Never A Dull Moment

We’ve had such a full week and that is part of the reason I haven’t been able to post. On Tuesday, when the tile was still nowhere to be found, Jeff, Emma, and I took off for Cuamba, Mozambique with Janice’s car. Some SIM missionaries there had a room to be tiled, the tile, cement, and grout ready to go. The journey was about 300 kilometers (roughly from Monmouth to Olympia in comparison) on a dirt road. It took about 5 hours and we finally arrived shaken, literally. There were pot-holes, ridges, bumps, pedestrians and bikers in massive quantities. Cuamba is down in a valley and was about 95 degrees with humidity at about 90%. We ate a quick bite for lunch and started on the tile job since the plan was to tile the room in two days and grout in the morning of the third day and leave for Lichinga. Almost immediately Jeff started feeling sick. The room was really hot, so we thought it was a bit of heat exhaustion. For those of you who know Jeff, hard work isn’t a foreign concept, but he was having a really had time. He had an extremely high temperature, was dizzy, achy, and nauseous, but tried to work through it. At the same time, Emma started having diarrhea. I didn’t bring the antibiotics with us and I didn’t have nearly enough diapers for the many she was going through. The night in Cuamba was miserable. The temperature never dropped and we lay sweating, Emma crying, and me, worrying that Jeff had malaria. I decided we needed to get back to Lichinga, so we were up at 4:30am trying to take advantage of the slightly cooler temperatures. Jeff helped me finish laying the tile and we left for Lichinga. That was a long journey and we were so glad to be back at Janice’s house. I immediately got Emma started on the anti-biotic and Janice took Jeff to the hospital for a malaria test. It was negative and they had no other diagnosis, but he came back with a whole lot of pills. He’s steadily doing better and Emma is already completely recovered.

While we were gone, Janice was supposed to be working at the office, catching up on all the work we had been distracting her from. Instead, the electricity went off and that means no water, and no email as well. She spent 4 days this week trying to get the power company to fix the problem and encountered many frustrations. Also, there were many “people” issues for her to deal with. Many people coming and going, needing help, needing money, needing counsel. One of her SIM team members suffered in a very bad accident while camping in Botswana and had to be air lifted to Johannesburg. Because Janice is the area director, her job is to keep other team members informed. Also this week, one of Janice’s guards (the one whose wife we brought back from the village last week) was sent to prison for threatening to beat a man he thought was having an affair with his wife. Generally, a small money donation (some would call this a bribe) would release him from prison, but they are saying it may be four months before he is released because of the holidays and all the paperwork. Life is never dull in Lichinga!

The tile for Janice’s house is supposed to arrive today! We still have time to finish the whole house before we go, so pray that all goes according to plan (God’s, not ours!).

Thanks for your prayers.