The Treasures of Mozambique

Oiohoio!
Ehmm, this basically means ' hi! ' :) Hey everyone, how's life over there? For some reason the rest of the world seems pretty far away when you are in a bush village, 8 hours down the road, without any of our comfort stuff but with the most amazing people you can imagine! By the way, I'll type this blog entry in english on request, hope you don't mind... Next will be in dutch again. I'm going to try to give you some of the highlights of the past two weeks (so much for the Pemba internet connection :)

A Treasure arrived
Before I start talking about the bush outreach, I have to tell you about Cassimo. He's the wonderful little treasure that arrived here @ the Iris base with his mummy last friday evening (a week ago now). A 25 days old baby, born apparently after a full term pregnancy, with a birth weight of just 1600 gram. And believe me, that's TINY!!! His mummy didn't have enough milk, so instead of steadily gaining weight, he's been loosing weight and right now, he weights 1545 grams. This means he's really skinny, but adorably cute... He has a lot lot lot of hair! He and his mum came in in the evening and he was very quiet, not really responsive and dehydrated. But even over the night, by giving him very regular feeding, he improved soooo much! He's looking around, waking up around bottle time and putting up a loud 'voice' every now and than ;-)

At the moment I am kinda in charge of making his feeding schedule and weighting him every day (on a kitchen weight scale!) and this means being inventive and go with the African flow ;-) I made a feeding schedule (tnx so much to all the wonderful colleagues from t St Jan, miss you all!! You'll love the pics. And tnx to dr v Helvoirt for taking time :-). But as we have learned earlier on, this culture is not time-orientated at all, so I'm really curious how this is working out. All I can say is that every time I see him (and you know me, I'm in there at least three times a day), he's doing absolutely fine, he's even trying to nurse and his cheeks are getting fuller already! So I gave up to try to get a time schedule. Things are just different here, TIA :-) The Tia's (aunty's who take care of the children here) are absolutely amazing. The know how to take care of baby's. Cassimo weighted 1695 gram today, which is really good and he's so lively and active. It's a true blessing to see him getting better every day. I could spent the rest of my life looking after kids like Cassimo, truly, it's just amazing! His mummy loves him, all the tia's come in just to give him a cuddle every so often and they are just loving him to life!

...and much more treasures!
In the village where we went on our bush-bush outreach (savanna terrain), we met so many wonderful people! We were staying in the compound where 3 families had there houses and a shared open area with a big mango tree. They invited us to place our tents in that compound, which was awesome. So friendly, so loving, so hungry to hear what we had to tell them. It was (again) an experience of a lifetime. My internet time is so short at the moment, that I can only share some of the highlights...
The trip was a story in itself :). 4 hours on the main road in the back of a (very bumpy) truck, all our stuff in the middle and the team (12 mission school students, 8 mozambicans) somehow around the stuff. The main road was really good though, and we traveled a little over 200 km in those 4 hours. Knowing the entire trip would be 280 km, we were very optimistic. This isn't too bad, we all thought... Well, after the main road we just turned right and went up a terribly bad road. Bumpy, holes everywhere and a driver who tried to please us by driving slowly so that we felt every single bump really well! (don't know how it had been if he would have been driving faster, probably even worse...). Anyway, that road continued almost forever and it took us 4,5 hour on the bumpy road to get to the village. Have you ever been in a situation that felt so surreal that the only thing you could do was make fun out of it and just laugh at the whole thing? Well, that's what we did and we really had lots of fun in the back of that truck! Singing, shouting and joking we made it to the village. On arrival there were many people waiting for us, singing and dancing and welcoming and that surely made up for the journey. It was amazing! I just love Africans, they know how to make you feel welcome!

Phiew, my time is just flying by, so I just quickly tell you about the women of the village. We had the opportinity of spending an afternoon with a group of 5 of 'our' ladies and 20 women from the village (all carrying at least one baby). And that was so amazing. We gave them some explanation on diarrhea prevention and treatment (for there are still pretty much baby's dying of diarrhea in this particular village), which they really appreciated. And after that Pauline, who is a wonderful Kenyan girl coming to the school, shared heart to heart about dignity and self-worth and I wish you could all have seen the change in the women. They literally came sitting staighter up and it just gave them so much value. That was incredible. And it wasn't about stuff that was far beyond their opportunity, it was just about true day-to-day life, shared by an african to africans and it was GOOD! A pleasure to be around.

My time is running out, so sorry for the short and quick updates, internet is kind of rough here at the moment. Love you all, and I really hope these updates give you a chance to take a small look over my shoulder. Big hug, Rachel