Of Blocos, Batismos, & Bendita

We have become very well acquainted of late with the typical Mozambican cinderblock brick.  We are using them for the walls of our new chapel construction and they cost about fifty cents apiece.  We happened across the scene above this week as we were chasing down marriage documents with Veronica and Gaspar, the twins parents.  Pictured is a little family brick factory.  They have two molds.  Dad is mixing sand with cement--using as little cement as he can get away with as that is the expensive thing--as a result, the bricks are extraordinarily weak and will break if dropped on a hard surface.  Mom above, with baby on the back is filling a mold with cement and whacking it with a flat board to tamp it down.  Dad will then remove the mold, leaving the brick to dry for a day or so.

The membership of the church in Quelimane increased by 25% today. We had a wonderful and powerful service. Five people were baptized, four from the family of Gildo and Katia, who have been taught for the last twelve months.  Getting them to this point has been a tremendous effort on their part and and that of many missionaries.  We have been here watching them grow and change for the whole time.  It was fun for me to interview them to see of they were ready and prepared for this important step.  Tinoca, who was taught by Debbie and I was also baptized-- I think that she has been the quickest person to join the church here yet, taking a little under two months.  .  She is also perhaps the convert here who had the most powerful spiritual experiences leading to her conversion.  She has been great fun to teach and we have grown close to her.  Debbie played mother, and took her shopping for new church clothes this week.  Tinoca lost both parents before her earliest memory and lives with her grandparents. 

This is a portrait of Bendita (wife of Rui), a recent convert that Debbie and I have taught and nurtured for nigh on nine months.  Words cannot express how impressed we are by this woman.  I cant think of anyone in my life of experience who has more faith.  She does not speak Portuguese well--but throws in a lot of local dialect in her speaking.  She does not read--but is expending great effort to learn as she knows that it will help her grow and serve (which includes walking 5 kilometers to Debbie's reading class twice a week).  She prays her way through life;s challenges and receives answers, strength and power.  When she spoke in church a couple of weeks ago, she declared: "the Lord has told me what to say to you, so you better listen".  And she delivered a very very powerful address.  She is very very simple, but very deep.  If you tell her something needs to be done, she simply goes about finding out how to accomplish what is needed.  We love Bendita and become more impressed with her every day.  I have a nagging feeling that she will be left a widow before too long and I think alot about what we might do to help her get through that.

Northern Exposure

I am going to let the pictures do the talking about our recent visit up north for church work in Nampula and recreation in Nacala.   Here goes:

This is part of the new Primary presidency in Nampula.  The area presidency in South Africa
put together a marvelous training video showing all the different aspects of the Primary
program.  The lady in pink is the president,she has been a member about one
year.  She is VERY hard working.  The lady in red is the professora  (teacher)
and was baptized in June.  She is very animated about the work.  I was trying to
help them design a program for the kids to do in sacrament meeting

We went to visit this investigator family.  I was so surprised to see these
beautiful cookies being made.  This lady makes them by order and gave
us a small box full to take home.  They were delicious and I will order some, by the
kilo, next time I am there.  Her friend, who is investigating the church does pro bono
work in the courts and is married to a man who shows some interest in the church, but I
don't think it will go anywhere.  He did like showing off his French and English skills to us.

These fisherman were diving and snorkeling looking for fish
in the same place we were wading in the water on Monday.  Love
those dug out canoes.

Yes, it is a hard life, but someone has to do the work!

When missionaries have the chance they get very creative.  This missionary was
a little crabby!!!

This is a boabab tree on the way home from the beach.  They are so
awesome, just like the Elders.  From left to right:  Elder Fitzgerald, Elder D'Olivera,
Elder Gibson, Elder Berg, Elder Bradford and Elder Peckham.

When we stopped to take a picture of the tree, these street vendors
starting running in mass.  About six more came out of the trees.  They hawk their
wares by waving their arms and putting their bodies into the lane of traffic to get
your attention.  We are surprised nobody gets hit.

But look how delicious their wares are .  We always buy cashews on the road.  The full red bowl was
about 180 mt. or about $7 for over a kilo of nuts.

This shows you what mission life can be like if you are really, really good and volunteer to serve in Africa!
We don't know why more of our friends and family don't join us in this important endeavor.

Persecution complex

I have no pictures that do this little narrative justice. I would be great if it had been caught on video.
We left Saturday morning to drive to Nampula for the weekend. We had only travelled a block or so from our home and were approaching a major intersection. As we pulled to a stop we saw a woman in great distress with a pile of tomatoes fallen on the ground, most of which were crushed and broken. In anger she was stomping the rest of them to smithereens (I actually don't really know what a smithereens is, but I think that it is small and unusable). We surmised that she was carrying a basket load of tomatoes to sell at the market or roadside when she dropped it. She cut a pretty tragic figure there stomping in tears in the middle of the road.
Despite widely held opinions to the contrary, I am a compassionate soul. I asked Debbie to roll down her window and offer some money to the distraught woman--to reduce her loss and lighten her load. As she did so, the woman reached down and grabbed a heaping handful of tomato chunks and heaved it through the open window, accompanied by words of fury. The missiles plastered Debbie, me, and the car's interior and windows. Onlookers at this busy intersection looked on in amazement and amusement. We were somewhat surprised by the outcome of our largesse. Finally awakening from our shock, we drove on--spending the next seven hours in a sticky pizza-like state-- though lacking pepperoni.

A week in the life

We have had a very full week on the heels of a couple not quite so busy.  Which is better, too much to do or not quite enough?  I think that Debbie and I would opt for more rather than less.

Cute children unstaged on the way to a lesson.  We taught much more this week than in recently.

A new investigator family Araujo and Nivalina and their children.  They are the very first people that we have taught who have been legally married at the beginning.  Sort of a nice change to be able to spend time teaching rather than fighting the challenging Mozambican marriage process.

We had to leave the city for to find a source of gravel for our island well-project which began officially commenced this week.  This is an abandoned quarry in which local children were frolicking.

We don't have alot of company over in Quelimane.  This is the McDaniel family from North Carolina.  We ran into them during the week and invited them over for dinner.  They are Baptist missionaries and we had a delightful evening with them.  Charming people they were and it was interesting to exchange perspectives and compare lives and missions.

This picture (on the way to Ilha de Idugo) allows you to see the effect of the blight that has devastated the coconut trees and crop of Zambezia.  This was once among the leading producers in the world and it has been reduced to nothing.  Most of the trees are dead or dying.

Well, this is the first week of our chapel expansion project.  I was mighty proud of my low budget effort but I admit to having had a few surprises this week.  Like the recognition by the contractor that he omitted a few critical items from the materials list and miscalculated a couple of others.  We have had to double the number of cinderblocks among other things.  I still have hopes of it turning out well and inexpensive--but we will see.  I suspect that if the overruns get too embarassing I will end up funding them out of my own pocket.

The twins of course.

And so it begins...

We have our new contract with our dona (or owner) for two years, so the work on expanding the chapel and painting our interior rooms began this weekend.  As with all remodels, I hate the mess already.  So many unknown workers on the property all day long.  So I am praying not to be stressed by it all, even though parts of it are driving me crazy.  On Saturday, my husband took the workers to buy all of the supplies for the project.  Ha!  We have made one or two trips each day for more of the same.  It will be great in the end, since we have 106 at church last week and really need the enlarged space.

Edma and Aissa wanted to earn some money, so we taught them how to paint.
It was harder than they thought, but they are ready for another room.  We
had them practice on the Primary last Saturday.

Part of the crew.  The man in black is the head of the project.  I asked Amezide
how old he was.  He said "ancient" about 50.  I laughed and said, well am I
ancient then, not merely old.  He gracefully avoided answering me.

The is the new wall going up.  We will create another side walk or path
through the grass to get to the out buildings and the bathroom.  Everything is
done slowly by hand.

There was the problem of the electrical pole...

It was taken out and wires  moved, but what to do with it now?

Necessity as the mother of invention

Our friend Amizade has become our "go to" guy on so many things.  He simply knows how to get things done, and that is a very useful friend to have.  He has been helping us purchase the materials for the chapel expansion project and today he presented me with a pile of invoices to fully account for and justify the cash he had expended.  If it were you or I, we would have stapled them together.  But this is Mozambique where not one person in 10,000 have a stapler.  But, needing the same effect as a staple, note that he used a needle and thread in the upper corner and stitiched them together for me.  Very creative I thought.



This is a plastic sack that formerly held twenty-five kilos of corn meal.  It is empty but its life is not over.  We saw this in the yard of an old grandma who was painstakenly unravelling it to access the individual plastic fibers.  They are surprisingly strong and tied together make an efffective cord.  This same day, I saw a house whose branch walls were held together by these strings--scavanged from plastic sacks.

This picture may not look like much but I think that you can see the remenants of a coconut shell.  When one wants to light her cooking fire, she goes to the neighbor and borrows a coal and carries it home in a half coconut shell.  People probably have matches, but borrowing a coal is easier and somewhat time-honored--and it keeps you talking with your neighbors as well.

I may have shown one of these marvels of engineering before.  They are a hand powered wheelchair used by the immobile.  I love them because they are so intelligently designed.  They are easy to steer and power with ones arms--but the marvel is that they are sturdy and largely unbreakable and use only common bicycle parts--easily replaceable in Quelimane.  There are hundreds on the streets here and generally their users do just fine--though I once had to give a gy a push through some deep sand in the road.

This picture has nothing to do with necessity nor invention but I thought it time to introduce our two new Elders in Quelimane (having lost Elders Workman and Steel in the last week or so).  Second and fourth from the left are Elders Andrade and Christensen respectively.  From Cabo and USA also respectively.  Good young men.

Hopeful and Helpless

The portrait below is of our friend Amizade standing next to Júlio Machado who is holding in his pocket the recently executed contract for the expansion (by 50%) of the Quelimane chapel. I was rather proud of my effort to get this done. My Portuguese required only a couple of corrections in the end and the contract provides for everything it needed to--safeguarding our interests as best we can and providing the contractor with a bonus to make things go on budget and schedule. The first proposal that we had received for this work was for upwards of $40,000 US dollars (remember that this is a rented building with a two year lease). Our final negotiated price with Júlio here is a bit under $2,000 US. Make me report in a month on the results of our cost-conscious efforts. I have hopes of a beautiful and more capacious chapel at a bargain price. We also have hopes of becoming an official "branch" of the church at about the same time. We will see.We spend the late afternoon buying concrete (there is a shortage in quelimane). There is no doubt that I have "lost a step" in the last years as those 110 lb. bags of concrete were not all that easy to toss around.



This is young woman is a random Moçambicana lass. I show her as a representative example substituting for the woman of whom I will speak. She is a long time attender of the church here in Quelimane. We visited her the other day and she needed a shoulder to cry on. She is 19 with two children. To escape a new stepmother and absent father, she moved in with a young man when she was 12 or thirteen (called "traditional" marriage here) and started having babies. Now with two young children she finds herself with a "husband" who has wearied of her and wants out--and she is without any skills or ability to support herself on her own. She explained that her only option is to find a man to support her, which she feels means she must sleep around to find someone willing. It is how it is done she explains. This is an attractive and very bright woman who is without a lot of options. She seemed genuinely surprised that that "adultery commandment" that she had heard about had some application here. I am a pragmatic man, but not quite that much. Truly the traditional culture, and the dearth of economic opportunity here create a very bleak world for an awful lot of people. What would you do if you were her? Or what would you counsel if you were I? How would you give her hope?



 

These are our twins Santo and Santinho (it has been days since we last posted pictures of them). They have peed on each of us a number of times this week, but we cannot fail to have hope for the future when we are around them.

Location:Quelimane, Moçambique

Odds and Ends or FYI...

     Just a quick glimpse at some of the interesting things that went on this week:

Here is Elder Osborn teaching a new member, Neusa, about the organization
of the Church.  We don't have the full program yet here in Quelimane, so we want them to know what they have to look forward to.

Yes, you may note that the weather is changing and guess who is
back from vacation?  THE ANTS!  Especially tiresome are the
hundreds covering the entrance to the bathroom.  No bare feet for me!

In the center is Elder Workman, his companion, Elder Williams to the right and
Elder Osborn at the airport getting ready to send Elder Workman to Maputo to fly home
from his mission.   He is among the very best missionaries we have served with here in Mozambique.
  His advice at our district meeting Friday was threefold:
1.  Be a 24/7 missionary (you can't act worldly during lunch and then teach with the Spirit afterwards)
  2.  Leave it behind, meaning the world and offenses
 3. Love the people.  Great advice from a spiritual giant.

This is the inside of our little couples apartment in Marromeu.  It often
reminds us of camping except with nice indoor plumbing.

Behind the chapel in Marromeau is a nice garden (horta) where
som of the young men are growing lettuce and cabbage.  It is pretty ipressive.

People leaving church in Marromeu on Sunday.  Of the over 200
people attending, nobody has a car.  Today  there were almost 80 children
in Primary.  About 60 of them were street kids with no affiliation
or interest in the church really, except to have a place to go
on Sunday.  It was a zoo and something that will require a lot
more thought and planning in  the future.  Really it was amazing!

Driving hoe we saw many acres of land burning, which is the norm.  We have often
wondered how they contain these fires.  Well, today we finally saw a house burning
in the field and are surprised that it is the first one we have seen.  The fires do not
really look like a controlled burn to us.

Does anybody really know what time it is?

There are some interesting things about life in Mozambique, or at least our little backwater of Quelimane.  Here are some recent things I have noted:
1) You may ask a pregnant woman when she is "due"--when the baby is going to come--but you will never get an answer other than, "whenever it comes" or "soon" or "not for a long time".  The idea of figuring out such things has never occurred to them.  They sort of look at you with the question in their eyes of "who could possiblyknow that?"   And, I guess when you live as they do, unburdened by calendars and schedules for many, it really is detailed knowledge beyond their need to know.  Which brings us to the next item.
2) If you ask someone when their birthday is, chances are they won't know.  We asked that question to Veronica the other day and she had absolutely no idea.  We asked Rui and Bendita the birthday of their daughter and they responded that they have a document somewhere that contains that information, but of themselves, they really didn't know or care.  As one who is sometimes overwhelmed by all the gift giving occasions of American Society, I must admit that the state of affairs here has a little bit of appeal.  It really is non-essential information.  Which reminds me.  Recently, we met Rui's father who looked to be in his sixties or seventies.  We asked him how old he was (no questions are considered rude here) and he gave a year, but couldn't remember a month or date.  His son started laughing a bit and mentioned to him that he was younger than his son according to his reconing.  Really, birthdays are not a principal focus here.
3) They take a different approach to naming children here.  I'm not quite sure what the underlying philosophy is, but for sure they take it a little less seriously.  I have already shared pictures of our adopted twin grandsons here, Santo and Santinho or Saint and Little Saint.  We have a baby at church who is named Haha (he likes to laugh).  We met a woman with child last week at church and asked after the name of the infant.  "Ultimo" she replied, meaning "last".  She assured me that he would indeed be the last.  (but then, I recall that I do have a last child of my own daughter who is named Fin--a similar statement of finality--perhaps one must be a mother to understand this).  I have already documented here that sometimes, the task of naming a child will simply be delegated to someone else to take care of, so that the parents don't have to bother with it.

4) An admirable custom here is that of "filhos da casa" or children of the house.  It is very common for families to have children who live with them who are unrelated.  If a family does not have the means to provide for their children, someone else will take them in and feed them.  In return they will help out as needed.  It seems to work.  They are not slaves but they eat and work and are provided a place to sleep and a little bit of supervision.  Gaspar and Veronica, who we teach, are poor as can be, (at least until he got his bike), but they have two such children in their mud home--who help out with the twins. 

Most anything that can be is carried and sold via bicycle.  We had to hurry and catch this guy so Sister Osborn could make her purchases.

Slowly, slowly

This is Veronica who is so dyslexic I cannot even tell you.  But, she wrote her name today on the board without looking after about five tries.  I am so proud!  Her  progress after a month is sort of like life in the church here; slow, slow but progress is happening.