Red tape

This is Amizade and his wife Lourdes and her mother--who is perhaps the oldest person I have yet met in Mozambique--being somewhere close to eighty (they think).  I have spent a lot of time with Amizade and family this last week.  We have been helping them in the endless process of getting personal documents (like birth certificates) so that they can get married.  Because she comes from a less developed region, Lourdes had no birth certificate, but to get married she must have one.  So she needed to bring her aged mother into the city to testify that she was indeed born.  As her mother has no documents nor proof of citizenship, I'm not quite sure I see their logic.  But after many false starts and initial denials--and a few hundred kilometers of driving, we succeeded.  Both are now official and can now apply for the other documents that it will take to finally get married--still months away.  And baptism, which is their objective, will follow that.  Lourdes, by the way, speaks little portuguese, though she understands it mostly (like Debbie a bit).  She speaks Chaubo which is the predominant dialect in these parts.  More people speak Chaubo than portuguese around here.

Amizade, is the pastor of three churches that he founded.  he is a very good man who knows the scriptures far better than I.  I was content when his bible fluency exceeded my own, but now I find that he is able to quote Book of Mormon chapter and verse with greater accuracy than can I.  We have great gospel discussions and he is like a sponge--asking the greatest questions like.  "What about the people who die without hearing the gospel?  There should be a way for them to not be punished for something that is no fault of their own."  I asked him what he is going to do about his churches after he is baptized.  He loves the people and wants to help them--so he is figuring out what kind of contact he can maintain and how he can teach them the gospel.  I really like this guy.  He works as a guard, has a son in jail, with who he has shared the gospel message and who is now being taught by the missionaries (their report is that Mozambican jails are not as bad as they feared). 

We have had the 16 Elders of the Zone with us for the last couple of days.  It is always sort of fun to have the boundless energy of youth around--which rubs off a bit as well as reminds you that you are grateful to already be a bit older.  These are good young men.  We always put on a lunch for the group when they come and this time we opted for more traditional fare--rice and beans.  It turned out ok (with help of our maid--cooking the beans in her giant pot on our charcoal bbq on the back porch.

We had found what we thought were real watermelons on the road from Nampula--so we bought three of them--thinking that they would be a good treat for the elders.  You can see here, that they were less than spectacular.