vilancolous and beira

This was a big week of traveling for Toby and me, and hopefully I can share here some of the highlights.  On Monday we drove for 7.5 hours to Chimoio.  We stayed at the Banks home.  Their home doubles as the chapel, seminary building, and they host a FHE group every Monday night.  They have a lot of youth in their area.   They want the youth to have a safe place to be in the church buildings away from the trauma most of them face at home.  We attended the Monday night meeting with the youth  They played a game with an empty water bottle and you had to learn everyone's name and say it quickly or you would get hit on the head. Needless to say, the loved hitting each other on the head, but it was a fun evening. I had some culture shock when I went into the big store there, called Shop Rite. It made me wonder how I will ever face COSTCO again.  The shelves were full, the produce fresh, Christmas decorations abounded and there was so much variety. It was great to stock on on things we never see here in Quelimane.
     The couples conference was great.  It was held in the resort city of Vilanoculos, right on the Indian Ocean with real beach and a lovely pool and lovely rooms. We met all of the other couples in the mission and had great and informative training by the President from his recent Mission Presidents Seminar.  There are  6 couples in this mission.  One couple. the Rosses are here for their second time.  They have a lot of institutional knowledge about the laws here and the history of the church.  Another couple had been here for three days; they are the country directors for welfare and humanitarian work. Everyone talked about their areas and we had a lot of fun learning about a lot of specific stuff that we have not been instructed on before. Much of which is unique to Mozambique.  Along with weightier matters, we were challenged to try to make the missionaries eat more vegetables and clean their showers more often in an effort to not die of malnutrition nor bug-borne diseases.  Each night we had a lovely group dinner. In the daytime after meetings we swam and enjoyed some local shopping.  Sister Hall was robbed in the market place and was so mad.  She mentioned doing some things to the locals that would help them never to forget her. Although the bartering is fun, it really smelled horrible.  When I undressed at night (in our fancy thatch-roofed bungalo, all my clothes were just permeated with the stink. Toby and I had great walks on the beach and came home with nice shells.  In the evenings there were some lively games of "Five Crowns". Toby and Pres. Spendlove are two very competitive men, but there were also some sisters that had a bit of a nasty streak as well. It was so nice to visit in English.
  On Thursday, which was Thanksgiving, we drove 7 hours to Beira.  If we thought we had seen potholes before, we had seen nothing yet.  For two hours as you approach the city, you have to swerve to the other side of the road constantly, or alternatively you can go into the chasm in first gear and crawl back out.  But, of course there are tons of semis also on the road, swerving to your side to avoid things and it got pretty dicey along there.  We stayed with the Boninis, the CES couple from Brazil.  Oh, even to me, their Portuguese is easy to understand and they are so much fun. We went out for great Chinese food during a power outage.  On Friday we had our shopping day for the house.  We bought another air conditioning unit to put in the room we want to make into a living room, a safe, a sound system for the chapel, more groceries, a visit to the mercado for some fun things and we saw the two chapels in the area and just had a wonderful day.  Toby bought a beautiful hand-carved ironwood chair--the design of which is uniquely Mozambican.
    On Saturday we left at 6am or the long drive home. We were packed to the gills.  We finally saw some wildlife on the road, two troops of baboons and more swarms of butterflies. You will see from the pictures something new we could buy to eat, but chose not to. We almost fell asleep listening to a book we had downloaded from Deseret Book.  The title will remain nameless. The produce along the road is always much better than in the city. We brought home great mangos from Beira and pineaples from Nicodala just outside of Quelimane. It is the season from liche fruit and they are sold everywhere.  We got home just in time for group singing on Saturday afternoon and time to get ready for Sunday.  It is a challenge to not compare housing, branches and other things with the other Senior couples.  We enjoyed feeling of their strength and were happy to come home to our Elders. We were able to bring packages from home for most of them, including ourselves, so that made for a fun evening.


This small deer called a pelefina, we figured was what in Tanzania we called a dikdik. We went through a ten mile remote area where ten different people were selling them alongside the road (we figured a whole group of them had fallen into a pit or something).



This is collectively all the senior lds missionaries in Mozambique.  We thought that we would have the distinction of being the youngest--but we are more middle of the pack.  There is a 48 year old amongst us.



Let us be charitable and say that our accommodations were several degrees better than Quelimane.  There were no ants.  It was very nice to get away for a couple of days.



This is Debbie being mobbed by children as she engages in the forbidden practice of offering candy.



Debbie and Sister Bonini who charmed us for a couple of days.  The Bonini's are from the Sao Paulo, Brazil area.  We went with them and ate Brazilian and Chinese food--and no Zambezian half chicken dinners.



This is one of the Beira chapels that was quite nice.  It will be a while before Quelimane gets one like this.



I thought that this was a charming picture of  sisterly care and concern.

o

.