Distribution

Well finally after a week of running around in cirlces we got some food to people in need! There was a village where some people had lost their farms, and a few their houses, but so far they where not on any official lists and the only way we heard about them was thru our church in the area.

5am, dawn has hardly broken and we are on the road to scout out the village where we are going to go do distribution later that day... We got back to the base at about 8am!

First hurdle: Getting a 4 ton truck. I had an agreement with the one that was delivering stone to the construction site where we are building the church, he was to arrive at 8am the next morning. When he didnt show at 8:10 I decided to find another one, but there were none to be found, not at the usual camiao hire area, nor at the ferry. Just then a team from America who had driven up from South Africa arrived and I had to go meet them, so I sent Chris to go find a truck. He found one and it 'quickly' went off to fill up with diesel...haha. After about 30mins I went to find it. It had a flat and was trying to find a spare...

Eventually we make it to the WPF warehouse and load the truck with 4 tons of maize flour and 100kg beans... then the fun began! We were about 30km out of Caia, down a little footpath when we came across a little muddy puddle/stream that we had to cross. I got thru easily but the truck, well it kinda got stuck! We first tried towing him with his old frayed rope, then I remembered I had a good tow rope in my car, it was only goot for up to 5tons, but I thought to give it a try anyways. Well it broke. So then the African way of doing it started. We used the broken tow rope (now sorta fixed), the other broken frayed rope (now fixed) and another rope I had with me and they tied these 3 ropes more than once between my car and the truck. Then we got 50 guys to push while my car pulled. It was quite a sight and with a great heave-ho the truck was un-stuck! It was not moments later, while turning into the drive of the church property that the truck fell prey to the deep sand. We were only about 200 meters from the church so I drove to and fro with my car carrying 1 ton at a time until the truck was empty. Then we had to do the whole towing thing again! Then to top it all off, basically whenever the truck stalled it had to be push-started... or in my case, pull-started, so that was quite fun, interesting to say the least.

While all this driving and towing and pull-starting was happening the pastor was in the church preaching, so when I got there the distribution was ready to start. We personally gave food to about 100 families in the hour and half we were there, but then it was starting to get dark and I wasnt keen to get lost in the myriad of foot paths there were around this area.

We got home at 6pm, a full 13 hour work day for me!

Then today we gave out the last of the food, there were 5 churches that were affected and we sent messangers to 4 of them to let them know to come to Caia to receive food. The 5th church was too far away for people to easily walk, so we went to them. It was a surprise visit, they had not been expecting us so it took quite a while to gather them - so we dropped the food and showed them the portions to give and we left to go do the distribution in Caia 'city'. Some of these 4 churches that were coming to us were still in-accessabile by car, so it was a good thing they came to us.

They started arriving early, but 9am there were already a number of people waiting for the distribution that was due to start in the afternoon. We arrived back from the morning distribution at about 1:30, and immediately started giving out food to these people. It kept us busy till about 4, and each family received about 12kg maize flour, 1 kg beans and 1 litre oil.

We are quite tired now, its exhausting work, but so fulfilling!