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.)