Day 19-20 - Vila Massane, Subida, Ngupa, Kanimambos

Thursday was an awesome day. We started the day teaching the second half of the health book to the health promoters of Vila Massane. The promoters were so excited to learn and answer all our questions. I ventured out and presented some of my material in Portuguese! Actually, I just asked 2-3 questions in Portuguese but I was proud. I teach about malaria prevention and treatment and immunizations. Most of the time while we're teaching, the lesson gets translated twice-- from English to Portuguese and from Portuguese to Senna. When Justin teaches, we can skip one step because he teaches in Portuguese. 

Anyway, it was a really fun day of teaching because as soon as I asked a questions like "How can you prevent malaria in your families?" or "Why should you make sure the families you're in charge of get their vaccinations?" they would blurt out great answers. It makes me excited to think of the influence they will have on the families in their village. 

Here is a picture of a health promoter practicing teaching a section about oral rehydration solution. Also, notice the Six Flags sweatshirt. :) 

While someone else was teaching, Justin snapped these pretty pics of a little girl listening in on our lesson. It's amazing how photogenic these kids are!

Everyday after we teach, this is what we find. The back of our truck becomes a playground for every boy in the village. They run around playing king of the truck. :)

NBD just found a fellow KINGS fan in Mozambique!!! I first noticed her awesome shirt, but also isn't she beautiful? 

MOVIE NIGHT AT NEVER NEVER LAND

Thursday night we drove over to Kedesh (aka never never land) for a barbeque and movie night! It was honestly a wonderful night. John (the man who started the orphanage) made a humongous pot of popcorn and we sat around outside just chatting with the boys. 

I talked to John for a long time about starting the orphanage and some of his experiences. I think I wrote a little about Kedesh before, but I'll tell you a little more about what I learned. John came to Africa from the US years ago to help his mom move and never went back. He saw all the suffering and decided to open an orphanage for orphan boys after the civil war. When he started, the street kids he took in only had one way to deal with conflict-- violence. He had to break up fights daily and said there were at least four times he saved a boy from being killed. Now that a good amount of time has passed since the civil war, John said the boys are much less violent. He has really changed the lives of the kids. They are so polite and hard-working. One of the boys has the job of delegating all the jobs or chores out to the other boys. They all help out-- doing laundry, preparing meals, tending the garden, etc. He told me stories of the miracles that have happened at the orphanage during the time he's been there. It is so amazing what he has created and how he has helped the boys in Mozambique. 

Back to the BBQ. After chowing down on popcorn and the bbq, John announced that we would have a movie night. They had a sweet set-up with a projector screen you can watch inside the treehouse or out. We all gathered and as the DVD menu music started playing what did I hear but HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL!! I was probably just as or more excited than the boys! I couldn't believe we had the same great taste in movies. I was seriously on a high from the combination of HSM and Africa. We sang and danced to all the songs. The boys had some sweet dance moves. 

Troy Bolton comes to Africa!

The boys enjoying their popcorn and movie

Friday morning we drove out to Subida for our teaching session. When we got there, all the promoters and supervisors were just starting their weekly village meeting. Part of CFL's program is putting into place a local leadership. They take their positions very seriously. I love seeing the people show up with their plastic folders in tow to the "machessa" (gathering place they build). It was awesome to see the leaders meeting together and finding solutions to their own problems. 

After we finished up teaching, we started on the dirt road back to the city. We turned a corner and found a big van (chapa) stuck in the narrow, sandy "road". We jumped out to see if we could help push him out. Tons of the village kids had gathered to see the excitement of the day-- a stuck van. 


The driver hit the gas and Justin, João, Dr. English, and a few nice neighbors started pushing. After a few attempts at accelerating, Dr. English had the idea to reverse and then throw it into drive. It worked! I truly though someone might get run over in this process (especially a small child!) but luckily no one was hurt. This repeated one more time a little further on before the driver made it through the sandy part and pulled over into someone's yard. The best part was at any point that the car seemed to advance, all the children would cheer. A big group gathered and cheered on the stuck van. 

* * *

It's Justin, again. After a long day of working in the villages, we took some of the newly-arrived volunteers to our favorite Chinese restaurant here in Beira. Who would have thought, great Chinese food in Africa? Awesome. The empty plates below make it look like we ate enough food to feed a small army. The food is family style, so really the majority of those plates were empty to start with :)

Together again!

Our favorite dessert: fried banana with a caramel sauce and ice cream!

I can't believe that we only have a week left here in Mozambique. I feel like I have learned and grown so much in the time I have been here. I have been amazed by the people's capacity to learn and to grow, and then to sustain the changes that they make. One of the biggest lessons that I have learned is that people live up to the expectations we set for them. For decades, NGOs and foreign governments have come in with no expectations of the people here, simply giving things out because they think the people aren't capable of doing things on their own. Under these circumstances, the people of the villages here lived up to that lack of expectation and became dependent on the foreign involvement. I have been blown away though as I watch the villages hold their leadership meetings and to watch them show how much they are really capable of. At these meetings, the village leaders report on the various areas they are in charge of. At almost all of the leadership meetings, some kind of village problem is brought up. In the newer communities, the leaders then turn to the Care for Life reps there at the meeting for them to solve the issue. Immediately, though, the CFL reps turn it back to the people for THEM to come up with the solution, and they always do. In the older villages where CFL has been for a longer amount of time, the people start to come up with the solutions on their own and instead of hearing them explain the problems in the community, you start to hear them explain the problem and the solution they already came up with and put into practice. It has been inspiring for me to see. 

On Friday, we handed out the last of the health books to the health promoters in the village. Over the last two weeks we have trained nearly 65 health promoters and handed out nearly 1000 books to them. Over the next month, the health promoters will hand deliver each of those books to the nearly 1000 families in the communities. I am so excited to hear about the impact this will have. At one of the meetings I was at this week, one of the health promoters explained a situation in which a village member had presented with one of the sicknesses we had taught about the week prior. To my pure excitement, the health promoter explained how she not only recognized the sickness, but also stayed up all night with the sick village member applying her new knowledge of how to treat the sickness. Her intervention very likely saved this village-members life! Cool, huh? 

This week as I was reading a WHO health report on Mozambique from earlier this year, I was amazed (and saddened) to see that the average life expectancy here is only 38. Interestingly, though, the average life expectancy if the person makes it to 60 is another 13 years beyond that (73 years). So basically, the life expectancy here is so low because so many people die at early ages from very preventable sicknesses. As I read more, I realized that the leading causes of death among children and young adults were the sicknesses that we were educating the people against. I am so pumped to see the difference this work makes in the future. I can only imagine that in the future this information will be common knowledge and people will talk about how things used to be.