Last blog entry from Africa until May

Last blog entry from Africa until May
Well, we are leaving in a few days to come back to the US for a while so this may be our last blog until we return.

We are anxious to see everyone but will miss the children here. One of the older girls asked e to take her with me because she wants to see Jamie. I said, “But Betty, you don’t have a passport.” To which she replied, “I’ll use my health passport”. Very clever, I thought. I told her that there is no picture on her health passport and she said, “No problem, I’ll take a picture of myself and glue it to my health passport.” Oh, I wish it were just that easy and that cheap. (The health passport she was referring to is a book that follows them around for life. Instead of the doctor office keeping your charts, the doctor writes in this book and you bring it with you each time you visit a doctor, hospital, health clinic, etc. The doctor writes prescription information, sicknesses, whatever, in this book so you always have a complete health history with you – if you don’t lose the book.)

I asked Mphatso, one of the five year olds if she had her passport and if she was ready to go with us. Her eyes lit up, she shook her head and said, “Yes”. Oh, I would love to bring her home, no front teeth and all.

It will be nice to sleep in a house that is in a relatively quiet neighborhood – at least quieter than it is here. It will be nice to not hear the same some six songs repeated over and over and over. It will be GREAT to eat Mexican food and we both really want a salad. I’ve tried making salads over here a couple of times but each time, I’ve had stomach issues for days so we don’t even try any more. It will be nice to stay up later than 8:30 each night. Last night we went to bed at 7:00 because we had been without water for 2 days already and power since early afternoon. Our laptop batteries were drained and we had no power for lights to read by so we went to bed.

We went to the field to harvest the maize with the kids on Saturday. It was great fun, especially for me, the “city girl” who has never been in a corn field. But it was hot and we were itchy so as soon as we returned to the orphanage, we went home to take a shower. Then we discovered that we still had no water. Oh great, what fun and we had no water in our reserve drum either. We bathed in about a pitcher full of water each and called it good.

We are currently on Day 4 with no water. When we left for church on Sunday, stinky and all, there were lots of people in our neighborhood out searching for water. Our reserve ran out on Saturday so we rented the big truck this morning and had water brought over from the orphanage. However, when we came home from church, God showed his faithfulness again. It was raining. I mean it was really raining. All the way to our house, we noticed people had buckets, tubs, whatever they could find to catch water out. It rained and rained and rained. When the rains finally stopped, we had all our tubs and buckets filled and were able to function as normal. We even filtered the rain water to drink. God knew that his people needed water and he was faithful in providing water for our area of the city. Thank you Lord!!

Like I said, we will miss the children and Peace (3) just started playing and teasing with us. But………we’ll be back in late April. Surely, they won’t have forgotten us by then.


Note: This is picture of Peace sitting in the maize field as we were harvesting on Saturday.

Eggs and preaching

When was the last time you had an egg? If you are like us, it was just a couple of days ago. Well, Ray & I thought it would be nice to buy the kids eggs one day so I sent Evance to the market up the street to purchase eggs. One of the little stands sells eggs and he was delighted to sell that many at one time. I wanted to make sure we had enough for the 80 kids plus one of the each of the staff and teachers so I hard boiled 110 eggs. What a hot job. Anyway, we took them to the orphanage the next day, intending them to be for breakfast but Esther wanted to keep them for lunch. Ok, no problem. So at lunch the kids had nsima (their favorite), soup (tomatoes & onions cooked down with some spices added) and an egg. They loved it. The excitement on their faces was priceless. Of course, we didn’t have the camera that day. The one day we leave it at home. I asked Esther when the last time the kids had an egg was and she said they had two last year. One during the crusades in August and the other was when she bought them one other time. Wow – two eggs in a year. Then one of the teachers came up and said he wanted to thank us because he had not had an egg in over two years. When we got home, I discussed this with Evance. Eggs cost about 35 kwacha. He said that if you have 35 kwacha (equivalent to about a quarter), you could buy more items and feed more people with that amount of money. You could buy a tomato, an onion and some vegetables and feed probably 4 people with those vegetables as opposed to one egg. That makes sense, especially when you live in a country where 35 kwacha is very hard to come by. I’ll remember that the next time I eat an egg.

Since most people don’t have televisions in our neighborhood and quite a few don’t even have electricity, if you want to get information out, you either post signs (which costs money), use word of mouth, or have a loudspeaker attached to the top of a pickup truck and drive around spreading whatever type of information you have. The elections in Malawi are coming up very soon so it is not uncommon to hear someone driving around making some type of political announcement. So this morning, it was 4:30 AM and we were sound asleep when in the distance, I hear some type of announcement. I thought at first that it must be some type of emergency information that they were trying to inform everyone of because of the time, then I realized it wasn’t that. Then I thought it was some type of political information. When the sound got closer, I realized it wasn’t political either. By this time, Ray was awake too and we were trying to figure out what was going on. It sounded like it stopped right outside our house. Actually, it had stopped at the Catholic church behind our house. It was someone preaching. He was outside that church preaching for about 20 minutes, then sang a song and prayed. Now, I am all for preaching. Don’t get me wrong but if I were not a Christian and I had someone invade my neighborhood with a loudspeaker at 4:30 AM, I would probably think that I don’t want any part of that Christianity stuff if I have to wake up my friends at 4:30 to tell them about Jesus. If you want to hear about Jesus, we’ll be more than happy to talk with you, but not at 4:30 AM!

I can’t wait for next week because by then we will have taken a hot shower, slept in a bed without a mosquito net, watched tv, turned the water and light switches on and off at will, and surfed the web with speeds faster than a crawl!

(This is a picture of the water coming out of our bathroom sink one day. It is not always this dirty -- this was unusually bad this day.)

Rainbows

Saturday’s rainbow has to have been the most beautiful rainbow ever in the entire world. It was a double rainbow. One of them was very intense in brightness and you could see the entire rainbow, end to end. Driving home, at one point it looked like it ended on top of our house but upon further investigation, it appears to have ended a few blocks from our home. People were stopped on the road, in fields, anywhere they happened to be, watching in amazement at it. This was the most spectacular rainbow we have ever seen.

Ray walked around our neighborhood taking pictures and this picture is the end of the rainbow. The mountain in the back is the mountain we climbed to pray. Ok, so we didn’t climb all the way up the mountain because we live about ½ way up but we climbed from there. We take this rainbow as a sign of God’s glory and his promise to us. We read in His word about the rainbow, “And God said, "This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth." Gen 9:12-16 (NIV). We’ve had some clouds in the recent past but we believe this rainbow was a sign to us of His faithfulness.


See you in about a week. We leave here next Wednesday, March 11 and arrive in the US on March 12. We'll be there until April 27. We hope to see you then!