Hazards of Fire

One of the things we see frequently here are people who have been badly burned. We live in a society where much of the cooking is done on charcoal fires or small wood fires and often inside the home. In the Mocuba area, most of the houses have grass thatch roofs. They are inexpensive, provide wonderful insulation to the heat, provide shade, and keep the rain out in the worst of storms. However, sometimes things can get out of control. You can see the houses in the background in this first picture but the house to the right, which is right next to one of our churches, is absent a roof. You guessed it, it burned down with a total loss of everything inside the house. It was accidentally caused by the kids, but fortunately in this case, no one was injured. The family is still living in the house, cleaning the smoke off the walls and eventually will rebuilt the roof. The second picture more clearly shows the state of the house after the fire and much cleaning out. The church has been helping out and the family sleeps in the church when it is raining.

To further illustrate, you can see Ann inside another house cooking dinner over two charcoal fires. It was a great dinner and we spent alot of time with this family. They were hacking and coughing much of the time and I wonder if some of the lung problems we see here are related to living in houses all the time that are full of smoke. A wood fire will clearly smoke but the charcoal fires are a bit less obvious and I would note after several hours, I would start to have a headache that I thought was due to smoke or maybe even carbon monoxide - not sure. But, like all things you get used to it.

But, when the fire is ready, you cook the dinner and when it is ready, you stop, because there is no keeping it warm if the fire has gone out. Mmmmmm, I think there is a spiritual analogy there to the fire within us!

PS, the dinner Ann prepared was excellent - Rice and chicken and our friends laughed at us because she did bring some food in a can. (One of the cultural assumptions about Americans is that they eat food from cans, which is seen as very strange here!).

Blessings.

"Be pleased to save me O Lord, come quickly to help me." Ps 40:13