Late June 2018

Road Disappears

Road Outage - Mosteiros in the Background

Today we drove to Mosteiros for training to be held at the hospital for our community health project.  Except we didn’t make it!!  Because the road was out!!  The road hangs onto a cliff, barely, and a large rock slide had taken out the road completely.  We were amazed that just to the left of Elder Biven you can see an opening in the rock wall, this is the stairs down the mountain, the rock slide just barely missed taking them out as well!  When we arrived people were trotting up the hill, those hardy Cape Verdeans!  It looked steep to us and we were a little concerned about where to leave our car if we walked down into town for the meeting.  So

we drove back to São Filipe, 45 minutes around the volcano.  In the future, to get to Mosteiros, which is the second biggest town on Fogo, we will have to drive around the other side of the volcano which will take an hour and a half.  The last we have heard, a special piece of heavy machinery is being sent from Portugal to help with the reconstruction.

Road Outage

New house

Lucindo Mixing Cement

Our translator Lucindo is building a house for his young family.  On this day they were pouring the cement roof.  They mix the cement with a hoe on the ground and then hoist it up to the roof.  The work was about a third complete when we visited.

Hoisting the Cement to the Roof

One last photo from Brava

Fogo Island from Brava

We have had so many lovely evenings watching the sunset over the sea above Brava.  I have posted some of those photos.  This photo goes with the others, instead of sitting on Fogo watching the sunset over Brava, we were sitting on Brava, during our trip last week, watching Fogo.  And having dinner as we sat on a rock wall. 

We are not sure if we will get back to Brava, but it was a fantastic interlude to the heat we have here in São Filipe on Fogo where we get the afternoon sun and perhaps some heat reflection off the volcano looming behind us.  Our house is made of cement blocks, though, and we are able to get it cooled off well at night.  That is one of our many sweet blessings, we love being able to keep the house opened up, even though it is summer.