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March 27, 2001
Diario de Diane
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 de rigueur footwear
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.
I 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 that I was able to step
over. 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 fulminate from
buses overburdened with passengers, baskets of produce, and tethered
goats excreting freely on the roofs. Even outside the city center,
thatched huts eerily steam vapors whenever the sun repents of
its errantry.
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 tableaux
that resemble Norman Rockwell paintings. But without the optimism.
Yet whether by inextinguishable instinct or sheer defiance, people
still exhibit hope
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. Betinho 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. We are committed to staying here and supporting
the work of the church because we 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 perseverance 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. Beneath this-worldly manifestations
of poverty and materialism, intellectual and religious pride,
fear, doubt, and presumption, there lies the age-old battle between
the truth of God’s liberating, healing love in Jesus Christ
and the powers of darkness that would quench that revelation.
We pray that God will break in with a powerful outpouring of His
Holy Spirit.
Mozambique needs revival. We all need revival. Come, Holy Spirit!
In Christ,
Diane Wonnenberg
The 2001 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 44
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