Pictures Talk

I follow quite a few blogs. Some are personal, others are medical. Some have lots of pictures (like mine) on each post, others have only one or two, then there are a surprising amount that have no photos at all. That’s surprising for me because I can’t imagine using that many words without pictures to help say what needs to be said! Maybe I’m just a lazy reader, (I KNOW I'm a lazy reader), but those lo-o-o-ng text-only entries, especially if they relate to U.S. politics/health-care, from people I don’t know personally? Yeah. Those require a great deal of discipline for me to read. I usually just don’t bother. I need pictures. 

Anyway, back to this blog post.

This has been one of those ridiculously busy weeks, and it is now Friday afternoon and my week’s “to do” list is far from being done. I thought I’d let these pictures tell the tale of my week, but I know I'll have to throw some words in as well.

Tomorrow is our Annual General Meeting for the Mozambican mission entity (A.S.A.M.), so we’ve been busy as bees getting our (for me, health and orphan ministries) 2008 reports done up and budgets prepared for 2009.

Wow, a lot has happened! Try doing your own year-end review, you’ll probably find the same thing.

This week, schools officially re-opened for the year so we attended orientation day at our school.  There were many items on the agenda, but one of the fun parts was to tell the kids the good news about the extra desks they'll be receiving this year because of Thorsby Elementary School's "Dollars for Desks" fundraiser. Very good news indeed!

Francois tried to get them all to pronounce "Thorsby". It sounded more like "Toes-be". Hmm, good try. Anyway, we're getting more desks...yay! A big thank you goes out from this school to Thorsby Elementary!

School kids.

Some kids signing their names on a list since they will be going away to boarding school for grades 6, 7 & 8. We're sure proud of the kids who stick it out and stay in school.

This is Memory and Eunice. Eunice is our Women's Ministry coordinator. She also teaches arts and crafts at the mission school. She first came to us as a women's literacy program participant. Memory was a baby then and was failing to thrive, so she received milk from the health post. Eunice kept attending classes then eventually got involved in teaching the women herself. As you can see, things have changed a lot for them both. I love success stories.

Eunice (along with others) has been instrumental in helping the school by making uniforms for the school kids this year. They'll be distributed to the kids as soon as they're all done. Wow...more benches AND uniforms!

Here's this year's school staff (both full-time and part-time) with Francois (school director) in the middle. 


Moving right along here--today was orphan food delivery day. And since they too start school this week in their respective villages, they received school supplies as well. Oh, and there are guinea fowl in the box for one of the homes. Pretty full eh? Can you believe a student still crawled in on top of all that to get a ride?

New clothes for school. 


Filipe's not in school yet, but he got new clothes anyway. Here he's admiring his new yellow shoes.


More guinea fowl got distributed today too. It's nice to see 'em come, but it's nice to see 'em go too.

The widow who got them had made a dandy fine cage. (Dwight getting video coverage of the event :))

Prayer time. Yes, I should have my eyes closed too, but I couldn't pass up this cute shot. You know, me and pictures.

So that was more or less my week. Now, I really have to get going on a managerial accounting course (NOT my strong suite) that I'm under pressure to finish by February. I'm stuck on a concept though--the "Step-down" method of cost allocation. I've googled the term for added instructions and can find lots of lengthy written explanations about how to do this. But *sigh*, what I was really looking for was pictures of how it's done. 

Pictures? Anyone?