We arrived in Mozambique June 9th

There is an incredible difference between South Africa and Mozambique in environment, economy and waste management… and it literally starts at the border.

We said goodbye to our cute little resort and I noticed as we drove north the scenery of So Africa reminded me so much of California and Italy.  We had with us a sort of African guide/translator to help us navigate the border and she told me they grow 10 different kinds of avocados (I wish I could have tried them all), citrus, and grapevines and it is very green.  

Hello to Mozambique – It is very dry and desert like – even though it sits on the coast – with a kind of dirty sand – that I lovingly referred to as quicksand, as there are few sidewalks or concrete pads and walking through it all day and evening was not the most pleasant, although it was easy to dig trenches in.  The children are also everywhere and are rarely chaperoned by adults.  I saw some four year olds carrying babies on their backs. I don’t know how these women do it but they balance and carry the heaviest things on their heads This was border patrol.  We had a ridiculous amount of paperwork and visa requirements to cross but some of their computers weren’t working so those of us who went to the non-working ones just got waved through and the others got thoroughly checked in including their fingerprints and photos taken. We all had to get off our bus and then once through border patrol, the bus had to drive across the border and we had to walk the 1/4 of a mile across the nondescript border to the bus.   Once we got to the outskirts of Maputo we did a lot of driving around town with bad directions, worse navigation and the hotel owner not answering the phone or  anyone at HEFY (another issue being the first group here) and everything, I mean everything that is somewhat nicely built is surrounded by concrete walls with barbed wire at the top and attendant guarded closed gates which made it very difficult to locate our place we were staying. We stopped at a gas station which are all guarded by the military with machine guns and finally got someone on the phone to come meet us, and made it to our cute little hotel called Costa del Sol.  I got my own room…It was like a tiny little trailer with a curtain around my toilet that was in my shower. The kids slept 3-5 to a room on lounge chair pads because the place didn’t have enough beds for us…(first group issues). They got mattresses on the floor a couple days later. I’m not going to go in chronological order from now on – I’m going group photos into experiences.  First, poor TT got a bad cold when we arrived in Mozambique but toughed it out going to the work site every day and sleeping anywhere and everywhere he could find a place. Most of the kids slept when they could.  Our schedule was very tight and super long days. We were up at 6:30 and went to bed at 11.

We started the work site with a dirt lot that by the end of the summer (and five HEFY groups) they will have two school rooms for the kids who have class under banana trees; classes get cancelled when it rains.  This school has over 1500 kids, only one hose with running water, four concrete boxes with holes in the ground to use as bathrooms and a few concrete buildings. It is littered with trash mixed into that horrible quicksand. We had shovels, machetes, hacksaws and wire cutters to dig trenches, cut wood, wire and rebar. It was truly old school construction. I sooo wished there was a Home Depot nearby to rent a few pieces of equipment.  We hand mixed both concrete and cement with shovels, built rebar frames, carried at least a thousand cinderblocks, and pushed hundreds of wheelbarrows of sand, gravel and 100 lb bags of cement.  We became one with the dirt day after day. After two weeks of nine hour work days ..we finished the foundation in order for group number 2 to take over their part of the construction.  First we fenced it to keep the very curious kids from wandering in.  These were my shoes on the last day.  That is not dirt, it is concrete.