Necessity as the mother of invention

Our friend Amizade has become our "go to" guy on so many things.  He simply knows how to get things done, and that is a very useful friend to have.  He has been helping us purchase the materials for the chapel expansion project and today he presented me with a pile of invoices to fully account for and justify the cash he had expended.  If it were you or I, we would have stapled them together.  But this is Mozambique where not one person in 10,000 have a stapler.  But, needing the same effect as a staple, note that he used a needle and thread in the upper corner and stitiched them together for me.  Very creative I thought.



This is a plastic sack that formerly held twenty-five kilos of corn meal.  It is empty but its life is not over.  We saw this in the yard of an old grandma who was painstakenly unravelling it to access the individual plastic fibers.  They are surprisingly strong and tied together make an efffective cord.  This same day, I saw a house whose branch walls were held together by these strings--scavanged from plastic sacks.

This picture may not look like much but I think that you can see the remenants of a coconut shell.  When one wants to light her cooking fire, she goes to the neighbor and borrows a coal and carries it home in a half coconut shell.  People probably have matches, but borrowing a coal is easier and somewhat time-honored--and it keeps you talking with your neighbors as well.

I may have shown one of these marvels of engineering before.  They are a hand powered wheelchair used by the immobile.  I love them because they are so intelligently designed.  They are easy to steer and power with ones arms--but the marvel is that they are sturdy and largely unbreakable and use only common bicycle parts--easily replaceable in Quelimane.  There are hundreds on the streets here and generally their users do just fine--though I once had to give a gy a push through some deep sand in the road.

This picture has nothing to do with necessity nor invention but I thought it time to introduce our two new Elders in Quelimane (having lost Elders Workman and Steel in the last week or so).  Second and fourth from the left are Elders Andrade and Christensen respectively.  From Cabo and USA also respectively.  Good young men.