Well, I haven’t posted in awhile.  Seems like life suddenly speeded up.  However, my mom sent me a link to a short video on YouTube of a guy driving around Nampula and I thought some of you would find it interesting.  I think it was done within the last 5 years as not much has changed.

He starts off driving up a street that we drive on quite frequently, from Toby’s school to our house.  If you continue on that first street straight (he turns right) you’ll soon turn left onto another street, then right onto our street.

He drives on the two main streets on Nampula in this video, where all the shops and nice buildings are.  Not all of Nampula looks like this, not by a long shot, but it gives you an idea of what the shops look like and the college, and the biggest hotel.  The minibuses you see driving around are the taxis that everyone uses.  15-20 people per taxi.  And this is what the terrain looks like, a lot of scrubland, palm trees, and dirt!!

I apologize that the quality is absolutely awful.  But for those of you who are interested, you will see some of the sights we see every day.

Here’s the code for YouTube:

Or you can go to YouTube and look for the video “Nampula” by myminami

-cami

Last week, I learned how it is to be a Mozambican woman in one way – cooking the meals.  Our propane stove literally ran out of gas, and there was none to be found in town, so I was cooking on a little charcoal stove, outside, for four days.

Now, last year we lived with a lovely family in the bairro (slum area) for a week, and daily I watched the lady of the house do the cooking over a one-burner charcoal stove.  It took hours, but I kind of chalked it up to the fact that she didn’t have a lot to do and so could kind of dawdle over the preparations.  However, I have a two-burner “grill” here at my house and I still found that cooking anything took a great deal of time.  Just getting that stupid fire started was such a hassle.  The you have to stand and fan it, and finally put your pot of water or whatever on top of it and wait for it to heat.  It takes a long time.  Thankful for my microwave, I just cooked once a day and we ate leftovers the rest of the time.

And boy was it it hot!  The furnace blasting in my face was especially unpleasant in this 95 degree weather.  Didn’t like the smoke much either.

But back to the point.  What I really found was that to cook anything takes a great deal of time.  I didn’t even want to fry an egg because in order to do that you have to light the fire 30 minutes ahead of time.  You have to monitor the food closely because you can’t regulate the temperature.  For each meal of the day, you must light the fire and hover nearby.  Everything is cooked from scratch, and to make the daily staple, shima, takes quite a bit of time.  And that is if you are cooking that and not the cheaper option, mandioca, which must be pounded with a giant mortar and pestle, then boiled, then kneaded, then some other things I can’t remember.  And this is just for basic, daily living.

I was talking to some colleagues about having ladies’ meetings, and they cautioned me that the women really only have two 2-hour blocks of time in a day, in the morning after breakfast and then after lunch.  That is because they need to return home to cook lunch, then again to cook dinner, and they must be home after dark since it is dangerous to be out past that time in our city.

People talk about African women having it hard.  I must confess that I didn’t expect this level of work for city women, but for the majority of ladies in our city, this is reality.  Which doesn’t include of course, washing all the laundry by hand (including cloth diapers), nursing constantly, shopping daily for bits of food to put in the pot, etcetera.  They do have a pretty good system with having the children and young people help with carrying water and cleaning the house, though.   Absolutely necessary.

This week, I am very thankful for my propane stove.  -Cami

Ok, so we don’t celebrate Halloween over here but everyone else is sending around cute photos of their kids in costume, so I’ll post this one of the boys as pirates. Those teeth on Ben just crack me up every time I look at them!

There was a little girl at Toby’s school who told he had yellow teeth.  Apparently he hadn’t been brushing his teeth very well.  So, we got him cleaned up and sent him to school with the yellow pirate teeth.  He grinned at her with those awful teeth and asked “Are my teeth still yellow?”  It was hillarious.  Anyway, enjoy the photo of the pirates with their foam swords.

By the way, we don’t celebrate Halloween here because people don’t find the idea of pirates, ghosts, vampires, or witches funny.  And they aren’t, when you look at the circumstances here.  People here still are quite fearful of witchcraft, and people do put curses on one another.  It is not uncommon.  Bandits and thieves beat people up and rob them regularly, and the spooky creatures of the night are not a joke. So, the skull and crossbones will not be flying on our house because people would believe we were advertising for performing evil magic!
-Cami

Well, as we shared the news of our new president this morning with various Mozambicans, there wasn’t much interest.  However, when we told them that the new American president was a black man, it was amazing to watch their faces.  A slow grin crept over them, ending in a beaming smile.  “Wow!”  many of them said.

You see, it never would have occured to most of the people here that a black man could be president of a country like America.  The USA is revered as the “land of milk and honey” and widely considered the most powerful country in the world (whether that is true or not).  And for Americans to CHOOSE a black man as their president.  Well, that is amazing.

Here in Mozambique, many black people consider themselves inferior to whites.  There are many reasons behind this, related to the tortured history of this place, to the poor quality of education that many receive, and also due to the whites that they see coming through here in their big trucks and seemingly loaded down with money.  Whites are powerful, educated people.  So for a country of whites (their perception of America) to choose a black man is truly surprising to them.  They think to themselves “Wow, a black man can be president in a country like that!”  I love watching that realization dawn on them.  It is a real self-esteem booster for them and makes me feel so good.

It also makes me proud to be an American.  From over here, we see and hear terrible stories of racism from all over the world.  There are many places where a black man (or anyone of a minority race) would never have a chance to hold the most powerful office in the nation.  But in America, it is possible.  Putting politics aside, forgetting about all the issues and about all the people who agree or disagree with our president-elect, I am proud that we are a nation who can look beyond race.  And happy for my Mozambican friends to know that THEY are capable of great things, that their color does not mean that they are less.  It’s a beautiful thing.

-Cami

Who doesn’t love a puppy?  They are so sweet and cute and fluffy and they smell so nice.  Here is a photo of our little 6 -week old girl.  We are still deciding on a name for her.  She is quite a contrast to our hulking dog Spotty (pictured in a previous entry) and will be lots of fun for all of us.  Of course, she arrives in the very week that Benjamin appears to be potty-trained . . . so now it is back to square one for training someone else – the dog.  Hopefully she’ll learn quickly and we are thankful for the tile floors.

Here she is with her bowl. . . ain’t she cute?  She came from other “missionary dogs”, the dogs of our AIM colleagues the Slaytons.  They are currently on home assignment, but our other colleague, Sueli, and the folks who are living in the Slaytons’ house have been caring for the puppies and getting them ready to go out.  Dogs like this are a HOT commodity around here – everyone wants a good guard dog because of the crime situation.  You have to be careful that your puppy doesn’t get stolen, though!  We are thankful to have a yard enclosed by a high wall, which is already occupied by our 12 year old Chow dog, who will protect the newcomer.  She is actually afraid of the puppy (as are our cats) but doesn’t seem to be acting aggressive.

We are so thankful for this dog, who will be a great guard dog (just because she is scary-looking) and also a wonderful family dog if we raise her right.  – Cami

Pictured here you’ll see two sizes of eggs.  The “huge” ones are actually normal sized ones, like you’d find in your grocery store.  Those are the eggs from our chickens. The teeny white ones were given to us on Kevin’s trip out to Lilini (see his blog), as a gift.  They usually don’t feed their chickens – they scratch around for bugs and scraps.  These were very nice, yellow-yoked eggs and we enjoyed them very much, though feeling rather guilty about it.  The giver didn’t have any eggs this week, and here we have so many.  People outside of town always give a little gift to Kevin when he visits (in this case, we also received a huge stalk of bananas which are currently ripening on our veranda, suspended from the ceiling!!) and are so generous.  Once, he received a chicken but managed to pass it off to someone else before he got too far down the road (on his motorcycle). – Cami

Here is a photo of Kevin holding up two of the new springs for our LandCruiser.  Some of you people out there who know about cars will be impressed by how huge these things are.  For those of you who aren’t, I’ll just tell you that these are massive springs!!  We broke two of our springs last year on two separate trips by hitting deep potholes, and they were welded back together.  We’ve been getting along just fine since then but fearful that any day we were going to hit a big one and feel the thump of a broken spring.  Those springs were old when we bought the car, and really needed to be replaced in the beginning.  But finally, four months ago we heard about a good price to replace a car suspension that another missionary had gotten in Johannesburg, South Africa.  So, we emailed them and ordered the parts, paying by credit card.  They were delivered to our regional headquarters there in Joburg and spent a couple of months in our boss’s garage before another mozambique missionary picked them up and dropped them four hours south in Nelspruit.  There, they were picked up by another mozambique missionary and taken across the border into Maputo, Mozambique and left with a missionary there.  Then, we hired a taxi to pick them up and take them to the truck depot of a Christian business where they were put on the truck coming north.  They bounced along for 3 days, probably, and arrived out at the business outside of town where a Nampula missionary picked them up for us and brought them to his home.  Kevin picked them up there on Sunday night.  WOW!  We are so thankful that these much-needed parts arrived safe and secure, and will be installed on Saturday.  We are making a big car trip at the end of November and feel so much better with a new suspension system.  There are 4 new springs, and 4 new shocks.  Hooray!!  – Cami

Last week, Kevin went to visit the Maratane refugee ‘camp’ 20 kilometers outside of town.  You can see it pretty much looks like a village, with the exception being that there is not much growing. The soil out there is pretty bad, which is probably why the camp is there, although it is said originally it was a leper village.  Many of the refugees come from DR Congo and other war-torn central african countries and have no hope of ever going anywhere else, let alone home.  They are allowed to leave the camp and look for work (walk 20 km to town!), but even the locals can’t find work here.  Most don’t speak Portuguese at all, and that makes moving to a different area impossible.  They do receive a stipend from the government, which allows them to survive although this is being cut and next year they will receive <span style=”font-style: italic;”>nothing</span>. How they will survive, they do not know. They live on next to nothing now and will soon have less. If you can imagine, no form of income, dependant on outside charity for all–all your food, shelter, materials to build your ‘house’ (plastic/bamboo/maybe tin roof). You live in a three room house most likely smaller than your one car garage. You have two chairs (made out of sticks), sleep on the dirt floor on a bamboo mat—with the five other members of your family. Kevin was moved not by the poverty as he sees it often on his village visits, but by the strength adn faith of these people.

There are groups of Christians within the camp, and Kevin hopes to train one of the young men who speaks Portuguese, Swahili and French to teach the TEE classes there.  There are many small churches as well, and Gods work is being done.

It was sad, though, to see these people who are “stuck”.  They can’t go back and they can’t go forward.  What will life be like for their children?  We can only hope that somehow they will be able to integrate eventually, or that the situation in their home country improves enough so they can return.  But return to what?  Therein lies the reality of being a refugee.

BTW, If you ever thought the United Nations High Commision for Refugees and groups like CARE, Compassion and other NGO’s are useless and unneeded…pray for them all, they are still overwhelmed with needs and providing necessary help to those in need.

Last week, up north where our colleagues are working in a mostly Mu$lim area, the wife of one of the church leaders committed suicide.  Apparently she believed that he was cheating on her somehow.  Our long-time colleagues here in Nampula explained to us that, if she believed that someone had cursed her, causing this misfortune, and she couldn’t find out who made the curse, the only escape was to kill herself.  Whether or not this was the case, I don’t know, but it seems likely.

Please keep Momade (Moh-mah-dee), the church leader and husband of this woman, in your prayers.  He has two young children and his wife’s family believes that he caused this misfortune.  They have vengeance on their minds, and the police kept him in jail for 48 hours for his own protection.  His children have lost their mother, and they probably cannot move back into their house for some time, as that is where the suicide took place.  Momade is a recovering alcoholic, and we all fervently hope that he does not relapse.

This also leads us to the question of what will happen there in that town with ministry.  He was living at the new community center that had been constructed by our missionaries.  It was an open, non-denominational place that was attracting a great many people, both Christians and enquirers. Now that someone has died there, we wonder what will happen.  What will its reputation be now?  Beyond the personal tragedy, we don’t know what will happen to the ministry.  Please keep this situation in your prayers.

I would just like to say a few words about Carol Nauta.  Passionate.  Committed.  Do-er.

I didn’t know Carol very well, but those were the things that I really noticed about her. She contacted me via email a few months back to let me know she would be the liason between one of our supporting churches and us. She was bright, energetic, and through her emails I sensed a great sense of humor.

But what really made me sit up and take notice of Carol was the newsletter she sent out to us. In it, she explained how she felt that missionaries and churches needed to be connected, so she had started an organization to do just that. She was raising support so she could do it full-time/part-time. She also had led missions trips to Uganda, and written the photo of one of her group members holding a child, she had the caption “Anyone can do this. You can make a difference!” She believed passionately that everyone could contribute to missions. A verse in her newsletter caught my eye:

Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms. I Peter 2:11

Amen, sister. She believed it. She lived it. I firmly believe that when she arrived in heaven earlier this week after a car accident that took her life, God said to her “Well done, good and faithful servant.” We will miss her, although I’m sure those who were close to her and loved her will miss her a million times more. But we wanted to give tribute to this wonderful lady who believed in the Good News. Thank you, Carol, for believing in missions and for helping others to believe in it too.