Work Begins on Classroom Repairs

You may have heard the sounds of a grand celebration from across the globe as work began this week to repair our classrooms. New electrical wiring and new lighting is being installed in all classrooms as well as new doors and a great amount of paint.

A huge amount of thanks which can't adequately be put into words is presently being shared with our friends in Madrid Spain at África Directo and Fundación Profesor Uría. Br. Angel has been leading the effort to keep everyone in Madrid updated on our needs.

We look forward to sharing the news on our progress with many pictures.

 

Students in our classrooms will one day sit on new desks

Much hammering will be done
for the new electrical lines

Months of painting ahead

Work will be done on three classrooms
at a time during school 

Workers began building new doors from scratch

Brothers from New Orleans and Rome visit Amatongas

Three Brothers of the Sacred Heart visited Amatongas last week and brought great joy and renewed energy to everyone. Br. Ronald Talbot, Provincial of the New Orleans Province, Br. Ronald Hingle, 1st Councilor and Vocation Director in New Orleans, and Br. Paul Montero, General Councilor from Rome, but also from the New Orleans province, spent a full week visiting, meeting and working with the students and brothers in Amatongas.

Brothers gather to sing community song to students

 While the brothers visited we celebrated the January and February birthdays of our resident students. Eight students received various small gifts which included Mardi Gras beads brought by the brothers from New Orleans. A week after the celebration and the students are still wearing their much loved beads.

Br. Ronald Talbot distributes birthday gifts

 The brother visitors joined us each evening for supper with the students and enjoyed the challenge of speaking English to our students. Our students take English classes, but find the language to be very difficult.

Br. Ronald Hingle eats is evening meal with the students

 Official declaration of our school in Amatongas was received just before the brothers visit. You may have heard that the official name of our school is now Escola Comunitaria Sagrado Coraçao de Amatongas or The Sacred Heart Community School in Amatongas. The Community School part is needed for the Mozambique Education System and basically means the school is a Diocesan School.

Brothers gather for a picture with the official declaration
of our school in Amatongas

 All of the students wrote thank you letters to our brothers in New Orleans and a few of the letters were read aloud to the brothers the night before their departure. Special thanks was expressed to Br. Noel for his families contribution to the repairs of the bathrooms and to the communities of the New Orleans province who have sponsored 10 of the students.

Students read thank you letters to the Brothers

 We are still awaiting the arrival of our piglets as three of our sows are preparing to give birth. However, while the brothers visited, one of our goats gave birth to three little babies.

Br. Chris with the newest member of the Amatongas family,
a baby goat. One of three born while the brothers visited.

Amatongas Library, Pig House and Farm

I have mentioned in the past about the lack of textbooks in the school. This, of course, is not a isolated problem as I have learned that very few schools in Mozambique have textbooks for students. Anyway, we received a few boxes of books a few weeks ago, but only a few resource books now make up the Amatongas Library.

As you can see in the picture below, students can check out the only textbooks for the school and they must copy by hand. The only other method is for teachers to read from the book and then the students copy what the teacher reads. We are thinking of using a copy machine in Chimoio to copy a few more textbooks to make it easier for the students. We are hoping it will not be too expensive.

The Amatongas Library

Students copying from the only textbooks in school

 Our pig house was in need of expansion as we are awaiting the birth of three litters from our sows any day now. We constructed the space so that it would be easy to wash down with a hose. The pig quarters are washed out twice a day by our worker, Zeca. It must be the cleanest pig house in all of Moz.

Pig house expansion

Sow enjoying her new larger home

 Resident students put in a few hours of work planting beans in our farm recently. We will hopefully be harvesting 3 hectares of beans in a few months.


Resident students planting beans Saturday morning



Santos planting beans and smiling as always

The nets go up!

If the electricity would cooperate, I could meet my goal of posting one blog a week. I'm getting close.

Monday we finally found some Mosquito nets in Chimoio for about $3.70. Br. Angel and students finished installing the nets today. In case you don't know, sleeping under a net is one of the best ways to prevent mosquito bites and preventing malaria. We hope it helps our students who have been having a difficult time lately with sickness due to malaria.

Br. Angel and students putting up nets

Br. Angel and students in dorm

 Since we don't have a machine to dry our corn, it must be done the old fashioned way. Our students put the corn out most days to be dried under the sun. We didn't harvest as much as we would have liked, but it will help. We are hoping next year will be better.

Students putting up corn

Students gather to put corn into storage

 It took 13 people seven full working days to clear the corn field and make it ready to plant beans. As of last night the rains returned after a two week dry spell and bean planting began today. Beans are very popular here. Though they look a little different from our red kidney beans back home, they taste just like good ole fashion Red Beans and Rice in Louisiana. And the answer is "yes", I even found some Tobasco in one of the Indian owned stores. Now if I could just teach them how to make good cornbread.

Corn field cleared and ready for beans

Workers clearing corn field

 It was strange to see a rainbow in the middle of a two week dry spell here lately. Though it's not great, in the picture below the rainbow soars over the church.

Rainbow over Immaculate Conception Church

Malaria

I shared this on facebook, but I realized many who read this blog don't use facebook.

It seems 2-3 of our 54 resident students have malaria every day since school began. Had to bring one to the hospital to get fluids because he became too weak to walk. We need to put nets over their beds, but can't find them. Let's see, can't find bed nets and school has no text books. Something wrong with this picture.

One issue with mosquito's here is that they are smaller and you don't always see them or hear them at night. Sounds scary, like some kind of science fiction horror movie. To make it even scarier, we have three brothers in our community and one has not had malaria yet. I'll never tell.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/malaria-deaths-high-thought/story?id=15499330

Our Daily Schedule

First, I want to thank my family, brothers, friends and God for giving me this opportunity to work in Amatongas. Saturday, Feb. 4 2011, I arrived in Mozambique. It has been one incredible year.

Since the students arrived three weeks ago our days go by like a flash. I thought I would share with you our daily schedule to give a sense of our day. As you may remember, our school actually has three sessions, one in the morning, one beginning after lunch and an evening session for those who work during the day. Our resident students attend either the morning or afternoon session. Below is the schedule for the students attending school in the morning. The difference, of course, for the students who attend school in the afternoon is that they study in the morning. The different schedules require student monitoring all day, every day.

           AM Schedule

  5:25              Roll Call

  5:30              House cleaning jobs

  6:00              Bathroom

  6:30              Breakfast
6:45               Class for AM students
12:00              Lunch
13:15              Study for AM students
14:15              Break
14:45-             Study for AM students

16:00              Recreation for AM Students

18:30              Supper
19:00              Prayers,Various

20:00              Study for all
21:30              Sleep

 

Fr. Jose with students at first Mass of the year

Every week Mass is celebrated on Sunday and Tuesday by our pastor, Fr. Jose.

Fr. Jose distributes communion while Br. Lucas leads the singing

Student Monitors, in blue,  lead the residents before each meal

Meals are served family style

New front entrance to resident student area
with kitchen in background

 Br. Lucas began teaching a full load of physics classes in the evenings. In the picture below he is teaching to 48 students in a classroom with two small lightbulbs.

Br. Lucas teaching physics at night

Welcome Back!

I thank you for your patience over the last month. I took a break from the blog. (There must be a word for that in blogspeak) I suppose I was looking for inspiration and my inspiration returned to school last week. So, the blog is back with more pictures and I hope I could say better than ever.

Last week Mission Amatongas welcomed 52 students into the dorm for the 2012 school year.  Thanks to the efforts of "Meet the Challenge" and all of our great sponsors, each student received a bookbag filled with notebooks and pens to begin the school year. We couldn't do our work here without the wonderful support from so many people. You should have seen their faces when we brought the bookbags into the dining hall. I can safely say that some of these guys have never had a bookbag in their life.

Students holding their new bookbags full of notebooks and pens

 One of the many changes greeting the students was a newly painted Dining Room, which also serves as the 10th grade study hall. Over the holidays new lighting was also installed and much cleaning was done by the brothers and workers.

Students in the dining hall

 The brothers eat supper with the students every evening at 6:30. Twice a week the students eat chicken and the other items on the menu are fish and beans. Of course the traditional staple of the students diet is "Masa", something like cooked down grits, which they love.

Br. Angel with students at supper

 Some of the students attend school in the morning and some in the afternoon. The difference in schedules requires much organization and since the students study 3 hours each day, students are in study periods for the better part of the day. Br. Fabian, the Director of the Dorm, has instituted student monitors who act as prefects for the study periods, meals, work projects and nightly dorm routine.

Br. Fabian, director of the dorm, at opening meeting

 Of the 52 students in the dorm 20 are orphans from the local area. Thanks again to our sponsors, we have already bought shoes, uniforms, towels, blankets and other personal supplies for the orphans. Many of the orphans come with wounds on their lower legs caused by insect bites. These wounds can easily become infected and often leave scars. We have heard of people in the area who have died from a simple infection of an insect bite. Every evening before and after supper, I attend to the wounds.

Br. Chris bandages a wound

 Thanks to our supporters of the Sustainable Support Projects (SSP's) we are in the process of harvesting about 3 hectares of corn which we hope will feed our students for a few months. We battled a few dry spells and fed many monkeys over the last few months, but we still have a good crop coming in.

Picking corn on our farm

Corn being dried

Also over the holidays we remodeled an old classroom and made a large chicken house that can hold about 500 chickens. The chicken project is another effort of the SSP's that will help us in the future.

New chicken house with 200 new chicks

 The students wake up at 5:00 AM every morning and do a variety of chores before breakfast. One of those chores is to cut the wood used by our two cooks. Some of the other jobs include cleaning the dorm, bathrooms, study rooms, and laundry area.

Students cutting wood for the kitchen

More to come! Really

What's your Mission?

 "Mission Amatongas" is a Charity Partner for the Louisiana Marathon in Baton Rouge, La. January 15, 2012. Join "Team Amatongas" and help us sponsor more orphans next year. Just click on "Mission Amatongas" when registering. Why do you run? Run for a mission!

http://www.thelouisianamarathon.com/

Interview with Temótéo

         Our goal is have 50 boarding students next school year, which begins January 15, 2012, with about half of the boarders being orphans from the Amatongas area. Once the people received news of this it did not take long to have many requests and we realized we would have to organize the process. We talked to the local school directors to get names of some local orphans and began interviewing some of the students this week. Check out our video here interviewing Temótéo.



We are looking for people willing to sponsor one or more of our students for next school year. Please contact us or visit the sponsor link on our blog if you are interested in helping these orphans.

Thanksgiving in Amatongas

The school year ended in Amatongas this week leaving the place much different with the kids gone for the next two months. The most important part of that news is now we have tons of work to do to get ready for next school year beginning in mid-January.

Last week the brothers finally moved into our repaired and permanent residence, with the highlight being a new chapel. We took the third floor of the old giant Franciscan residence, which was composed entirely of bedrooms, and converted 4 of the old bedrooms into chapel, community room, kitchen and dining room. Another highlight is the beautiful views from both sides of the house. Thanks again to all those who made this move possible and to the parish for allowing us to use the two guest houses temporarily. We now live in a residence closer to the school and closer to our Sustainable Support Projects. We indeed have much for which to be thankful.

Now that we have more rain and sun, we see more flowers in the area including this beautiful orange flowering tree and these lilly's.

One of our many projects for the break is to increase the number of desks for our students next year. Workers spent a few weeks making repairs on old desks and we are trying to raise funds to buy new desks. Our estimate is that we need about 100-150 new desks next year. Each desk cost about $60 and seats two students. If you have interest in helping let us know.

One project we needed to complete before the serious rains come soon is to construct a new roof for the school building. This project was completed just recently and gave us a sigh of relief. We can now begin the work on the rest of the school, installing new doors and windows, repairing electricity, and much, much cleaning and painting.

Before the school year ended the brothers appointed a Dorm Council for next school year. The Dorm Council will be responsible for taking care of the boarders and running the activities of the dorm next year including meals, cleaning, study, recreation, and weekend programs which include club meetings.

Dorm Council with their director Br. Fabian (left)

One final note: If you are one of those who reads this blog regularly you know we have struggled with the internet for 9 months since arrival. Recently, we delayed the renovation of our computer lab because the local telecommunications company could not help us get a connection to our future lab. However, yesterday we met with the director of a new telecommunications company recently approved by the Mozambique government. Movitel is out of Vietnam and has been busy developing their infrastructure including installation of a cable which just happens to run in front of our school. The director not only said that we could get a line to the school, but that the installation and the use of the internet for our school computer lab would be free of charge. I am, of course, skeptical because we all know nothing is free and if it sounds too good to be true, welllll. However, we are thankful for the good news and possibilities.