In Which the Boys Go Barnstorming

School has made it to the end of the second term here and so we’re on a bit of a break. While I assume most kids back in the states are eating sno-cones and riding their bikes to the park everyday for their summer break, the boys at the orphanage have taken a much more capitalist approach to their two-week term break.How so? Lemonade stand? Lawn mowing? Goat herding? No, no, and mostly no. We’ve been playing soccer!

How does playing soccer earn you money? It’s very simple. So simple in fact that if word gets out it could revolutionize professional sports. I’ll explain.

Say you have a baseball team, or basketball, or football team. Let’s exclude the fringe sports like roller derby or boxing for a second. It’ll soon become clear. What if instead of paying your players whether they win or lose with guaranteed contracts, you only pay them if they win and do a good job. This makes sense in real businesses, so why not sports. If I have an airplane company and the people building the airplanes haven’t quite figured out the whole “flying” thing they are soon going to be out of a job when nobody buys my defective product. Or let’s say you have a restaurant where the food is really good and the line is out the door. The chefs are gonna keep their jobs and you’ll need to hire more waiters.

In Which The Orphanage Hoops It Up Part II

Our tournament was starting. Saturday was game day, and we were ready to go. All the kids were up early and dressed in their uniforms ready to go. The other kids not on the team were begging to go along and watch our epic victory that was by now all but guaranteed. But before we had a chance to trip out of the gate, we first had to get to the gate.

Our game was supposed to start at 8:30. We figured on getting there an hour early to watch the other games so the kids can get an idea of just what they got themselves in to. As the time arrived to leave we had a minor problem arise: We had no vehicle to take us. This would be not be a problem normally, we would just wait for our truck to come back from whatever work it was doing and then take us. I had called the driver, and he assured me things were fine and they’d be back shortly.

The problem is that culturally here, no matter how bad things are, it would be shameful to tell somebody how bad things actually are. I’ve visited people in the hospital that have been largely unresponsive and when I ask them how the pain is they say it is so small they don’t even know its there. So when the driver said he’d return in a few minutes with the truck, what he should have said was that he was broken down an hour outside of town and you should send help.

So as we patiently waited I soon realized that I would be faced with the problem of finding a minibus on a Saturday morning (not easy in our edge of town) and then fitting 24 kids onto it. The second part was not as worrisome to me because I’ve been on minibuses with 24 adults when they’re meant for only 15. So after chasing down a minibus we finally get everybody on board and try to pursuade the driver to drive fast but don’t take up all 3 lanes weaving in and out of cars/bikes/goats.

We arrived late, and by late I mean they were calling our team and saying it was last chance before a forfeit. As the team was taking the court for the tip-off I was going over in my mind all things sports movies were telling us we needed for a victory. Rag-tag underdogs? You bet it. Getting to the big game amidst sabotage/insurmountable odds? That’d be us! A rousing pregame speech about character and integrity and playing with the heart of a champion? Signed, sealed, and deli---

NO! Not delivered! I forgot the speech! I didn’t have any time for the last minute pointers and story about climbing the mountaintop and seeing the promised land! This was a bad sign. A very bad sign! The girls took the court for the 10-minute first half and by the time the whistle blew we were losing 18-0. I thought to myself that this is playing right into our hands. No worries, now we have another ingredient that all great sports movies need: We’re losing by a really big number at halftime. All that’s needed is change our uniforms, bring in the dog to play, and give a heart-stirring halftime speech about when I was a kid and how my dog died or I survived leukemia or I avenged the death of my mentor by killing the evil Darth Maul--- WHAT DO YOU MEAN THERE’S NO HALFTIME?!? You just keep switch sides and keep on going?

Just as quickly as I was beginning to think that we were actually the other team is somebody else’s sports movie the game ended with the girls dropping the first round 34-0. That’s a big old goose egg. And while the boys didn’t end much better, at least they made it a fight and held the other team 12-4.

If you think that’s the end of the story, have hope. We had 6 more games to go. Even though the shirts and hats we all got as uniforms said “tournament” it really should have been called a league. There were 8 boys teams and 8 girls, each with 12 kids. The games were 20 minutes and were on shortened courts with 8 foot high hoops. This made the girls games a little more doable and the guys really exciting to watch. We got 7 games in all, one against each other team. And while the boys side was a fairly good mixture in the standings, the girls side looked a little different. There was about as much parity as there is in the NFL. The best team finished a triumphant 7-0 and didn’t allow a single point scored against them. And our girls, where did they finish? Unfortunately they were the Detroit Lions / Cleveland Cavaliers / Pittsburg Pirates Seattle Mariners of the tournament and finished 0-7.

The highlight of the girls time though was always rooting for the boys, who we always arranged to play right afterwards. What my team lacked in experience—EVERY other team I talked to practices year round and has several levels in their program, more like a basketball club—my boys more than made up for in pure athleticism. They were able to out-run and out-hustle almost every other team to their advantage, and it made fun games and the girls cheered enthusiastically the whole 20 minutes. They finished a modest 2-5, tied for 6^th place. And they definitely improved along the way. What was hard is that while we won two games we lost another 2 more by only ONE point. We just as easily could have been the breakout sensation that captured the attention and affection of all the fans at the games (an important ingredient for our sports movie).

We arrived at the final week of games and I started counting all the pieces that needed to be in place for our sports movie. We had the team of players nobody else wanted (literally), we had the lowly humble beginnings with zero talent, we had the bad start followed by continued improvement, our musical montage played in my head (“I Just Want To Celebrate” – by Rare Earth) as I pictured each of our games, the team playing better each time as the crowd slowly pulls to our side. We even had a non-intimidating name. The girls were the Margaridas, which is, I think, a flower. All I know is every time somebody said it I was craving salt and lime. They boys were named the Bears, which could have been intimidated, except we were up against the likes of the Dragons, the Jackals, and the Tiger Sharks. The only thing we were lacking we soon found when we got to the courts: an arch-rival!

The girls played first and as they got on the court, they we met with sneers and jeers from the other team. All season long we were facing several disadvantages outside of what I have already laid out. We were often walking several miles in the heat to get to the games, often we left early in the morning before eating breakfast, and we were easily identified as the team without shoes. Because so few of the kids had good shoes other than flip flops they were often playing barefoot or swapping shoes during substitutions.

As if this wasn’t enough, the other team was starting with comments about how the girls were ugly because the don’t have expensive hair extensions or jeering them about their lack of shoes or dusty skin from walking to the games. I’m not even kidding. I had more than a few words for the other coach after the game. And while I expected the girls to more or less give up after a few quick points from the other team, we managed to score our real first points of the season (the others that had gone it were seriously intended to be passes). Eight points we scored, in fact. And just when we were coming back, the whistle blew and we lost 8-11.

But, just like a good sports movie, this one had a feel good ending. The girls were so thrilled to have scored so many points for the first time and made the game so close that when the ref signaled the end the of the game they stormed the court and celebrated and then they all mobbed me in a group hug and we danced and celebrated. I secretly think they were also celebrating that they didn’t have to come play basketball anymore, but I’d have taken anything at that point.

Once the girls finished celebrating and cleared the court, it was time for the boys to get their turn. And as their story too would be incomplete without a villain, they to took to the court to discover this last game would be against a team we had lost to by 1 point just a few games ago. They knew we had gotten better and were ready for a battle. The other team made attempts to step on their toes and ask during the breaks in the game why our kids’ parents weren’t in the stands. On top of that, I noticed the other team using two kids that had followed us once during a practice asking if they could help because they were 14 and too old to play in the tournament anymore.

Come halftime we were losing 2-7. We needed some magic and quick thinking. After an Oscar-worthy halftime speech by yours truly and some crafty lineup changes we pulled back into it and managed to go ahead by one score to make 12-11. After a timeout I decided we would just hold the ball to burn out the clock. That strategy worked, and when the whistle sounded the boys and the girls took storming to the court celebrating our narrow victory.

And so the boys, like any good sports movie, got the victory in the end. But as you know, every truly great sports movie has an even greater victory that they are almost more proud of than the real thing. One of the orphanages decided to have a kid with AIDS be on the team as it would be a good diversion for him. Well, we had our own “Rudy” moment the final week when he got some playing time and scored one of our baskets. We had our own “Remember the Titans” moment as the other kids, who had disparaged us and seen us as impossible and outcast, watched us win that final game and celebrate as friends and leave with our heads held high.

The kids too, having known this all along, knew that winning was never the most important thing. They each and every week played will energy and excitement and loved this opportunity that none of them had every had before. And none of them ever get downtrodden because of their circumstances or lack of shoes or walking in the sun or the fact that they’ll never have their own “Field of Dreams” moment. But, most importantly for me, my kids, after we got home the last week, asked if they could pray and thank Jesus for the tournament and our safety and the fun time they had during all of it. And I don’t know if they made a movie for that moment yet. That one gets to be part of our story.

A snapshot of our boys team. My picture of the girls team didn't turn out.

The boys and girls that played from our orphanage. Top row (L to R): Isaque Pequeno, Estela, Ronilda, TJ. Bottom: Ofeita, Canito, Belson, Atija.

In Which The Orphanage Hoops It Up

I wanted to take some time these next couple of days and let all of you know what became of our basketball team. Many people have asked me how it is going and have wanted to hear how our team did. I will tell you, but I want to portray it like a sports movie. And since I don’t have enough time to make a movie (thought about it though) I ‘ll just tell you.

The problem with doing this though is that sports movies are super unrealistic. Like, really super-duper unrealistic. Lets look at a few examples, shall we?

The first example of a sports movie comes from the 80’s classic “Karate Kid”. In this movie, Ralph Macchio gets beats up by the Aryan kid from the Kobra Kai dojo. Suddenly, we have our underdog hero. He runs into Arnold from “Happy Days”, washes his car and paints his fence during a musical montage, and is suddenly a 19^th degree black-belt or something. Ralph Macchio then beats up the Aryan kid who, mind you, had literally been practicing karate since he was in utero.

In at least the first 5 “Rocky” movies the title character (that would be Rocky) is a poor lower class worker that is too [fill in whatever underdog adjective you’d like] to get a job. He ends up earning himself a match against Carl Weathers and then starts training during a musical montage that shows him chopping wood, punching frozen meet, and running up stairs. He then survives against Carl Weathers. in a victory so pyrrhic that they considered renaming the expression ‘pyrrhic victory’ to ‘pulling a Rocky’. Pyrrhic because the real life inspiration for the movie refused to go down in the fight and suffered something like 50+ stitches to the face.

In the football must-see movie “Remember the Titans” we find ourselves cheering for a high school that has just been racially integrated. We root for the team as they overcome incredible odds to not only become friends but go on to win a lot of football games all set to a montage of awesome ‘60s music. Somehow, after being so thrilled that they happened to win a state title we seem to forget that, other than the whole 1960’s race thing, a big source of tension in the beginning of the movie was concern that the current team and coach had already won so many state titles that the new kids and coach were going to upset their system..

“Rookie of the Year” is a lovable baseball movie where this kid has a freak medical accident and, in a shocking turn of events, doesn’t sue the hospital but decides to become a pitcher for the Chicago Cubs. The kid, Henry RosenBagger GardenHoser Rudabager Roengardner eventually loses his 98mph fastball but not before he goes through a series of fun musical montages and learns all about life and love and friendship and, since he plays for the Cubs, losing.

“Little Big League” is a movie where the Minnesota Twins decide to let a 6^th grader manage their baseball team because, hey, why not?! We got nothing better to do in Minnesota until hockey season rolls around and we’re inbetween filming “The Mighty Ducks” sequels. This movie is full of musical montages where the team somehow gets good and wins a whole bunch of games. But the movie is ultimately stupid become for some unconceivable reason Ken Griffey Jr. is the villain. Seriously? Yes, seriously. This movie just lost all credibility.

In “Air Bud” this kid who has no idea what a basketball is teaches his dog to play the game. Their team ends up winning because the other team is scared of the dog, the kid gets sagely advice from an old janitor (who for the longest time I though was Bill Russell until I learned what Bill Russell actually looks like) and most importantly, repeat after me, it has a musical montage. Its good to note that I’m only talking about the first Air Bud film because the other 14 are just too far-fetched to even consider.

Our story plays out a little more like “Bad News Bears” where the team is full of all the rag-tag misfits and I have the starring role where I get to play a (slightly) less hung-over version of Walter Mathau’s character. That’s about where the similarities stop.

Anyways, our story had all the beginnings of a great sports movie. We combined with two other orphanages into a basketball tournament, we had two teams of 10-12 year old boys and girls that had never seen basketball played before, and we had only 6 weeks to prepare. Instant box-office gold in the making.

Then practice started… Since I’ve coached baseball before I was counting on that experience to get me through. The first practice went great. We arrived early one Saturday at one of the two basketball courts in the city (a city of 500k people) that has backboards and rims and taught the kids to dribble and pass the ball and to not run away when they are being guarded. It was a great success.

Then the next week, nay, the next three weeks, were nothing but disasters. One week we showed up to the court and there was a roller hockey tournament (apparently they found the only roller skates in town and each team just took turns using them). The next week our truck was stuck out of gas and we didn’t want to walk 10km to the court. The third week practice got cancelled because it was raining cats and dogs. It wasn’t really raining cats and dogs, that’s just an expression. I know you know it’s only an expression, I just don’t want people to think that raining cats and dogs is an actual thing here.

We were sitting now with only two weeks to practice before the tournament and only one practice under our belts for a group of kids who have never ever played the game before. If we weren’t underdogs before, we sure as heck were now.

Then, with two weeks to go we turned in the official rosters for the tourney. We were met with more than a couple problems as all the boys (that came from one of the other orphanages) were too old to play in a tournament. Remember from my first basketball post a long time ago where I had a picture with my super-tall secret weapons affectionately dubbed Hakim and Akeem Olajuwon?

They were definitely both 15 years old. Their new nicknames are Danny Almonte and Miguel Tejada.

With two weeks to go we managed to get in two practices, albeit with a squad of 8 new boys and 4 new girls. The last session was a blur of rules and tactics and strategies for how to defend without punching and how kicking the ball to control it and pass it up the court is not legal (that one took a lot of repeating).

The day before the tournament started we received our uniforms and the kids spent the whole night trying them on and talking about how they were going to wipe the floor with the other teams tomorrow and then they would win a trip to Maputo (the capital). I’m still not sure why they though they were going to win a trip to Maputo. People assume that everything here with a prize is a trip to Maputo. For example, I have a contest right now to take kids that memorize their multiplication tables out to lunch. People were kind of ho-hum about it until somebody wondered out loud if it was lunch in Maputo and then they all started jumping and screaming with anticipation.

Part 2 is coming tomorrow, and we’ll find out how much floor got wiped and who did the wiping. This shouldn’t be that hard to figure out, especially if you understand my love of sports movies.

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.

Apparently, white men CAN jump

I’ve had several experiences here with basketball. The first happened to be at the local high school, which has been well documented on this site already. Another one came when some guys were taunting me when I was passing by the court one day. So I decided to destroy them, dunking on them and insulting their momma’s the whole way. I don’t know of that’s what is culturally appropriate here, but it’s what you do back in America. And dunking? you ask. The hoop was about 6 inches shorter than normal, which was just the little bit I needed to send them home crying.

Well, Victor was at a meeting with the Social Welfare big wigs the other day with a few other orphanages. The conversation went like this:

Big Wigs: We want to sponsor your orphanages to enter a youth basketball tournament for kids ages 10-12. It starts in exactly 5 weeks.

Other orphanage directors: But nobody from any of our orphanages has ever played basketball before. How will ever find somebody to teach them in time?

Victor: Hey, we have a white guy from America at our orphanage. I bet he can do it. They play basketball in America.

Other orphanage directors: Are you sure he knows basketball?

Victor: He’s really tall.

Directors: Hallelujah, we’re gonna win it all!

And in case you think I'm taking artistic license with the coversation, that is literally what Victor told me happened almost word for word. Now, their assumption of my knowledge of basketball is about as stereotypical as asking that black guy in the movie “Office Space” about money laundering. But in this case, they got lucky. And I was more than happy to teach the kids basketball. After all, it’s not like after rounding up all the kids we’re gonna get to the court to practice and find a group of kids that have been practicing for over a year all doing conditioning and situps and pushups.

OHMYGODTHERESAGROUPOFKIDSTHATHAVEALLBEENPRACTICING-

FOROVERAYEARALLDOINGCONDITIONINGANDSITUPSANDPUSHUPS!!!!

After we pulled ourselves together emotionally, I got to talk with the coach of these other kids, who’s parents had hired him to coach their kids after they heard about the tournament last year. Well, our kids jumped right in and started right in.

After a long time of just watching dumbfounded.

Coaching kids from three different orphanages is kind of tough. Lucky for me, I had a lot of help from my friend Tomo. He is great at helping the kids and also great at defense. Here he is just before stealing the ball from not one, but TWO kids who have never ever played basketball before in their lives.

It’s going to be a long uphill road, but I do have a few aces up my sleeve, two kids that I like to call Hakeem Olajuwon and Akeem Olajuwon.

That is if if H/Akeem Olajuwon was 12 years old, Mozambican, two of him, and towered over everyone else by a head and a shoulder.

Anyways, after a hot Saturday morning of practice, as we were driving away every kid was asking me if there’s practice before next Saturday, because they really want to do it sooner. And I’ll be sure to keep you guys updated on how progress is (or is not) coming along.

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.

Basketball Jones

So, there are many hidden meanings in the title, and I'm sorry I have not put up the cobra pictures yet (its a great story, I promise). So, a couple of days back, courtesy of Christina's sister Ann, we got ourselves a basketball! We went to the secondary school that's about 2 blocks away. First of, its probably the nicest school in Mozambique because it was built by the World Bank within the last decade. Which means that parts of it are air conditioned and its not decaying on itself. It is also the place where we get our water, because they have their own well (we're still working on ours). Second off, anytime time I go anywhere is bound to attract attention. See Pictures about when I drive the truck.

Now imagine that the hype is now doubled. Christina's brother in law Mike accompanied us to the outdoor basketball court at the school. Now imagine that Mike is even taller and stands out more in public than me. I conservatively put myself at 6'3", and he's got 2 inches over me easy. So after the usual song-and-dance of arguing with security over whether or I am a threat to their existence before they let me enter their campus, we start walking through the school to get to the gym. It felt like all 200 students that were there came out to watch us, and for all I know they thought Mike and I were pro NBA players. Its was also cool then for the kids from the orphanage that attend the school because we could say hello to them and then they could tell everybody "Yah, they're NBA players. Yah, They know Michael Jackson. Yah, they're my friends."

The basketball was a blast for the kids to get to scrimmage with us. We just played a little 3-on-3 for a while. There were definitely some kids there want wanted to strut their stuff, so it was fun to steal the ball or block them every now and then just to let then know who's the boss (bonus points if you get the picture reference).
After Mike and I stopped playing it quickly devolved into what appeared to be an intra-squad scrimmage between the Washington Generals (more bonus points if you get THIS one).

The second meaning of the story is just something you can't experience until you're either here in Africa or at a Dave Matthews concert. Every morning, myself and the rest of the neighborhood have a few simple chores: get our water before it gets too hot, start on breakfast (if there is food) and rake the yard. Raking the yard consists of getting all the leaves that have fallen off of the tree, gathering them with all the huge clumps of pollen that have fallen off the tree, putting into a big pile, and burning it (potentially using it to roast peanuts, too).

The problem is that every day, everybody decides that the best place to burn the pollen is right next to the fence behind my bungalow. The other problem is that everyday the pollen has about the same aroma as Marijuana.

Yes, I know what you're thinking. Let me assuage your fears by assuring you that I am a good responsible kid, but I did go the University of Washington and would visit Fremont on occasion (by necessity, I assure you) so the aroma of wacky tobacky is not unfamiliar to me. I should also tell you that I am certain that the amount of burning foliage I'm exposed to is having no effect on me. I have, however, developed large lapses in my attention span and rather insatiable urge to snack on cheetos all the time. More on that news as it develops, if I remember...