My African Adventure

   This is a blog about my time in Africa. It is not written like a blog because I didn't start it until I got home so I was able to write it in the order I wanted to.  I hope to add more photos if I can get them and I might add more posts as well. If you go to you tube and search for Harvest School you can find several video's there. I was in Harvest School 15. It was an awesome experience.
   I made this blog for myself to keep the memories but I hope you enjoy it too.

Arrival, the fun begins

When I got to Mozambique on Sept 30th, it was very hot! I was going to a mission school called Iris Ministries.

     It is a base with 170 children living there but it's in a village of thousands. They loaded us and our gear in the back of a truck for a 20 minute ride. The truck was so full we had to stand up and hold onto super hot bars to keep from falling over. These are the trucks we used whenever we went anywhere.

  

   All the kids knew we were coming and lined the roads shouting and waving and chasing the truck.
                                            

This is an aerial view of the base.  

    There were 270 students. We had orientation and were shown to our houses to hang our mosquito nets. The houses have 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and a kitchen. The bedrooms have 3 bunk-beds and a only enough room to stand in the middle of the beds. You could touch all 3 beds without moving.

 

    We had electricity most of the time but it went out about once a week for 4-6 hours. The bathrooms had showers and Western toilets but one shower didn't have a shower head and the other just dribbled out. We would end up bringing in a water bottle to rinse our hair because of so little water pressure. The water was always dirty with an orange/red sand so after your shower you looked like you had just gotten a spray tan. We often didn't have water at all. We had it about half the time. Sometimes we were able to take bucket showers but at one point the whole village was of water so

we weren't allowed any showers, laundry or toilet flushing.  

  This is me (below) and my culturally diverse house mates. These girls were from all over the world. This is where they are from left to right: Finland, New Orleans, England, Hong Kong, Canada, Australia, America but raised in Turkey, Germany, Scotland, me, Pennsylvania and Montana. It's amazing that not only did this other student come from Montana but from the same town as me. AND, apparently she came to my third birthday party, according to her mother. I don't remember it.

This is our house.

                                                        This is our laundry room.                       

 
                                                                   Our Bathroom.

                                                  The shower was already being used.

This blue thing (below) with the black specks is ants on a sheet. There are a LOT of ants in Africa. She woke up covered in ants. If you lean up against a post in on our porch or any of the gazebos the ants get in your hair. When you sit on the cement there are no ants but within 10 minutes they crawl out of the cracks and swarm over you. In the bush they were everywhere. They bite you a lot and the bites burn. They get in your clothes; you have so many bites it looks like a rash.

 Besides those bathrooms we had latrines. They are cement walls and floors with a hole in the middle of the floor like squatty potties except the hole was smaller, softball size. And there were no doors on them. No toilet paper of course, and no place to wash.  When we went to the bush the latrines had cockroaches coming up out of the hole and rats. We didn't use this toilet.

 We preferred this one (below).

     We were very near to the beach so we did have that. To get to where the water was nice it was about a 10-15 minute walk.  There were a lot of jellyfish and a lot of people got stung. Sometimes the water was full of seaweed, garbage and leaves but sometimes it was nicer.  You could wade out a long distance and still the water would only be waist deep because it was all coral. Sometimes it would cut you, you couldn't swim and had to be careful not to fall. You can't see the bottom so you never knew when you would hit sand or a rock.  The rocks are full of sea urchins which look like little balls of spikes. It's like stepping on porcupines and their spines break off and stick in you. People had to go to the clinic and get the spines taken out. One guy got hit by a Stingray and that was really bad. The photo below with the little girl shows what it looks like at low tide. At high tide that is all under water and very hard to walk on without getting cut up on the coral.

This is what it looks like from the air. You can see how far out the coral goes.

 

eating, playing, town

                           

                           Breakfast everyday was 2 buns of white bread.

To get them someone from your house had to go pick them up between 5:30 and 6:00am. If you wanted you could go to the kitchen and get tea which was more like syrup. I liked it but didn't want to walk to the kitchen so I didn't have it very often. We could make coffee in our houses. Part way through the school they started giving us a jar of peanut butter and jam one per house per week, but it was always gone in a day.  At that time they also started giving us 5 eggs per person per week. That didn't work out really well because some of the eggs were rotten. If someone cracked open an egg and it was rotten they'd take another one, not thinking how that would work out mathematically. I don't like eggs at home but I really liked having those eggs. Breakfast was at 6:30am and that was all you got for 7 hours until lunch at 1:30pm.  We boiled the eggs and made egg sandwiches with our rolls. I would put tomatoes on them also. Before every meal they would ring this bell which was really loud. I think it is just a wheel and they hit it with a metal stick.

  Every day the base feeds over 1000 village kids. First they have worship and teaching time and then they feed them. This is all Mozambican run. The cooks and the people who do the worship and teaching are all Mozambican. The guys who do the teaching are  in their late teens and early 20's.  Following are photos of the feeding program. The white people are volunteers that are visiting the base, Not Harvest School students.
  Whenever Mozambican kids line up they always sit in tight lines like this. Anytime there are kids they always sit them in lines. They sit through hours of church like this. We were told not to sit Indian style and we never saw any Africans sit Indian style, not even the kids.

 

 

                                Lunch was beans and rice every day.                                  

   In a separate area of the base we'd stand in a long line to wash your hands. Everyone walks up to a guy with a bucket of water and a cup and he pours cold water over your hands. No soap or hot water or towel.

                                          The bucket on the pathway.

                                              The hand washing.

   Then you get in another line to go to the kitchen where there is a huge stack of plates,

a guy with a huge pot of beans and another with a huge pot of rice. The first guy grabs a plate and puts on a scoop of rice, hands it to the next guy who ladles beans on top of the rice and sets it on the counter. You take it from the counter and take it to sit on benches or sometimes the floor to eat it without silverware or anything to drink. 

      They had some tables but they filled up fast. You could bring your own silverware but I didn't- maybe a third of the students did.

This is a photo of the plate of beans and rice. If you look closely you will see a maggot in it. The food did sometimes have maggots in it as well as sand. At first I would pick the maggots out of my food when I saw them. But after awhile I just quit looking at the food and ate it. 

    Dinner was at 5:00pm and was fish twice a week. Whole head, tail, fins, scales fish. They might have been dried, we aren't sure, and then they were deep fried. They were salty, that's why we thought they were dried. You can eat the whole thing, bones and all. Rice and some watery sauce was served with it.The fish was as long as your hand and about 3 fingers wide. The head is pretty big so if you didn't eat the head it was a pretty small fish.  I ate the head once but I mostly gave it to the kids, they think the head is the best part.

     Twice a week they served matapa which is leaves, sometimes from a grape plant, sometimes another plant.  It's kind of like spinach but doesn't taste like spinach, also served on rice. Most people didn't like this meal much and it was often gritty with sand in it. This is a boy with his rice and matapa.

                               Here is a picture of it being cooked in a village.               

                               Here it is served (above). The other plate has something called sheema. It's made from cassava root and has very little nutritional value but they eat it a lot. It's kind of like a combination between grits and potatoes but with very little flavor. Remember everyone eats out of these plates together, without utensils.  

To make the sheema you take cassava root and use a giant thing thing that looks like a mortar and pestle except way bigger. You put it in this pot and crush it with a big stick. Two people face each other and in drop it in a rhythm. You drop yours and while you lift it back up they drop theirs. The kids can do it by clapping between drops. 

                    After it's crushed up they pour it into a basket and sift it.

Then it's mixed with water and stirred until it thickens. This is what wikipedia says about cassava root -Nigeria is the world's largest producer of cassava. It is classified as sweet or bitter, depending on the level of toxic cyanogenic glucosides. (However, bitter taste is not always a reliable measure.) Improper preparation of cassava can leave enough residual cyanide to cause acute cyanide intoxication and goiters, and has been linked to ataxia or partial paralysis. Nevertheless, farmers often prefer the bitter varieties because they deter pests, animals, and thieves.In some locations the more toxic varieties serve as a fall-back resource (a "food security crop") in times of famine.
Here they are peeling cassava root.

                                 Once a week was cabbage on rice.

   Once a week was spaghetti, which was noodles and tomato paste but it was dry and sticky and they put tuna or sardines in it. We even had it when we went into the bush. Here is someone cooking it in the bush village.

On spaghetti night we'd also get some old lettuce with an onion and vinegar on it. The Mozambicans didn't like spaghetti and had beans and rice instead. Every other Wednesday night we got a tiny piece of chicken with the rice, until their budget ran out and then it was beans again. That was OK because it was just a tiny piece of chicken so the beans were actually more filling. Some of the guys lost a lot of weight during the school and some of the girls gained. Every Monday all Pastors (anyone in the Bible school) were required to fast breakfast and lunch and they made it optional for the mission students to fast as well.  I fasted most Mondays.
   There was some (not many) cooking utensils in the houses so we were able to make cookies and cakes and some people cooked a lot of their own meals or went out to eat. Because of the beach being right there, there were some tourist places to walk to for meals. You could also take your rice plate to your house and then cook and add your own vegetables. This is a photo of the first desert that our house made so we were really happy about having desert. They bought cornmeal instead of flour by mistake (couldn't read the label) but it was pretty good.

 

     We went to class from 8:00am to 1:00 or 1:30pm.  Before class there was other stuff going on in the mornings like meetings etc. Monday mornings were called cross culture and Heidi Baker taught that most of the time. It was a mixture of the students (from all over the world) and about 100 Mozambican pastors, who are going to Bible school at Iris and some Mozambican women. She talked a lot about "go low and go slow," which means be humble and go in as a learner (when going into another culture).Most classes were taught by prophets and missionaries from around the world and some taught by Heidi and Roland Baker. In all the classes we had to sit on the cement floor unless we had our own chair. Some people went to town and bought plastic lawn chairs because sitting on the cement floor that long can be painful. Here are some photos of the school hut.

 

This is Roland Baker speaking.

This is Heidi Baker speaking.

This is Amy Lancaster of Jackson Mississippi. She was one of my favorite speakers. She has a ministry called We Will Go in Jackson, Mississippi USA.

    This is called a fire tunnel. Everyone gets in two lines and prays for people walking down the center. The outreach teams were prayed for this way.

     This is the base news board. It would list who today's speakers were, what the optional classes after lunch would be, any announcements, group activities etc. 

                             This is what the classroom looks like from the outside. 

                        Can you see the wall behind it?

      There is a wall around the whole base for security reasons. There is broken glass on top of the wall. The village kids can come are only supposed to be on the base from noon to 5pm. They aren't supposed to come in the morning because of this school, and they are encouraged to go home at 5pm because it may not be safe to walk the streets at night. Also if they stop showing up at home the parents may stop caring for them. The kids will stay as long as possible though, often later than 5pm.  They also come in earlier because the guards just let them. Here they are sneaking in on the wall by the classroom. They aren't really supposed to be in this area and we aren't supposed to look at them or photograph them. haha
 They also throw rocks over sometimes.

                                        This is another way they get over.

  Afternoons they had smaller optional sessions that were more specific like for people that were interested in specific things such as working with prostitutes, or working in a certain country, or becoming a missionary family. Sometimes there would be language classes, or practical missions, or meetings with your outreach group. Or you could just hang out with students or the kids. I loved hanging out with the kids. They loved to braid my hair, which was a little painful.

In the background below you can see the soccer field. I was on the girls team but we only had 3 games. It was fun though.

  Fridays were practical missions day. Everyone had a job and that was called practical missions. My job was gardening which was mostly hauling water in a bucket to water flowers and trees. I hauled the water on my head like Africans do. It took about 2 hours. Sometimes we made compost or planted things. The base is kept really nice and it very beautiful. Here is just one of the places I watered.

                                                I trimmed this bush.
    

 
  Friday or Saturday was the day most people went into the town which is an hour or 2 walk in the heat. We could pay a taxi which was a lot, or hitch hike. It was pretty easy to get a ride at first. People would stop and some would take you into town for free in the back of a truck; sometimes they asked for money. But then they started doing a lot of road construction. Here is a photo of the road construction.

     Because of the road construction people weren't driving by the base to get to town so it was hard to get a ride and we had to start taking vans that are used as buses. They are designed for 9 passengers but they would stuff as many as they could get into them.  We counted 30 including a chicken and a child, 28 not counting them. Those were really hot and slow because they had to stop whenever anyone wanted off.                     Here are some pictures of the town.

  

                                               The town is Pemba.

   

   In town there is an Internet cafe which is the only place we had internet the whole time. The whole school would want to use it so you'd get there and all the computers would be taken, or you'd get there and they wouldn't have any Internet. If I could get a computer and Internet, the internet was so slow that all I could do is read a few emails and write one email and an hour would have passed. It cost $4 USD for an hour.
    After that we would go shopping but people would triple the prices when they saw us coming. The fruits and vegetables looked better than the ones in the village but they wouldn't barter with us. 
     

     That was about all we did in town except go to ATM's. There was also a grocery store, a bakery and a bulk store that was cheaper but you'd never know what they'd have there, sometimes we bought cereal, coffee and chocolate. We also had to buy our own toilet paper the whole time we were there. One time our house used 37 rolls of toilet paper in one week. There were some items our house members wanted to put money together to buy for the house to use. Items like oil, sugar, flour, bleach, dish soap etc. and toilet paper. After the house went through 37 rolls in one week no one would pay for toilet paper anymore so, for a couple weeks we didn't have any. There were 13 in the house and no one ever did figure out what happened to it all. The toilet paper is smaller and thinner there but that was still double or triple what we had been using in a week.
   It was much harder to find a van going back and they were really full so it was hard to carry anything with you on them. We would either pay for a taxi or hitch hike back to the base. We'd try hitch hiking right by the store and if we didn't get a ride in a half hour or so we'd give up and walk to the taxi's for a ride.