I took a few quick shots of our trip on the EN1 through Mozambique on our way to South Africa just a few days ago. In case the photo is not descriptive enough, note that besides the humungous truck bearing down on us, there are no shoulders on the road and there are pedestrians walking and vehicles stopping on the sides as well.
Add to that, the bad patches with nasty potholes, overloaded vehicles (often with no working head/tail lights) and it can be a treacherous highway indeed!
We’ve made this trip many times along this particular route (the only alternative is going through Zimbabwe, which isn’t such a great idea right now), and every trip seems to set itself apart from previous ones through some or other unusual incident. Oddly enough, this time the highway, traffic and pedestrians weren’t the problem. The problem was a case of road rage in Maputo.I’ve witnessed my fair share of frustrated drivers over the years, either shaking their fists or making expressive hand motions at other drivers (yes, at times, even at me). But what I witnessed the other day in Maputo was the sort of thing I’d only read or heard about before.
A play by play account of the incident is tempting, but I won’t put you through that. In a nut shell envision this: we going the speed limit and a VERY ANGRY "Mr. T" shaped guy behind us who wanted to go much faster (and ? had been drinking?). He did his best to ram us off the road and at one point came to a dead stop in the road ahead of us and came out of his car, enraged, with explosive words coming from of his scrunched up face and arms swinging wildly in agreement. I’m not sure we interpreted ALL the messages accurately, but we got the main message: he was extremely ticked off at us for not getting out of his way. He didn’t look sick, had no labouring woman with him, and he obviously wasn’t a cop, so...personally, I think he’d had a bit too much “happy hour” and wanted the thrill of speed to boot. It took a few tricky manoeuvres to avoid and get around him, but Dwight did an impressive job of that. We only finally lost him when we approached a police check-point. Suddenly he needed to make an exit!Our 27th wedding anniversary almost slipped by yesterday unnoticed—that’s when you know there’s too much on your mind. Dad took us out for a nice supper which turned out to be a rather humorous event. We’d been to the place once before, so I was coaching dad regarding some of the menu items. “The pumpkin soup, with its cream and spices, is wonderful. Oh, and under main dishes, the “potjie” would be very good too, dad. It’s a unique type of stew with vegetables. VERY good.” When our host came to tell us the evening specials he listed the potjie as made from venison (Kudu) along with other delectable ingredients. My dad’s smile caught mine across the table...that was exactly what we were going to have! Well, the pumpkin soup was stupendous and filling, but the much-anticipated potjie, sad to say, rather resembled mud. The lumps of meat that clung to large bones were layered with fat, and when we finally did manage to detach a piece to chew, it certainly fought back! (Sudden flash-back of the road rage gentleman.) As for flavour, the little there was left much to be desired. After about 6-10 very brave mouthfuls of the stuff, both dad and I had had enough. Thankfully the soup had been good and quite filling, but now, it was time to go home. The waitress brought my leftovers in a take-away container, which I decided to leave right where she put it. I have no dog or anyone else here to feed, and I sure didn’t want any more! This anniversary would be memorable for, if nothing else, that meal alone. As we left, I wondered if dad, walking behind me, would pick up my “left-behinds” and present them to me just outside the restaurant with a knowing grin and a witty comment. Thankfully he didn’t, but we had a great laugh at the thought anyway.
Today we head to Johannesburg since Dad’s flight leaves tomorrow morning. We’re sad to see him go, but happy that he can be back home again after so long away.
I’ll sign off this time with some advice from recent experience:
1. Stay out of the fast guy’s way
2. If you can’t avoid the fast guy with the volatile temper, be ready for some fancy manoeuvring
3. Beware the delectable, exotic, too-good-to-be-true item on the menu--it likely is too good to be true
1. Stay out of the fast guy’s way
2. If you can’t avoid the fast guy with the volatile temper, be ready for some fancy manoeuvring
3. Beware the delectable, exotic, too-good-to-be-true item on the menu--it likely is too good to be true
4. Laugh, whenever possibleTTYL
This week marked the nursing group’s final week with us and I think it turned out to be the most eventful time of all. There were 2 full days of community immunizations, health teaching at the grade school, time in the health post plus some presentations and debrief time. I was very interested to hear the presentations which included their assessments of local community’s health and possible interventions,
personal challenges faced by the students, etc. It was interesting to see my surroundings through their eyes.
(like tying our doors shut on the night before departure). We took it in stride--this time.
Currently we’re headed back home to the bush after saying farewell to our friends and guests at the Beira airport. This coming week will prove to have a pace of its own as we prepare for the 2 day marathon drive to South Africa over the deteriorating N1 highway (my dad leaves from Joburg to return to Canada). The worse the road gets though, the slower the going. Or at least, that’s the usual response I encourage from the passenger’s seat with “Whoa..slower, slower!” But somehow, there’s an echo in my mind from the recent past...a voice from the back of the van saying, “More gas!”
At the end of their experience they had a much better appreciation for the challenges the people here face in order to simply survive. 
By the end of the drive, we'd seen a good number of baboons, warthogs and antelope, but elephant tracks was about as close as we got to the real thing! 
The spectacular sunset spoiled our disappointment though. Isn't it gorgeous?
The team of nursing students from Prairie College (PCAAT) has been here for a week and what a full week it has been! For the first week, they’ve split into 2 teams: one focused on activities in the mission school, and one focused in the mission’s immediate community and the nearby Pina School.
Taking in some of the realities here can be a challenge, and this little boy with extensive 2nd degree burns was one of those this past week. We first saw him on Friday and Suzanne (one of the instructors), 2 of the students, and the socorristas tackled changing his dressings. On Saturday he was due for dressing changes again and I couldn’t help but take this picture of the clinic table half way through the procedure complete with nearly all of the prescribed essentials one needs in order to treat burns: Flamazine cream, sterile dressings, tensors, Flintstone vitamins, children’s Tylenol and Hershey’s Chocolate Kisses (for the patients, of course)!
The grading that was done this past week had nothing at all to do with the students, by the way. After waiting for many, many months, our name finally rose to the top of the list to rent this grader to have our roads and the training center site contoured! The grader spent 3 days here crawling up and down our entry road transforming an otherwise bumpy ride into a relatively smooth one. The rearranging of soil transformed it from its relatively compact composition into heaps of fine, fluffy dirt (akin to icing sugar) which billows great clouds of dust every time a car drives over it, regardless of how slow it’s going. A bit of rain would be nice about now to pack it back in place, but hey, who’s complaining? Compared to the swamp these roads were this past December and the pain it was to get stuck in them, nicely contoured dust tracks are most certainly welcome!
As the grader worked to level the training centre site, it had to cut down about 75 cm along the top boundary which happened to have a termite mound nearby (the little hill behind Dwight and my dad). 
As it turned out, the mound’s base was much more extensive than we’d thought, rather like an iceberg, and the skimming off of the top layers of dirt revealed many tunnels and holes that these busy little guys had been mining, as we figured, for many years!
What’s amazing is that these termites are very small compared to their huge underground city (the little white “thing” in the below photo is a termite). What productivity! Hope they don’t mind us moving in on their territory.
Another cool thing happened this week. Last year, we were donated some solar powered MP3-type players that have the entire Bible recorded on them. They're wonderful here because you just set them in the sun and turn them on. We’ve supplied them to people and places where we felt they would get the most use. One of those places was the community health post we run, since there are usually people on the veranda waiting to be seen. Apparently, a few weeks ago, a drunk guy camestaggering past the health post and heard the "radio". He was quitecaptivated by the thing and slowly came closer and closer and finally came right up onto the veranda and sat down and listened for aboutan hour or so. Then got up and left. The next day, the same man returned,sober, and asked if he could listen to some more. As he sat listening,tears started rolling down his cheeks. Ernesto, our health care worker, asked him if he could help him. The man said, "These words are going straight into my heart, are they true? I’m not doing what’s right. My drinking hurts me and my family. I want to stop. Can this God really help me?” Ernesto answered his questions then called a pastor in the area to talk to the man. When Ernesto told me this story the following week, he summed it up by saying, “God got into that man’s heart.” (Ernesto holding the small unit--taken on the health post veranda.)
Last but least...there's one thing that, since yesterday, doesn't look like it's "working together" at all anymore. In my rushing around getting many things done, I made the mistake of absent-mindedly leaving our small house generator hooked up when I flipped the main switch to the big generator. I won't go into detail of how things are wired, but, this is a definite no-no! My dad walked past the small generator about 10 minutes later and figured something was wrong when he heard humming and saw smoke rising from it. :( After it cooled, he pulled it apart somewhat to see the extent of the damage. Apparently, lots. Hopefully it can be repaired, or parts can be replaced. Then it can work together for good again too.
The doors for the grain shed also finally got finished this week. The shed was built earlier this year with adobe blocks (produced by a machine that was donated to the mission), but the doors were a bit slower in coming. The carpentry shop has a LONG “to do” list as I imagine all carpentry shops must. But finally this week, after months of waiting, the doors were finished and installed. It think they look too nice to be hanging on a shed, but the wood we work with here, for the most part, is all hardwood and quite beautiful. It can be as tough to cut through as iron at times, but it’s well worth the effort! 
This is inside the grain shed. Palettes (also made from beautiful wood) were made for the sacks of maize to rest on. Safe storage of food against rats, weevils, dampness and theft is a big challenge for us, and we hope we’ve now got a handle on at least a few of these. With rising fuel prices and this year’s poor crops, the food shortage is sure to turn critical. (This is Mushu, making sure things are rat-free).
Here’s one of the other ongoing projects in our ever-busy wood shop: window frames for our house. Yay! I must say that now that the walls are going up and our house is starting to resemble a real house, I’m much more enthused about all the work it is taking/will take yet to build it. The older you get, the harder it is to start over again.
This week we received the official “ok” to start work on the training center. Dad and Dwight went to the site to “shoot some levels” (no weapons involved, by the way). What they discovered about the proposed site—chosen because we found water there—is that there’s much more of a slope than meets the eye. Hmm. History repeats itself. We discovered the same thing where we’re building our house too. The guys asked me to take photos of them showing the difference in levels from different vantage points. Looks like a scene from “Honey, I shrunk the kids” to me. Once this construction gets underway there will be a whole lot more work for that wood shop! 
Snake paragraph (aka last one): I almost stepped on this little guy this morning. Dwight and I were merrily walking along and suddenly my feet started doing the backward two-step...a-a-a-a-g-g-h-h-h. I think my conscious mind only kicked in after the danger was past. It’s funny how one’s senses at times can kick in with a reaction to something before the brain has entirely registered what is going on. He was pretty small, maybe 7” long or so, and being juvenile made him pretty hard for me to identify. I think he’s a boomslang (tree snake) with that stubby nose and huge eyes. Yes, Boomslangs are poisonous. So we gave him the proper respect that poisonous snakes deserve, and since he was little and not in our immediate backyard, we let him carry on his merry way, head up and weaving side to side.
PS: btw, someone (Dan from Three Hills, Alberta) discovered some information about our sterilization pot. It’s actually an accessory that’s used to sterilize dressings INSIDE a larger, pressure-cooker like pot (like the one pictured in the previous blog post). Well, that’s good to know! Thank you Dan.
“Some new instruments came with it: kidney basins and forceps” they said smiling wide. That was great news. But... I’d never seen a sterilizer pot/autoclave that looked like this. Actually, I’d never seen a small one in my life before! Any hospital I’ve ever worked in used huge, commercial sized electric ones. I was at a complete loss to know how to operate this odd item. I assumed that the clamps on the lid and on the side metal sheet were for sealing off the unit to create pressure inside. There were no gauges, dials or rubber rings though.
This was a little disconcerting, especially since the one clamp that was tack welded on the side is already broken on our “new” pot. I told the socorristas that for now, we’ll just keep it in its box and use cold sterilization methods for our dressing instruments.
The mission sponsored him for a year to attend a special school for the blind where he learned to read and write in Braille. He has since returned home and is in a regular school now. But he has faced a few challenges, as you can well imagine. A few months ago, he requested a radio so he could know what time it was so he wouldn’t be late for school. An alarm clock is not quite as helpful as a radio since you usually have to set and check clocks. Radios just need new batteries from time to time. This week, he came to ask for assistance with a Braille typewriter. He’s been taking notes in class using his Braille tablet, but it’s too slow a process for him to be able to keep up with the teacher. Here he’s taking Dwight’s phone number, a process that took several minutes. 
We told him we would do what we could to help him find a Braille typewriter. A first good step would be to conduct a search using google to assess costs, etc. But I didn’t mention googling or internet because that would take me down a path I didn’t care to go again. Just google it.
Dad and Dwight doing some measuring on the old farm’s entrance road. We need a culvert like this one at the new farm to divert the huge volume of water we get flooded with during torrential downpours in the rainy season. 
Me getting medical boxes ready for the student nurses from Prairie who are due to arrive here at the beginning of June for a 2 ½ week practicum. It’s great to have the surplus of supplies left by the previous nursing team. Thank you USASK nursing program and those who sponsored them!