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.