The Orphanage Experience…
Of all the things that I’ve experienced or been around this year, the orphanage in Mozambique was the most life changing. Words cannot describe the conditions or what it was like, but I’ll make an attempt…along with some pictures.
The orphanage all began after the cyclone (hurricane) that hit the area in February of 2007. God spoke to a man named Jaco and said to take care of orphans, so in obedience to that, he took in 23 orphaned children that he found living off the leaves and bugs in the Mozambique Bush. These kids, many very young, were living in the bush alone during the cyclone. He was provided with 5 hectors of land near a school, which turned into what now is the orphanage. Recently there have been 2 more orphaned children added.
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The Orphanage Now.
The orphanage physically consists of 2 large tents, a boy’s tent and a girl’s tent. The kids sleep on straw mats, no beds. There is a tent which the orphanage parents live in, and a tarp structure for a kitchen. There is a few logs which have been creatively placed to allow some seating for the children in a “U” to form their dining room and living room combo…no cover overhead. There is some tarps put up to form walls that mark the area that is their shower area…and another tarp walled area to form the bathroom…a hole in the ground. On one side of the orphanage is an area that they are attempting to plant a garden…more on that later. That’s it…nothing fancy at all.
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The Bathroom
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The Kitchen
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Where the Kids Sleep
Everyday…EVERYDAY…they have the exact same meal plan and they cook over an open fire for all of their meals….Millie Meal and Beans. In the morning the Millie Meal is made real watered down to form what they call porridge, and in the evening after school they eat beans and pop (millie meal that isn’t so watered down…millie meal is a corn product that has no taste and kind of reminds me of grits). That’s it…the meal plan doesn’t change day in or day out, today as you read this, they are eating pop and beans for dinner. As we were there we helped them by planting pumpkin, spinach, and cabbage so that hopefully soon they will be able to eat something else at times. While we were there we provided a chicken meal with rice and vegetables…oh yeah, we were told not to eat the beans…they had insects in them.
Water for these children is another story altogether…if you haven’t seen my video about the well, be sure to look at that blog as well. The children have to carry water for their needs everyday. They take a wheelbarrow (which they were blessed with, before then they had to carry it) to the local well along with 3 plastic jugs that hold 20 liters of water each. Typically 2 boys would go at a time, I would estimate the age to be around 10 or 12 years old. They would walk .4 miles to the local well, usually without shoes, to the community well. Then they would manually pump the water into the jugs, load them back into the wheelbarrow, and push the 132 pounds of water back to the orphanage. To get the water they need for the day (not the water that they should have, the water that they absolutely NEED to survive) would take 9 trips each day, for a total of 7.2 miles each day. Take that into consideration, what if you had to walk 7.2 miles each day to have enough water for your family? The orphans do it with a smile…it would take $15,000 to install a proper well that would work off of solar panels…oh yeah, did I mention that there is absolutely no electricity on site?
<img src=”http://www.markstratmann.com/mstrat/WRP/Blog/orphanagewell.JPG”>
Kids at the Well
Oh, and after all that work: we were also told not to drink that water, although it’s tested safe, we were told we may not want to drink it…put that into picture: the orphans walk all that water and do all that work, we visited it and were told not to drink the water that they worked so hard to deliver…they dip a cup in and drink it.
We stayed the night in the tent with the orphans, on the way we stopped roadside and got some reed mats, ones like the kids sleep on. Sleeping on the mats in the orphanage, hearing the sound of the kids sleeping or whimpering at times, smelling the smells of unbathed children, it will change you.
What’s real life changing about this was when I sat there, on the log bench, staring at the kids, realizing that we moved on…they stay. Today, as you read this, they are there, doing life together. They are in better conditions now than a little over a year ago, when they were rescued from eating leaves and bugs with no shelter, now they have shelter and food (as unappealing as it is)…they have adults who truly care for them that look after them, and they are all going to school (if they are old enough to). All but two of the children passed their classes last term, the two that didn’t pass don’t speak Portuguese which is the language that the school teaches them in…they are learning the language now though. There is currently 25 orphaned children living there, Jaco says that he knows of 76 more that are living elsewhere in the bush with no provisions, eating leaves and bugs. That’s all in one location…76 more doing life alone. He wants to provide something for those children as well, and is torn as to what to do. On one hand, he could bring them into the current orphanage and probably find enough for a tent for them, but the current children would suffer because there’d be less food for them each day…they don’t have the money or staff right now to be able to provide even the same living standard for them. The current orphanage (supporting 25 orphaned children, the orphanage parents and their 2 kids, and one other staff member who helps out every day for a total of 30 people) is funded by around $200 U.S. Dollars per month…that’s it.
The vision that Jaco has is to have proper housing for the orphans. He has plans for the orphanage to have a dedicated well and proper building to house 100 children in a stable environment (stable being shelter and food and adults who care for them). His nearest estimate for the entire project is $35,000, which would provide proper bathrooms, a building large enough to house the kids, the orphanage parents, bathrooms and a kitchen. Right now he is only concerned with the money to get the building and well made, he isn’t concerned with how the money will be provided to keep it going, he knows…God will provide for his children.
