Tools to move the job along

I know. Mary Poppins actually sings that "a song”, not tools, will move the job along. But a song only goes so far when you have a huge field to plow and a year’s worth of maize to plant, all by hand. In the hot sun. Even on days when you don’t feel so good. So you can understand why Pastor Pedro and his wife are smiling here as they receive this donated plow. This year, for likely the first time ever, they’ll have cows and a plow to work their fields.

It was a happy outing for us and a bit of an adventure too for our newcomers as we bounced over bad roads and even bush whacked a bit in order to deliver this plow to Pastor Pedro’s home. We were welcomed with such warm smiles!

After the plow was unloaded, its blade and wheel had to be fastened and tightened. There were many hands to get the job done plus a fair share of “oversight” by little ones—just to make sure the job was done right!


This means it was a great photo op too!


This is Pastor Pedro’s granddaughter and her friends



It was quite the neighbourhood event. Even passersby stopped to see what was up.


These are the cows that will pull the plow. They were bought recently and are getting used to their new corral.

Here, the women sort through raw peanuts to select good ones for planting.


I can’t imagine preparing and planting huge fields with a cow and plow, never mind by hand, but I do know these “tools” will be a huge help to this family.


This week, Keren arrived from Three Hills, Canada. She’s a nurse and a short termer who will be with us for about a year. I have a number of jobs lined up for her including helping me complete the preventive health manual and do some home visits (and so on, and so on), so she’ll be a busy young lady! She also needed something to help "move the job along" while she’s here, so she went to Chimoio yesterday and got it:

She’s the proud owner of this set of wheels which, I can guarantee you, more than just a few around here envy her for right now.

And last but not least, I couldn’t help but get some shots of a Praying Mantis crawling on Murray’s stuff. The mantis seemed genuinely as interested in the camera and us as we were in him.





Below: He stretched up toward me in this shot and actually jumped right onto my camera!

Here, Glenn gets a shot while the Praying Mantis stretches up to get a better look at Glenn.


I better sign off for now. This post comes early because we are preparing to head out on a group trip over the weekend—a bit of a getaway at Paindane Beach. It’s about an 18 hour drive round trip which is the downside, but it is just about the most beautiful spot along the Mozambique coast and for that, it’s worth it. I’ll post photos of it next week.

Until then!

Family

Father and Son serving lunch.

Family is great! At least most of the families I took photos of this week are. Some aren’t, so I waged war on them. But we’ll leave that topic for the last paragraph.

Pictured above: Fernando (left) the mission school cook, and his son, Matthew (right), the mission office administrator. For the last few weeks Matthew and Glenn (our short termer, below) have been working on updating school files and doing vision screening with the school children. At lunch-time, they pitch in and help Fernando dish up food for +/- 200 kids!

Mom and daughter

This is Tendai and Heather. They are in the process of becoming family (they along with Heather’s husband, Rick, of course). Isn’t she cute?

Here are some of the other families who came our way recently.

These widowed moms and grannies (and the children in their care) are facing hungry times as they’ve run out of their year’s food supply and are still months away from a new crop. They have received some help from their local churches and now also receive mission help to feed their families.

This new family came for help this week. Here, Dwight, Rick and Charles (and Heather and I—not in photo) find out more about the family’s situation.

The kids pose for a shot.

Cute! The little boy showed us his scar from a crocodile bite that apparently happened earlier this year.

What a brave little soul!

And last but not least in the “Great Family” category, is my own family. This week we happily welcomed my cousin, Murray, from Canada. According to local culture, cousins are considered sisters and brothers, so here he’s referred to as my “mano” or brother. I can live with that ☺

He’s come to spend some time with us and get stuck into any work we send his way. Here, he and Dwight move a bathroom cupboard (that Dwight built) into the house. Yayyy!



So, now for the week’s family that was "not-great”. Big, yes, but not great at all!

These are stink bugs.

This is huge family of stink bugs figured they’d just move into my house. At first they clustered in doorway corners, 30-50 of them at a time. I lost no time at all with my handy can of RAID but they just kept coming back from goodness knows where. So I did a thorough search outside our house and discovered, to my immense displeasure, that hundreds of them had taken up residence (or hatched) in our rafters and between the mud bricks of our home!

(They would be the light dots all over the place.)

So I panicked and went crazy alternating spraying them with that trusty can of RAID, followed by a dousing them to wash them away with the water hose.

When stink bugs feel threatened, they…stink. So it was quite the smelly, drawn-out battle indeed as I kept spraying and they kept pouring out through the cracks of our house. At one point I decided I should do a Google search about the problem to see if I could get some ideas.

You know, any unpleasant experience in life can be a lesson of some sort. And even though this one didn’t have any kind of profound element (maybe one will occur to me yet...), I did learn something new. I had always thought that we had two types of stink bugs (and I think other people have also thought the same): big ones like this:


And small round ones like this:


But apparently they are one in the same, just adult and juvenile (nymph) forms. Aha. I felt both stupid and enlightened at the same time. And I'm now more diligent about killing the big ones whenever I see them.

Stink bugs (again, the dots) dropping onto the front step.

I’m not quite rid of this family yet, but I’m workin’ on it!

I’ll close with a few bug/frog shots for those of you who enjoy this kind of stuff. It is bug season, after all, so they present the best photo ops right now.

Praying mantises in the house:

By the kitchen window

And on top of the cupboard.

They eat bugs but I'm guessing probably not stink bugs.

A tree frog who hangs out on our veranda catching bugs, here on top of the dart board. #2 brave soul of this blog post! He's just lucky I wasn't throwing darts.

And, later, “window shopping”.

It's also cicada time again.

Cicadas are noisy, rather ugly, and clumsy in flight, but they're a rather likable “bug” in our family’s opinion.

Well, maybe not in ALL the family’s opinion. Here, Murray smiles wide as he catches one in the house with the full intent to turf him out the door.

Good job! Now let's see if those stink bugs are gone too.

Hang Around

That’s what this Green Mamba did in a nearby tree during our staff devotional time the other morning. Guess he needed the encouragement too? :D

So, did I pay attention to the devotional message? Good question. And yes, I did, which is commendable considering the fact that I have a very distractible mind. ‘Course, it also helped that we only learned of the snake afterwards. And since you asked, Glenn (our short term volunteer) was sharing about hanging on to faith--doing the hard part but the right thing: remaining faithful--and trusting God through life’s difficulties. Because God can bring good out of even the worst we go through.

It’s funny though, how these kinds of life lessons are put to the test over and over again. As if we might forget. Who knows, maybe we would. What’s not always so funny though, is how when we’re going through real tough times, we can be sorely tempted to decide otherwise and NOT hang around.

Our son, Russ, hanging around, during our early years in the bush.

By the time we moved out here to the Mozambican bush, we’d already been through a ton of life’s challenges that had tested our resolve to “hang around” to the limits. But we had decided to stay the course and pursue what we felt was the right direction for us. Moving to the bush.

The move was a major one: from city to remote bush. No electricity, TV, water, bathrooms, house…actually, there was pretty much nothing of anything! There was our stuff in 2 vehicles, our dog, our tents, very foreign surroundings, and us. Oh, and a drum with 200 liters of water we’d hauled from the nearest source some 65 km away. We didn’t even have a cell phone back then. So it was like us and God ☺

We drove into the bush on a footpath for several kilometers until we reached a dry riverbed with no bridge.

“Well, this is it guys. This is where we camp for the next month or so while we build the bridge that will take us across to the old farm buildings where we’ll build our house and the mission base.” My husband announced.

“Huh???” I thought. I’d heard all about this place. Dwight had been here before with colleagues (who were also due to arrive at some point) and his stories of bush-living/working were infused with a passion for the incredible opportunities and possibilities for making an impact. This was a new, exciting chapter in our lives!

I stepped out of the vehicle into what felt like total wilderness and vulnerability to lurking poisonous snakes, biting bugs and malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Thorns on shrubs grabbed at my legs and gnats flew at me from every angle. While Dwight pointed here and there excitedly talking about the bridge and visions for the future, I swatted bugs away from my ears and eyes. I think I managed about 5 or 10 minutes before I was totally overwhelmed with what had seemed (to me) like a real bad idea! Moving out here, to nowhere, with kids?? To do what?! Try to survive? Suddenly, it seemed like a very bad idea indeed!

I quickly crawled back into the car, shut the door securely behind me, and had a mini-melt down. “Nope. Can’t do this. I can’t live here. This won’t work…” Melt downs always come at the best times, don’t they? Dwight comforted me, prayed with me, and told me to just stay put while he put our tents up for the night. And I sat and thought about whether or not I could “hang around”.

Our daughter, Amanda, in our open-air makeshift camp kitchen.

I’m happy to say that I did decide to hang around. I think it came in small steps, like “Ok, I can do this tonight.” Then I’d do the same thing the next night. By the time we saw the first (not our) dog get bitten by a snake, we were freaked out but already pretty much there to stay, come what may. And I’m glad we did.

And with that, I’ll wrap up this blog post.

Oh, what about the Green Mamba?

The guys who work in the litchi orchard were concerned for their safety since the green mambas LOVE hanging around in the litchi trees…all those tasty birds and all. And they are poisonous snakes. So one guy went after him with a slingshot. He didn’t hit him but it was enough to convince the snake to climb a little higher. And I guess that’s another lesson we can take home ☺

New Cool Neighbors and Health Post News

Rock Monitor (juvenile)

Actually, since most of our new neighbors are cold-blooded reptiles, classifying them as “cool” rests on whether or not you’re a reptile lover. I guess after so many years of living around them, I’ve learned to rather like reptiles. Good thing since there are so many!

We recently discovered this Rock (or White Throated) Monitor living in our water tower. These guys can grow to 1.32 meters in length, but this one is still a baby. And yes, he dug a hole/home into the compressed dirt brick. Apparently they bite hard and hang on like a bull-dog when threatened, so I won’t go poking him with my finger. (more info on White Throated Monitors)

Rainbow Skinks like this one skitter and sun themselves among the rocks in our yard.

Tree Agamas and Ground Agamas hang out in the yard too.

This Rough-Scaled Plated Lizard lived among our rocks but then he found a safer, more convenient spot—a rain-water drainage pipe we installed. So he moved there instead. I bet he said, “Thank you, God!”

This is snake time, and a Twig Snake like this (there are actually 2 in the photo)

was lying smack dab in the middle of my path the other day while I was rushing to get somewhere. I stopped dead in my tracks and we just stared at each other for a long time. There is no anti-venom for the deadly bite of this snake. Thankfully, it’s a very shy snake. I hurled sticks, which he ignored because they didn’t land anywhere near him (I have terrible aim ☹). When I turned around to look for something bigger to throw (small target + larger weapon = increased probability of at least scaring enemy away), he slithered off into the bush. Phew. I didn’t have my camera on me so I used this photo I took last year.

And then there are these guys.

These Ghekos live IN our house WITH us. At night, as they chase bugs or each other around, they can be more entertaining than the TV or Facebook status updates. Supposedly, they make barking or chirping sounds. I, myself, have never heard them so for me, the verdict is still out on that :P

We have other neighbors right now too, like big hairy spiders, several varieties of wasps, more scorpions, centipedes, bats, monkeys and mice. Oh dear. If only we could choose our neighbors!

Moving along here.

We’ve been busy as bees trying to finish up our house. I spent hours down there tiling a shower. Straight tiles in an off-square shower = a time consuming challenge! Sure glad Mushu was such a big help.

Glenn and Matthew put a lot of time this week into updating school child photos and info,

plus doing vision tests on the kids.

And there are changes in the works for both of our health posts.

#1: Construction on a new health post, which will be situated right beside the school, has the official “go ahead”. The new situation will make the health post more accessible to not only the school kids but for the local community as well.

#2: The Health Department has requested our help in expanding the current Mucombezi Sede community Health Post (which the mission operates)

to a “Health Center”. (More building!) Health Centers, which are staffed by nurses and have regular visits by Dr.’s, provide a wider range of services. This would help to better meet some of the critical health needs in our area.

Now THAT’s cool!

Until next time.