TW3

In the sixties, there was a television show entitled "That Was The Week That Was" and nicknamed TW3. Herewith is a bit of a review of recent happenings in our neck of the woods.

We heard today that Anchorage just surpassed the all time record for snowfall this winter. We were happy to have missed that.

Our new guard team. Nikko for the night (he is bigger and stronger and brighter) and Gildinho for the day. They were very pleased that I gave them machetes for weapons. We do not actually expect that they will do muchfighting to protect our lives--but we have hopes that they will scream loudly as they run away at the first sign of danger.

I promise that it was Debbie who focused the camera in on this woman's backside. It is covered by a capulana made especiallyfor the celebration yesterday of Day of Women. It features a portrait of Josina Machel, a revolutionary war hero (began 41 years ago) which would make her a communist. It was the communist revolution here which threw off Portuguese rule and abuse--there followed many painful and destructive years of civil war to throw out the communists. Mozambique enjoys relative political stability for now Please note the woman above is wearing Chinese-made flip flops, which are worn by 80% of the people.

Sometimes I complain a little of how crowded it gets when we transport all six young missionaries in our truck. This truck is the same size and is holding about 33 in the bed.

Tonight we went with Elder Barlow and Home and taught the family of Amizade and Lourdes how to hold a family home evening My "concentration" game with original osborn artwork was a great success. We enjoy Amizade a great deal--particularly his efforts to learn everything and implement every single gospel principle and church practice into the life of his family. At the start of our meeting we had six adults and three children present--for a total of 9.

By the close of our FHE, we had, by actual count, a total of 21 neighbor children participating, for a total of 30 in attendance.

After FHE we had our very first home cooked Mozambican dinner at the home of Amizade and Lourdes. They made an effort to keep it pretty mild for us--the only real weird thing is the green slime pictured above which is called Matapa. It is made of pounded manioc leaves and is a sauce to put over rice and other things. It looked disgusting but really did not taste bad at all. The fact that sister osborn excused herself briefly from the meal to go throw up, should not reflect poorly on the evening (yes really). We brought fresh squeezed lemonade for all to avoid any question of drinking water from their well.

Speaking of which, there is a lot of sickness these days among the poor because of contaminated drinking water--brought about by the recent heavy rains and runoff. The picture below is what standing water looks like after sitting for a day or two--lots of algae growth.

Many had their heart strings tugged at in Debbie's recent post regarding the hearing aids. We continue to get more non-functioning hearing aids given to us--the word has gotten out some how. I have learned a bit in the last week or so. They need lots of batteries to keep them going. And the average person in Mozambique cannot buy batteries. So it is something of an impossible situation. We may yet decide to buy a bunch of batteries to give these people (and some of you have offerred to help) some time with a functioning apparatus--but I'm not positive that that temporary assistance will be a good thing for them. It is hard to know what to do to help. I have spoken with the Starkey Foundation, an American manufacturer who supplied these hearing aids in a local effort a couple of years ago--but they don't seem to be focused on maintaining the long-term usefulness of the product too much. To thier credit, they distribute hundreds of thousands of units world wide to the poor--but I am struggling to understand the long term benefit if they quickly cease to function.



How can people go hungry when there are sources of protein like this around? Our snails are about six inches long.