I failed to mention how we did on SOGI #4: “Don’t spend most of our time with non-Africans.” On one hand this was relatively easy to follow since in Tete there weren’t many estrangeiros. Tete is the real mission field. Not like those wimpy allocations like Harare or Chimoio where they have things like Italian cafes and Shoprite. If you have a Shoprite in your town you’re not really living in a tough place in Africa. Shoprite sells cheddar cheese and chocolate. And fresh fruit imported from South Africa. How tough is that? If you don’t have a Shoprite in your town it means that instead of going to one place with a heavily-guarded parking lot and buying all your groceries at once, you have to park on the street, get accosted by sidewalk vendors, petty thieves and blind beggars, and then visit four or five dinky little shops to get reasonable substitutes for half the things on your list. The exception to this is Nampula, Mozambique where they maliciously built the Shoprite on a busy road so you get mobbed every time you get in and out of your car. Tete has no Shoprite. And it doesn’t have any of the cushy advantages of a beach (Pemba and Beira) or high altitude (Lichinga and Chimoio). If you are based in any of these four cities in Mozambique you are a wimpy missionary. No condemnation. Even wimps can serve Jesus.

But we were suffering in Tete, the toughest of the tough places in Mozambique. Tough climate. Cantankerous citizens. A beautiful river that you can’t swim in because of crocodiles. And one of the toughest languages ever spoken on the planet. I know this because I had to learn the language. Nyungwe people in their default cussedness insisted on pronouncing everything in the most impossible ways. They can’t simply say B like we say B. They have to pronounce it implosively by sucking air in instead of out. And while most languages are content to have one or two consonants between each vowel, the speakers of Nyungwe use three or four. So while some languages are happy to have a word like siku for “day,” Nyungwe has ntsiku which sounds like someone trying to speak with a mouth full of taffy.

Thanks to a combination of hot weather, lousy shopping and an impossible people group speaking an impossible language, Tete was not overrun by foreigners or what the locals called azungus. And those azungus that did live in Tete were strangely wary of each other. Sometimes I would find myself packed into the bank lobby surrounded by a sea of black faces with one very white person standing right next to me. And they would act like I wasn’t there. What’s the deal here? Sometimes they were secular people that could tell from a mile away that I was a religious nutjob. Other times they were trying to fit in and so didn’t want to associate with white people (see SOGI #4). This became increasingly absurd, like two mimes working the same street corner and pretending they didn’t see each other. After I was more experienced I just developed a policy of greeting such people with a big smile and a loud American, “Hi!” Then if they wanted to just glare back at me it was their choice.

Fulfilling SOGI #4 became a visionary quest like getting a dinner invite in Lisbon. While the people in Kenya practically dragged us from one house to the next to drink tea, in Tete, after the initial greeting at Dona Gloria’s house we never got invited over. This perplexed me. I invited people over a lot. We served tea. We served ice water. We fed Africans pizza and tacos (not at the same time). But the reciprocal invites didn’t happen. There was something cultural going on. And I was so thick-headed that it took me years to understand and not be offended. Inviting someone to your home was not culturally correct. Instead, if you wanted to socialize, you just showed up at their house. People did this a lot. But I didn’t always notice since I was hiding inside my house trying to survive next to the air con. Eventually, I realized that most socializing took place in the late afternoon and at funerals. In America I remember going to funerals occasionally. In Tete it was a weekly event sometimes several times a week. There was no social relationship so distant that you weren’t obligated to attend the funeral. In the US we would attend the funeral of a family member or a close acquaintance from church, but other than that people might have been dying every day and I wasn’t going to go to their funeral. But in Africa, things are different. Families are big. Churches are big. Everyone knows everyone in their neighborhood. And people die a lot. If you make it to age five you’re lucky. And then at best you’ve got forty years or so to produce as many children of your own before one of the multitude of African hazards takes you to the grave. But people didn’t really see funerals as an obligation. They wanted to go to funerals. It was a chance to wear nice clothes. And pile into the back of a truck with forty other people and sing sad songs all the way to the cemetery. If you weren’t a church-goer funerals placed an obligation on the family of the deceased to provide food and booze for everyone who came to the wake. The ceremonies surrounding death are many and I’m obviously giving a caricature but if I could go back and start over again I wouldn’t wait for people to invite me to tea, I’d just wait for people to die and then get over to the house and sit with everyone else and socialize.  Sometimes I did feel like I spent all my time interacting with Mozambicans as either the patrão or a customer. But in our first several years, despite the pressure of trying to keep four little kids clean and malaria-free, we did find time to make a few friendships. Our mission places a high value on associating with humble people. But in the highly stratified society of Mozambique this created some awkwardness. There is a social distance between an azungu and those around him that is antithetical to our egalitarian nature. We resisted always being given the best seat in church, and being treated like VIPs wherever we went. All men are brothers! But by nature of being rich, powerful and well-educated azungus, people expected us to hang out with the highest ranks of society and that would mean spending our time socializing with high-society Mozambicans, usually from other parts of the country who only spoke Portuguese. A crude but helpful standard of measure is your method of transport. Do you walk, bike, ride a motorcycle or drive a car? Choose your friends accordingly.

A few days after Christmas in 2000, we decided to drive up to Cahora Bassa, the hydroelectric dam that had created an inland ocean out of the Zambezi River. Again our romantic nature got the better of our common sense. It’s a two-hour drive to Cahora Bassa from Tete on a well-maintained road. The last five hundred meters however were down a steep incline scattered with huge rocks and fallen trees. Making it down was bumpy but pretty easy. We found an idyllic little spot next to a dry creek bed and set up for a nice picnic. After enjoying our meal we started exploring the dry riverbed. We started finding tracks. The first tracks were large, deep and amphibian. We decided they must be hippo tracks. Then we explored some more and found cat tracks. But these weren’t kitty tracks. these were plate-sized impressions made by the kind of leonine feline that eats picnic-goers for a snack. We quickly retreated, got the kids into the car and cut short our outing. That five hundred meters was more challenging going up. Despite my inexperience, the Land Rover just took over and rumbled up the side of the hill and back onto the good road.

As we were driving out of the hill country surrounding the reservoir, Hilary looked out over the beautiful scenery and said, “Surely there are people that speak Nyungwe in this beautiful place. Taking that as a hint, I returned the next week with Lourenço and Branco and discovered the village of Dinthi nestled among the hills where the people were friendly, the climate was pleasant and the language was close enough to Nyungwe to fool even a linguist.

Picnic by the dam, 2000	Andrew’s ready for a nap.
Little did we know we were being sized up for a snack.	Hilary is sure they must speak Nyungwe here.