Day 8
The first 5 days of this adventure in Mozambique were about information gathering and getting a sense of the pulse of Marracuene and the village of Possulane. Pat has relentlessly asked questions of everyone we have met - digging in to learn their story, trying to understand their take on life and their circumstances. In a sense, Pat was gathering all the puzzle pieces. Today would be about throwing all those pieces on the table and trying to sort through it and make sense out of it all. The question we all wanted to try and answer was "Now what?" Keeping with the puzzle analogy, the first and most important question we needed to answer was "What is the picture on the front of the box?" If you know what you are trying to create, the task is much easier, right?
As an aside, I must confess that although my family had been invited into this journey from the very beginning, I had in my mind that once the orphanage / community center was done, the work would be fairly complete - that we would just need to focus a little effort and energy on helping them get organized. Wrong. There is so much more opportunity in this village and in this country. So much so that it is difficult to know where to start. The articulated needs of most everyone we talked to involved the basics - food, water, housing, clothing, medical care, and jobs.
So the day began about 7:00 a.m. with me trying to put together an agenda for the day.
Sheri Pattillo, the point person for Partners in Ministry's efforts in Mozambique, had requested that we videotape Ernesto and Seba answering questions about the state of affairs in Mozambique. That seemed like a good place to start the day - a recap of all that we had discussed for 5 days. So, we filled over three hours of tapes listening to Ernesto's and Seba's testimony, the history of how their work with the community of Possulane began, their roles in the work and the elements of their typical day. We then talked about education in Possulane and the challenges the kids face in getting into school and being able to stay there. The conversation then shifted to health and medical needs, food and housing.
Once the taping was complete, the four of us (Pat, Ernesto, Seba and I) pulled chairs to the table and began to strategize. We decided to stay at the hotel for the day, as it afforded us some nice surroundings in which we could have our discussion and a restaurant to feed us. The pictures below are of the pavillion where we spent the day.
Pat and I came to the table with similar attitudes. We both wanted to help and contribute to Ernesto's, Seba's and Filo's efforts in Marracuene and Possulane. We saw ourselves as "interested consultants" so to speak. As I opened my mouth to begin the "consulting", Ernesto, somehow sensing this "consultant mindset" pre-empted me and looked at both Pat and I as though he was looking at us from his heart. He said this work is "our work. You, Michaela, Pat and Mama Sheri (as he called Sheri Pattillo) are our partners in this work." The invitation to take ownership in this effort was unequivocal.
We then turned our attention to identifying "the picture on the box." It is worth mentioning that planning is not a natural response for most of the people of Mozambique. They are mostly reactive in their thinking, and the reactive thoughts and behaviors are born mostly out of the need to just survive. We spent some time discussing the value of planning and looking a long way down the road instead of at just the next step. Fortunately, both Ernesto and Seba were starving for a plan. Their heart's desire was to "teach the people how to fish" - to give the people of Marracuene and Possulane the ability to feed, cloth, educate and house themselves. We worked our way through the process of coming up with a short, focused statement that would describe where we wanted to go - a mission statement. Or, for our purposes, the picture on the box. After much discussion and multiple revisions, this is what we came up with. CCSR (Real Dream Community Center) exists to be a beacon of Christ's love to children and families in darkness, seeking to meet their immediate and long term physical needs in a sustainable fashion, and giving them the light of Chris to carry as they go. Each word was carefully chosen, and represents a specific part of the "picture" that we all see.
The rest of the day was spent making the initial effort to identify the corners of the puzzle - those foundational things that needed to be accomplished first in order to realize the vision. We listed our goals, assets, challenges, opportunities, the roles we would each play, how we would be accountable and transparent with one another, how we would handle communication, ideas for income production, a budget and a timeline to accomplish our agreed tasks. I'll defer some of those details until later, but suffice it to say we covered a lot of ground. We completed our day of planning about 20 seconds shy of midnight - the day of planning had taken 17 hours. And, we had only just begun!
Ernesto (left) and Seba.
Pat during our conversations
Michaela writing in her journal
Ernesto's son, Caleb (10 months). He was Michaela's favorite subject to photograph and hold. We had to peel them away from each other at the end of the day. As you can tell, this kid is personality plus.
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