Monday, July 30, 2007

with red hands..

Hello dearest family and friends!
 
How are you?  Things here are going well.  I am in the middle of a little mini vacation.  Things have been so stressful at work that we all decided that a week off would do me good.  I was able to hitch a ride with Mick who was going back to Windhoek after some meetings, so it worked out to get a free ride!  :-)  I will be going back tomorrow if I get the car that I just bought... but that is for another email!  (I will try to write more about it tonight)
 
Never before have I hurt so much but felt so proud!  What in the world am I talking about you ask?  A few weekends ago we got to play in the mud and assist one of the church members, our friend Zeka, in building his mud hut!  My hands and feet were scraped up, scratched up and were stained from the red mud for over a week!  But we were all so proud of the job that we did!  Who are we you ask?  It was a total of 9 of us.  It was Rob, his mom (Grandma) and brother (Ben) that were in town visiting, his two oldest girls Erin and Kaliegh, Sarah, Amy, Sally and me.
 
When we arrived the special mud that is used had already been delivered.  There is only a certain time of the year that this mud can be obtained.  What is so special about it?  The mud they use for their huts comes from the river bed.  So after the water starts receding, they wait until it dries out but before it hardens and gather what they need onto an oxen cart.  Because the sand is deep where the houses are the mud is delivered at the outside edge of the village and then carried, bucket by bucket, into the hut.  Sarah and the girls helped a bit with this, for as we started using some of the sand they started bringing a bit more. 
 
They showed us how to mix the water with the sand and what consistency it needed to be, which was like runny mud cakes that kids make in the summer.  They didn't let us girls wield the shovels to mix the sand, but at intervals they would call us all in to mix it with our feet!  It was much harder than it looked as our feet would get stuck in the mud with each step.  At each turn at least 3-4 of us would hold hands just to keep our balance and allow us to keep picking up our feet.  Then we would stand to the side as they continued to mix.
 
Then the fun would begin!  The frame of the huts are made from large supporting poles (stripped trees) that have been buried about 2 feet deep, in-between those are smaller poles that aren't buried, but are held up by the sticks that are woven horizontally to create a 5-6 inch hollow wall space.  It is in that space that you have to carefully place the mud and keep it from falling out the other side.  So part of the time I went outside to be an extra barrier to keep the mud inside the wall.  When it started getting dark we stopped, and we had only done about half the hut. 
 
Though we would have been happy to come back on Sunday and help finish, they kept insisting that we had done enough.  It is pretty funny because they have never seen white people do that kind of manual labor, so the entire neighborhood just stood around watching us.  The children weren't shy about their curiosity, they stood just outside the hut and stared at us the whole time.  The adults were a little farther off, but you could still see them watching.  I often wonder if they didn't accept our offer to come back because they didn't think we were strong enough!  
 
Either way, it was a blessing to our brother and a huge demonstration of the love of our God for the community to see these shirumbus (shih-room-boo-s = white people) helping a black man help build his mud hut!  Please pray with us that Zeka will be able to be a witness in his community as he has discussions with them about why we were there helping him!
 
I know that you are wondering if I have pictures... of course I do!  Well, I didn't take any, I only have Rob's, but yes, I did post them.  However, because the Yahoo site is closing and I had to figure out where else to place them, I have chosen to open a spot on Facebook and post the photos there.  So, you can go to the following link and find them!  :-)  If it doesn't work (I'm still new at this) then let me know and we will get it figured out!  http://www.facebook.com/photos.php?id=624739114
 
 
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