May 2002

Dear Friends,

In Milange

Two miles from the Malawi border I entered the small Mozambiquan city of Milange in Zambezia Province. I checked into a downtown boardinghouse, the Pensão Lili. Judi, my translator, asked the pastor and me to go to the hospital to visit a tuberculosis patient. We drove up the hill to the end of the broad, pot-holed avenue where the Milange district administrative building stands like a
mini-replica of the White House. Then we crawled up a rutted road to Milange Hospital, constructed in 1946. The interiors of the hospital buildings were gutted and destroyed when Renamo rebels pillaged the town in 1986.

The National Statistics Institute reports that among the province of
Mozambique, Zambezia has the lowest vaccination rate. The 1997 statistics show 32 percent of children die before age five; 22 percent of the population is infected with HIV, 45 percent of which is under age 25.

The sun was setting and the vista of the valley was marvelous. I pointed to a large, modern building near the top of a mountain and asked what it was. It was a house built by the hospital physician, who suddenly left for Zambia—why, Judi did not know—and it has been vacant ever since.

Inside the dim hospital room I almost stepped on a woman patient on the floor, laying on a blanket with a baby in her arms. Three patients, one the TB patient we had come to see, lay side by side on gurneys, although TB is contagious. The few strands of light through the window cast ghostly shadows. All I could see on the TB patient's bed was a blanket-covered bundle. After a few moments of listening to the patient wheeze, I offered a prayer. I wanted to make some kind of physical contact, and pressed my hand
down on the bundle, but could barely feel a body under the cushion of blanket. I rebuked the disease in Jesus' name. Leaving, I saw yet another woman laying in a corner on the floor. That made six patients, counting the baby.

On Sunday evening, half a dozen young men gathered at an elder's house for a Bible study which lasted two and a half hours. We continued last month's study on "The New Song"; that the work of the evangelist follows a heart-impassioned song. After the study I was humbled when two of the young men approached me with a petition, to pray for them, "that we become preachers of the Gospel like you."

Personal Saturday Morning Preparations

If you happen to have problems oversleeping, you'll wake up plenty early at Pensão Lili. There's one dog that is agreeable to a fault. Think about anything—or don't think about anything—between midnight and dawn and it will reply "yup yup" just enough to make you toss and turn again.

Light began to shine in and I sat up. My prayer was basically, "Jesus, help me."

I got up to go bathe. Here it's not a simple matter to bathe. First, after being at least half-dressed and armed with shampoo, soap, and towel, you have to find yourself outside and hop over the drainage ditch, then cross the street to another building to find a dark room with a darker tiny stall wherein you stand naked and with one hand alternately pour over yourself cup after cup of too cold and too hot water from two buckets while waving away mosquitos with the other.

Wide awake, I prepared for breakfast. In the dining room, the young woman in the waitress uniform was slouched at a table while being poured more beer by a man in similarly slouched. There may not be enough food in the country, but there's an abundance of beer. My omelette looked and tasted like it was beyond the expiration date.

I have time to go to the toilet before meeting the others for our trip to rural Simbe. But the toilet at Pensão Lili is too gross. I walk down the street to a sidewalk café and order a cup of Ricoffy, which is a popular fake coffee, and a cheese sandwich, because choices are very limited. Through the portal into the saloon, I arrive in the toilet room to feel for the light switch and discover no toilet paper, then go out and say "bom dia" to the bartender who stands stiffly behind the bar, and I ask in hushed tone, "Por favor, tem papel higienico?" He has no idea what I am talking about. I forget hushed tone and repeat myself and wonder how graphic one can be and still be decent. Finally eyes light up and he says "sim, sim" but adds "não tem" [Yes, he understood, but no, they didn’t have any]. But since you have good drama skills the bartender rewards you with a wad of one-ply napkins. More statistics: 93% of Zambezians have no latrines and defecate in the open air, 83% drink unsafe water from unprotected wells, streams.

In the Land of Simbe

We drove eight miles from Milange and turned on the Simbe trail. Despite the cacophony among the dozen people packed in the Land Rover, I enjoyed the slow drive on the trail. I saw the richest farm country I’d yet seen in Mozambique, with tall maize and thatch grass and broad-leafed tobacco. A stream of smiling bicyclists stopped to wave and let me pass (mine were the only auto tracks). Even the humblest home had the extra touch of flowers around it.

No one could give me the dimensions of the land of Simbe, but it has a tribal chief, so I suppose it is a "chiefdom." The few people with formal education speak Portuguese, but the majority only speak Chechewa, one of more than a dozen tribal languages in Mozambique. Several miles down the trail we turned into a drive and parked in the swept, expansive yard of José, a lay leader of the local Gogoda Presbyterian Church. José wore a blue gas-station attendant’s shirt that read, "General Manager" and "Ernie."

Everybody got out to gather under the mango tree. Bamboo mats were placed on the ground while a chair was brought for me by the wee empregado (worker), ever-smiling, nearly-toothless, hardly-clothed. José wrote the names for me of the three Presbyterian churches of Simbe and the prayer houses serving each. Meanwhile, the empregado brought over a bundle of sugarcane on his back, like an ant carrying an oversized load, and let it roll onto the ground. The "husk" of the inch-thick stalk is stripped off with teeth
before munching away.

After preaching, prayer, and a lunch of "maize on the cob," we stopped at the sprawled-out market. Not a Coke in sight, yet one booth served as a mini-bar, so much per swig from three lonely partly-filled pints of Viceroy brandy. What was impressive was the activity at booths selling bicycle parts, every part you could think of neatly displayed. Everybody seemed to have a bike, kept shiny
and in tip-top shape.

Sunday morning our troupe arrived at 10:15 at the Gogoda church. We were escorted to some dozen chairs under the shade of five big mango trees, then the other men were called to a meeting. They entered a small open doorway of a partial wall 25 yards away, disappearing into the old church, in ruins, yet partly thatched. Next to it the brick building-in-progress stood, waiting for funds for a zinc roof.

As Judi and I waited, she asked, "Have you eaten meece here?"

I thought she was talking about a maize meal recipe. "No," I said, "tell me about it."

She spread her fingers out and said, "They are this size. They are two kind, one for the house, that one you do not eat, and one for the field, that one you eat."

"You mean mice?" I asked

"Yes, meece, yes. You go to the garden and dig meece with a hoe and put them in a pot. Then you put salt on them and put them in the sun to dry. They are very good to eat. You have not eaten them?"

"No I haven't. Uh, you skin them first though, right?"

"Oh no." She almost looked incredulous.

"What else do you eat here?"

"Grasshoppers."

"Grasshoppers?"

"You take off their wings and fill a pot full of them. Put salt on them. They are very good."

We talked ethnic food until a man came and called me to the meeting

Three choirs, the largest with five-dozen members, performed. I wondered how many rehearsals it took to achieve the magnificent flow of voices and clapping and dance steps. Yet everything seemed natural. I wished people in America could experience this sight and sound. But it bothered me that the choirs only faced the dozen or so of us, with their backs to the 300 congregants.

Back in Rover, we traveled about a quarter-mile to the grounds of a school where a meal had been ordered by the chief. A couple minutes later the chief and José came walking and carrying Coca Colas. The chief, slight of build, wore a high-brimmed cowboy hat. It was made of black paper felt and banded by a wide green cloth sporting a Marlboro logo.

We were ushered into a small brick "cafeteria," and the men were seated at a table set with covered pots. I thought, "So that's why I learned this morning about mice and grasshoppers—God was preparing me for this." Judi was asked by the chief to give the prayer. She knelt to pray, as did all the women. Then the lids were taken off. I've never been so glad to see chicken and spinach in my life.

I was asked questions. "Do you live near D.C.?" I answered via translator into Chechewa that it was a three-day drive over good highways from my home state, "Dakota do Sul," to Washington, D.C. I spoke about how sparsely populated was South Dakota, that native tribes live there, that I rode a horse to school when I was a boy, that it can snow half the year. Someone asked how come people live in such a place. "Does Dakota grow many mangos and oranges?" "What do black people do there?" I told them I was 13 when I saw my first black person other than on television, and now I'm the first white person that some people see. "Does everyone
have a television there?"

On my drive back to our home in Chimoio I tried to process my experience. Simbe and Milange still bear terrible scars of colonialism and war. Yet the church has established a presence of sorts. Where sin and greed and power-hungry men have brought destruction, we want to see the Lion of Judah, Jesus Christ, continue to bring healing and hope.

Please keep Milange and the land of Simbe in your prayers.

In the love of the Lord

Charles Wonnenberg

The 2002 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 43