Samaritan's Purse - Inhambane

Last week Paul flew a team from the aid organisation, Samaritan's Purse to visit some of their projects in Mozambique.

Samaritan's Purse are a large Christian relief and aid organisation who arrange and promote community self- help projects around the world. Our purpose  was to fly donors and staff to visit a number of their programs in the south east of Mozambique.

We have flown them a number of times before and once again took them to Inhambane on the coast.

From there we drove a total of about 300 km to visit a number of their centres  where they reach out to the local community. These were really follow-up visits but they did allow the visitors to see and hear firsthand from the beneficiaries themselves, the difference that their efforts were making.

The first visit was to a couple, (left) and their children who had been receiving help over the past year.

The next visit was to one of their own workers who had become ill and, when we arrived, was sleeping outside in her village under the shade of a tree.

Some of the Samaritan's Purse nurses attended her and gave her some medicines.

We gave her a big bowl full of useful day to day goodies.

One visit was to a project where they were growing their own food, so we were offered corn, sweet potato and cassava roots and leaves - yum!

One lady we visited had some tests and some counselling.

One family received a herd of goats.

One lady we visited had fallen into a fire when she was five and got quite badly burned and disfigured.

Samaritan's Purse asked us if we could arrange some medical help for her with the doctor teams we often fly. Her family was also given a goat and some food.

One interesting observation in one of the villages was this measure of security.

It was a chunky padlock attached to a length of re-bar by a short piece of tatty rope!

Inhambane is on a peninsular so we saved our drivers 90 km of travel by taking a 25 min ferry ride for the 3 km bay crossing.

 

 These pictures don't show it but there was quite a mean swell during the crossing.

 The next day I dropped my passengers off in Chibuto where they had some more visiting to do.

Before making my way back home via Maputo.

Flying back to SA my ground speeds at 10000 ft were a good 50 knots slower than usual. When I looked at the satellite picture later I saw this bizarre long cloud stretching from central Angola, right across where I had taken off at the coast and continuing right out into the Indian ocean. Perhaps that had something to do with it.

Thank you.

Paul and Cathy