In which we break for spring

[Internet has been, to put it politely, inconsistent the last month or so here in Nampula. I try to have as much ready to go as I can, but it often doesn’t last long enough to post material. Sorry for the sporadic nature of new stuff.]

School was on break this last week for the finish of the first /trimester/third of the year. Its also odd that I refer to it as spring break, because here in the southern hemisphere we’re moving into autumn. And here in Nampula, we’re all but officially out of the rainy season. The sky hasn’t done anything other than spit once or twice in the last three weeks.

So what does spring break look like at the orphanage? Well, this year we decided against going to Cancun because, lets face it, Mexico is basically a gangland and safety was too much of an issue. There were about 6 or 7 kids that went home to family, leaving us a little bit tinier. Three went to their uncles, who happens to run an orphanage even further out of the city than we are, and two others went to Murrupula (village 90km away) because their niece died. Two others just went back to see relatives. Its important for them to keep these connections to family, especially the older kids, because however distant they may be their family is a culturally large part of their life.

For the majority of us that stuck around spring break meant lying around working on our tans and drinking ice-tea through crazy straws. Just kidding. It meant YARD WORK! Since we’ve finished the rainy season there was a lot of grass growing up in places we didn’t want it. Basically, grass means mosquitoes, and mosquitoes mean malaria, q.e.d. grass means malaria. Aside from that, there was a ton of rocks, cement chunks, and nails in corners of the soccer field that has been used as staging areas for construction.

Monday was a long day of working. For everybody. Spirits were kind of down and the girls gave up on the work pretty quick. The boys were getting tired until I told them that the goal of clearing the rocks and grass was to add about 10m to the soccer field. I have never seen people work so hard before. We finished the job just before lunch (a nice 6+hrs of work). Our field is now about 80 meters long.

After a few hours of hydrating, we were ready to christen the new field. Because the weekends are busy with church and the busy school schedule it was the first chance we had to play with everybody in about 3 months. We had a full 12 on 12 game. We started at 3pm sharp and played past dinner (6pm) before collectively collapsing of exhaustion. Yours truly stopped keeping score when he was losing 8-1.

Because of the heat and the sun, the afternoons are kind of a doldrums. Even shops close down. Spring break means non-stop soccer, so the mornings were filled with simple games like keep-away. Tuesday brought another day of anticipation of the afternoon game. Sun down is about 5pm and by 5:30 its dark out this time of year, and once again by 3pm the game was afoot.

Something interesting happens when there are spurts of lots of games. The first is that the same two people always pick the teams. The second is that things get a lot more competitive as the games go on. These are very related concepts. The same people tend to pick the same people and the teams remain mostly the same save for a few players. This makes it easier to remember who is on your team. Also, the team-pickers also move the players around to make slightly more balanced teams. They’re still picking to win, but just not as big. As a result, yours truly won on Tuesday by a mark of 7-3. Again, it was an epic 3 hours of soccer. No breaks. No halftime. No mercy. Okay, maybe a little mercy…

Part Two to spring break coming up soon.

In Which TJ Discusses Behavior

Not every detail of every kid gets put into cyberspace because of privacy concerns, but here I try to be as close to an open book as I can be. Each kid we have is deserving of his or her own post. The kid I’m talking about today is probably deserving of his own site dedicated to all the goofy stuff he does.

The kid I’m talking about is Jose. For people that have ever been to the orphanage in the last year and half, you know who Jose is. Jose is all of 3 feet tall (1m), and we registered him as being 7 years old because that’s how tall he is. In reality, Jose is about to turn 13 but has the mind of a 5 year old. Aside from having the body of a seven year old, he has problems with physical coordination, can’t count past two, and has a speech impediment that makes him slur all his words and unable to pronounce at least half the sounds he needs to communicate.

I blame his awesome Gene Simmons-esque tongue.

Jose is here with his older brother Jordão and his younger sister, Dorca. While Jordão is also learning impaired, he is physically normal and has adequate skills. A large part of Jordão’s learning disability, I believe, is that he never attended school until last year at the age of 14. Dorca is 4 and we honestly have no idea if she’ll exhibit the same problems as her older brothers.

In which we catch the wild geese (the geese are the mattresses)

When we last left our hero (that’s me), I had spent three days at the Port of Nacala awaiting the release of a container that contained new mattresses for the orphanage. The donated mattresses came on a freighter and we were paying a do-nothing broker that was supposed to do all the work for us. Well, seeing as three days had passed and I wasn’t gonna get any tanner, we packed up and headed for home Thursday night.

To top things off, about little while before the three hour car ride home I started feeling tired and feverish. After a very long three hours with my head basically shoved out the window to try to cool down we arrived in home. I think the fresh air had done me some good, cause my fever had started to go down, but I was still not feeling super well. I went to sleep that night with a fever and the determination to get up and be the first person at the clinic in the morning.

In the meantime, Victor had received a call from the boss of the broker we had been using. The boss, upset not that his reputation was being destroyed but that he was losing money after we made him pay for our food and hotel all three days, gave Victor his word that the mattresses would leave the port Friday and practically begged for us to come back to get them. Victor went back with Charles, Maurio, the boy and the Fatman on Friday (day 4 od the debacle).

In Which TJ Continues Chasing Wild Geese

Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth. Percival and the Holy Grail. Lewis and Clark and the Northwest Passage. The Nazis and any relic that Indiana Jones is currently also seeking. The Cubs and a World Series. You can to the list of mythical and unattainable quests TJ and the Mattresses of Nacala (movie rights currently for sale).

Recap: Donated Mattresses. 3 hour drive to the Port. Wait all day, no mattresses. I’m with Charles, Maurio, the kid, and the fat man. Arrive at hotel for the night. Go to sleep. All is peaceful.

All was peaceful. Around 11pm (which is like 2am in American culture) I was woken to shouting and yelling in the hotel courtyard. At this point, I figure its a drunk neighbor leaving the hotel bar and it’ll end in a minute. Well, one minute turned into TWENTY! Finally, the shouting stopped and peace was restored. Turns out what was going on was that some Pakistanis were staying at the hotel decided to head out in the middle of the night. The night security guard, being polite, asked them what they were doing leaving in the middle of the night. The reason he asked was he was probably concerned for their safety and a little puzzled, because people just generally don’t leave hotels in the middle of the night in this country.

That innocent little question turned into the two Pakistanis taking offense at the guard “intruding into their privacy and implying that we’re criminals”. The way I heard it was the Pakistanis started shouting and woke up the rest of the staff and then woke up us and then you have a full on mini race riot going on as the Pakistanis accuse the hotel staff of being racist and the staff accusing the Pakistanis of being crazy.

In Which TJ Chases Wild Geese

Last Tuesday I got called off the bench and put into the game. As not excited at all thrilled as I was to take part in this errand, I soon discovered that it was the equivalent of being put in to defend Kobe Bryant when the starters all say, “I don’t care anymore” and he is on pace to put up 60 points.

So Tuesday morning it was. Nice and early, I think around 7 am we left. After the calm three hour drive later we made it to Nacala. Charles and the other guys and I pulled up to the beach, and began to relax.

What’s that? Oh, right. Why were we at the beach? Well, a while back we got ourselves some mattresses donated back in the states. Rather than strap them to the backs of whales and ride them over here like majestic, aquatic chariots (my idea), wiser heads prevailed and the mattresses got put on a ship and sailed over to us. We got a call from the port broker on Monday night that they were ready to pick up. On Tuesday morning once arriving in Nacala Port we met with the broker who told us that he would call me on my cell phone when it was ready to leave and in the meantime to go about our things. Well, since my things include getting life to resemble a caricature of South Pacific, we headed to the beach.

By that benchmark, the trip was a failure.

this one's kind of like an update update

This one is less about saying what's been going on than it is to say that soon I'm gonna tell you what's been going. I know there was a strange silence on the site for most of last week, save for the April Fools post. iPads. Gimme a break. Most folks in our neighborhood can't feed themselves half the time. If we all get iPads we're gonna get robbed and lynched by an angry hungry mob that will probably try to download and eat pictures of goats.

The only reason that post went up is because it was written about 3 weeks ago when I got the idea and had it scheduled to automatically go. I got called unexpectedly to Nacala last week for official orphanage business and spent 3-4 days on the road. Its a long story and involves me nearly dying several times, so if you're looking for a good bedtime story for the kids, go get a copy of Winnie the Pooh.

Anyways, that is the story I was planning on telling today, but thanks to my computer being out of charge and the power going out this morning, that didn't happen. It just now came on so I'm getting this out to tell you to stay tuned and to hear about "TJ and the Quest for the Unobtainably Obtainable Treasure".

Treasure Hunting: It's official orphanage business!

In Which the Orphanage Enters the 21st Century

Part of our mission here at the orphanage is to help prepare the children for the future. We put far more emphasis on education than most of the friends experience because we know how important it is to their futures. Also important to their futures, especially as Mozambique is becoming more connected with it’s neighbors and even further globally, it to train them and give them a fundamental understanding of technology. In the past, we’ve sent some of the high schoolers to the local university for a computer proficiency course (internet, email, Word, Excel), but we decided that for our kids to compete for jobs and opportunities in the new economy of Mozambique, they must be proficient in something more than navigating Windows95. It is with that goal in mind that we decided to do something really great for the kids, and we went out and got them all iPad 2s.

It took some considerable scrimping and saving in order to do this. Things like “electricity fasts” as well as the slightly more unpopular “food fasts” of reducing meals from rice and beans to just rice, and sometimes just rice (in the singular, not the plural). But I think the kids will tell you it has been well worth it.

The kids are able to do their homework on it and its loaded with educational tools, although most of the kids will tell you the thing they use it for most is aquele jogo com os passarinhos zangados (that one game with the angry birds). The second most popular activity has to be viewing rir gatos. You probably know them as LOLcats.

Eu estå molhado e eu nao estå felîz. I is wet and I is not happy.

The iPads have my life much easier too. When the kids need homework help, we just instant message or use FaceTime to talk to each other. And when it is time for Bible study and worship in the evening we can just do it from the comfort of our beds as I literally just phone it in. And will all the administrative tools I have, I can control which websites they view. I can also control which apps they download and authorize their downloads at the end of the day. And for the last three days we haven’t had anybody click on a “1 millionth visitor Grand Prize” link so I think the kids are learning pretty fast.

Unfortunately, when you’re dealing with children they have a tendency to become careless and not appreciate the fragility of the electronics. So far we have had three iPads break. The first one was when Pacheco accidentally sat on his. The screen cracked, but he can still use it. The second was when Atija, unsure at how the motion sensors worked, accidentally drop-kicked her iPad playing a soccer game. The third was when Nacape dropped his in the latrine. When I asked him what he was doing with his iPad in the latrine in the first place he responded with “Eu cheguei num nivel maninge alto do jogo dos passarinos.” (I made it to a crazy-high level in the bird game).

Much like the rest of the world, we have only scratched the surface on the potential of these beautiful machines.