Well, the internet was not cooperating yesterday, so this comes one day late.  Here is a photo of one of the monitors, Emilio, with his family.   This must be one mother who is very tired!  Not all of these are his own kids, but most of them are. He has seven.  Here in Mozambique, cousins, nephews and nieces commonly live with a family.  They come in from more rural areas to take advantage of the city schools.  These visitors help a lot around the house, often putting in a lot of hours doing housework, laundry and cooking, so mom does get a lot of help.  There is still plenty to do for everyone, though!.

Someone told me I should put up lots of photos of bugs – and I do have lots of photos!  I just can’t find them……

So, here is a photo from some years ago of Toby with a rhino beetle.  We get all kinds of interesting bugs here, and the camouflage is incredibly awesome on some of them.  You wouldn’t even guess it is a bug until it moves.   Some of them make you incredibly itchy, and some of them just give you nightmares.

Here’s a photos of the grocery store!   We were very excited when this store opened last year, because the only other good store burned down a couple years ago.  In this store, we can get yogurt, cheese, spices, ice cream, cookies, toilet paper and other wonderful things, all in one place.  Previously, it was necessary to go to a lot of different stores to get those things.  Of course, we still buy all our fresh produce at the central market, and there are a lot of things we buy in other, small, stores because they are cheaper.  But this store, with about 5 aisles of stuff, is like warehouse bonanza for us here in Nampula.  🙂  You have to run the gauntlet of street kids, hawkers and beggars going in and out, but it’s not nearly as crazy as the old store was. – C

Here’s a typical church; some are made of mud, others of bamboos.  The rock formations around Nampula are called inselbergs.  Very interesting!

The kids ride this bus back and forth to school every day, 45 minutes to an hour each way.  We are so thankful for this bus, because it would take at least 3 hours of our day if we had to drive them back and forth.  It costs $100 a month for the two of them to ride the bus.  They seem to enjoy talking with their friends and complained on the one day I picked them up at an earlier stop!  – C

Here are some of the worse-looking apartment buildings in our city, and I found it very funny that most of the apartments have satellite tv!  You can get a package here for about $80 a month (I am guessing) which is a huge luxury.  People here are becoming addicted to TV, though, which is sad to me.  If you do have satellite TV, you can get a lot of shows from the USA and all over the world.  – C

Here’s a view of what’s for sale this week!  And last week, and the week before.  The merchandise around here rarely changes.  This was taken in a shop window, and most of the shop windows have this kind of thing, or food items, on display.  The quality is very, very bad. Think dollar store

, but worse.  🙂  You can buy nice things at other, more expensive stores (for example, I can buy “genuine” Pyrex cooking dishes at t

wo stores in town).  We have almost no advertising at all here, and things rarely go on sale, so it is a whole different

type of shopping atmosphere in Nampula. – C