Hopeful and Helpless

The portrait below is of our friend Amizade standing next to Júlio Machado who is holding in his pocket the recently executed contract for the expansion (by 50%) of the Quelimane chapel. I was rather proud of my effort to get this done. My Portuguese required only a couple of corrections in the end and the contract provides for everything it needed to--safeguarding our interests as best we can and providing the contractor with a bonus to make things go on budget and schedule. The first proposal that we had received for this work was for upwards of $40,000 US dollars (remember that this is a rented building with a two year lease). Our final negotiated price with Júlio here is a bit under $2,000 US. Make me report in a month on the results of our cost-conscious efforts. I have hopes of a beautiful and more capacious chapel at a bargain price. We also have hopes of becoming an official "branch" of the church at about the same time. We will see.We spend the late afternoon buying concrete (there is a shortage in quelimane). There is no doubt that I have "lost a step" in the last years as those 110 lb. bags of concrete were not all that easy to toss around.



This is young woman is a random Moçambicana lass. I show her as a representative example substituting for the woman of whom I will speak. She is a long time attender of the church here in Quelimane. We visited her the other day and she needed a shoulder to cry on. She is 19 with two children. To escape a new stepmother and absent father, she moved in with a young man when she was 12 or thirteen (called "traditional" marriage here) and started having babies. Now with two young children she finds herself with a "husband" who has wearied of her and wants out--and she is without any skills or ability to support herself on her own. She explained that her only option is to find a man to support her, which she feels means she must sleep around to find someone willing. It is how it is done she explains. This is an attractive and very bright woman who is without a lot of options. She seemed genuinely surprised that that "adultery commandment" that she had heard about had some application here. I am a pragmatic man, but not quite that much. Truly the traditional culture, and the dearth of economic opportunity here create a very bleak world for an awful lot of people. What would you do if you were her? Or what would you counsel if you were I? How would you give her hope?



 

These are our twins Santo and Santinho (it has been days since we last posted pictures of them). They have peed on each of us a number of times this week, but we cannot fail to have hope for the future when we are around them.

Location:Quelimane, Moçambique