Today you get mostly pictures...

Its a good day when you wake up with electricity!  My shirt and shorts still pass the sniff test, by local standards.  I washed them last Thursday but have been wearing them since we got here.  (Don't worry, I do shower, use deodorant and change my underwear.)

The locals learned to make french toast yesterday so guess what they fixed today! 
We are getting ready to load up and head to the build site as soon as a vehicle gets here... we'll start dragging our shelf parts as we go, trip by trip.

Last night we ate and had our usual game of Catch Phrase.  Its funny what you learn when people try to give clues for a word.  Apparently there was a war called the Veterans War in the US, people in Ireland wear a vest under their shirt, "coin" is pronounced "kine"  there also. Apparently "korchine" rhymes with fortune... and yes, an American college student invented that word.  Its a good thing we all love each other.

I tool several pictures as we went through the day and instead of jabbering, I'll post what we see most days...

These shots are a typical ride to the build in the morning.  

The van load... like sardines.

The local prison... they say you dont want to be locked up here.

The road is littered with pedestrians and bicycles.

Even the dirt roads going to the village...

I'll be you couldn't do this... but they do it every day and this is a small load.  Usually it is firewood, charcoal or sugar cane.

 

Arriving at the village... they see us...

Doug greeting a few of the kids.

I just gave this crew candy... and made some great friends.  Sam is in the wheel chair, the little guy I worry about is in the back row, second from the right.  He's sick.  :( 

It was time to put some shelf sections together and my crew that got candy showed up so Cristi and I had them hammering nails.  We're on Africa time so there is no hurry... the kids loved helping us out and did a really good job.  I have to say, I was proud.  Its good that they feel that they contribute to their school and library.

This little guy needed a little help with the equipment.

Sam enjoys hammering... and does a good job of it.  Fingers clear, please.

This little guy thought he needed to carry the rake.

After building the shelves and letting them hammer... and starting the day with a little candy, these two didn't want to let go of my hand.  It breaks your heart when a little kid walks up to you and grabs two fingers of you hand and is just happy to stand there with you.

All they want is your time, your friendship, and your love.

Glenn and Doug start glazing the windows into the front door of the library, John is working on the side windows...

John "The Irishman"  ( I love this guy.)

Glenn, or "O.G." as we now call him.  (Original Gangsta)  Everyday is a great day with Glenn.

Doug... "Our Doug"  Always a happy and helpful Doug!

The contractor's crew finishing the pointing on the back wall and finishing the cement around the edge.  This allows the water to run off without undermining the foundation of the structure.  They do great work considering what they are working with!

Then we went to the village for lunch...

This is the Invest Resource Center at Makalani Village.

Lunch Inside...

Actually a very good lunch, Nsima, Beans, Potatoes, Greens (not so good), Tomato soup (I skipped that) and local tangerines, that were green, but good!

 

Megan and company have been painting the name on the building.

Then there is time to play...

This is a basketball goal, African village style.  :(

I played ball with this crew today, a ball made out of tightly rolled walmart bags, shown in my right hand.  (Works well)  They would have been happy to play it all day.  I'll admit, it was fun.  We made a good team.

Then, leaving the kids is always kinda hard.

They do the Peace Sign Goodbye...

Hug your kids, and don't forget your conversations with God.


-Dusty

Posting early WITH pictures today!

I'm going to try to write this as the days goes on, so I will be caught us as we go.  Remember, if you comment and you are not signed in, please sign your name so we know who you are!

We got electricity back last night in time for supper.  I swear I am getting fat.  I'm really not hungry for potatoes anymore... they love sliced potatoes aka "fries."  We eat tons of rice, fried chicken (which is good, except for the foot that they throw in.)  We also usually have small T-bone steaks similar to beef jerky, spaghetti noodles, and a potato and carrot salad.

After we ate, a group played some rowdy spoons and our Mzungu friend, Sydney showed up with cinnamon bread she had baked.  Yum... we devoured it in minutes.

The crew turned in early except for some who were practicing for the BTCV Idol talent show that will take place Thursday evening at the lodge... more details on that later!

It got down to about 40 degrees last night and we awoke to... guess what... yep, no electricity!  Grant and Jimi were cooking french toast over an open flame as they had promised Mark, David and Stevie the morning off from cooking, to be our guests.  They work at the lodge and fix our morning and evening meals, often starting at 4:30am.

We all ate and loaded up for the build site and arrived to several happy little kid faces on site.  The kids are out of school so the hundreds that encircled us the first morning are spread out across several villages.  The group this morning included one little guy named Sam in a wheel chair.  Someone had gotten him a good chair but it was sad to see what he probably had to go through living in a dirt road village.  He was happy to see the library had a ramp so he could get into it too.  I think only one of the other classrooms had a ramp when I looked around. 

As we worked shoveling and spreading gravel, some of the contractor's crew worked on pointing more of the exterior brick and we took time to play with the kids... soccer, hop scotch... all the good stuff!  :)

 Jimi and Sam doing the hop scotch...

Janet helped with some laundry for the teachers

  Abbi... the hop scotch expert.

Some of the kids started a soccer game beside the build.  Jimi grabbed Sam in him wheel chair and jumped in the game pushing the wheelchair so Sam could hit the ball with his hands.  I took some video that I will post when we get home.  It was hard to stand there and watch the laughing and expressions on Sam's face as Jimi wore himself out running everywhere around that soccer field.  I guarantee it is a day that Sam will probably remember the rest of his life... somebody took the time to show him the love, to let him get in a soccer game.  It was awesome.

Sam

Grant and I took some homemade saw horses over to the village and part of the crew went over there to do some painting at the Invest Resource Center in the village.  Megan was going to use her mad artistic skill to paint the name on the building.

Lawrence hauled Grant, Cristi and me over to the lodge where we prayed the electricity would be back on.  We were lucky and got the rest of our boards cut so the shelves can be hauled over to the library and assembled.

I got a chance to run to the internet cafe to post a few pictures that were on my phone but the computer kept locking up and the internet was intermittent.... but I did get some pictures added.

Once again, excuse the typos and poor structure of some of these posts.   The keyboard on the phone is horrible and the screen is too small to successfully proof read these posts.  Spell check somehow makes up its own mind when it wants too.  One project of mind when I get home will be to fix the blog, add pictures and video and make it more readable!

I'm posting this early this evening because I am doing it from the computer... take care be safe, keep the prayers coming and have your conversations with God.  He has really never been so evident in my life.

Candlelight confessionals….

Here I sit, typing a little earlier tonight, with a candle.  Turns out that the power went out this evening before supper.

 We had acquired a power saw today and while Grant, Jimi, Cristi and I were sawing those beloved boards from the saw-less saw mill, here at the lodge, the power decided to go out.  At first I was a little worried because the saw we acquired didn’t have a plug on the end of it when we got it, and me, being from the United States had never re-wired anything that was European 220 volt.  (For some reason they find the need to make the wires different colors than at home… so I made an educated guess and prayed for no sparks.)  Turns out, there were no sparks, but the saw didn’t work either. Further trouble shooting and inspection revealed they hide a fuse in the plug of these devices and guess what? Yep, the fuse was blown. 

Let me remind you, we are in Africa and when you ask the local guy in the kitchen at the lodge where to get a fuse, he just looks at you funny.  That’s when you realize that the hot plate he is using has no plug on it and has just bare wires shoved into the slots of the wall receptacle. 

Remember the other day when I said general maintenance is not high on the “to do” list in Africa?  Yeah… they don’t replace fuses either.  So, going with the flow, I pull the plug off and decide to “go local” and shove the wires in the wall, still a little scared because joint has twice the voltage that I’m accustomed to being electrocuted by in the States. 

Remember when I said God was watching over us?  Well, he’s still here and he didn’t allow me to "epically fail" at such foolishness as the wires were too small to stay in the plug.  Dang it.  I guess he decided it wasn’t my day to die by electrocution.  Thank ya, Lord. 

Taking a little guidance from above, I determined that the extension cord we had was equipped with a fuse in it so I just stole some wire from the cord and jumped across the dead fuse and we had a working saw.  (Yes, hold your applause, please.)  It’s still all fused and the saw owner will never know his cord is two inches shorter.  He shouldn’t have given the "gringos" a saw with a jacked up cord anyway.  (actually, white people are called "Mazunga" in Africa, respectfully) 

So… after hot-wiring the saw and the power going out, I was sure glad to see the entire block was out of power.  That way I was pretty sure it wasn’t my skilled electrical ingenuity that took down half the grid.

On to the serious stuff that you guys care about…

This morning we went to the build site.  On the way, we had to stop and get lunch.  Not a good thing to see… we drove down the road until Lawrence pulled off next to a roadside hut where a couple of skinned critters were hanging from the rafters.  He walked up and chatted a bit and they grabbed one critter, threw it on a nasty, bloody, waist-high, bacteria and rot-infested stump and commenced to hack on it with some strange sideways axe.  The tossed their chippings onto the blood dripping scale and tossed it into some used Wal-mart type plastic sacks.  It was Mikayla’s job to carry lunch to back to the van.  After all, my hands were full… I had the camera.

We dropped the meat off at a mud hut in a village where they began to prepare it and we headed to the build where the group started pointing the bricks on the inside of the library and treating boards for the fascia. I’m thinking the meals have been pretty good so far in Africa… I really didn’t need this morning’s meat scavenging experience.  I don’t know how long that animal has been dead, and can you believe the butcher guy didn’t have an apron OR gloves? 

Anyway… Lynda, Jacquie, Cindy, and Melody along with Grant and myself went over to the Makalani village with Lawrence to meet with Chief Makalani.  We met the chief… he was a little guy, probably about 5’2” with a smile from ear to ear.  He was obviously a very kind and generous man, with his wife by his side.  Both were very clean, well mannered and polite.  She wore a rosary around her neck and he wore a simple cross.  He dressed in a bright red button up fleece shirt and a pair of old dress pants.  Nothing fancy, but fairly “western.”  We were invited into his house which was obviously different from the rest of the dirt floor mud-brick huts.  His had furniture and the walls were plastered, and painted.  Religious décor was throughout.  He greeted us and thanked the team who had come previously for their continued support of the area villages and even welcomed me, the “tourist” ‘I’m assuming because I was the nerd with the backpack and camera.  Ha.  We talked with him for about 20 minutes and walked through the village with Lawrence to see some of the places where the widows that are sponsored by Invest were living.

Let me start by saying that these people live in austere conditions to say the least.

We met one widow who brought us into her home.  First she wanted to straighten it up a bit, so we waited outside.  Then three people went because that is all that would fit.  It was mud-brick hut with a grass and tattered PVC plastic roof with sticks lashed together for support.  Some type of political poster from 2009, accompanied by two identical 2008 calendar and one 2009 calendar adorned the wall for decoration.  A time wooden table and two chairs sat in the tiny room.  There was another very small room off to the side that was apparently a bedroom behind a piece of dirty hanging fabric.  Lawrence said that they sleep on roll-up thatch mats to stay off the ground.

I cannot imagine.  It was so small that I could not get my Nikon camera to take a picture inside without going outside and looking in the door.  I have had walk-in closets with more square footage.

After leaving there, we walked through the village where we encountered a grave yard with large above ground cement-like tomb covers that were the graves of previous village chiefs.  A large woven thatch “silo” sat in the middle of the village filled with ears of corn, or maize as they refer to it here.  We walked to the edge of the village and looked at the land that the chief had given to Invest Inc. where corn had obviously been recently harvested by the widows.

We left the village and went back to the build site where the rest of the team was working and spending time with the village children.  (If the kids know we are at the build, they migrate to that area… after all, that’s where all the fun is.)  It wasn’t long before the group was playing ring around the rosie, old McDonald and the like.  If you walked around the back of the school, one would see a crowd of kids gathered around Kayla and Mikayla as the village girls braided their hair.  To be honest… it looked like it hurt!  Abby had been painting black boards and had black paint all over hands, but by the time we had our nsima and beans with roadside “beef-rot” lunch, the village girls had taken one of her hands and exfoliated it with sand and dug the paint out of her nails with sticks.  Kind of an African village day spa experience… the funny thing was, they only did one hand.

I don’t know how they cook in the villages, but the meat tasted great.  I haven’t vomited yet in Africa.  No one has…  Thank you, Jesus.

Fast forward to now… most of the group is on the patio and Abbey is playing her ipod through speakers.  WOW!!!!  Mikayla is a singing machine and Max should be on Dancing with the Stars.  (No, I don’t watch that show, I’d have to tune in my man card if I did.)  Jimi sings like a superstar and I even got to see Cristi break dance under Max’s supervision.  She’s gonna keep her day job, but she did it.  Abby and Max demonstrated the Dougie, you’d think they were dancing on the clearance rack at Déjà vu in Columbia.  If you don’t know what that is, just never mind.  They guys out of the kitchen here even went out and joined in… its really cool how well everyone gets along here, even the locals.  These ARE the friendliest people in the world.  The sounds of rap, country, and Christian music are ringing through the place right now as everyone demonstrates their talents and has a good time.

Its so good here that I’m getting that lump in my throat.  No, wait… I just remembered that cold shower I just had and its not that great.

Oh, look… the power is back on.  Candles are blown out but I’m not changing the title of this post, I thought is was too creative.

Tomorrow we will work in the morning and head off on our mid-trip R&R at Lake Malawi.  (Google it.)  We will spend Friday and Saturday night there and come back Sunday afternoon.  Everyone is hoping we will have hot showers, we’ll see.  I don’t know if we will have cellular or data connection for me to blog, but if we do… I will, don’t worry.

Once again today has brought me to a greater appreciation for the life I have.  I don’t have a care in the world compared to the challenge these people have in the village everyday to simply survive.  Its good to see they are a people of faith, its obvious that God takes care of them, just in a different way.

For us, its not too often that we realize in everyday life how much looks after us, but on this trip, it is completely evident that he hopped in someone’s carry-on and TSA missed it.  He is here with us and has made EVERYTHING work out better than Murphy would normally allow.

Everyone is good, life is good… don’t worry, keep the prayers coming and God bless all of you.  Don’t forget your conversation with God.  He’s still listening.

Your other task for today is to get on Facebook and search for “Be The Change Volunteers” and “Like” them.  They have 161 people who like them now… it needs to be about 1 million.  So, see what you can do about that.  Spread the word.

Goodnight from Africa.

PS… It was cloudy and kinda cold here today.

Our faces hurt...

About all I can say about today is "wow."

I guess you all want to hear a little more about it though...

So, we loaded up this morning and headed to the village school with very little gas... enough to get us all there, but not for sure home.

There is a huge fuel crisis in Malawi and cars are lined up and down the streets at gas stations, all simply trying to get "some" gas.

So we started our day with a prayer that we could obtain gas, something that we haven't been able to do for two days and headed out.  Timothy, a young local pastor drove a group of us to the school site that is about a 20km drive. (Thats 12.8 miles for the metric challenged.) Our plan was to work on building the library and see the school kids, while another part if the group went into the village and delivered some items to the widows that are sponsored by people in the states through Invest. http://www.investinc.info

As we drove down the dirt roads to the village area, kids would wave and smile the biggest smiles you have ever seen.  I was amazed again but not prepared for what I was going to momentarily encounter.

When we pulled into the school yard area, there were literally hundreds of little kids who commenced to swarm us.  I thought I was Santa and Superman all rolled into one with maybe a little bit of the easter bunny because these kids where so excited.  As we stepped out of the van, you were surrounded by tiny little hands reaching up to you to politely shake your hand, grin, giggle and merge back into the masses.  I shook hundreds of little hands within the first few minutes.  My face hurt from smiling after a short bit.  These kids were sooooo happy to meet you and touch you.  Pretty soon a little boy taught me to knuckle bump him, pat my fist against my heart and raise my arm in the air.  Oh.... that was hilarious to the other few hundred so they all came in for some of the action.  I caught a few of them circling in for second and third knuckle bumps... because THIS WAS FUN.  Here and there you would see a shy one who didn't come to you.  When you went to them, their little faces lit up and it changed their entire demeanor because YOU noticed THEM out of the mass.

As I looked around, I was not the only one being swarmed.  Megan was shaking hands as fast as possible, Kate and Abby we're frantically shaking hands and playing with kids... Max was by this time the hero to a large group who scurried him off to play ball with them.  Mind you, their "ball" was a bunch of pvc plastic wrapped in twine to form a ball.  It seemed to work pretty good.  Literally everyone was smiling and playing with these hundreds of kids!  Jimi, Cristi, Grant, Doug, Glen, John, Janet Kayla, and Mikayla... everyone was shaking hands and soon many were roped into some type on dancing, singing, or game.

A few of us got over to the structure and started helping the locals who were starting roof trusses. The contractor who is helping with the project came and let us know what needed to be done and we set off on the build.  We asked him about fuel and he basically told us he might be able to get 6 liters for us but we were going to be out of luck because there was simply no fuel available.

Timothy went back and got the crew to take to the village to the widows and we all met up again at the build site for a great lunch of rice, goat meat, greens, and beans.  Oh... that you had to eat with your hands!
Believe it or not... it wasn't bad at all!  I definitely used some hand sanitizer first because we were already filthy from the built and after shaking all those hands... sadly, many of which were obviously not real well.  Some kids you could tell were happy little balls of fire and personality while others had somber little faces with jaundice eyes... some had mild deformities, and others had chronic nasal drainage.  Obviously, some of these kids probably didn't know what it felt like to "feel good" a day in their life.  Id say the majority were on the healthier side but my guts rolled thinking of the hell these poor little kids lived in, yet exuded such spunk and happiness.

School is the highlight of their lives.  They would run to you and ask your name and then pick out our names by the spelling on the back of the BTCV shirts that listed all our names and sponsors names.  Amazing... these kids could read!  They dragged out trashy little paper books that they wrote their lessons in and were so proud.  They make the best out of the worst... and all they want to do is learn.  They are little information sponges... and they are little singing and dancing machines!!!

At one point I was up on the roof, sitting and waiting for materials as I watched as Jacquie, Cindy, Sherry, Melody, Tammi and Lynda play games and sing with the kids that I couldn't hold back the well in my eyes... kinda like right now.  I've got that lump in my throat that I can't swallow.  :(  I could hear the song many of us remember... Jesus Loves Me.

Right now as I sleep on a mattress on a floor, they are sleeping on the dirt, but will wake up tomorrow chipper and ready to go.  The sick ones will follow the crowd and do their best until the day comes that they cannot go anymore and survival of the fittest will remove them from life.  Many of the kids are orphans as it is... parents who die of AIDS or just die from such a life, or leave the horrible environment to "find work" and never resurface.

Its so sad Im going to quit writing about it.

When Timothy came to pick us up, he had a full tank of gas and a smile.  If you don't think God had anything to do with that... you're dead wrong.  Everyone loaded up and Max, Grant, Jimi, Cristi and myself decided to walk back across the unknown paths that my handheld GPS would point us through and allow us to save some gas. 

As the crow flies down dirt paths and dirt roads, that walk was 6.8 miles of the realities of Africa.  Amazing, but probably not a walk you would want to take alone, it was a good experience and probably a walk that at least Grant and I will take again.  Thank you Garmin GPS for leading us home.  :)

Ill leave you tonight with a picture of a few of the kids and a picture of the African sunset as we walked home cross country... goodnight all.  Say your prayers, hug your kids, and keep everyone in your prayers.  Their souls will be changed when you see them again.

Think about doing something too... consider doing a mission, a build, change someone's life.  Help make this stuff possible... visit http://www.bethechangevolunteers.org or http://www.investinc.info.  I can tell you your support and contributions make big differences in the world.

Be the change you want to see in the world.

Goidnight, until tomorrow.
-Dusty