Power Play

We had a power outage for about twenty hours today.  Luckily, it was a beautiful winter Quelimane day of about 75 degrees with a nice breeze so we didn't swelter.  We had no microphone at church of course, but everyone, with a little prompting from their group leader, spoke in a loud enough voice to be heard.  Finally about 9 pm, when our ipad batteries were about dead too, the power returned.  Who knows the reason.

A speaker flaked out on  me at church so I had an unexpected ten minute block of time to fill.  Our group has heard enough of my preaching of late so we called a three of people from the audience to speak.  Debbie was the only pale one and she was spared because the first two took more time than their assigned three minutes.  Both Mozambicans were clearly challenged and by the experience but did really well--and thanked me afterward for the adrenalin rush.  Debbie will speak next week--though she has yet to thank me.

Elder McCullough was one of our speakers today.  He spoke on pioneers and borrowed from me the story of my Great Great Grandmother and the quail at sugar creek.  I was surprisingly moved to hear it told in portuguese by someone else (and his point to them was that they are similarly pioneering in Quelimane).  He and Elder Petersen are at the end of their missions and are going home next week.  It has been very good for Quelimane to have two highly motivated, very fluent, and very polished missionaries spending their last days here.  (Not implying that they are the only ones--they are not).  We will miss them as they head home. Elder McCullough, more than anyone else I have seen, speaks like a Mozambican--which doesn't necessarily mean that he speaks good portuguese, but he speaks excellent Mozambican and, as a result, relates very well to folks here.  We will miss them, but we will try and use them well for another seven days.  They have requested a special P-day activity tomorrow--which in deference to the squeamish or to the mission president who may be reading this, I won't fully describe--but it does involve crocodiles and chickens.

We were outside the city, helping some folks on Saturday and gathered something of a crowd.  Immediately after this picture was taken, Debbie tried to balance one of these water jugs on her head--let's be charitable that she doesn't have the head for neither algebra nor cargo.  If you are related to her, you have likely seen the video of this experience already--which is full of  good natured guffaws from the locals.  These yellow plastic containers hold 20 liters and originally contained cooking oil--but are used by everyone for water, gasoline and anything else.  They are the standard liquid container of choice in Mozambique.

The picture is not particularly flattering, but keep in mind that a 50 kilo sack of rice is not a particularly easy thing for an old geezer to heft.  We were helping folks move ten sacks from point a to b.  I did fine with the above sack until I needed to climb a very steep little  hill with it--there simply came a point when my legs would no longer do what they needed to do.  I left it for the young bucks.

Bendita and Rui we have spoken about before.  They finally succeeded this week in getting their documents ready and have started the formal marriage process here.  A significant achievement to be sure.  I will perform their marriage towards the end of the month--three days before their scheduled baptism.  Rui works as a driver for a Chinese enterprise.  He recently risked his job and refused to work any longer on Sunday (after a dicey day or two, he now has Sundays off and more responsibility).  These are good simple folk (who are full of interesting complexity) who we have loved to see grow over the last months.  They were the first of our investigators.