Well, we thought so until our meeting today (they called us) when they presented us with a list of things they needed to get married - and wanted our help. It amounted to $900 worth of food and supplies for the party after the wedding which is a tremendous cultural pressure here (sound familiar?). The bride's family is pushing for this big party (which amounts to feeding about 300 people in exchange for a lot of presents). Now in this culture, we should feel great honor that they would present this need to us personally, and we are learning to be gracious in these requests, but in a country where a typical wage is on the order of less than $100 / month, this is a little extravagant. Without the family blessing, the marriage will probably not happen. In addition, there was a request for help buying land for the house that is so very important (they are renting a nice house by Mozambican standards right now). We had planned to contribute a little to the wedding (mainly the documents and things for the wedding itself) but of course not paying for the party!
Cultural and family pressures here are tremendous and put real barriers in front of couples, which probably contributes the the problem with promiscuity here and tremendous HIV problem. Pray with us as we seek God's wisdom in how to counsel this young couple. We really do seek to understand the culture better so we can operate within it in a Christian paradigm that is not full of all the western bias that is so deeply imbedded in us. It takes such discernment and as we continue our daily "read through the bible in a year" devotion that we do year after year, we are seeing God's word in a entirely different light as we understand things better here. But, oh, we have so much to learn.....
But, I started off this entry thinking about the well at Picoco! We met with a Portuguese man today who one month ago shipped in some well drilling equipment from Portugal and is trying to start a well-drilling business here. His name is Jose and we quite enjoyed meeting with him and inspecting his equipment.
In Mozambique, the World Health Organization has the initials "OMS" in portuguese so we are confused with these folks all the time. It actually works to our advantage quite a bit and has unintentionally given us some 'free passes' to things because we said we were "with OMS" and various assumptions are made. In this case, the man had gotten very very excited to think he would be quoting a well for the World Health Organization - he thought he'd jumped into the big time and when we gave him our card for OMS International - reaching the nations for Christ, he couldn't help his momentary disappointment.
Anyway, he has given us a partial quote for the hole (about $4500) through the rock and is obtaining a second quote for the pump assembly. So, we are encouraged that we are moving forward again and it is no coincidence because we know of several groups in America who have been specifically praying for this well for the last couple of days - and to find this guy trying to start up - it's not coincidence!
We quite hit it off and talked for quite a while and he helped us with our Portuguese and we learned about some tragedy in his life and were able pray with him. We see some great potential opportunities here and look forward to what the next couple of days will bring as we finalize our arrangement.
So progress in response to the prayers of God's people. Thank you Lord, thank you friends.
Dave & Ann
No comments:
Post a Comment