30/06/10

Tonight we had an absolutely wonderful REDES (girls in development, education, and health)! We meet twice a week and alternate between using the computers and having discussions. Needless to say, the girls are far more interested in and engaged during the computer sessions, as opposed to discussing life issues. Tonight we were supposed to use the computers but they weren’t working. I am not 100% but I believe there was a power surge last week that completely fried some if not all of the computers. So we are waiting on something to fix them and hopefully protect that from happening again. So we had a discussion about marriage that started out painfully. Thankfully two of the girls were incredibly animated and talkative, relaxing the environment, making others laugh, encouraging a few other girls to chime in, and leading to a wonderful discussion and meeting that we had to cut short due to time.
In America half the reason for getting married or divorced is for financial reasons. But in a world without prenuptials or being on your spouse’s healthcare plan, it’s no wonder why many people don’t bother making their marriage of end of marriage official (in the eyes of the law). Many Mozambicans have traditional marriage ceremonies without officially registering as married, and many have what we call common-law marriages. Also in a culture where multi concurrent partners is fairly normal and accepted, why bother getting divorced? Once a man (adult) who works at the mission sought me out because he had heard my parents are divorced. His parents had split up and he wanted me to explain to him why they would do that.