February 19, 2001

Beloved in the Lord,

Blessings from our new home base in Chimoio, Mozambique!

It’s the rainy season. The rain never stops, it just pauses, and mildew could be a cash crop. A young man passes us on the busy city street, riding his bicycle with one hand as he holds a blue- and-green plaid umbrella over his head with the other. Young girls wear tissue-thin, grey and black striped plastic grocery bags on their heads, tied like scarves. Once, during a pause in the rain, I admired a woman with perfect posture casually walking by with her closed umbrella poised on her head, pointing the way. The footwear de
rigueur is cheap, rubber thongs. The occasional knee-high pair of rubber boots, while a symbol of affluence, must be podiatric torture chambers in this humidity. The many hatless, bare-footed pedestrians have one advantage. If they can find leak-proof shelter, skin dries quickly and easily. Everything else remains perpetually damp.

I (Diane) remember muttering to myself in Maputo about having to maneuver through muddy streets, oily puddles, broken sidewalks, trash, and dog waste. Then I saw this paralyzed man, dragging himself across the street on pads duct-taped to his knees and elbows, his face eight inches from the ground, and I resolved to never again complain.

For people raised in an antiseptic culture of health and wholeness, the cityscape of Chimoio is Fellini-esque (and for young folks reading this, that’s pre-Spielberg filmmaking). Cement walls perspire week-old rainwater. Black diesel fumes spout from buses overburdened with passengers, baskets of produce, and tethered goats excreting freely on the roofs. Even outside the city center, palhotas (thatched huts) eerily steam vapors whenever the sun repents of its errantry.

The first time Charles saw Zaccheus, he thought he was standing in a hole in the sidewalk with his muscular arms folded over his chest. Then he unfolded his arms and began to move, swinging his 2/3 torso forward on his hands at a steady pace. Zaccheus is a handsome young man, with a bright smile and a body cut off just below the waist. We were happy to learn he is a student at the secondary school. Another man, whose name we do not know, hobbles around on four stumps, begging, his hands and feet most likely sacrificed to the ritualistic mutilations inflicted by rebel forces during the civil war. Another man with two withered legs drawn up to his chest slides down the street on his butt.

Two weeks ago we visited a small, downtown restaurant called the "Social Clube." We were standing at the blackboard menu trying to decipher the smudged chalk in Portuguese. Não houve problema—they served peixe (fish), t-bone, and limp salad, just like every other café in town. I sensed someone behind me and was startled by a blind woman beggar who had silently entered the restaurant, led by her adolescent daughter. I turned away, offended by the impropriety of their presence. They left after passing by the few other customers, unacknowledged, and we sat down at a small table.

We tried to order a grilled cheese for the children, but the waiter brought cold rolls with cold cheese. With the help of another patron who spoke English and Portuguese, even demonstrating with hand motions, we explained that all they needed to do was put the cheese in the bread, put the bread in the pan, put the pan on the stove, wait a few minutes, turn it over, etc. We were baffled by the waiter’s seeming intransigence. Finally, he explained the problem: they didn’t have a stove. The Centro Cultural is another restaurant without a stove. They serve pizza baked on an open hearth, and there we once waited two hours for two pizzas, watching the cook intermittently blowing on the embers as Isaiah fell asleep at the table.

Now another blind beggar entered the restaurant, shuffling between the tables. This was a younger woman with a baby bundled on her back, led by her 7- or 8-year-old daughter. I was so taken aback I looked away until they left.

The cook managed to hold the cheese sandwiches over the coals for a few minutes, and we finished our meal, awaiting our check. A third blind beggar walked through the restaurant. This was a tall, middle-aged man led by a boy of 12 or so. This time we were better prepared and quickly handed them the few slices of bread remaining on our table. As they were leaving, the boy hungrily eyed the steak bones we intended to take home to our puppies.

I remembered a scene across the border in Zimbabwe a few weeks earlier. Charles and I came out of a restaurant and tipped the lean, jobless street youths a few coins for "guarding" our parked vehicle, as is the custom here. They saw his sack of bones and gristle. "Give us food!" they cried, "we are hungry!" Charles handed them the sack. As we drove away, we saw them fighting over the scraps like a pack of dogs.

We left the Social Clube, dodging the rain in our Land Rover. I tore the meat and fat from the bones, thinking somehow that lent more dignity to our offering. We found the blind woman with the baby on her back a few blocks down the street, and I ran over to place the sack into her older daughter’s hand. It’s hard to feel holy in Mozambique.

Sitting still for hours on broken wooden chairs in government office waiting rooms, leaning on counters inside unstocked grocery stores with no customers, the Mozambiquans compose colorful tableaus that resemble Norman Rockwell paintings. But without the optimism. Yet whether by inextinguishable instinct or sheer defiance, people still exhibit hope.

We have read that Marxism was a failure here because Africans are true capitalists at heart. We see women along the road sitting patiently on brightly patterned blankets with their carefully piled pyramids of mangoes. The children stand in clumps amidst baskets full of mangoes, with armfuls of mangoes, outstretched hands bearing even more mangoes aloft, waving as we drive by. "Buy my mangoes!" "Buy MY mangoes!" "Buy my MANGOES!" Mangoes, mangoes, everywhere, but not a buyer in sight.

One of our security guards is named Betinho. He lives with his brother in Bairro Cinco in a large hut with holes in two sides through which the rain washes. It is a few kilometers away from us on the other side of town, down rain-soaked muddy paths lined with crowded huts and shanty stores that sell very old packs of dry cookies, candles, damp cigarettes, and recycled bottles of some mysterious, highly flammable-looking liquid. He is a young man with a wonderful smile. A few weeks ago he stood outside our home, singing with joy a new song he had learned at his church: "I want to praise my Lord, from generation to generation…."

Centuries of colonialism, racism, slavery, war, drought, famine, and flooding have deeply bruised this generation of Mozambiquans, but God is at work. I am committed to staying here and supporting the work of the church because I believe there is power in the gospel of Jesus Christ: power for hope, healing power—for repentance, forgiveness, political transformation and deliverance from the curse of poverty. Power for perseverence in the face of fathomless problems; power to praise the Lord in all circumstances! There is an international community of missionaries here at work to encourage, equip, and inspire the people without creating a culture of dependency.

We need your prayers, and we know that you also need ours. We all are engaged in a spiritual warfare against forces that would hinder God’s kingdom on earth. Whether they manifest in poverty or materialism, shame or intellectual pride, fear, doubt, or presumption, we pray that God will break in with a powerful outpouring of His Holy Spirit.

May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ fill you all.

In Christ,

Diane Wonnenberg

The 2001 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 44