to when I need a good dose of neighborhood gossip because she always seems to know everything that’s going on. A couple months ago I got the story of how a guy that lives down the hill from us that paid the witchdoctor to bless him and make sure he’d remain wealthy as long as he lived. As rumor has it the witchdoctor told him that as long as he wore pants with holes in them he’d remain rich. The man wore pants with holes in them and remained rich until the he died, a full 6 days later.
She, like her brother Lazaru, has been here longer than anybody else and everybody knows it. You may have heard me mention in the last post that she is 21, and I know a lot of you wondered why the heck do you have somebody living in an orphanage when they’re 21 and can fend for themselves.
Well, the reason we just don’t dump a kid back on the streets or in the jungle when they turn 18 has to do with what our goal is here. I’m sure there’s some fancy mission statement lying around the stack of papers I have here, but the goal is this: to transform lives. Sometimes we go out and find kids, while other times they are brought to us. Their lives already destroyed and headed for death until we step in, ransoming them, and literally pull them from their old life and giving them a new one. Along the way we teach them, instruct them, correct them, sometimes often discipline them, and provide them with the chance to have a future full of opportunity and joy. Spiritually, we do the exact same thing. Or, rather, Jesus does it. When their entire life’s journey is a mirror of the Gospel, it becomes easy for them to see why they need Jesus.
But just as the spiritual journey is sometimes always full of bumps in the road, the journey in life is also. All of the kids here are aware of that fact, and so is Regina. Aside from the normal everyday pressures for our girls to get married young (we’re talking 15, 16 years old over here) or to hurry up and find a man before you’re undesirable (20, 21 yrs), there’s the normal everyday pressure to be cheating in school, sleeping around, or doing “favors” for teachers to get good grades.
But Regina has a very good head on her shoulders, and God has remained faithful to transform her future. The first big piece of that transformation took place a little over a year ago and she found out she got into the Teacher’s Training college after finishing 10th grade with exceptionally high marks. As I’ve mentioned before, grade ten is kind of the benchmark around here for having higher-ed opportunity. This last year she went to Teacher’s college in the morning, and continued with 11th grade in the evening. This earned her the nickname “The Professor”.
This December she completed teacher’s training so the staff, her brother Lazaru (pictured below), and a couple of her close friends here at the orphanage went out to dinner at the Millenium Hotel, the best restaurant in the city (it’s really good, but the bar is set pretty low around here). It was an occasion they’ll never forget.
