Worship Time during our Opening

 

DTS starting

Well, we are now living in a two room suite in a large community! Wow, it has been exciting to see this place fill up with people eager to learn more about the Lord! From the children’s perspective, 3 families came with three 3 yr old little girls, plus 2 neighbor girls around there age, Victoria and Clara have lots of friends to play with! Victoria is thriving on it, complaining when she has to come in for afternoon rest time and bath time/bed time. Clara enjoys it some of the time. Other times, she puts around our rooms, enjoying alone time, finding things to organize in our still disorderly – in the state of unpacking- rooms. (Today she found some little children’s books I had that all fit in a box and she nicely put them all back in.)

Dona Maria (the lady who helps us with our house work)rides her bicycle (which she got early May) all the way out here to help wash clothes and carry water from the well to buckets in our bathroom (since the water tower with the water tank fell down the day before we moved….after Victor had spent hours and hours fixing up the whole plumbing system to have running water).
A few students couldn’t come at the last minute, but it looks like we will have 19 students, a good number (plus 11 children, including ours). It is cold here….since we are situated on a hill, with the wind blowing up off a large pond below us. So we have hung grass mats around the outside gazebo where we eat and have hung transparent plastic over the windows in the classroom.

Yesterday, a man trained by other missionaries, came to show the students how to build a wood stove that conserves heat and greatly reduces the amount of firewood needed. This should help cut down our cooking and heating bathwater expenses.

So today Victor rented a huge truck for $100, got a license to haul firewood, and took over 15 guys out (mostly students) to the bush 30 kilometers from town and cut down loads of dead trees. He said the guys worked hard and with a great attitude! We should have enough firewood to last the whole school, hopefully!

Balbina, the wonderful wife of our YWAM leader Dinis, awoke at 10:30pm one night to make tea for students just arriving. Our wonderful staff ladies from England and Holland are working tirelessly making menus and figuring out budgets for the kitchen. We are feeding 40 people a day. I get up each morning to make a big pot of porridge (ground up corn, peanuts, beans, and soy) for the 11 children, 3 nursing mothers (counting myself) and one pregnant lady! Frank, our Dutch staff, bought some carpentry tools in Malawi and has spent the last two days trying to get 4 tables put together. Victor will leave at 6 am tomorrow to pick up the 20 chairs we had made that will hopefully be ready for our first day of class tomorrow.

It is always a challenge to get the schedule going and everything running smoothly, but so far things have gone pretty well. Most of the students arrived one or 2 days earlier than we had planned, so they have been sitting around a couple days now and are ready to start. What do African women do when they are away from home with very few responsibilities? They braid hair, and unbraid hair, and braid more hair….their hair, their friends hair, etc. I joined the party, having to braid both the girls’ hair. With one other lady helping me, it took half the time.
Well, hopefully this gives you a few word pictures of what is going on here………. More later. Thanks so much for your prayers.

Love,
Lori for all of us

Trip to Tanzania

Sorry for the long silence here. We were out of internet contact for almost a month, due to our last minute trip to Tanzania to visit my father in law, Victor's dad, who is terminally ill with bladder cancer. It was a long trip, about 70 hours in total with us covering 5000 kilometers! The following are a few pictures from our trip:

The girls, in their seats in our car, ready to go. Sunglasses and a piece of gum in their mouths, and they were good to go. The children did exceptionally well traveling. Clara still asks for a piece of gum now every time we get in the car. That was their "long trip treat" that they enjoyed.

We didn't have too much entertainment for our travel, other than look out the window, talking, singing, listening to music on an Ipod Grandpa set up for them, a few books, and sleep!



We had our moments of fussing and fighting but it was not too bad. The girls had to learn how to use latrines or bushes for rest stops. By the end of the trip, they were experts! God blessed our trips in so many ways, one being that our children stayed healthy the whole way, inspite of dirty latrines, food cooked in all sorts of places, and sleeping in 10 different places in 25 days!

Our road went through 50 kilometers of Game Reserve in Tanzania and we were thrilled to see a giraffe, as well as antelope, elephants in the distance and zebras!

On our second night of the trip, we had traveled all day and were quite tired. Someone had arrived a hotel for us to sleep in but the directions to the place were sketchy. We drove around the town for almost an hour trying to find the place. With everyone's nerves on edge from fatigue and frustration, Clara broke into song, singing her favorite song (from Steve Green's Children's Bible Memory Songs) "Give thanks to the Lord for He is good! His love endures forever! Give thanks to the Lord for He is good!" What a timely reminder coming from little lips!

On our way to see Victor's father, we stopped at the YWAM Morogoro base where we had gone for me to do my DTS 4 years ago! It was so good to see friends there again. Victoria was born in Morogoro while we were at this base. In this picture, Victoria is standing in front of the house we lived in when she was a baby. The house was a duplex. The family in the other

Merry Christmas!

A few Saturdays ago, we invited over the neighbor children and another little friend and enjoyed decorating Christmas cookies together! This was a first for our friends, but they enjoyed it!

I also told the Christmas story, using these little picture cards with the verses on them. Each family represented (3) was able to bring a set of cards home to play with and learn the Christmas story.

We want to wish you all a Merry Christmas! We are leaving today, Saturday, for Tanzania to visit Victor's sick father in the refugee camp. We would appreciate your prayers! We will not be home until the New Year. We'll catch up then! Praise God Victor drove into our yard Sunday evening, December 12, with our new vehicle. We are so glad to be all together again as a family!

All Creatures of our God

It was raining outside, as it had been all day. Suddenly shrieks were heard from the children's bedroom. The 'auntie' staying with us and I turned from were we were in the kitchen just in time to see a big slimy frog come leaping out of the children's bedroom. I'm sure he was as startled as the girls were terrified! It is still a mystery to me how he got in the house. I could not get a straight story from the girls as to where they first saw him. Anyways, maybe he was trying to escape the rain. The 'auntie' staying with us bravely caught him in a basin and deposited him outside.

You can see him below, next to the waste basket in the kitchen. I'm sorry the picture is not clearer. It was a quick grab the camera and snap before he lept away.

Do you see the next creature we chased around the children's room the same night?

He here is a bit closer up....zoomed in, visiting the section of our library that holds our "My Little Animal Board Book" How appropriate!

Can you still see him, by the same book? This is our Mozambican book holder. The girls were having a hard time lining up books neatly on a shelf. I had seen a type of cloth hanging bookhold in the Aldies food store in Wisconsin before we came. So using that same idea, we sewed loops in a capulana (the wrap skirt cloths so common here), put bamboo sticks through the loops and hung it from the ceiling beam. It works great! The small books are to go on top, the medium size books in the middle and big tall books in the bottom pocket. As you can see, the girls don't always get the sizes right (the Berenstein Bears book is a medium size and should go in the middle pocket) but they are much better about putting away their books now. And the book hanger takes up very little space in their small bedroom.

Anyways, back to the gecko. Thankfully, since our first week here we have called the little geckos around our house "Sammy, our pet." So the girls are pretty excited (and not scared) when they see one and we see them (there is more than one) almost daily. It is spring here and it has been fun to find tiny baby geckos around the house. But this particular gecko has been living on the girls' floor in their room for 3 days. I don't know if he fell off the wall and couldn't climb back up but he was definitely living on the floor. He would startled me as he would scramble out of my way as I looked for things in the girls' room. I tried putting some legos as a ramp from the floor to the wall to see if he would climb up it and resume living up by the roof as most of his kin do. But it didn't work. As you can see from this picture, he did manage to climb into our book hanger. Of course, then Victoria did not want to get a book out. Earlier in the day, an MK had been playing with the girls. She has been here a year and a half and is more advanced in her tolerance of creatures. She actually touched the gecko and chased him around the room for awhile. So the night of the frog, after our brave 'auntie' threw the frog out of the house, she worked on catching this little guy. It took some work as he scampered out of reach, but finally she cornered him and he too got put out of the house. So for today, their room was "creature free." Other creatures we have found have tended to be smaller in size, a cricket, a fly, little worms, etc. It seems as if the creatures are seeking refuge from the downpours outside.

Rainy Season

It is December 6 today and we awoke to a gray drizzle that soon became a steady pounding on our tin roof. It was a welcome sound. The rains are late this year. The heat has increased in intensity, the clouds have built up, the thunder has rumbled for about 2 weeks now but very little rain has fallen. So we are thankful for the rain.

When it is pouring like it was this morning, most people stop and stay where they are. Meetings are understood to be postponed until the downpour stops. Maria, our house help lady, got caught in the market in the rain. So she found shelter there and stayed until the rain stopped, arriving about half an hour late.

My dilemna now is how to manage the children's play. The girls happily went outside as soon as the rain stopped. What fun to climb the sand piles (for the construction work of our garage), to rub hands in the mud, and to run off some energy. But there is a cleanliness cost to this fun! When I get the camera back from Victor, I'll take a picture. Clothes, shoes, hands, feet black with mud and sand. (Even the panties, under the pants got brown!) So do we only play and live inside during the rainy season, trying to stay clean? Or do we go for all out fun outside? Even careful play outside would leave one dirty. So we are going to try this: when they are tired of outside, we clean up and stay inside the rest of the day. As for the clothes, there will be one or two sets of play clothes that will be just that: for playing in all sorts of weather and conditions and then hand washed and used again. Crocs (their footwear) are washable as are their little bodies!

The other challenge will be drying cloth diapers! Thankfully our old 3rd or 4th or 5th hand washing machine still works to spin them almost dry. We'll be thankful for every sun ray that breaks through the clouds these next 3 months or so.

Thank you, Lord, we still have water to clean up with. Our neighbors to the right had water until last week. Their water level in the well dropped so low that it is mostly muddy murky water now. So they come for water now too. We have been learning to conserve water too. But if these rains continue now, the wells should fill up again.

The Blue Gate

The entrance to our yard is a metal gate painted a bright blue. My husband has our camera in Maputo to take a picture of our vehicle when it comes off the ship. Pray that the car will be unloaded soon! The ship has been in the port for over a week but has not been unloaded yet.

So, for now, you will have to imagine our bright blue gate. It was a bit heavy for the hinges so it hangs a little crooked and therefore scrapes the cement column on the side as it opens. That's ok. That is how I know when someone is coming in the yard.

So who comes in our yard? Well, on Monday, the first person in was Titia Maria, as the girls call her, the lady who helps us in our home. She usually walks through the gate carrying something for lunch in a plastic bag. I give her money in the afternoon when she goes home and in the morning she shops at the market for the day's lunch! Can't get fresher than that! Our staples for lunch are greens, beans, frozen fish, or goat meat.

Next the gate scraped open for four ladies with buckets in hand. It is the end of the dry season and wells have dried up at the majority of homes behind our house. So people come asking for water. We've put a limit on the number of people who come or else our well will dry up as well! We are thankful that until now, we still have water!

Around 10am the milk boy swung open the blue gate. He has brought 3 quarts of fresh milk for us on the back of his bicycle, riding at least 5 miles. He comes twice a week. The rest of the time we use powdered milk. I'll have to get a picture of his milk carrier on the back of his bike when I get the camera.

About an hour later, an old friend passed through the blue gate to say hi.

Then I see another face I don't know at the gate. A young guy was passing by, gazing into our yard, and decided to stop at the blue gate to ask for work. He saw the piles of bricks and sand in our yard that we have collected to build a garage for our vehicle. Being brick masons, he was hoping to land the building job. Unfortunately for him, we already have other masons lined up to work. So he doesn't get past the blue gate.

The last one through the gate as darkness falls is a Brazilian coworker who is staying with the children and I at night while Victor is gone. I lock the gate, praying for angels to stand guard for the night. No more scraping of the blue gate until tomorrow.