December 22, 2008 at 9:58 pm (My real home)
Tags: Family, home
Am back in the UK and shivering! But just a quick post to wish you a very merry Christmas and a fabulous new year!
More stories from the minefields next year but for now I am off on a family ‘expedition’ to the forest to find the perfect Christmas tree (final decision to be made by mother-dear so this could take some time!) swiftly followed mince pies and mulled wine.
December 5, 2008 at 3:33 pm (Life & work in Mozambique)
What an awesome day last Thursday…a fun, frantic, fantastically energetic day with 60 kids and some paint! Then a Thanksgiving party with some friends from across the pond!
The protective visors we use in our minefields eventually become scratched, broken or just a little ‘past their shelf life’ so we replace them for our deminers and end up stuck with lots of old ones – there’s not much call for old broken visors!
However, with some imaginative thinking and a little help from our friends, the idea for ‘MascarArte’ was born!
With friends who work with a local orphanage and have connections with an incredible artist, last Thursday was spent in the compound with 60 kids and lots of pots of paint!
It was a pretty hectic day – I forgot how ‘enthusiastic’ sugar fuelled children can be – but fantastic fun and all for a good cause.
The children were brilliant, avidly watching one of supervisors show them how the visors are worn by our deminers in the minefield and patiently listening to instruction from our artist.
Then eagerly (and with utter concentration etched on their faces!) becoming artists themselves, spending the day decorating our old visors in any way they fancied.
There was lots of clashing colours and I think half the paint ended up on the children, on the floor or on me!! But by the end of the day we had 60 beautiful, fun, colourful masks. And we’d even managed to tire the kids out too!!
The masks will now be exhibited locally to raise awareness of child rights and child health in Mozambique.
After a long day at the office it was a quick scrub in the shower then – still slightly speckled in paint! - off to a friends house for a Thanksgiving dinner!
It was my very first Thanksgiving dinner and promised to be a rather fun evening. The party was made up of Colombians and Americans (who had married Colombians) so for a start the language of the night would probably be ‘spanglish’!
Suits me!
It was all very authentically ‘Amercian’ with all the Thanksgiving trimmings…although just to remind us we were in Mozambique the power went down about 10 mins before we were due to eat…hence the rather ‘rustic’ dinner by total candlelight!
Great fun though, and a good warm up to Christmas dinner indulgence and over eating at the folks place in a few weeks time!
