Walk the beach

    While we ate breakfast Sunday morning the worship leader for the English service called to urgently request help setting up sound equipment. So I finished my eggs and took a chappa (shop'pa - the public transport) to the house where we meet. By the time I got there it was mostly done, so I arranged a few things and walked on on the adjacent beach. It was about seven kilometers home via the beach, so I strolled. A group of Mozambican boys in underwear rolled in the sand and leapt in the waves. A middle-aged South African couple with their daughter walked their dog. They wore the uniforms of leisure: the man a loose button-up shirt, and and the women sundresses and sun-hats. Two young Europeans sat facing each other, deep in conversation, with posture a of friends not a couple. The the two empty beers stuck in the sand and her ukulele next to them gave carefree ambiance to faces showing intense consideration of the topic at hand. Under the pines at the top of the beach Zionists in white robes held their service, singing in a Bantu language.

   The beach is broken into segments by groynes, built perpendicular to the water to decrease erosion, and each beach has its own function, demographics, and smells. 

The next I crossed was a fishing beach, shown by a sheen of silvery scales mixed with the sand. Collateral damage of minnows and dead jellyfish lined the water, where they had been drug out by shore nets. I climbed another barrier and was greeted by more fish breeze, but this was home to small dugouts which lined the top of the beach. These are rolled like the logs they were into the surf, paddled out beyond the waves, and then sails are set. 

    Women squatted just above the waves sorting the 4-6 inch catch-of-the-day. Clothes were spread to dry on the boulders of the barrier, and a driftwood fire cooked crabs. The next beach was mostly deserted, except for some potential apostles mending their nets and chatting in a tribal language. They quieted as I passed, but at least they didn't stare like many others.

    

The ravaged sand on the next beach showed definite signs of a struggle; the slope just out of reach of the rising tide was furrowed and pitted from some violent conflict. Some craters bore tell-tale signs of bare toes, as though a frenzied army had rushed the shore. The truth was much more pleasant, and the pair of upright sticks on either end made it easy to recreate the rousing football match that had so ravaged the sand.

The next barrier I climbed revealed a dichotomy characteristic of African economics. The pristine beach on the other side was edged by the patio of a restaurant/beach-club, instead of flotsam and trash.

South Africans and Portuguese families dined under umbrellas, some youth played sand volleyball, and Mozambicans waited tables. A Caucasian man loaded his yacht onto a trailer (assisted by Mozambicans) pulled by a new pickup. On the far side a Chinese couple, dressed for the occasion, fished from the Groyne with 15 foot saltwater poles. 

    I finally found a relatively uninhabited beach, with shade and a wall to lean against and stopped to read and write for a while.

My reverie was disturbed by a yell, followed by the body of a boy in a running front tuck off the low wall. His younger companion attempted to replicate the stunt, but his body rebelled and he just jumped into the sand. I watched them for a bit, then joined and did a couple of front and back flips. I gave some pointers in meagre Portuguese accompanied by demonstrations, and the older of the two flung his body into the air with abandon. He was used to doing back handsprings, and it is hard to overcome that instinct once it is ingrained. We parted ways with a handshake and I wandered on down the beach. 

    A freighter left the Beira port, passing the two dredgers that keep the channel open. Well, one is now responsible for the work since the other ran aground and has been slowly sinking over the past three weeks.I crossed another fishing beach with small fish scattered in the sand. I thought perhaps this was waste until I noticed they were separated into squares, spread one layer thick, drying in the sun. Their odor could be tasted. 

    Upwind, and over the next barrier, a group of young men sprawled in a circle around a handle of gin and a bag of sugarcane. One demonstrated his English prowess with the oft heard phrase: "How are you my friend?!" "Estou bem, e você?" His English was apparently exhausted with this exchange and my Portuguese was tiring, so I waved and moseyed on. I passed two more congregations of Zionists, one apparently in a heated debate between the sexes. I also passed two football games, with upright sticks confirming my earlier deduction. One pitch was in danger of being claimed by the rising tide. The goals were at the brink of the waves, and all the action was further up the beach.

    I reached the point of Ponta Gea and turned inland. I picked my way home along unfamiliar streets, and became somewhat disoriented. Fortunately the sun and shore steered me true and I began to recognize landmarks again. When I reached home I took a quick cold shower to rinse off the sand and salt, and went to the evening service of Peniel Portuguese. By 2300, after a four hour service and waiting on a leaders' meeting, I was so tired I could hardly see.

Visiting Dondo

Before starting Equip Mozambique, Jon and Carla worked with IRIS ministries at the base in Dondo. The directors there now are friends of ours, and we made the 40 minute drive out last Saturday to visit. The cratered, pitted, two lane road is known as the Beira Corridor. It is the artery of supply from Beira's port to Zimbabwe and other landlocked countries. At the margins of the road are small shops, parked cars (narrowing it to one lane), and many pedestrians and cyclists.

Fortunately Jon is an expert at avoiding such obstacles, and we made the round trip without accident.

I enjoyed these clouds for several kilometers.

  We did, however, have a run in with the local police. They waved us off and showed Jon with a radar gun that he had been going 80 kmph. This (roughly 50mph) is the speed limit on the national highway, but apparently near towns it is subject to change without notice, so we should have been going 60 kmph (37mph). The conversation was interrupted as the officers stopped two more drivers: remarkably both were foreign and both were travelling exactly 80 kmph. The SOP for traffic tickets is for the police to take your license, and you have to come find them later to pay your ticket and retrieve the license. Further, your license is not taken to a station but kept in the officers' possession, so you must hunt them down wherever they are patrolling. Fascinating. This creates obvious problems, especially if you are travelling long distances.
    We arrived at the IRIS base just as Eric and Tanya were returning from a funeral. One of the young men who had lived on the base had just died, probably from cerebral malaria. They said it was made more tragic because he had recently found a job and built a house, which he never got to live in. In talking with people who work here, death is disturbingly commonplace. The pastor of Peniel English said it was surreal at first. "I would leave for two weeks, and when I got back I'd ask 'where's so-and-so?' 'Oh, he got sick and died'. It was harder because one doesn't talk about the deceased, so unless you ask directly, no one tells you."
    Jon gave me a tour of the base, which is beautiful with gigantic mango trees, flower-beds, and well kept buildings. Sadly the facilities are under-utilized due in part to a lack of staff. When Jon and Carla were base directors the orphanage, boys home, bible college, primary school, and widows relief program kept them quite busy. Of these only the last two are currently functioning. It was illuminating to hear of the challenges Eric and Tanya face with there work in the area, especially since funding is not one of them. Identifying actual needs and finding honest people to work with is more difficult. Jon and Carla were able to identify with and encourage them as they worked under similar circumstances when they staffed the base.
    Tanya made amazing tacos for supper, and I remembered why I have decided it is my favorite meal. After supper I chatted with two girls from Zim who work on the base. They left medschool in the fourth of five years because they felt that God was calling them to do something different. They sold their few possessions for bus fare to the IRIS base in Dondo, and are helping with the ministry there. It was encouraging to see that God can guide with such clarity as to inspire that radical of a change in direction.

Review of Interviews

I have been rather busy with all the activities here, as I help Jon prepare the poly-lingual audiobible app for launch, prepare for conferences, fix computers, start on the business project, and build relationships and Portuguese savvy. So I haven't had as much time as I would have liked to record and share the experiences. Instead of a comprehensive update (which is intimidating and takes more time than I have at the moment) I'm hoping to compose some vignettes to share a taste of life here.

    In preparation for a conference at Peniel (the primary church Equip Moz works with), Janie was to interview some of the leaders concerning the development of the church. I tagged along to help arrange the set.
We arrived at the open-air stadium that is the church building a bit early, before the other people involved. After exchanging greetings and news with the guys in the ticket booth/church office, we got keys to the storeroom and started collecting equipment. The first challenge was to find the perpetually-absent video camera batteries. (Earlier in the week I had heard an epic of hastily searching for it as a sermon was beginning.) The desertive battery was nowhere to be found, so we hoped Dino would bring it and went on to look for a computer. We couldn't find the needed computer, but we did find "the computer that never works for recording audio". I resolved to fix it in case another computer didn't materialize. The microphone would not connect at first: apparently it was dropped and the USB ports don't work right. One port constantly connected and disconnected with the associated sound (doo-ding! ... dee-doong! doo-ding!...), so I turned off ports in the device manager until I found the culprit. Once I got the mic connected I had to figure out why Audition wasn't recognizing it, nor recording, nor throwing any errors. After 30 minutes of poking around the settings I finally got the bitrate and sampling rate set in all three necessary places and it worked. Much rejoicing.
   We had most of the set arranged in an outbuilding by the scheduled time for the interviews. I tested the lights, and they didn't turn on, so I checked another outlet which also didn't work. Some investigation revealed that the prepaid electricity had run out, so Dino went to acquire more. In the meantime I did a soundcheck with the laptop, and everything was working properly. Eventually we had the equipment powered and the interviewee in position so I left to decrease background noise and tried fix a guy's phone. A few minutes later Janie ran up asking for me to come fix the computer as it stopped recording. I turned things off and on again, corrected yet another setting, and the mic worked again.
   During the interviews I joined a planning meeting of the Peniel media team in preparation for the conference. Dino, the team leader, assigned tasks, kept things moving, and translated for my benefit. At the end of the meeting, one of the guys went to tell the interviewers of a change in the plan. Apparently in a meeting only he had been privy to, a different direction was selected for the interviews, but no one had informed those actually doing the interviews. So Janie redirected the interview process midstream, and carried on.
    And the interviews were accomplished in (relative to how most things go here) a very smooth and successful process.
In other news, I found this valve in the middle of an intersection. Somebody had a bad time.

Computers, Media Training, and Bush Outreach

    The last two weeks have been an intense process of adjustment and learning. I arrived on June 15th a bit early, which is apparently unheard of. As I walked down the stairs onto the tarmac, I was clearly in Africa and the smells and sensations cued memories of my arrival in Kenya. The warm, still air carried the familiar scents of diesel, body odor, wood smoke, and sewage, combined here with that of the nearby ocean. I was once again blessed with a very simple passage through customs and I waited outside for my ride absorbing my new surroundings.
    About the time the taxi driver I was talking to had exhausted his English, Jon and Carla arrived  and took me on a tour of Beira. We drove first to the beach, then from mansions to shacks via open air markets. And then to Wednesday "bible study" at church, which was perhaps the most startling of all. That trip, and the following few days were rather overwhelming as I re-encountered the infrastructure dysfunction, cultural challenges, and myriad other stressors of an unfamiliar, developing country. Poverty is much more severe and pervasive than I observed in Kenya, though apparently the city is rapidly developing. In addition, the language barrier is much greater than anywhere else I have traveled, adding to the disorienting experience as an alien.

The street in front of my house/the Equip Moz office

    My first few days were a return to age 12, attempting to create working computers from broken, aging hardware. Someone donated a bunch of computers and printers in various states of dysfunctionality, and without knowing anything about what worked testing was quite a challenge. Technical knowledge is rare here, and though I have no more experience than that of a tinkerer, I am a relative expert simply by knowing what the inside of a computer looks like. Organization is also a rare skill, so I sorted tubs of electronics and arranged things on shelves. I also followed Jon around on errands, became acquainted with the city, studied Portuguese, met people, and spent a lot of time at church. Two friends of Jon and Carla skilled in media arrived a few days after me, and planned training for the next week. Media teams from several churches in the area came together to learn basic project planning, video shooting, and editing. Once again skills and knowledge taken for granted in the states are invaluable here, and the crowd of students steadily grew during the week.
 
I sat in on a some of the training because Equip Moz helps the local church a lot with media processing, which I know little about. I thoroughly enjoyed learning with the Mozambicans as peers, collaborating the practice projects, and learning a bit of Portuguese in the process. With the rest of my time I continued working on computers slowly isolating the problems. I also learned a lot about the culture, development, corruption, and the opportunities that exist here as I tried to find where I fit in the activities. I still felt completely out of place, and mostly unproductive, but at least I could manage the five minute walk from the office where I stay to Jon and Carla's house without getting lost. I even ran across town at 0415 to run with some South Africans I met in the English service of church. They had cancelled due to impending rain, so I had a lovely morning reading on the beach as the sun rose.

   Over the weekend I joined the people from the English service for an outreach in the bush two hours north. Our bus jolted over familiarly rough dirt roads and I chatted with the other people. Most were from Zimbabwe (and hence spoke english) and it was great to be able to actually converse. I talked about logistics in Africa with guy who works for Cargill in that role, and discussed politics with a missionary from Eldoret Kenya. I was reading Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, which intrigued several people and started a conversation on development. We passed hundreds of pedestrians, and wondered aloud how far they all had walked. We also passed people riding or pushing bicycles comically overloaded with burlap sacks of charcoal. I was saddened by the thought of the ancient trees that had been sacrificed in the interest of the day's income. The paradox is that deforestation is wreaking ecological havoc, but it is also the livelyhood of many in sub-Saharan Africa.

João and I

    The bus stopped without explanation in the village of Chinamacondo, so we got out to stretch. I talked with João, a second year medical student from Beira about his motivation coming from seeing the need for medical care. After an hour, and buying eating some two-cent oranges from a stand, I asked if anyone knew why we had stopped here. No one did. The bus driver had also disappeared. Our situation was discussed for a minute or two, no conclusions were reached, and it was dropped again.
 
    The bus driver eventually showed up, and we learned that we were waiting to be ferried by the pastor because the road was too bad for the bus. Just before sunset half of us climbed the back of a pick-up for a 40 minute drive to the Nhamasengheri.

    Riding in the back of the pick-up, at golden hour, on a track through the bush is exhilarating, and awakened a desire for adventure and exploration of untamed lands. At the same time I wondered how people survive so far from 'civilization' and thought of the challenges of development work in this remote of an area. The two wheel track dwindled to a footpath, wound through undergrowth and forded several streams before arriving at a partially finished shack. We set up tents, made a fire, and then ate supper while the pastor went back for the rest of the group.

I wandered a little ways away to look at the stars, and as my eyes adjusted I was more and more astounded by what I saw. The stars of the bush are unrivaled by any I have seen elsewhere, even in the high desert of the American Southwest. The milky way was a shimmering cloud with swirling texture and tendrils of stars. The rest of the sky was so populated with stars that it was difficult to make out constellations. I lay on my back in the sand and listened to the night until it was pierced by approaching headlights.

   Our plan was to show the Jesus Film in the tribal language Senna using a generator to power the speaker and projector. The generator did not wish to start. Five or six people were crowded around it so I wandered into the night again and sang hymns with the stars. By the time I returned the generator was running, but only for one minute intervals. I thought I might be able to channel Simeon, so I followed the path of fuel to the carburetor, checking the filter, pump, and lines. After a bit of pondering I thought to remove the air-filter as that had caused similar problems with a lawn mower once. But we didn't have pliers. With true African innovation one of the guys used the jaws of the jumper cables to grip the nut and was able to loosen it. The filter didn't look too dirty, but without it the generator ran. I wrapped the air intake with a t-shirt to keep out the larger bugs, and we drove to the school to set up the equipment. It was 2200 and a chilling 60 degrees Fahrenheit by the time we started the movie, so only 40 ish people showed up. João introduced the movie in Senna, and crowd, mostly children, was glued to the screen for the next two hours as the story of Jesus was reenacted.

    After a night of very little sleep I got up a bit before six and sat around a fire as the sun rose. While corn porridge was prepared for breakfast we kicked a soccer ball around to shake the morning chill. Some of the people joined a Brazilian missionary couple for a kids program at the school and the rest went hut-to-hut evangelizing.














    Many had been talked to on previous outreaches and the people who had come before we excited to meet with them again. I went with a group to the local chief's house and sat down outside with his family, including his daughters, sons, and their wives and children. We exchanged pleasantries for a while and then told the story of creation, fall, and Jesus' life and death.
     Samira was very engaging in her presentation and held the attention of all but the toddlers. The chief said his whole family attended church, and one of his daughters seemed to have absorbed a lot. It was clear she had put some effort into learning about God, and I also observed that she seemed the happiest of all of them. One of the others appeared pretty angry the whole time, and when we offered to pray at the end, it came out that she was bothered by a spirit. She wore a charm from a witch doctor, so Samira talked with her for a bit, and she removed it and allowed us to pray with her. One of the sons had a child they had not yet named, and apparently it was decided that should be done. The father had chosen to name her Azalea, and the mother agreed. In a rather awkward ceremony the name was given, and I told them through double translation it was the name of a flower. The chief showed us around his garden where he grows pineapple. Quite successfully apparently, as it included the largest pineapple I have ever seen. His fruit trees also included mango, lychee, orange, tangerine, papaya, guava, and passionfruit. He sent us with two pineapples and a basket of tangerines, and many thanks for our visit. On the way back to the school we passed a bakery, consisting of a wood-fired, clay oven under a thatched roof. Domingo, the owner, sold us still warm bread for about ten cents for each small loaf. It was delicious.

 

  After distributing some clothes and cleaning up we headed back to Chinamacondo. While they ran the shuttle again I wandered out of town to enjoy the solitude. These two boys were clearly fascinated by this Mzungu, so I took a picture of them with their bikes. After they moved on I was alone with the afternoon sun and the smell of summer evening. I was not at all disappointed that the shuttle took over two hours, and somewhat regretfully got back on the bus. We bounced back to Beira parallel to the sunset to bumping gangster rap, and I listened to Piano Guys in my headphones.


(Thanks to Melissa for many of the photos in this post.)