According to the wise old men it was of the utmost importance that I get to Tete and start helping the Nyungwe translator as soon as possible. Unfortunately, the translator wasn’t there but in a nearby province. And I didn’t know anything about Nyungwe. Or Bible translation. Or just about anything. But the important thing at this stage according to the wise old men was to get a warm body in place, to hold down the fort, and keep the momentum going on that translation. God seemed to be smiling on our progress. Our first Sunday at church in Mozambique was celebrated at a missionary compound called Boa Nova, “Good News.” Boa Nova was way out on the outskirts of the Mozambican capital, Maputo. As we came out of the church service, a nice young man introduced himself and asked us what we were doing in Mozambique. I said, “We’re getting ready to move to Tete.”

“I’m from Tete!” he replied in amazement. “What are you going to do there?”

“We’re helping translate the Bible into Nyungwe.”

”I speak Nyungwe!” he said. I looked at this guy and got interested.

I asked, “What are you doing in Machava?”

“I just graduated from Bible college and I’m looking for a job.”

So Lourenço became my first Nyungwe tutor. He and I studied “Translating the Word of God,” or TWOG as insiders like to call it, and began working our way through the draft of the Gospel of Luke in Nyungwe. Unfortunately he had been out of Tete for more than a decade so his Nyungwe was pretty weak in some parts. With the help of the Nyungwe version of Luke and a Nyungwe dictionary his language skills quickly improved.

God had brought us together with a talented translator and we were blessed with a lot of other people who were working on our behalf to get us ASAP to Tete. During the week, we didn’t really have any worries. Efficient people in Maputo were taking care of all our residency permits and I only needed to travel to town once a week or so to sign papers or check email. Maputo is not what gave me stomach ulcers. The road to Machava gave me stomach ulcers. It was rainy season and the sandy road was a long undulating path that through the passage of time had developed enormous potholes, or slaggat as the Afrikaners like to say. Slaggat is a wonderful word for potholes. It sounds like an expletive. These slaggats were something worth swearing about. They were sometimes twenty or thirty feet long, sometimes more. Shoot they were miles long. Deep, too. In our low rider VW Double Cab Combi I would drive in one side and sink slowly until the wheels were covered and we’d just chug through the puddle like a tugboat until we came out the other side. For a brief moment I’d be on top of a sand mound before descending once more into the next inland ocean. This was a skill I never learned at pre-field orientation: “How to drive a car underwater.” The local people were resourceful. In order to increase traction in the potholes, they would fill them with locally available materials. Since there was a Coca Cola factory nearby, there was an excess of broken bottle glass. So they filled the slaggats with broken bottles. I was sure this would pop my tires but for some reason this was smooth broken glass. The other material they used was branches from thorn bushes. These were put in the potholes I suppose so that if the glass didn’t pop your tires the thorns would. Amazingly, in four months of living in Machava I never had a flat tire on that road. This was the new world I lived in. A place where cars are boats, roads are lakes and sharp objects are placed under your tires as a favor.

The one flat tire I did have during that time took place in a game park in Swaziland where we had gone to spend the day since in order to get our permanent residence visas we had to leave the country and come back in on our new visa. The game park seemed to specialize in ostriches. Everything else was hidden behind grass that grew higher than our heads. We couldn’t get out of the vehicle because of lions. I didn’t see any lions. But when a rock in the road banged into my tire, I got to change my tire hurriedly, always wondering when a lion would leap on me out of the grass and give me a good story to tell in my missionary newsletter.

Before heading overseas I rather fancied myself to be a clever “desktop publisher.” My newsletters had clipart. And fancy fonts. When we were raising funds for our vehicle I made a little graph of a Land Rover climbing a hill toward 100% with Mozambique at the summit. It was hard to get photos into my newsletters since all my cameras were old-fashioned. I spent a lot of money on a gadget that could capture still frames from my video camera. Once we went overseas, our newsletters were more difficult to write. We wanted people to think we were doing something somehow ministry related, but sitting in a classroom, or standing in a line, or studying “Translating the Word of God” are not very photogenic activities. So we mostly included pictures of our cute kids. Thankfully, it was the cute kid shots that people wanted anyway. For years after we were in Mozambique we would get emails from people thanking us for the photos of our kids “and God bless you in your ministry in Madagascar.” Do prayers for our ministry in Mozambique count if they are about Madagascar?

Ellie and the Bob Bus.	Cute kid shot: Andrew
Figuring out the gadget	Bedtime story

So our newsletters were pretty fancy. But I learned later that this can backfire. Supporters don’t want to send money to missionaries that spend all their time fiddling around with fonts on their newsletters. They want rough and ready missives full of inspiring stories, preferably printed on recycled paper for economy’s sake. The irony of prayer letters is that when you really need the prayer you’re too busy to send letters. When we started, it was before the advent of email. Or at least it seemed that way to our prayer partners. So we needed to produce something on paper, get it checked by the censors, put it in an envelope and send it by mail. It was slow and really expensive and by the time it got to your mailbox I would already have been eaten by a lion. Even if you did know I was being chewed on by a lion you might pray for me in Madagascar and the guardian angels would rush off to the wrong place. Nowadays, supporters know everything I’m doing as I do it. For example, I just posted on my Facebook status, “I’m writing about our life in Machava ten years ago.”

While I was riding the Glass Thorn Roller Coaster and rescuing implicit information from translational obscurity, Hilary was dealing with dangers of a domestic kind. It was hot season, so we kept all the windows open and the fans blowing, but in the night rain storms would blow in from the Indian Ocean to disturb our sleep. A rainstorm in Oregon is like the white noise on a TV it just shushes for hours. But a rainstorm in Mozambique is like a car wreck, or an avalanche. Suddenly your running like crazy all over the house, closing windows, and setting out buckets to catch rain that fall unimpeded through multiple holes in the roof. The other watery thrill in our house was the shower which was somehow hooked up to the electricity. If you took a shower when the power was out you could be certain of being spared electrocution. Otherwise you had to step on a wooden platform and avoid touching the faucets without rubber gloves on. In addition to water, this shower sprayed you with electricity. None of us died from the experience but it was electrifying.

What woman hasn’t dreamed of having a maid to take care of all the household drudgery? In Mozambique all your dreams can come true. In fact, it was a social sin or a sign of stinginess to not have a maid. So Hilary had a maid. I think her name was Rosa. For some reason most of our maids are named Rosa. Maybe it goes with the job. We needed Rosa because we had no machines. In America, machines do all the housework. Washing machines, driers, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners. Maybe that’s why I’ve never met anyone named Rosa in America. But in Mozambique there are lots of Rosas. Some of them are quiet. Some are chatty. Some polish the glaze off your dishes. Some of them are so lazy that you have to tell them every step of their routine. I thought it was great having a maid. I wanted a butler. When I got to Tete I ended up with Alberto, a cantankerous nine-fingered chain-smoker who killed snakes in our yard and chased off more thieves in a single evening of duty than the rest of our guards did in a month. Hilary did not like having a maid. She didn’t want another woman in her house. Maybe this is some woman thing. They mark out their territory and chase off competitors. Whatever the case, Hilary didn’t enjoy having maids. I loved it because I didn’t have to feel guilty for not doing the dishes. In fact making dirty dishes was helping to support someone named Rosa and her husband.

The thing I was most excited about in Machava was my new Land Rover. OK, I was most excited about bringing God’s Word to someone in their own language. But after that I was really excited about my Land Rover. The only Land Rover we could afford was a two-seater utility vehicle with all the aesthetics of a breadbox. The lack of seats didn’t matter since as soon as we got the vehicle we drove it out to Nelspruit, South Africa and had a welder add seats, a roof rack and the coolest bull bar I’ve ever seen. Unlike most bull bars in the US, my bull bar actually got used on a bull. It bent the bar but it killed the bull so it really worked!

In order to keep my Bob Bus in Mozambique I would have had to pay $1600 in import duties. Instead I sold it to another up-and-coming missionary. Almost as soon as he purchased it, the Bob Bus completely fell apart like a cartoon vehicle whose tires pop off and motor sends out big plumes of smoke. I felt so bad that I gave the missionary back some of his money. In 2001 I saw the Bob Bus for sale in a car lot in South Africa and I fantasized of picking up a second vehicle. With the Bob Bus gone, a new rumbling Land Rover decked out with all sorts of protective armor, and our residency papers in our pockets, we headed north via Harare, Zimbabwe where we stopped long enough to get robbed at gunpoint before proceeding with our mission.