Morçegos of Marromeu

I have never complained that our mission was boring.  It continues to throw us new experiences and challenges every time we turn around.  Our mission president recently gave us a new assignment--which was to take care of the bats (morçegos) in the Marromeu chapel.  Marromeu is a a city in which the church owns a very large and beautiful chapel--somewhat south of us on the Zambezi River and quite distant from anything other than a sugar factory and square miles of cane fields and jungle.  We visit about every month and I had never noticed a bat problem.  He did.  So we got there and we had the young and agile missionaries open up the eaves and take my camera with them.  Here with is a shot of one small area.

There is nothing that young men like more than a juicy project like this to sink their teeth into.   Adding to the allure was the near inaccessibility of the attic and the risks one would have to take to reach it.  There ensued a flurry of action, some of which was productive and some not so much.  In the end however, many bats chose to leave their previously peaceful environs.  We will call this project now 10% complete.  When we get the rest to leave (no, I am trying desperately not to resort to smoking them out--but we are going to try a little Led Zeppelin) we then have the task of cleaning up the enormous and smelly mess that they have left.  I am open to suggestions from any who have dealt with these beasts before.  It is interesting to note that these are relatively small rat-sized bats, unlike the very large chicken-sized fruit bats we have here in Quelimane.  We were pleased to have no life threatening missionary injuries in this little endeavor, though Elder Berg did need a bit of gauze, rest, and Neosporin before we were done.



The RS choir of Marromeu cannot carry a tune to save them--or when they do, it is one of their own making rather than that envisioned by the hymn's composer--but they do sure look good in their matching capulanas and hats.

We had a little bit of time so we drove out deep into the jungle where we had heard that there was a game reserve.  It was a beautiful drive, and all people that we ran into spoke the dialect of Sena rather than Portuguese--but tin the end, it turned out to be a hunting reserve and we could only enter if we wanted to kill things and pay for them.  We passed.