Mozambique: Children's Day - Sunday 6/1

Today is children's day - a national holiday. The orphanage opens its doors to literally thousands of local kids. They come from far and wide by bus and truck and on foot. Some are in their best clothes - little girls in frilly organza dresses, that get radically dirty as the day goes by.

We start with a church service. There are rows of narrow benches, with an open area in front, covered irregularly with rough mats. The children cluster around us, crowding on the benches, until they get bored and move away. At one point I make a new friend, Fran. Our conversation sounds exactly like a script from my Pimsleur Portuguese lessons. She says something incomprehensible, so I respond (in Portuguese):
I don't understand.
you don't understand? do you speak Portuguese?
No, I don't speak Portuguese.
Do you speak English?
Yes, I speak English.
She shook her head sadly, disappointed, as if she were saddened by a child who should know better, or maybe a toddler who should be toilet trained by now.

The service was chaotic. The sound bounced off of the metal roof, so even when soemthing was translated into English (not too often) it was pretty incomprehensible. Most of the service was translated from Portuguese into Makua, so it was hard to even guess which parts to try to decipher. I grasped a few 'espiritu santo' and 'gratia a Dios' and 'obrigado's.

As the service ended, the orphanage kids were dismissed first to go eat -- the highlight of the day. Children wait all year long for this day. In a country where so many are starving, it's all about food, and they are not disappointed -- the meal includes entire pieces of chicken, and bottles of coke. This is considered a feast, but as adult visitors, were were warned that we wouldn't get to eat until all the children had been fed (and as it turned out, not even then).

Our first job was crowd control, barricading the gates so that the other kids couldn't push through until it was their turn. I felt a little like the riot police. For the next set of kids, we were supposed to create a human aisle up to the dining room -- we kept running up the hill to wait in the sun, only to find out that it wa a false alarm, and it wasn't time yet. Next it was the turn of the children from M. -- a nearby village they have a special connection with. And finally the turn of the local village children, hundreds and hundreds, lined up by 20s. After lunch, the children run down the hill for games. It is hot and dirty, but they are still eager and energetic and surprisingly good tempered. We can still smell the aroma of the chicken on their fingers, and I realize this will probably be the only time I ever find myself jealous for the meal of a Mozambican child.

To end the day, we line up near the exit of the orphanage, creating a human aisle by the gate to make a 'fire tunnel' for the kids to walk through and receive prayer as they leave. The incentive for them to exit is that their goody bags are just outside the gate -- a huge motivation. We pray for each one as they leave. Some are crowded so tightly together it is literally hard to reach the little ones. Hundreds and hundreds of times, I pray in Portuguese "I bless you in the name of Jesus". They fed around 2400 children today, and we blessed around 1000 on their way out.

Click here for a short video of children's day.

Arrival in Mozambique

I finally decided to get my journal out of the freezer and start blogging. No, it's not a security measure, it's an anti-bug measure (the kind with legs, not the electronic kind). When I got home, I put my suitcase outside on the terrace, and immediately washed everything that was even potentially washable, including my knapsack and coin purse. But my passport and journal needed a different approach, so I put them in a ziplock baggie in the freezer, in the hopes that any Mozambican insects wouldn't be able to handle the cold.

As soon as my feet touched the ground, I noticed that the very air smells different here - a combination of sun-baked earth, and faint burning smell, mixed with a pervasive scent of body odor. I would soon learn that these three smells are ever-present, just in varying percentages.

The airport is tiny -- only part of our group can even fit into the terminal. We wait in line outside until we finally get in the door. There is a mysterious $3 fee at immigration, but I'm lucky, because other people seem to be charged other random amounts. The baggage area is even smaller. Once I locate my bags it is hard to get them out of the room, because the aisle is narrower than my suitcase is wide. I'm fortunate in that the customs officials are so busy talking to each other that they pay no attention, and I don't have to explain the donations I'm bringing, including an excessive amount of feminine hygiene products (I chose them because they are light, and because I figured the guys would probably not opt to bring any).

Outside the airport, we finally see the ministry representatives [name intentionally omitted at their request]. They help us load our bags into the back of the flat trucks (which we later learn are called camions). After the bags are loaded it is time for the people to pile in. After a 10 minute drive we are there. We pull in by the visitor compound, and the staff mentions that they will get some guys to help us get out bags up the short hill to the gate. I'm expecting teens or adults, and am taken aback to find out the helpers are kids, who pull the bags onto their heads, and improbably make it successfully up the hill, where they unceremoniously dump the bags in piles of red dirt. By the time we then wheel the bags on the dirt paths it is like driving through snow, with the wheels wearing deep grooves and the bottom of the suitcase pushing the dirt aside like a flawed snowplow. It is our first taste of African dirt, and we naively still think there is some way to avoid getting dirty. We will learn better soon.

Our room has 7 bunk beds with barely enough room to walk between them, and one chest of drawers for 14 women to share, but we are ecstatic to find out there is running water! Hurrah! It is only a trickle, and you can't drink it, and there is no hot water, but when you turn the tap something comes out! (at least most of the time).

My bug repellent has leaked. The entire bottle has disbursed through my suitcase. Fortunately it's the Repel,not the deet, and didn't destroy any clothes, but it saturated a notebook and a box of pepto bismol tablets (both of which I had to toss), and contaminated the other items, so my end of the dorm room has a peculiar herbal aroma. I comfort myself with the thought that we won't get malaria, and indeed I don't see a single mosquito in our room during the entire trip.

I'm excited to have arrived, but I'm also a little tentative. Why am I here? I hope that after getting over jet lag this will all start to make a little more sense. And I hope even more strongly that I'll find out that this whole thing was God's idea, not just my own.

P.S. If you would like to comment on my blog, please note that the ministry I was visiting has asked us to not use their name online. Please avoid using the name of the city, the name of the ministry, and the director of the ministry in your comments.