January 2002

Grieving in Mozambique

Dear Friends,

Mercy Eve Goto-Goto, age 7, died of malaria complicated by seizures in the local hospital at 4:30 that morning. It was a Monday, the last day of 2001. Mercy’s parents were catalysts in the founding of the Chimoio congregation, and both were members of the session. Her grandfather and great uncle were Presbyterian ministers. We had been asked to join family and church members for a prayer service at the Goto-Goto home at 10:30 a.m. It would be the first of eight services held in their home over the next six days.

Our eyes were slow to adjust from mid-morning sunlight to the darkness of the narrow entryway of the cement home. One could barely make out the still sentries of sorrow seated on the bench along the wall. It is said that no loss in life exceeds the death of one’s child. We entered a fathomless sea of grief. Anna Goto-Goto, Mercy’s mother, lay in anguish on the floor, wrapped
in an African-print sheet. Seven women surrounded her, sitting on bamboo mats. Mercy’s father Daniel sat on a chair with the men, eyes gelled with tears, sightless in uncomprehending grief.

In the prayer service that morning pastors, elders, family, and church members made brave battle against despair. We prayed, read from Scripture, sang familiar songs of worship in Ronga and Portuguese. Another prayer service in the home was set for 6:00 p.m., and there was also the previously scheduled 11:00 p.m. New Year’s Eve service. At midnight the pastor led us in prayer in that sad, dark, house humid with tears. Outside in the surrounding city rose the cheers of the New Year’s celebrants, the screaming whistles of
bottle rockets, the pounding explosions of cherry bombs.

Two months earlier, Pastora Gabriella Mucavele, the first woman minister ordained in the Igreja Presbiteriana de Mocambique, died of malaria in a hospital in Maputo. We have anger at the futility of these deaths, because we know more effective treatment is available. When possible, we give out stronger medication. Hospitals here continue to treat with chloroquine even though international health agencies have identified the disease in this area as chloroquine-resistant. We have been told that mortuaries are running out of refrigerated space for bodies, and funerals have to be conducted in soon after death occurs.

On Wednesday when we arrived for the mortuary service, the rear of the hospital resembled a busy marketplace crowded with vehicles and people. The confusion was so great it took time to make out that our group was still waiting outside its sherbert-pink walls. The previous service had extended into our reserved time. We joined the press of people confined to the veranda, which was closed in on three sides. Waiting in the stifling afternoon heat we breathed in the sweat, dust, and diesel fumes so familiar in Africa. As those in the mortuary’s impromptu chapel streamed out the side door, we flowed in after. Their worship songs nearly blended with ours.

Anna Goto-Goto was dressed in the uniform of the Senhoras, the Presbyterian women’s society: a discreet, grey, two-piece suit, with a large, white, pilgrim collar and black, narrow-brimmed hat. At the close of the brief and dignified service, the mourners processed in the tiny room, circling the wooden casket to view the little girl’s face. Another member of the Senhoras stood at the head, assisting in a ritual of anointing. Each person in turn was handed an aerosal can, spraying once or twice into the casket.

Yet another crowd converged on the mortuary and pressed in at our departure. Somehow our funeral procession assembled. A pickup carried the casket and the handmade wooden cross with Mercy’s name penned on it. There were several other private vehicles, a large farm truck with an open back carrying at least 50 people, and a police truck, as Daniel is a policeman.

It was our first visit to the cemetery, a few kilometers out of town. We turned off the highway at the Coca-Cola bottling plant with its eight-foot Coke bottle icon pedestaled on the guard house in front. The last stretch of rutted, dirt road passed through cultivated land. Barefoot pedestrians and bicyclists assumed respectful postures with downcast eyes as we passed. Even a couple of
half-dressed boys and girls with bloated bellies stood at attention in silence.

We reached a wrought iron gate through which only the pickup carrying the casket was allowed to pass. We parked across from a homemade hearse, a Fifties station wagon hand-painted black with a white cross on the back panel. We had to walk another kilometer past dozens of rows of graves. I had the odd impression of being in a nursery, as the raised beds of the graves were planted with wildflowers and set in a grid spaced two feet apart. The horizon presented a pretty African version of prairie: blonde, waving, grasses, and jagged granite outcroppings against a cornflower blue sky, dotted with a few puffy grey and white clouds.

We congregated around four, freshly dug, child-size graves. The shallow graves were laid out two by two, head to toe, like four shadowy cards on a table of earth. It was difficult not to trip over the roots and piles of fresh dirt, as there was no attempt to clear out the surrounding area. I balanced my Bible under one arm, and tried to steady my umbrella in the occasional dusty gusts that lifted it. It provided the only shade in the now searing sun. To my right rose the cries and songs of another service being conducted. A leafless trunk of a young paw-paw tree pointed heavenward above the crowd. My guess is that it had been placed as a marker for that graveside service, the way we tie balloons on mailboxes in America.

Mercy’s wooden coffin was placed on a rough workbench beside the grave on the lower right-hand corner, and our service began. The guest preacher was only a few minutes into his message when two grave diggers suddenly appeared in our midst. They wore identical dirty, faded-denim shirts, and their skinny legs protruded from shorts so worn that the hems hung like ragged ribbons at the knees. Our service continued as they stepped right through our circle into the dirt of the grave on the upper left-hand corner.

One gravedigger began to heft his hoe with heavy strokes, noisily hacking away at the interior of the grave. He paused as his partner produced a three-foot length of old, thick rope, extending it as a measure. Keeping his fingers clenched on the measurement, he stepped through the clods of dirt to the grave on the lower left, next to Mercy’s, and compared dimensions. Our preacher continued to teach on I Corinthians 15. The gravedigger then returned the few steps to his partner to again begin hacking away. For a second time they paused in their labors. Figuring it would provide a more accurate gauge, he stepped over to Mercy’s coffin, to measure its
length. Nobody blinked.

The gravediggers completed their efforts just in time, as a chorus of miserable cries rose through the crowd beyond. The wailing was coming from another procession of mourners. Our group had to give way, and step over the graves to accommodate them. We formed two, barely distinguishable semi-circles around that quadrangle of graves, a jumbled, colorful, human cemetery wreath. A coffin neatly papered in white, so that we could not make out the material underneath, was carried in and placed on a bamboo mat.
The other pastor and his interpreter began their service not 15 feet away from us. Our preacher continued impassively, although each speaker had to raise his voice to be heard over the other.

Their service concluded before ours, and we endured the discomfiture of facing the other grieving family as their little papered coffin was lowered by ropes into the earth. The gravediggers reappeared, hacked in two the bamboo mat upon which the coffin had lain, placed it in the grave, and shoveled in the dirt. Even as the other group was slowly departing, yet another group of mourners began to assemble to our left. I believe there were at least five burials within an hour in a radius of fifty feet that day in the children’s section of the Chimoio cemetery.

We returned to the Goto-Goto home the next evening for another prayer service. Though subdued, the family was no longer exposed in the nakedness of grief. All the tears wept, the hymns sung, the prayers whispered, the readings of hope, and the comforting presence of loved ones had actually wrought a transformation. Futility, indignity, poverty, even death, had not won a final victory. We witnessed the miracle of the church, the miracle of faith in the One who is the Resurrection and the Life. Anna Goto-Goto was sitting up, looking beautiful again. She even smiled once.

Charles and Diane Wonnenberg

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