One thing that impressed us the past couple of weeks has been the seriousness of the health situation here in Mozambique. On our way to Muembe about a week and a half ago, we came across a bad accident. One of the chapa(taxi) trucks had tipped over. These trucks carry many passengers in the bed of the truck as well as inside the truck and there were probably about 20 people needing to go to the hospital. We were the first vehicle to pass and the accident happened about a half hour before we arrived. There is no cell phone coverage in this part of the country or anything, so we with a full carload and an extra passenger, because we were giving her a ride out to Muembe, we played ambulance and carried the four worst of the injured back to Lichinga to the hospital. We put a lot of cargo on top of the truck and Traeger and Karis and Kallen all sat on my lap, while we had two barely conscious people in our backseat. We also loaded another two in the back of the truck, one with a very small infant. It took us about 1/2 hour over very bumby roads with them riding like that to arrive at the hospital. We have no idea to what extent these people were injured, only that they were barely conscious, but when we arrived at the hospital, they just pulled them out of the vehicle like they were dolls and carried them in and because they were short beds, laid two people on a bed the short way! It was a scary experience and makes me pray every trip out to Muembe or anywhere for that matter that we are protected from accidents. Also in the past few weeks team members of ours have had very serious health problems and one had to be med edvacuated out of the country to Joburg and the other almost. We are thanking God for his provision of health for our family thus far and ask that you all continue to pray in that regard.
We also killed our first poisenous snake in Muembe. There was a Mamba, which is very deadly, in Mateus' garden, so we were called over with Tim's big Katana to kill it. He sliced it in half and it fell into a trash pit, which we then lit on fire just to make sure it was dead! We always knew these were around, but we didn't know if we would come across one, at least we can rest knowing this one is dead.
On a lighter note, Tim constructed a swingset for the kids in our yard in Lichinga. The kids have been loving it and we are pretty proud of Tim's first construction project ever. It's a little bigger than we planned, but at least there is room for growth.
Tim is going to be going out to Caia tomorrow for an outreach event. They are planning on showing the Jesus film in Yao for the people there. Jeffrey, our guard, will be presenting the gospel afterwards, so you can be praying for him and the whole event. Tim will spend the night out there and meet with any people the following day that have questions, want to know more, or want to make decisions.
Our last bit of news is that Kallen is finally crawling!!! 2 weeks after her first birthday and she has finally started crawling. It has been fun to watch her and she is getting around good. She now follows me into the kitchen and her knees are permanently red. While in Muembe this last time, we had to keep her in the sandbox or in the house so she wouldn't crawl through the red dirt. She still got pretty dirty of course, but at least is wasn't that red awful dirt.
Here is our swingset, with one swing for each of the kids.
I also got to play barbershop in Muembe this week. I brought my clippers to cut Tim and Traeger's hair and I ended up cutting almost Mateus' whole family as well. They all got a buzz cut!
