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Please Always Remember these short term trips are mostly about people. Yes, there is a goal of accomplishing some work of some sort. Without some encouragement of, and interaction with, the local believers, that work might as well have been done by non-Christians.
Moçambique 2006
with side trips to South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and Botswana
Some time back, my church changed pastors. The new pastor, Steve Strauss, has friends serving in Moçambique, Africa with OMS as missionaries. Their tasks there involve a large number of different activities, but particularly involve training local church leaders. After taking the opportunity to visit his friends there in Africa, Pastor Steve decided it was time to have a team from our church visit. There is only a very small capacity to allow people to visit the OMS missions field in Moçambique right now, and our small team of 6 people was pretty much the capacity of the field for visitors.
The women on our team proved, on their first day in Africa, that they were willing to tackle the concept of human interaction even with a significant language barrier.
We happened to arrive just before a wedding (Saturday in Moçambique is apparently the big wedding day - we passed several other weddings on the way to the church we needed to visit) and thus we observed (and for the women above, helped cook for) the wedding. This is a highly musical event, involving a singing processing into and out of the church, as well as spending considerable time singing inside the church.
A church in a slightly more rural location was where we visited on Sunday.
Even though the church we visited on Sunday was very close to the capital of Maputo, it was still a very simple building much like the stereotypical rural church in Africa. The various troubles in Moçambique over the years has left the country in a very unfortunate situation, and lack of money is a problem everywhere.
The interior of the church we visited on Sunday.
While the church building itself was primitive, there was no questioning the spirit of the believers that worshipped there, which was quite lively.
On Monday we started work.
Our project on Monday involved this water well, which was not working right. Fixing the problem involved hauling up some 150 feet or so of pipe and attempting to diagnose the problem from the parts we were able to haul up - and not being able to see the mechanism that sits at the bottom function because we had hauled it up.
This process involved most members of the team getting quite wet in the process of lifting the pipe out of the well.
Water is, of course, vital to life.
However, even in some very urbanized areas of Moçambique it is difficult to obtain safe drinking water. This is a much larger well that operates on a church property much closer to the city. Due to the power required to operate the well, and the maintenance costs, the church does charge local residents a small fee to obtain water from this well. The hope is that this helps keep the well in operation, and also helps keep the people from wasting the water that they obtain from the well.
Another work project was the new seminary building.
The new seminary building has proven to be quite an undertaking. Trying to accomplish such a building in Moçambique can be troublesome due to the skill levels of some of the local workers. Thus, we helped do some of the simple tasks around the building that we hope will bring the seminary one step closer to completion.
When completed, the hope is that the facility will be the basis for training pastors by way of remote communication in many communities in Moçambique and perhaps a few locations outside the country.
Inside a newly completed church.
As the varios congregations grow larger, they are able to afford more modern buildings and offer their communities more services. This particular church, which has been fairly newly completed, offers a daycare school with a very large number of children from the community attending.
After Moçambique
David Livingstone Statue, Zimbabwe
Due to the cost of getting to Africa, and wanting to use the cost wisely, after our team left Africa I spent an extra week doing some tourist traveling. I went to Victoria Falls and also spent some time at the Chobe National Park in Botswana. During a day-long layover in Jo-berg I paid a brief visit to Soweto as well.
The famous explorer David Livingstone is still well regarded in this part of Africa due to his efforts at eliminating the abusive slave trade. Unfortunately, even today Africa suffers huge problems that can be traced back to these troubles.
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