Christmas

After the 10 day drop I came back to the base for Christmas. About 30 students chose to stay and spend Christmas in Pemba. The school was over so a lot of people went home.

Others went on other outreaches that were planned and paid for before the school started. I didn't know any of the people who stayed for Christmas and those that did weren't taking pictures so there aren't many photos.

They let us have quiet, late mornings, even though most of us were up by 6 am. The rest of the day we helped out with whatever needed done. 
                                             Here I am sorting donations.

We cleaned the empty houses, sorted donations, prepared a nativity skit, made 300 brownies, and helped with a Christmas eve party, decorating and making popcorn. The Iris kids get their Christmas presents on Christmas eve because Iris always has a huge diner for thousands on Christmas day that takes all afternoon and evening. 
                                                    The brownies. 

The three kings from the skit.

    On Christmas eve morning I got to watch the kids open their presents. It was a lot of fun. They got clothes but they were brand new and nice and since they only get new clothes once or twice a year they are happy with clothes. 

 This is hair extensions. They use them a lot.

    They also got toys like trucks, doll, balls, and girls got make up, and nail polish. Heidi and Rolland went around dorm to dorm to hand out the presents. After diner they had a Christmas eve party with lots of singing and dancing. We did our skit and different kids and other visitors sang songs.

Then we had a candle light service. We had cut candles and stuck them into cups which we passed out to the kids. The staff lit our candles and told us to go around and light the kids candles. We lit the kids candles and at first everything went as expected until, suddenly, kids ran by and blew out our candles. This was very annoying. We got our candles re-lit and continued to light the kids candles. It didn't take long for my candle to get blown out again! I went to relight it and I realized that I had lit the same kids candles over and over again. My candle didn't even stay lit for two minutes. This time as the boy ran off I blew out his candle. I realized how fun this was. Soon all of us where running around blowing out each others candles. People even stood on tables with their hands above their heads and the kids could still blow their candles out. The kids had had years of practice but we where bigger and taller so we still had some hope. The staff mostly gave up and stood in the back but the rest of us had a good time. It wasn't until I had gotten tired of running around blowing out candles and stopped that I realized some girls were still sweetly singing silent night up front. They had mikes but no one was listening and they were hard to hear over the noise of kids yelling and running. This went on for about an hour and then the party was over. We gave the kids brownies and popcorn as they filed out to go to bed.

The next day was Sunday and Christmas. Iris always cooks chicken and invites any who want to come for the meal. 

Here is the line waiting to come in the gate for Christmas dinner.

               
     The last couple of years they had fed 4,000 and this year they guessed that it would be close to 5,000. They always feed the kids first, then women before the men. In the past they started feeding around noon and finished around 6pm, but with church that day we didn't think we could start that early. Heidi and Rolland had planned church to end at noon since they had to catch a flight to the States, but we didn't think it would happen, so we were all prepared to help until at least 8pm. Church was crazy I had never seen so many people and so many kids. They were every where; the church was packed.

     The plan was that when Church ended we would some how get every one to leave and then we would start to bring the kids back in groups of 20. They usually have the kids line up outside the front gate; boys on one side, girls on the other, and bring 10 girls and 10 boys into back of the church. If the girls get in the same line as the boys they get harassed so they keep them separated. The kids are told that if they break off from the line they will be taken off the base and sent to the back of the line, so they usually behave and walk quietly to the back of the church.

This is where they dye their thumbs. This is their way of marking which kids have eaten or they will get back in line and eat twice when others haven't eaten. They use a harmless purple medical dye. After the kids are dyed they sit them down in long (train like) lines in the church were they wait to be taken to the middle gate of the base.

Once the kids got to the middle gate they got their hands washed and were led up to the kitchen for the meal. Then they had to be led up to the top gate where we made sure they left the base. In order to get the kids to co-operate and go up to the top gate they were told they would get candy if they behaved and stayed in line. Two people had to wait at the top gate to hand out candy as they left. There had to be at least two people with each group of kids as they were moved, and people to keep order any time the kids were waiting, so our job was to just help watch and move the kids. This is was a great plan and had worked in the past but because we started with so many kids on base they made some changes.

They decided it would be a waste of time and energy to get the kids out and back in, so we had the adults leave the church and tried to get the kids to sit down in long lines. I helped with this and it took over and hour before we gained control and got the kids in lines. There were 4 students helping and 5 Mozambican guys.

I then got moved to the top gate for quite awhile which was a hard job because the kids would not want to leave. I had a helper and we had two people who brought each group of kids up. What happened was, my partner would hand out the promised candy and I would have to push the kids out the gate, while the two who brought the group up would keep any from going back down to the kitchen. This job was made harder by the fact that we could not let them take any food off the base. Other kids would beat them up and take it, parents would send their kids to get food and then take it from them at home and the kid would not get any food. We had to watch for kids trying to smuggle food out under their clothes and then take it from them. This was very sad when I had to take chicken from a crying 6 year old girl. I wasn't actually allowed to take it because they might go out telling stories of how the mean whites took their food. I had to get the Mozambican guards to take it. It was still a terrible thing to have to do. 
                                                   Gate guard.

   
I was glad when I got switched back to the church, but this turned out to be almost as hard a job. The kids where not sorted guys from girls so we had to watch out for the girls and sometimes move them. Every time we got a group of 20 up to leave the church other kids would try to join the line or move lines so they could eat sooner. We constantly had to kick kids out of the line and get them sitting down again. We took groups out every couple minutes; it was an endless job of sitting the kids down again. Once or twice we lost complete control and had to shut the gate to the church and start all over getting everyone back in lines. They soon learned that trying to stampede slowed things down. During this time Mozambican guys played guitars and drums and sang to entertain the kids in the church because the wait could be pretty long, and someone would go through every so often and throw out candy to the ones that were well behaved.

When it was time for the adult males to line up they were just the same as the kids. They had to sit in the same train like lines and they pulled the same tricks of trying to get into lines they shouldn't be in and when they were thrown candy they grabbed it away from each other.

We realized around 4pm that some kids had found a way to get the dye off and were getting back in line. It's supposed to be a pretty permanent die but apparently if you go soak it in the salty ocean and scrub it with sand it will come off. Plus they used purple die which shows up really well on the white people doing the dying but not nearly as well on the dark skinned people they were trying to mark. Every time we found a kid trying to get a second dinner we had to escort them out the top gate which was a long, time consuming walk.

Near the end of the day I was moved to the dye station. They had decided to dye the kids hands after they ate as they were coming out of the kitchen. This turned out to be a very bad idea. The last thing the kids wanted was to be dyed. If we had done it before they ate they would have gone along with it because they wanted the chicken dinner. But once they had eaten there was no reason to co-operate. It was a slow, frustrating job making the kids line up stick their thumbs in the dye.

We ended up feeding over four thousand people. We didn't get an accurate count but we handed out 6,000 sodas. The problem was decided how many the volunteers and helpers and drank, and how many people actually got fed. We started feeding around 12:30 and ended just after 6:00pm so we did it quickly. It was a lot of fun but very frustrating at times; we were all exhausted. We were very grateful to the Mozambican guys who helped. They really are the ones who made the whole thing possible and they were all volunteers. They were a lot of fun to work with and taught us to laugh even when frustrated. They were so patient with the kids and never acted out of frustration the kids obeyed them out of respect and not fear. Some of the guys where only 14 or 15 others help daily with the kids feeding program so they knew hundreds of the kids by name. It was a long, hot, fun, day that I will never forget.