Just like the rains down in Africa

Thanks for those of you that have been praying for Mama Maria. She left the cholera ward on Monday night and is staying with her daughter trying to rest and get her strength back. Part of the reason why she  got sick (and everybody else gets sick this time of the year) is because of the rains. They were the most consistent during January, but as soon as we hit February they turned destructive.

Two weeks ago a storm came through on Sunday and destroyed hundreds of homes and washed out countless roads. One more came through on Thursday and Saturday that week much to the same effect. Mud houses just can't stand up to the weight of rain that is falling. Ground gives way at the absolute quantity of water falling.

Here's some pictures I took after the Saturday storm.

This is the corner where about half the orphanage drains out. The drain partially collapsed and impeded much of the water from leaving. This is Mama Maria's house. But don't worry. This all happened while she was visiting her brother in another city.

The water backed up and was touching the steps at Victor's house at one point. And keep in mind these pictures are about an hour after it stopped raining.

Of course, for the boys, it turns into fun and games climbing on chairns to traverse our... um... pool, or lake, or pond? Whatever you call it, Belson and Muaparato were traversing it.

You have to traverse it. It's very dangerous to walk through puddles or wade in the water because you can get m'tawi-tawi. Its just a horrible fungus all over your foot that is really painful. Never gotten it, but usually somebody will pick some up during the rainy season.

The rain also makes our road nearly impassable. There reason is up at the power station at the top of the hill, this nice little pond all collects and drains down our street.

This is the view up the street. At the lake, I figured out it was running at about 1.5 liters/second. Keep in minnd that this water in our street you see here is not standing water, it's running down our road. Here there is probably more from the water that has been collecting as it runs down the hill.

The view looking down from our gate shows more water running. Any spot where a hole has opened up people fill with branches and leaves to warn people that its a giant hole and not a little puddle. Those are the leaves you see in the middle of the road. Where the road bends downhill in the picture is about as far as you can pass.

The rain rushing down our road creates problems with holes and ditches and erosion. There are about 5 spots that I counted where the road has eroded away and exposed water pipes connecting our bairro. This is as far as I dared pass with the camera because more and more  water collected the further down the hill you went. About 50 yards/meters past the orphanage the road becomes impassable as it has eroded into a ditch/gulley/canyon about 5 feet (1.5m) deep and about 4 feet (1.2m) deep. And from what I could guess had collected all the water and was flowing at about 8 liters (2gallons) per second. That is A LOT OF WATER.

Jose standing with our neighbor Celso. Jose, as you well know, has major developmental problems and problems hearing and speaking. Celso, our neighbor, has a surprisingly common birth defect here and was born without ear canals, so is very limited in communication. Imagine cupping your hands around your ears. All the time. They both need to rely on a lot of non-verbal social skills to interact and because of that play really well with eachother. In the bottom corner is the drain from the orphanage. Given the water above it should be full of rushing water, but since it collapsed inside the water is trickling out.

Utilities here suck

That's about all I have to say. Power has been on and off since Saturday since the transformer blew and the internet has been out since before that. Its now Thursday morning here and its been three days without water from the city pipes, which is fine because we have the well. But the well is only good as long as the powers on.

I should have a flurry of updates here once things level out. Hang on.

The one where I get right to the point

Talk about one step forward, two steps back. I don't have a roof right now on my house because its being replaced for a tin roof, but in the meantime, there is progress. Just this week I got running water to my house. On Tuesday, I got everything hooked up to the water tower and took my first non-bucket shower. It was glorious. Right after I finished, I stepped out of the shower and a huge gust of wind came and dumped a truckload of dust and dirt right on top of me while I was still soaking wet.

And that's when I got to take my second non-bucket shower. It too, was glorious.

Then the next day the water tank went dry and I've been back to taking bucket showers.

A Day In The Life

Like the sands of the hourglass, so are the days of my life. The much requested, much anticipated, and much expected post chronicling all the details of a day at the Evangafrica Orphanage. This was all recorded during one absolutely normal, nothing special, always out-of-the-ordinary day in Mozambique.

And as an added bonus, keep reading to spot the best picture in the history of the orphanage!

5:30 - My day begins when the megaphone goes off. Its literally the siren on a megaphone and its sounds like the Huskies scored a touchdown (if anyone can even remember what that sounds like). I usually shake the bugs off my net, out of my shoes, and off my clothes. After that, I sweep through the rest of my bungalow and talk with the animals, just like in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.This guy has been hiding out in the kitchen sink. Its a great place for him to hide, because my sink has neither running water or a connected drain line.

5:35am - I usually get my wits about me and head over to the watering hole. Here I get to wait in line with all the kids and collect all the water I'm gonna use for the day. My main uses are only for drinking and showering.
6:00am - After picking up breakfast, I bring it back to my house. Breakfast is rice porridge. Recently we started getting sugar in it. For the first month I was here I swear somebody confused the sugar with the salt because it was almost unbearable salty at times.
Breakfast is usually a good time for me to get my necessities out of the way. I usually sit and eat it while I'm boiling my water. It need about a gallon a day here with all the work and heat/humidity. Its also a good time for me to get some reading in and spend some good quality time with Jesus while relaxing in my easy chair.
This is my easy chair. It was just sitting around here, and nobody ever used it or wanted it. And I'm such a sucker for anything free (ask me about the other 4 pieces of free furniture I've acquired over the years).

7:00am - After finishing my water/Jesus time, I clean up a little bit, get a shave in (I'm now an expert in shaving without a mirror, by the way) and get ready to face the day.

I inspect the roof of my bungalow before heading out. It can get pretty windy here, so I just like to assess it from time to time, because it needs to hold up if it ever rains. We're in the middle of the dry season now, which only recently has been giving us trouble (stay tuned for a post about the well).
7:05am - This morning I decided to go and chat with the neighbors a little bit. I was being friendly, but I had a secret hidden agenda.

7:10am - I encounter the first neighbor. We hang out for a bit, talk about the economy, his 401k, Michael Jackson, the Mambas (nat'l soccer team). But I didn't find what I was looking for.
7:30am - I run into the second neighbor. They're an older couple. The invite me in for some coffee, he talks about the weather and what life was like back before the war while she shows me pictures of her grandkids. We have good little chat, but I still haven't found what I"m looking for. whoa-oh-oh-oh.
7:40am - I found it! If you recall an earlier story about a morning ritual in the jungle here, you'll recognize what I'm talking about. The morning practice of burning leaves and pollen to create fumes with the hint of something oh-so-slightly narcotic. I meet the neighbors to confront them with the issue at hand. We discuss the potential environmental merits of perhaps creating a compost bin, but I am quickly dismissed as outlanding and told to pack up my Western ways and go home.Here is a picture of a smaller version of the epic toke-fests that take place most mornings behind my bungalow.

8:30am - I sit in during one of Professor Tomas' lessons. Tomas is a friend of Victor who comes in usually about 4 days a week and helps the kids in primary school who are behind in reading and writing (which is just about everybody).I'm just about as far behind in the reading and writing as they are and most days, especially if we're talking about verbs or tenses, it's really helpful. Other days its not, like if we're talking about whether the snake ate it's food or if the snake ate its' food.

The lessons take place inside the dining hall. And for all my HHS alumni reading this, the Portuguese word for dining hall sounds like "cafetorium".

9:30am - After the lesson there is usually lots of work to be done. Below is an example of when the bathroom was being tiled. Victor and Christina are hard at work to get the brand/grand new boys dorm up and running. Yes, I know. Contrary to popular belief, Victor and Christina are not those do-nothing, stay at home orphange parents you all think they are.This day, however, there was not actually any work to be done. Construction stops when there is not money coming in, which is about 4 days out of 5.

So in my spare time, I will just hang around with the kids and chat, give help on homework, teach English, play games all of the above.
I made my way over to the boys "dorms" for a little while. I call it tent city, because while the boys dorm is being finished, this is where they're living. Don't be shocked, they've actually done quite well for themselves with the walls, roofs, porches, etc.

After that, I make my way over to the girls dorm. I'm enjoy checking out the "African re-bar" aka bamboo.

11:00am - The first of the days many mini-emergencies take place. On other days its driving people to the hospital, having gov't officials show up without notice (not that we're hiding anything, they just generally suck), breaking up fights between neighbor kids, the list goes on. Today, it was mechanical (hooray)! A local NGO was bringing in donations when the car bottomed out on the gate coming into the orphanage and knocked the tailpipe clean off the car. TJ to the rescue! Sorry, no pictures. I was actually working during this one and couldn't take any.

After a quick change into my work clothes I started inspecting the car. I discovered that the tailpipe didn't break when the car entered the gate, this was just the final nudge it needed to drop completely out from under the car. The tailpipe was completely rusted-out and the muffler was tied to the car with an old bicycle tire.

1:00pm - After using some scrap-iron and a dozen or machine screws I attached the muffler and tailpipe back to the car. As I was prepping the broken section of tailpipe to weld a collar I made onto it (we have welding equipment here, but just stick welding, nothing fancy) another car pulls up. This is the director of the NGO along with his favorite mechanic. The mechanic is probably the same one responsible for "fixing" the tailpipe the other two times it had rusted out. He literally drags me out from under the car and proceeds to augment (read: destroy) my mounting brackets. He throws the tailpipe in the back of the car and drives off to his shop.

The boss of the NGO talked with his associates for a few minutes, and I could hear him reprimanding them for letting an estrangiero (foreigner) work on the company car. And then as they drive away he has the nerve to ask me (in Portuguese) if the mechanic could borrow our welding machine to repair the car. I was tempted to reply to him that the welding machine is a estrangiero too so he probably wouldn't like it, but Jesus restrained me and instead I told him I didn't understand what he was saying and packed up my tools.

1:45pm - After getting my clothes changed and discovering that my lunch had been given away (shima and beans), I put on my teacher hat and start with homework. I don't think the kids here (or most people in America) fully understand the capabilities of a mechanical engineer, they just see me working on cars, a coincidence. But they do know and understand that I love math and science. I won't talk a lot about teaching, because it and the education system here are going to get their own post later. But this is most of my time until dinner.
Everybody is hard at work doing the examples on the board.

3:00pm - The afternoon today was filled with a particularly different brand of excitement. The girls apparently have an upcoming grudge match against some girls from their school and started soccer practice today.
After a few drill and exercises with a very serious Gabriel (in the yellow shirt), and not paying attention, which frustrated a very serious Gabriel (still in the yellow shirt) they started playing.

If I were them, I would opt for a medium than soccer, but none-the-less it was undoubtedly the highlight of the day as all the boys came out to watch the girls try their feet at the worlds game.


It was a source of endless amusement to myself and all the other boys, and a few of the workers even (the two guys far left) stuck around after their shift to watch the "excitement". When a goal was finally scored it resulted in all the 20+ boys watching the game to start jumping up and down and doing flips off the wall we were watching from.

The next day I didn't see a single girl who wasn't either limping or walking around as sore and as stiff as a geriatric. I made fun of a few of them by throwing their pencils on the floor and watching them pick it up (just kidding, I promise).

4:30pm - After the excitement of the girls soccer game most of them went to shower and ice down. I was held back because some of the little ones wanted me to be their choppa driver. Choppas are the little mini buses that regularly hold 20 people that dart all over the city. They wanted me to drive them to a restaurant for dinner. At the restaurant we had, you guessed it, beans and shima! I splurged and bought them for cake for desert. No big deal. After all, I had a little extra cash because it costs 5 bottle caps to ride the choppa.

When I got out of the choppa (a work bench) to get the cakes, I took what is quickly being known as the best picture in the history of the orphanage. If you click on it you can view it in full wallpaper size. And I know that all y'all are gonna eat this up and send it to all you friends and introduce them to (from left to right) Jose, Mena, Ofeita, Samito, and baby Dorcas.

5:30pm - When I first came here and didn't know the language I discovered that one of the easiest ways to serve people here was literally by serving - dinner, that is. Now they won't let me leave. Oftentimes I will be hunted down to make sure I am not running away and skirting my responsibilities just to serve dinner to everybody.

6:00pm - Dinner is served! The last few nights, thanks to a local donation, we've been getting chicken liver along with our rice instead of beans. So after I've divide up all the plates and then ring the dinner bell and get to dish them out to everybody. Usually there's about 60 plates for dinner needed to include everybody.

7:00pm - After dinner there's devotional. It consists of one-part singing and one-part of a little scripture lesson given by one of the older kids here.

7:30pm - Devotional gets finished up, which means its time to start homework. The younger kid that don't have much have gone to bed by this point, and there's anywhere from 5-15 kids that stick around that need help with English, math, chemistry, physics, history, and/or geography. The only thing I refuse to help with is biology, which I never liked and I quickly discovered is impossible to translate for.

10:00pm Usually this is when I will get time to myself to check email, listen to BBC news on the radio, brainstorm for the water supply and well, update the blog, or just crash and get some much needed sleep to get back up and try it all again tomorrow.

Hop aboard the train to crazy-ville

So, Victor and Christina left for three days to Pemba, meaning that I am now king of the orphanage! Just kidding. People much more qualified than I are running the place. And while Victor's absence does not necessarily mean chaos, it does mean that everything is starting to go to hell in a lovely, traditional African hand-woven basket.

So far we've had: People learning to drive the big truck using the trial-by-fire method, boys dressing like girls, the girls holding a weight lifting competition (the real ones, not the boys pretending to be girls), people passing out from heat-exhaustion and smoke inhalation, killer rats on the roof, a freak dust storm, impromptu street-fighting lessons courtesy of yours truly (we watched Rambo 3 a few days ago, so that makes me an expert), a broken alternator, no water in the cistern, a flooded cistern, we lost power, people have been threatening to eat me, and I accidentally started two Michael Jackson rumors.

So far its been a pretty eventful anything-that-can-go-wrong-will first 8 hours without adult supervision. It only gets better from here. Be sure to tune in for the next post entitled: Cobras. Pictures included.

Learning To Go Without

It's sometimes the little things I've been taking for granted. Like getting access to snacks, or a fresh piece of fruit, or not having to spend the first 30 minutes of my morning boiling all the water I'll need for the day. But sometimes, its the larger things that I notices. Like EVERY night this week when we seem to lose electricity somewhere between 6pm and 8pm for the evening. Its ironic, only because I do notice the electricity because the lights flicker all the time and it's an unregulated 240V system (for the nerds out there). Its also ironic because we live next door to the electrical substation for the city. Mozambique I guess has a fairly developed electricity system because it exports a lot of it to neighboring countries. And with the electricity comes the internet, which we have at the orfonato, but never seems to work on the two days a week I try to use it.

Still, what I am not taking for granted are the ways that God seems to be providing seemingly out of nowhere. Like today, I was very upset over a TV station that came to interview the orphanage. The TV station is owned by the makers of KLIN (pronounced: clean) and they brought their klin truck and music jukebox and product placement banners and klin go-go dancers. It was pretty sleazy, because they came to entertain (for lack of a better word) the kids for a couple hours by dressing as hookers (its was really bad) and dancing for everybody for two hours.

In the midst of being disgusted at the obscene product placement and slutty go-go dancers, I learned that they brought a small donation of soap and $500. We went from having no money at the start of the week, to God making a way despite slutty product placement girls.

Still, be praying for some long-term answers to prayer, namely that God would:
1)Help us with the water. We've been drilling wells for almost two weeks and people are coming out on Monday to test the health of the water and what quantity we'd be able to get.
2) Find a new location for the septic tank. We've spent a week laboring over digging septic tank for the dorm, but we can't place it next to the well. It needs to be about 3meters deep, and at 2meters I hit quartz. Very hard to dig through.
3) Help us with the every increasing problem of money. The truck has not been bringing in as much work as in needed to help buy supplies and construction materials.