classes, church, and friends

     The classes are 5 hours long with no breaks they started with worship and we'd worship between every speaker. Morning classes we had worship 2-3 times and evening classes had more worship. So we had worship for 4-6 hours during a school day.  In the evenings we had more optional classes from 7-9 or later.

     Monday nights were a variety of things like testimonies or a talk on tongues and then they'd pray for us, prophecy etc.

    Tuesday nights were “family nights.” Family means everyone in your house. You would eat dinner in the house (or you could go out to eat) we would usually go get the food from the kitchen and eat it in the house and would make desert or something to go with the rice. People would give testimonies or we would play games or just hang out.
     These are photos from family nights. This is when we cooked a meal in our kitchen.

 We had pasta and I made the sauce from egg plant, onions, peppers, tomatoes and tomato paste. I learned to make it when I was living in Turkey.

                                   This is us eating it outside on our porch.

                       Here are a couple other times we cooked at the house and ate outside.

Here is the photo after our last family dinner. We went to a restaurant and our driver took our photo.

   There are some restaurants within walking distance and a lot more if you can get a driver to take you to town.         

 

      Wednesday nights were mixed class which means the Mozambican Bible Students (which we called Pastors) were with us. That night was almost always more geared toward the Mozambicans and had to be translated in English.

    Thursday night was movie night. These were God centered movies like The Finger Of God and the sequel to that called Furious Love.

    Sundays we had church in the morning that went until 1pm. It would start with Mozambican style worship with about 50 pastors in front singing and dancing with drummers and guitar players for at least half an hour. They do some really aerobic type worship dances that are a lot of fun so they get rows of people joining them.  There are some you tube videos of other Harvest Schools that show a little bit of the dancing. You might find them if you google Harvest schools on you tube.

   

      In church the Iris kids sit in front on one side and the village kids sit on the other side.
       The men sit in benches on one side and the women sit on the floor on the other side.

                                                   This is me and a boy in church.

                                                           Me and a girl in church.

   This is the back of the church. There is another little stage there where people can sit.
    

                                                This is the church when it is empty (nearly).

                                      This is what the outside of the church looks like.

    Next was Western worship without all the dancing, then announcements, baby dedications, prayer needs (houses burned down, malaria, someone in jail etc.) and we'd stop and pray for awhile. For the offering they laid a capalona on the floor in front and everyone would dance their offering up to the front and throw it on the capalona. Then the preacher would preach in Portuguese and it would be translated into Makua and then into English. The preacher was Heidi Baker about half the time. It took a long time for all that translating.

     It is so hot in church and stinky because of all the dancing and so many people sweating and don't wash their clothes or wear deodorant. The village kids have all kinds of sores and they always want to dance with you and be held and get on your back and braid your hair. They have 3 boys whose job is to attempt to keep them sitting and they throw them candy if they are sitting but they are so wild they never sit still. Instead of wearing our best clothes to church we would wear our worst clothes knowing that we would leave stinky and dirty. We'd bring nothing to church, not even our shoes unless we sat on them because the kids would take everything. Babies pee on the floor because they don't wear diapers. The women just use any piece of clothing they might have for sponging it up.

     There was one village girl named Memona who I would give my shoes to because I knew she would give them back. She is 11 and her mom is a widow and sick a lot. Her mom works at Iris but also in prostitution probably. She has 12 siblings and most of them are younger so she takes care of them a lot. Sometimes her mom is bed ridden. She can be mean and rough, throw rocks, push people in the dirt, hit, kick and bite. If she knows something annoys, she will do it.

  She is also really sweet and can get a lot of people to give her stuff. We have seen her eating peanut butter sandwiches given to her by the students and eating in a tourist restaurant. She would ask to wear my shoes (flip-flops) and I would let her because she would give them back. She was one of the very few I could trust to give them back. She wrote me notes when she could get a student to give her some paper. Here is the last note she wrote me.

 Here are some photos of me and Memona.

                                          

  After church everyone is welcome to eat lunch so it is a long lunch line and they make all the kids sit in the sun by the church while they feed all the students, pastors, and adults. The kids don't get to eat until around 3pm. I didn't like seeing the kids have to sit there so I quit going to lunch on Sundays. That was the only time the kids had to wait, they were usually served first.

    When the village kids come to eat they come in groups. The first group gets their food and while they are leaving with it another group comes in. I was watching the kids leaving with their food and they always stuff their plates under their shirts. Even the littlest kids would try to stuff their plate under their shirt. I saw a kid that didn't have his plate hidden under his shirt and other kids would grab handfuls of food off it as he walked by. Then I watched them go sit in circle groups where all the kids would dump their plates onto one plate and all eat off that one plate, sometimes 2 plates if the group was bigger. They do that because they never get their own plate at home so they are used to eating off a plate with others.

    After church the village kids would stay around all day so I usually hung out with them the rest of the day. I could also go with them to their houses. There is a rule that we couldn't go off alone, we had to be in groups and were never supposed to have just girls alone. I would go into the village a lot but some of the girls were afraid to go to the village and would come and get me to take them. It was hard to get the guy students to go out with us so we would just walk towards the gate and usually a Mozambican kid would ask if they could go with us. They don't get lost and they know the language so it worked out OK. I got to know a lot of people in the village and I liked going to the village. There were some people who never went left the base or hung out with the kids at all.

    There were some students who went to the village to evangelize and find people to pray for. I didn't go with them but I know that groups would go out. It's perfectly normal for strangers to stop and talk to each other so it was easy to stop and pray for people. I went out to pray for a girl who's mom was sick with malaria. When I got there she was sick in bed and after I prayed for her she said she felt better. The next day she was up walking around. Sometimes I would hear stories of groups that went out and prayed for people who got saved one girl healed of deafness.