First week in Cambine

Hey everyone.

It has been a relatively quiet first week for me here in Cambine. Today was my first very busy day, and I think next week and in weeks to come, it will be more like today.

On Monday Candido took me around Cambine, showed me his school, the church, Dieudonne's farm, and then we went to the orphanage for the rest of the afternoon. I met most of the other kids and some of the women who work there, although none spoke English. The biggest problem at the orphanage just appears to be there are too many children. There were 2 women who were trying to take care of about 6-8 babies at once, which they just aren't capable doing, and the older kids are just too crowded. They're all very nice though, and we played a game of cards and then played a game of soccer.

Tuesday Dieudonne showed me around some of the other places in Cambine and showed me where I would be working. I started working a little bit Wednesday and Thursday in the mornings, just doing small jobs like feeding the animals and stuff, and in the afternoons I've been going down to the orphanage to play with the kids. Pretty much everyone in Cambine, us included, gets up super early and does all their work in the morning before it gets too hot. Then everyone just sort of lies around from around 11-3 because it's so hot you don't want to move. It has it's good and bad sides, the good part is we usually are done with our day's work by 10 or 11 AM, the bad part is we are waking up at 4-5 AM to do this.

Today was a wild day. Dieudonne has been growing some rice, and I guess in the rice growing process you at some point have to move it from one field to another- I don't fully understand what we were doing because not everything gets explained to me in English. But anyway, we got up at 4 this morning to go to the first field where the rice has been taken out of the ground. With the help of a few kids from the orphanage, and a few of his workers, we loaded all the rice into the back of his truck. Then we had to drive about 2 miles on these paths through the woods until the road ended, then get out and carry the rice another half mile or so to where it was going to be re-planted. Well, I always thought people in poor countries eat a lot of rice because it's easy to grow, but this certainly is not the case. Without a car it would've taken all day. We made 4 trips carrying rice to the fields.

So later in the day I was going to go with Candido to Maxixe, which is a small city on the Indian Ocean maybe 45 minutes from Cambine. He had to buy some books, and I was just going to see the city and the ocean. We took the Mozambiquan form of a taxi, which is called a choppah, and is actually a pick up truck with about 20 people standing/sitting in the back. People sit all around the sides, then more people stand in the middle, the ones who can hold onto something do, the others hold onto those people - I was one of the people holding onto other people. I've always felt that there are certain things everyone should experience at some time in their life. A choppah is not one of these things. It probably wouldn't be as hard on paved roads, but on the bumpy clay road from Cambine, I was literally holding on for dear life.

That is pretty much everything I've been doing for the last week. It's been a very interesting week, I've seen some amazing things, and expect more of the same in the weeks to come. Thanks for taking the time to read this, and I will be writing again before long I'm sure.