FAQ's part 3

Where does funding for the orphanage come from?

See the paypal button in the corner? Funding comes from folks like you. We are moving towards resources and finding ways to get the orphanage onto more self-sustaining grounds. Other than that its all from private sources. And no, the state here does not fund or support the orphanage.

Where does YOUR funding come from?

I don't try to take anything away from the kids. My funding comes from when people send to the paypal but send an email stating that the support is for me personally, for things like visas, travel costs, health care, my food, mental sanity. Much of what I get usually ends up just going to the kids in the form of soccer balls for the boys or hair extensions for the girls or new clothes or shoes for the kids, Christmas presents, whatever is both necessary and fun.

What do I do?

Again, big question. I get the kids up, keep them on top of their chores, teach school lessons, play soccer with the boys, play house with the girls, barbeque chicken, mix cement, build, paint, repair the electricity, repeatedly shock myself with electricty, fix the plumbing, lead Bible study everynight, carry the little ones off to bed after they've fallen asleep, collapse onto my on bed, fall asleep, rinse, repeat.

What's the climate like.

It's too damn hot. Right now it's 95F (35C). Later in the hotter months it will regularly push 104F (40C). Medically speaking, if you have a fever of 104, they put you on ice because your brain is in danger of frying. But the hot months are also the rainy months, so when it gets just unbearable it might start to rain, leaving the rest of the day muggy and hot. That was somehow supposed to be the bright spot, but now that I write it down it just sounds miserable.

What's the food like?

Simple, seasonal. If you think back to how people at in America a hundred years ago, that is much of how it is. You did not go into the grocery store and find apples year round because apples were not being shipped from Honduras or bananas from Guatemala or oranges from Brazil in February. You had apples when they were in season, only when they were in season. The only time you got a treat was when the Wells Fargo Wagon came to town with a box of maple sugar for your birthday, you got some grapefruit from Tampa, some salmon from Seattle in September, you hope to get your raisins from fresno, or the D.A.R. had sent a cannon for the courthouse square.

Beans are in season year round, and they are eaten with rice from Asia or cornmeal from America/Russia. Yes, Mozambique can produce rice and corn locally, but the percentage that it contributes toward total consumption is not even in the double digits. Other than that, mangoes, peanuts, cashews, bananas, oranges, papaya are main season things around here. To a lesser extent there are tomatoes, onions, garlic, coconuts, corn, lemons, tangerines, vegatable oil, chicken, and goat.

How are the utilities there?

SAT prep time. Answer the following comparison Nampula is to Dodge City as

A)Maputo is to New York City

B)TJ is to Marshall Dillon

C)the municipal water supply is to watered-down whisky.

D)all of the above.

If you answered D, you are correct. We are in the disparaged northern end of the country, far away from most luxury and development. Now, we are clearly not living in the bush with no electricity or water or anything. In fact we are far from it. But here is some perspective. Several weeks ago the capital city Maputo lost electricity for two hours city wide and it made news with people demanding to know why there was an outage. Then, not even a week later. The entire northern half of the country was without power on a Sunday from 5am to 8pm as a part of electricity rationing. (The news publicized it as planned maintenance, but people I know on the inside say it is rationing, as this happens about month). This is in addition to the electricity browning out at least an hour a day, every day.

Where we are, and heading into the high point of the dry season, water is turned off to most all homes on our side of town during the day and then selectively turned on at night. The reason is because there is not enough water to go around, and because during the day, water is rerouted exclusively to the beer factory. Many people I talk to are fine with this because, in their words, if the water was instead coming in to their homes and not the beer factory they would have nothing to drink.