Getting There

There was a bit of a panic one morning last week. We were just finishing our routine morning meeting with staff when I caught a quick movement out of the corner of my eye. One of the guys had something on the end of a stick that he held stretched w-a-a-ay out in front of him, as far as possible, and he was rushing to dispose of whatever it was. It must have been pretty dangerous, so my curiosity was piqued.

“Wait, wait! What is it? Let me see!”

The guy stopped mid-step and turned around ever so carefully. There, on the end of the stick, was no snake, no furry, ogley-eyed spider, nor anything too horrid at all for that matter. It was a plain old chameleon. A fairly frightened one at that who was moving as quickly as possible toward safety!

Unfortunately for the chameleon, his species are programmed for disguise, not speed. And so his attempts to “scurry” were quite pathetic. At best, he swayed backwards and forwards repeatedly, in super slow motion, as his front foot reached forward, poised for eventual touchdown.

It’s pretty safe to blink, even several times, when watching chameleons walk. You won’t miss much.

They're quite harmless, but many here believe they’re deadly poisonous. I reached for the stick to rescue the little fellow and to relieve the guy holding him. As I did this, an animated discussion broke out as we shared our differing ideas about chameleons and the possible danger they pose. Some voiced concern that chameleon eggs on cassava leaves could easily be eaten by accident and poison a person. I was more concerned about the level of cyanide poisoning in the leaves themselves. They thought I was funny. I thought they were funny. We all had a good laugh.

The chameleon thought it wasn't so funny at the time but it could be later, after he’d reached safety. If he could just put that foot down and actually get there.

I think Raimundo (holding the stick) and I have similar thoughts about chameleons.
He doesn't seem too worried.

While we were having some fun but also challenging moments at home base this week, Dwight, Rick, Joao and Pastor Ricardo spent just shy of 2 weeks picking their way over dangerous highways and bad dirt roads to visit, teach, and encourage pastors and people in remote areas. I traced their path as best I could (below). The round trip covers approximately 1200 km.


Need I say why I don't accompany my husband on these trips? Conditions are rustic and besides, there are dangers along the way too. Who knows, maybe one day I'll muster the needed sense of adventure and go along. But not yet. Thankfully, Andy and Dwight took some great photos which I'll share here.

Rick, Heather & Co. hauling a trailer load of orphan gift packs for Chiriza and Chueza.
Good thing they were well wrapped on the bad, dusty road!

Crossing the Chiri River on the "ferry".
These bigger rivers are know for both hippo and croc attacks.

While Dwight drove, Pastor Ricardo "manned" the phones.
Dwight's phone is a busy one. Apparently Pastor Ricardo's is too.

Graduating pastors in Guro

Lunch with the Community Leader in Mutarara

Unique Christmas Gift packs, carefully shopped for and put together by Rick, Heather, Pastor Mariano and others, were distributed to orphans in programs in Chueza and Chiriza.

Awaiting gifts and lunch.

Gifts are so fun!

Grannies and elderly women who also receive help.


The Chueza church runs a garden to provide vegetables for orphans in its orphan feeding program. The walk there is several kilometers long.



Desperately needed pots for cooking were delivered on this trip as well.


Fresh produce from church garden in another area called Baue.

Follow up for the women's literacy program is also provided on these trips. Here, one of the remote women's class teachers receives supplies.

Here, a woman receives a certificate for completing a course in leadership training.
I love seeing the women involved like this.

"Work-for-food" project in Sinjal.
Bricks made will be sold to generate income to purchase more grain.

Checking out a possible remote base in Sinjal for the mission.
A place to call home while so far away from home would be ideal on these remote location visits.

Who knows...maybe I could be lured off on one of these crazy trips after all? There may be a few dangers and some adventure, but it would be a great experience. Maybe one day I'll get there.

2010--Busy times!

It was time to quit eating so much and kick life and work back into gear again on the Monday after New Year’s. Besides routine work for the first part of 2010, some priorities were to focus on finishing up a few orphan/widow homes, completing data entry (on new program) for school kids, planning for mission’s Annual General Meeting preparing departmental budgets and reports, finishing the health manual and sending it to print (me and Keren), and so on. Things were abuzz.

Then we heard that the government had moved up the date for the first day of school from early February (the norm) to January 18th!

Now, we have a lot of kids in school--both in the mission school plus those with sponsorship who attend other schools beyond grade 5--so there was some serious student registering/accommodation searching/parent meetings/last minute organizing to do!

Students at Chitundo, where many of the mission's sponsored students transfer to.

To add to the chaos, we were told that some of the kids could not transfer to the usual school we transfer kids to (Chitundo, where we have things more or less in place) because a new school nearby had expanded its capacity and they needed to transfer there instead. The new school is closer to the mission so, in many ways, that works better for us too. But it was the last minute scramble starting from scratch in a new school and finding housing in a new area that added a little touch of “crazy busy” to the mix. And all this while Dwight and I had to leave on a trip south. We’re very thankful for a capable home team!

It seems I’ve written volumes about this topic already but every time we have to travel the EN1, Mozambique’s only national highway connecting north to south, there's always another comment or story to add. This highway is in a perpetual state of both repair and disrepair, where the speed of repair somehow never overtakes disrepair, despite numerous work crews and contracts.

Right now there is a new outfit contracted with rebuilding long portions of the road.

They’ve done a terrific amount of earth moving which is a bit disconcerting considering the apparent lack of progress they’ve made since they began and considering the chaos with which the job seems to run. Heavy rains reduced certain sections to a nearly impassible quagmire in November.


This detour road has only one proper lane to drive in, and no flag people to direct traffic, so what you end up with is vehicles having head-on meetings where the only safe place to veer off is the portion under construction (evidenced by the branches on the road).

The engineers don’t like this very much, of course, and tell people to “get off of there!” Ok…but to where?

And get this: the new highway’s base layer of pressed dirt is already undergoing repairs. Yes, they’re repairing potholes in the sub-tar layer. This is not a good sign.

Here's a shot of the highway as it enters Maputo, the capital city. There are 2 paved lanes here with only dirt shoulders, but the norm is for the traffic to be 4 or so lanes wide regardless. So watch out pedestrians! And watch out motorists...a lot of cutting in and out goes on.

Anyway, we’re currently in South Africa on business for about a week. While here, we’re working on (besides the immediate tasks at hand) coordinating our schedule for the next few months. There are several teams slated to arrive fairly soon, plus individual volunteers as well. After that, there will be more teams, some from South Africa and two from Prairie (Canada) between May and July. So, busy times ahead. Good, but busy.

And with that I will close and get back to work!

ttyl

Home Jones

The trip home is always long and bumpy and it's great when it's finally over. I’ve blogged about Mozambique’s EN1 (National Highway #1) on other occasions, and every time we travel it, I can’t help but include at least one photo of the event. Every trip on the EN1 is an event because:

1. The bad and deteriorating asphalt can be downright dangerous.
2. The trip from Chimoio to Nelspruit is a 2-day marathon with few facilities along the way.
3. Every trip here is an adventure in itself.

You know the highway is bad when vehicles straddle the asphalt and the dirt shoulder in an attempt to find the good spots.

Passing slower traffic ahead of you is always very tricky because at the last minute, the car you’re passing may swerve to miss a huge hole. A “beep-beep” warning is advisable!

Negotiating a road like this is like picking your way through a life-sized maze. It’s a constant challenge to calculate where the deepest holes are, then to weave to and fro trying to miss them in order to minimize damage and stress on the tires, on the stuff we’re hauling that gets jostled around, and on us too ☺

Oddly enough, there are parts of this trip we rather enjoy, like the captivating scenery along the way or just seeing how time changes things. Or, in the case of the potholes, how it doesn’t!

Some of the exciting changes back home are:

The arrival of the floor tile for our house! The ceiling is up in our bedroom and still needs to be put up in the rest of the house. Door and window frames are going in and several of our homemade doors are ready as well. There’s lots of other work going on around here, so progress on the house is rather slow. But hey, progress is progress!


We have a growing number of guinea fowl, both for distribution to needy homes as well as for the mission’s own breeding stock, which will be used for the same purpose—distribution. Several of the guinea fowl hens are already laying eggs and I now have a broody chicken hen whose job is to hatch them. 

I called her "Chiquinha" because she's small. She could be a pretty busy lady since the average guinea fowl hen will lay 50-150 eggs per laying season! I'm presently looking for other, preferably larger, hens to help her out. 

The guinea fowl eggs are rather cute. They’re a bit smaller than chicken eggs. The chicken egg is the one on the far left.


I’ve decided that we need a proper pen now to keep them in, one with a good roof, perches and nests. So that has been one of this week’s projects for me, and a fun one at that!


This is the new A frame pen. Nice thing is, we can roof it with the twisted and otherwise useless  sheets of tin roofing that were torn off an orphan home during a storm a few weeks ago. 

Here's Liria's house with a new and improved roof. Our sincere thanks to all who have given to help those whose homes suffered storm damage.

So the orphan home gets a new roof, and the birds’ home does too. I love it when a plan comes together. 

P.S. "What's with the 'Jones' in the title?" you ask. It's just one of those little family sayings I picked up from, most memorably, mom Lagore, and it basically meant "Time to go home." It may have its origins in "Bring home Jones", which I think is a baseball term that is synonymous with a home run. Don't quote me on that though. I know much more about going home than I do about baseball.  

Pot holes (again), the Zambezi River and a furry spider

I’ve written about the potholes on Mozambique’s EN1 highway several times on this blog, but writing about them never seems to do them justice. Taking photos of them through the windscreen doesn’t either since they just look like divets on a golf course green. On our return trip to Chimoio last week, I told Dwight that when we come across one of the bigger potholes, I wanted to get out of the car and get a picture of me actually sitting in one. That would give a much better idea of the size of some of these nasties along the way. I thought it was a splendid idea. Dwight thought it may prove to the world that we are, in fact, crazy! His word of caution didn’t dissuade me in the least. We passed a few real doozers that we didn’t stop for because there was too much traffic. (Passing other vehicles on bad roads is a bit of an undertaking when everyone is swerving all over the highway to avoid potholes, bicycles and pedestrians. When you finally manage to manoeuvre past another vehicle that's zipping back and forth, you think long and hard before stopping for anything!) So here you have it. Not the widest or deepest pothole on the road, but a respectably sized one. (Note photo with bus to see just how riddled the road really is with these things.)

And as an added bonus, when we pulled off to take this photo, I noticed that we just missed this huge hole on the side of the road by a few inches. It was hidden by the long grass. Wouldn’t that have been fun to drop into :(It’s nice to see some repairs taking place. Mind you, it’s one at a time along a 50-60 km stretch with thousands of potholes. Roadside shot: This shot only captured about 1/6th of the entire street. One day I’d like to get the entire scene. All the yellow shops’ (bancas) paint jobs were sponsored by MCEL, Mozambique’s biggest cell phone company (whose colours are yellow and green). The newly emerging blue bancas are evidence that Vodacom is starting to elbow its way into the cell phone (and in this case, promotional banca painting) market as well.

Before we left to return home this time, I was asked by someone if our car was once again packed right to the canopy roof, like it often is on such trips. I thought for a moment then said, “No, as a matter of fact. We’re not hauling quite so much stuff for a change. It’ll be nice to be able to see out the rearview mirror.” I spoke too soon. On our way through Maputo we spotted this wicker furniture that we’ve wanted to pick up for a long time but it’s not always easy to find. Besides, space for hauling it is always an issue. We didn’t really have enough space to haul it this time either, but the guys selling it were bound and determined we could, and would, fit it on/in our vehicle somehow! After much pulling and pushing of boxes, rearranging of luggage, wiggling chairs in that wouldn’t fit, taking them out, moving stuff around then wiggling them in again...we finally managed to load it. The guys who had been so determined this could work, beamed with pride when the job was done. We were a little concerned the couch may lift off once we got up to highway speeds, but it didn’t. Don’t we look like the Beverly Hillbillies?

This week Dwight went on a 2 day (overnight) flight with the Cessna up to the Mutarara area on a trip with 2 other guys. They landed in Caia, then rode by pick-up for 60 km on bad roads to Sena where the Dona Ana railway bridge crosses the Zambezi River. Here they walked for a stretch then caught a ride on small motorbike “taxi’s” (luggage and all) along the narrow pedestrian walk across the 3.9 km bridge. I’ll try to post a video clip of the adventure for you to see. There's a croc story too, but I'll leave that for next time.

And last but not least, I had to show you this furry friend who I discovered by our door last night. The fact that he’s out hunting signals that springtime is just around the corner. Having hot, sunny days around the corner is one thing, having this guy there doesn’t elicit quite the same response!

An eventful trip and some sage advice

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

4. Laugh, whenever possible

TTYL