A Visit

Being placed over the kitchen has been a very good opportunity to make friends with the workers. Last week Ester, one of the workers, invited me to come visit her home. We originally arranged for Monday at noon, but after waiting for an hour I gave up and figured she had forgotten. She hadn't forgotten, she just came at "noon" Africa time: closer to 2:00. I had a meeting at 3:00, so that didn't work out and we rescheduled for Wednesday.

Ester came to the center (actually closer to noon Western time) and called for me at the gate to the missionary compound. I quickly slathered on some sun-block, knowing it would be a bit of a walk and the sun was decidedly strong today. I met Ester at the gate and she grinned. "Mado kerowa!" She greeted me cheerfully in Sena.

"Tado kerowa pyadidi, penombo imwe?" I responded as she had taught me just last week. She laughed and grabbed my hand to lead me out of the center. You don't see couples in Africa holding hands very often, but same-gender hand-holding is quite common as just a sign of friendship and togetherness. Just outside the gate we were joined by Brazito, a very tall first-year student at the Bible School who had apparently developed a friendship with Ester and was invited to accompany us. Ester excitedly chattered with several people in Sena as we walked along the road, though the only word I could pick up consistently was nyumba which means "home", so I guess she was telling them that I was visiting her home; apparently a great honor to her. We walked for some time in the beating sun, Ester and Brazito chatting in Sena and occasionally addressing me in Portuguese. We entered the Dondo bus stop area just as the mosque began wailing the call to prayer over the loud speakers. Our area is dominated much more by witchcraft than Islam, but there are enough Muslims to have a little mosque in Dondo. There are a lot more churches—we're winning. We walked past the bus stop and all its little shops, restaurants, and bars, and made our way toward the market. All of the trees and concrete walls along the way either have a painted red ribbon—the symbol of a cure for AIDS—or they are brightly hand-painted with advertisements of some of the most predominate companies and products of Mozambique: the two cell-phone companies, yellow-and-teal mCell and blue-and-white Vodacom comprise some of the most common ads all around the country, along with the red Coca-Cola and beer ads, the green and black condom ads, and the occasional Colgate or laundry detergent ad as well. We passed some ladies selling pineapples and avocados on the side of the road. Brazito asked if we have avocados in America, and informed me that they are called bakoti in Sena.

We stepped into the little market area, which much smaller than the Beira market I described in a previous blog post, and is becoming a place I enjoy going as much as I can. I like the bustle and familiarity people have with each other, it being a fairly small town and all. There are sacks of beans and peanuts, little piles of onions, plastic buckets of all shapes and sizes stacked on display, clothes laid out in the dirt for sale, brightly colored capulana wrap skirts hanging from the bamboo-structures' ceilings, and the usual array of sundry other items at the little shops: matches, notebooks, thread, soap, etc. Ester bought a grass mat and had Brazito carry it for her out of the market.

We walked on in the blistering heat. The wide paved streets lined with big concrete houses gave way to wide dirt roads with little concrete houses, which gave way to narrow dirt roads with mud houses, which we finally turned off to a very narrow sandy foot-path through the coconut-tree-shaded village. Chickens and ducks scurried about our feet, and children squealed "Mazungu! Mazungu!" (white person) when they saw me. I just smiled and waved. We passed a whole parade of high-school students on their way to afternoon school, all in their matching uniforms of dark green pants/skirts with a matching ties and light green button-down shirts. After walking for half an hour since leaving the base, we finally arrived at Ester's house, which was one of the poorest looking ones in the whole village. The bamboo frame was completely visible as most of the outer mud of the house had fallen off. Some of the holes in the walls had rags and old clothes shoved in them to fill in the gaps. The roof was made of the common corrugated material, but it was all very tiny scraps that were pieced together and likely leaked with every rain. Ester is a widow, and though she does have consistent work on the base, she struggles to care for her 6 children plus the 4 orphans she has taken in. She spread out her brand new grass mat for us to sit on the ground under a big tree next to her house, then busied herself with being hospitable. She tried to get her youngest child, Marcia, to come out of the house to meet me but she was terrified and just kept crying (I felt horrible). Her other children and those that live with her were bold enough to sit with me, but they were awfully quiet and shy.

African village life is so relaxed, laid-back, and communal. It always feels so peaceful—there is very little noise except for the voices of chatting neighbors and playing children, the random farm animal, and the birds. Some teen-age girls, Regina and Alima, came by and sat with us the whole time I was visiting—there's no rush, no stress, no worries. Ester sent her son Pedro to go buy me a soda and some cookies, and again I felt a little frustrated knowing she was spending money on me that she didn't really have, but I also knew that turning down her hospitality would be a much worse thing in the long run. When Pedro returned with my almost-cold pineapple soda (my favorite) and the little banana-cream-filled cookies, I tried sharing them with the kids every time Ester's back was turned. Most of them refused, but one adorable little five-year-old girl, Lina, was absolutely fearless and accepted the cookies gladly and finished off the last bit of my soda.

Ester busied herself preparing lunch on her little 1-foot-tall charcoal stove, so after a couple minutes of silence on the grass mat, I pulled out my notebook and informed all those around me that I really wanted to learn their language, Sena. I started with just pointing at everything I could see and asking them how to say it. Tree? Muti. Sky? Nkuzulu. Child? Mwana. Banana? Mafigu. After a while I graduated to simple phrases: I'm eating: ndiri kudya, I want: ine ndisafuna, she is washing a plate: akusuka prato. Little Lina would grin and giggle every time I attempted to repeat the phrases, it must have sounded strange to hear this foreigner saying things she understood (either that or I botched the pronunciation so badly that it was funny…). Ragina and Brazito were very patient and helpful teachers, and I had filled up two-and-a-half pages of my notebook by the time lunch was ready. Lunch was bits of fried fish with rice, and it was quite good. There was no silverware, so I was grateful for the experience I gained in Bangladesh eating rice with my hands. I tried out some of my new Sena with Ester, and she just gave her usual high-pitched "Shee!" (a sound the Sena people make when they're surprised) and looked very pleased. The fried fish was a little salty, so I was very thirsty afterward but knew better than to accept the water—didn't particularly feel like getting giardia this week.

After eating together and visiting a little longer, Ester picked herself up off the grass mat and asked if I was ready to go home. Honestly, I would love to spend far more time in the village, just making friends, learning the language, and eventually sharing the love of God with them when I have enough to communicate. But for this afternoon, my village time was up, and it was time to make the half-hour trek back to the mission base.

The African Way

Things are so different here than they are back in the states. I think, coming from America, we were ready for the difference in language, the difference in clothes, and the difference in living styles. What I hadn’t quite anticipated was just much everything changes – from what a handshake means to what’s rude to what money is used for. Even things we think are unchangeable, like logic and fiscal planning, are so different here that we barely recognize them. We missed a lot of this the first time around because we were usually working with large groups of missionaries – a large enough group that the Mozambicans around us had to bend to our ways of doing things. But now it’s us that need to conform to the Mozambican culture, and it’s quite a bit different than we first thought.

For example, if you were working in Africa, would you buy a washing machine or hire someone to do your laundry for a couple dollars a day? Most westerners think that it would be better to buy a washing machine than to put someone in a position of servitude. Here, where unemployment is over 50%, it’s incredibly rude to buy a mashing machine and put someone out of a job. If you do your own laundry and you can afford to have someone do it, you’re seen as selfish!

Another example – if someone comes up to you and says, “When are you going to give me your car?” How would you react? Offended? Put off? Incredibly surprised? Here the question isn’t offensive at all. It’s a compliment (I like your car) and a conversation starter (you have to respond because it’s a question)!

I still haven’t figured out what makes up logic here… I can understand western logic (which goes from several things we know to make a point about something we don’t), Hebrew logic (parallels or opposites, like any of the psalms or prophets), and Paul’s logic (A to B to C… Usually connected by rhetoric), but even with a Physics degree and usually excellent logic skills, I can’t quite figure out African logic. There’s definitely a pattern; you can especially see it when listening to a really good pastor preach. At certain points, you can see the crowd react in a powerful way to what was said, but those points don’t seem to make sense. It’s like going from A to F – two points that, to me, seem unconnected. I’ll give you an example I actually understand; the evangelist at an outreach said, “If you are sick, come up and receive prayer. You wouldn’t feed one of your children and let the others go hungry, would you?” I was so confused at first, but the crowd all understood instantly – if we’re God’s children then all of us should be able to expect Him to give us what we need. He wouldn’t just touch one or two people’s lives.

I’m still praying for that “Eureka!” moment… Hopefully that will be a post in the near future!

To market, to market

Yesterday Jon and I were officially placed as the leaders of the kitchen on base. We got to meet all 12 of the workers, learn about the kinds of problems and issues we may have to deal with, and then they prayed over us to place us spiritually as the authorities over that part of the base. Every day, our base feeds the 35 kids, 70 pastors-in-training in the Bible school, the 5 missionaries, and several workers. That afternoon, Tiago, the Mozambican head over the kitchen, needed to do his weekly shopping run for the base, so we decided to tag along this time and see what all goes into shopping for 100+ people.

Jon and I piled into one of the big "camions" (large, flat-bed trucks) with Tiago, kitchen-worker Jeremias, pastor Luis, missionary Julie, and driver Ricardo and made our 45-minute journey into Beira. The scenery going by reveals a variety of small, rural towns, fields with women working in them (you rarely see men in the fields), mud huts with thatched roofs, concrete huts with metal roofs, giant 12-foot-tall termite mounds, coconut palm trees, mango trees (which just went out of season), papaya trees, and tiny little bamboo-structure shops selling a few odds and ends by the side of the road. As we draw closer to Beira, which with over 1 million people is the second largest city in Mozambique, you begin seeing 2-6 storey tall concrete apartment buildings with winding spiral staircases and bars over all windows. Beira is the main shipping port for central Mozambique and all of Zimbabwe, and when that country was in its prime, Beira thrived as well. Zimbabwe's economy has been in the sewer for a while now, which has hurt Beira's economy somewhat as well, but that's digressing from my account of the shopping day…

Our first stop was a bulk food store where we picked up sack after sack of rice, corn, and sugar. Tiago tried to get fish at this stop too, but that particular merchant was clean out of fish that day. He didn't seem worried though, he would know of other merchants. Next we stopped at a propane store where we swapped out our empty 5-foot tall tank for a full one. They said they go through one and a half of those tanks every week, so next week they will need to bring both tanks in. We stopped again, this time to pick up two 4-foot long boxes of frozen fish from a shop that wasn't out. Julie, the missionary who does food distribution for the orphans living in villages, also did a bit of shopping with us to get 528 liters of oil for her trip next week. We picked up said oil at a big warehouse that had the oddest assortment of goods we had ever seen—part of the store had hi-def TVs, computers, printers, refrigerators, and A/C units, while the other part had pallets of sugar, juice, oil, and the only Pepsi products we have seen in a country ruled by Coca-Cola.

Our next stop was the huge Beira market, where the real African experience started. Just Jon, Tiago, and I went in while the rest guarded the truck from thieves. The market is a tight, winding network of stalls, some big and official and made of concrete (from Beira's golden days), but most made of whatever scraps of metal, wood, and bamboo people could find and throw together. The narrow dirt walkways are shaded with opened canvas bags, which was a mercy because it was a VERY hot day. A 2-foot deep foul-smelling ditch winds through the market with wooden pallets slapped over it to make bridges. The shops are together loosely by category—most of the tomato sellers are together, the onion merchants, and so on. I had to hold my breath when we passed the dried fish section. As we walked through the sellers would grab a few of their wares to show us and call out, "Amiga! Tomate!" or "Amiga! Cebola!" Occasionally a merchant would know a bit of English and call out, "Sista'! Hello sista'! Carrots!" Most of the merchants were men, and most of the shoppers were women, so they tended to try to get my attention more so than Jon's or Tiago's. Our first stop was right inside the market where we got 80 kilos of beans, 12 kilos of onions, and 2 kilos of garlic, all weighed in sacks from a spring-scale dangling from the rickety shop ceiling. We could tell that our presence was giving Tiago a hard time, because the merchants automatically made the prices go up when they saw our skin color and he would have to bat them back down to what he knew was the correct price. He does this every week, so he would know. We walked on, some shops were selling a variety of common items like the little packs of laundry detergent and toothpaste, while others had oil in recycled soda and water bottles, and others had bulk tea and spices in huge canvas sacks. A large, friendly lady named Louisa sold us our 11 kilos of tomatoes. Most of the shops didn't have their own plastic bags for buyers to carry their purchases, so many times after merchants would make a sale they would start shouting, "Plasticu! Plasticu!" to get someone to bring them a bag from another shop. At each stop Tiago paid for the goods then asked the shop keepers to hold on to them until we were done with all of the shopping and we would pick it up on our way out. On we plunged, deeper into the labyrinthine market, finding the 7 kilos of carrots, 20 heads of cabbage, and 30 coconuts we needed, but not the bell peppers—the market was fresh out of peppers for the day. Tiago got the help of a few adolescent boys to pick up the goods as we wound our way back to the entrance, stopping again at each shop where we had made a purchase to claim it.

Ironically, our last stop was Shoprite, the only western-style grocery store in Beira. The contrast of walking straight from the hot, bustling, smelly market into the air-conditioned convenience of the store was almost jarring. Tiago said Shoprite had the cheapest dishwashing detergent in town, and he would know.