Karen and Bill's
Letters from Mozambique
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Mission and Service Letters from Mozambique Letter 224 - October 7, 2009 She put the child in the basket and placed it among the reeds on the bank of the river. His sister stood at a distance, to see what would happen to him. - Exodus 2.3-4 Moses survived, thanks to the love and resourcefulness of his mother who made the wicker-and-tar basket, put him in it and launched it in the reeds–and of Miriam his sister, who stayed there to work some clever persuasion on the Pharaoh’s daughter–and who later became one of the most notable Israelite prophets. Miriam at that time must have been at most in her early teens, since she had an infant brother. But she had the wits and courage to hold her own with the princess of the empire of her people’s oppressors, and con her into taking in baby Moses–with his own mother as nursemaid. She must have had remarkable presence, self-assurance and self-presentation. If not for Miriam, there’d have been no Moses to grow up and become leader of the Exodus–no promised land, no Hebrew Testament. We’ve used this story of Miriam’s as the Biblical text for another one of our letters, back in January of this year. But no apologies for that–it’s a central text for the Christian Council’s PEDRA bolseira (bursary-girl) program, which aims to turn out Miriams. Last week, in the company of Terri and Priscilla, two women of the Unitarian Universalist church in the USA which co-sponsors the bolseira program, we visited the schools where the bursary girls are studying, and three of the rural PEDRA centres which develop and nurture the girls who become bolseiras once they’ve passed through grade 5, which is far as their rural schools can take them.
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We saw and took part in the PEDRA activities that have stimulated and
developed them–their art, dance, music, Bible studies, cooking.
We saw the bolseiras’ activist theatre that they put on for their peers and communities about the topics most urgent in their lives–HIV-AIDS, family violence, first-aid, staying in school–which show their urge not just for knowledge but for using it to improve their lives and those of others. The web-site photo ( shows a scene from one of their AIDS plays with dolls, performed in Molumbo for us and their peers and parents. They present faithful and non-faithful couples; and couples who use condoms and those who die because they don’t. We visited the rural school in Mangessa where one of those newly graduated bolseiras, Helena, is teaching–and met some of its 720 students, sitting on their log benches or the dirt floor, taught by a staff of only 4 overworked and dedicated educators. We met with bolseiras’ parents, who said they had never in their lives imagined that their daughters from those isolated rural villages could have the opportunity to stay in school as long as they are able. A dozen of these daughters now have graduated and have jobs as teachers. With their salaries they can help out their families, and be role models for girls in their classes and communities. It’s a well-established principle of international development that the ripple effect from money spent on girls’ education is the best investment of all. The PEDRA bolseiras show that this is true. In mission and service, Karen and Bill Butt
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Mission and Service Letters from Mozambique Letter 222 - September 7, 2009 "...infants and babies faint in the streets..." - Lamentations 2.11 Young children under threat of death are a grim dark thread throughout the Bible’s fabric, from Isaac at his father’s sacrifice, to children dying in the verse above at the fall of Jerusalem, to Herod’s slaughter of the innocents. In the Bible or anywhere, the suffering and death of children appalls because they have so much life ahead, yet often can’t protect themselves and depend on others for their safety. They are innocent and do not deserve the harms that come to them. In Mozambique about a quarter of children die before age five, from a grim array of causes–malaria, diarrheas from bad water, AIDS transmitted from HIV-infected mothers, drowning in uncovered wells, burned or scalded to death falling into fires, electrocuted touching exposed live wires, struck by cars or trucks, bitten by crocodiles or snakes or rabid dogs, blown up by land mines and other munitions left untended. The dreadful list goes on. We know many families whose small children met such fates, young lives lost so early. Through education, most of these mishaps could be prevented. In Canada, schools and parents and other bodies like the Red Cross teach safety to children and care-givers, and we do our best to child-proof environments frequented by children. In Mozambique where the system of education in schools and media is so much less developed, many people are not informed, and not attuned to teaching and prevention. So the video studio of the Christian Council of Mozambique here in Zambezia recently teamed with a partner organization called TIOS, in the neighbouring |
province of Manica, with the
mission to make an educational video on children’s safety.
Most of the performers were children aged four to eight, acting scenes to simulate children perishing from avoidable dangers. Luis played a boy who climbed a tree to pick a mango, was startled and bitten by a tree-snake, and fell to his death. Manuela drank contaminated river water. Cleide drank from a pop bottle on the kitchen table–kerosene, left accessible, opened and unlabelled. Amelia wading in a river was killed by a crocodile. Marlene stepped on a land-mine hidden and abandoned on a soccer field where she and friends were playing. And so on, a dozen grim little tales. After each accident scene comes a scene of grieving care-givers, and then a demonstration by a wise and compassionate elder on how to avoid each peril in future. The photos (www.stpaulsunitedchurch.com) show Cleide acting out her death throes after drinking poison, and the cast celebrating with Saimon, one of their teachers, after the video wrap. TIOS is distributing the video through schools, churches, other NGOs like CCM PEDRA, and in its own classrooms. If the video saves even one child’s life, it was time well spent. In mission and service, Karen and Bill Butt
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Mission and Service Letters from Mozambique "I saw a Philistine woman at Timnah; now get her for me as my wife." - Judges 14.2 Samson had his problems with women. Marrying the woman from Timnah provoked brawls where many Philistines died–and this was just the first wife. Part of the problem is, he fell for women not of his tribe. Stories of doomed forbidden loves are as old as the Bible, and still with us, resonant in any culture. Romeo and Juliet is another durable and famous example, star-cross’d lovers from opposing families known in cultures around the world. Which is one reason why a version of the play was just put on last week here in Quelimane, a collaboration of the Montes Namuli song-and-dance company and the Shakespeare Link company from Canada, plus the eight Humber College students mentioned in our last letter, and the girls from the PEDRA program who made 36 masks for the dancers in the ball scene. As always in these collaborative projects, the context is AIDS and discrimination. The Capulets shun the Montagus because some–including Romeo, and later Juliet–are HIV-infected. It’s been a hectic two weeks: rehearsals with no spoken language in common but lots of gesture and guesswork; creating and fitting-in songs and dances; a tailor huddled in a corner for days with his foot-treadle machine and bolts of fabric sewing costumes; PEDRA girls’ exuberant mask-decoration with foam, coloured markers, stickers and sparkles; scrounging miscellaneous additional seating for the audience– plastic chairs, straight-backed wooden or wicker chairs, stools, school-desks, benches, even an |
upholstered sofa for the
VIPs–including the Canadian High Commissioner to Mozambique, Philip
Baker, whose embassy provided funding (your tax dollars truly well
spent) and who came enthusiastically to both the opening and closing
performances, and the post-show party. In the web-site photo (www.stpaulsunitedchurch.com
) some actors are rehearsing Quelimane’s version of the balcony scene,
Juliet on other actors’ shoulders since the playing-space had no
useful upper level.
Then too, two weeks of the non-artistic logistic hoops and hurdles of the care, the feeding (local cocoanut, shrimp, hot-peppers, sweet potatoes and tangerines), the cultural interpreting, and the shepherding securely of seven young and conspicuously white Canadian women and one young man in a strange foreign city, who in the end suffered not worse than indigestion bouts, bug-bites, sore pummelled feet and one lost passport (much thanks to and God’s blessing on the High Commissioner who blessedly was on the spot to help with that, among other things). To the book of Judges, Samson’s death is part of God’s plan for helping the Israelites against their enemies. In Romeo and Juliet, the lovers’ death seems the only way to bring reconciliation between the warring families, and to bring at our play’s end a vow to end discrimination against those who are HIV-positive. In Samson’s Gaza if so many diverse people had worked so creatively together instead of feuding, that story might not have ended in such tragedy, with Samson literally bringing down the house. Here, they brought down the house with applause. In mission and service, Karen and Bill Butt |
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Mission and Service Letters from Mozambique Letter 220 - August 9, 2009 "Now wash and anoint yourself, and put on your best clothes and go down to the threshing floor...." - Ruth 3.3 A Moabite woman and a refugee in Judah, Ruth depends on her Israelite mother-in-law Naomi to guide her in the ways of this country that’s so new to her. Some of these customs might have seemed strange–glean in the field of Naomi’s cousin Boaz, lie down and sleep at his feet in the granary–but the story ends with cultural differences surmounted and blended, an inter-ethnic marriage, and two generations later the birth of the boy who becomes King David. Cultural bridging. On both sides it takes among other things constant alertness, faith in one another, and flexibility, to achieve this meeting and marrying of minds. Right now we have with us eight recent graduates of the Theatre Performance program at Humber College in Toronto, three other Canadian theatre professionals, and another from England. Besides another project of theirs in Quelimane they’re here to work with the girls of PEDRA–2 dozen girls each morning and another 2 dozen in the afternoons–teaching and learning songs, skits, games, dances–life, really–of each other’s cultures. What does this have to do with a program to protect young girls against HIV? Well, for all these activities you need to concentrate, observe, process new information. You need to coordinate gesture and voice and body activities. You need to work precisely as a team. |
You need to
plan and strategize.
You need to make decisions on short notice. These are challenges for everyone involved, especially when working with no common spoken language, and so a song or game or dance well done makes everyone who takes part feel good about themselves and all the others she is working with. Each girl feels strong and supported–and a girl with more such strength and support is better able to observe, process, and make life choices for herself, that will keep her free from the HIV. The two contrasting photos (www.stpaulsunitedchurch.com) show well enough the mixture of affection and orderly rambunctiousness that the week has been. The Spirit that unites us all in love has truly been at work. By the way, when you go on-line, at the United Church of Canada’s site on Flickr you can also see the now-former moderator of the United Church of Canada preaching at the General Council meeting in Kelowna, wearing one of the now-famous PEDRA friendship bracelets, hand-made here in Mozambique by the girls themselves– http://www.flickr.com/photos/31483287@N05/3804780683 When Ruth put on her best clothes to go to the threshing floor, probably she too wore at least one beautiful bracelet. If a friendship bracelet, so much the more appropriate, since she and Boaz straight off became fast friends and more. In mission and service, Karen and Bill Butt
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Mission and Service Letters from Mozambique Letter 219 - July 9, 2009 ...then the lame shall leap like a deer.... - Isaiah 35.6 This comes in that magnificent chapter prophesying Zion made new–desert blooming, eyes of the blind restored. In the gospels, Jesus makes healing of the lame a sort of career sub-specialty, a tradition continued by apostles in the book of Acts. In rural Mozambique, far from orthopaedic health-care–where daily work of survival means travel with heavy burdens from house to farm field and sources of firewood and water–to be lame, unable to walk, is a life’s disaster, as it must have been too in those pre-wheelchair Biblical times. Felizarda is a girl in the rural PEDRA centre called Regone. We wrote about her way back in Letter 158 in May 2006. She’s 17 now, in grade 7, and since childhood polio has had no use of her legs. For years, to get to school she crawled 2.5 kilometers each way through the dry-season dust and rain-season mud, until district Health authorities heard of her and arranged a wheelchair. ‘Felizarda’ means fortunate and happy. Despite her disability, she has the good fortune of courage, grit, and persistently cheerful disposition. Three years of travel on the dirt tracks of rural Regone have taken a toll on that first wheelchair. It’s sturdy but wearing out. So the Christian Council arranged another one, the latest Quelimane model, as part of an ongoing program with a craftsman in Quelimane named Matias who builds them (as well as the produce carts and ambulance stretchers which CCM also distributes).
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The PEDRA truck making the delivery happened to meet Felizarda wheeling
down the road towards home. When she saw the gleaming red chair in the
back of the pickup truck she let out whoops of joy–if not her legs,
her voice and apparently her heart leapt like a deer.
As soon as Jack the PEDRA driver had unloaded, Felizarda squirmed her way from the old to the new chair, wheeled off up the road on a test spin, did a tight deft quick turn, to applause from her mother and two of her friends standing by, and sped back beaming, as you see in the photo ( www.stpaulsunitedchurch.com ), one of many that Karen snapped, through tears. Behind Felizarda that’s her mother, with a basin on her head, leaning on Felizarda’s battered old chair. You see Felizarda’s legs, thin and limp, caked with the dirt she sits or crawls in whenever she’s not in the wheelchair–but you also see the smile, which lights her face daily. This past week Bill was responsible for the Monday morning worship at CCM. Some girls of PEDRA taught the staff to sing Jesus Bids Us Shine, with modernized Portuguese lyrics. The worship theme was each person’s light. Sometimes here in Mozambique it’s hard not to get discouraged by so much widespread and chronic poverty, suffering, ignorance, corruption, lack of capacity, bureaucratic inertia. But people like Felizarda are a blessing and encouragement, reminding us that some small lights do shine, and can make a large long-term effect in other lives they reach. Felizarda has an inner and outer smile that lights up the lives she touches, including ours. She can’t herself leap, but sure can make you feel like leaping. In mission and service, Karen and Bill Butt
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October 30, 2009