There’s a reason people write novels. Truth hurts. Many secrets would I tell you but they are not mine to share. Many friends whose pain and loss is known only to us. A decade of ruined health, wrecked marriages, spoilt dreams and changed plans. Mozambicans I have known who are dead now. Young people with so much promise taken too soon by lack of simple medical care or dangerous driving conditions, or AIDS.  For now, since we’re talking about things that really happened, you can only hear part of the story. Many follies have been committed by others. We could laugh at them together. But that wouldn’t be right. Instead I will focus on my own stupidity. Much of what I did in Africa involved chasing wrong leads, banging our heads against the wall and whining about the heat. Not really the kinds of things that make for thrilling prose. When our children ask us one day for the story of our lives, some stories will flow easily. Others we will hide in fear that they should ever discover our sin and stupidity. Stupid is instructive in its own way. I’ve always shared stories with my kids that involve me crashing into things while driving a bicycle, motorcycle or car. Will my strategy backfire? Instead of serving as cautionary tales will my sons take inspiration from my childhood stunts and try to repeat them?

I’m incapable of writing a sentimental memoir of our time in Africa. Every story does not end with a spiritual lesson learned. There is no silver lining. But still life in Africa is rich. It is aromatic like Ethiopian coffee and lyrical like the blind beggar chanting outside the bank. The rhythms are syncopated in ways that a whitey like me just never quite gets. But we can at least try. And Mozambique is one of Africa’s unexplored treasures. Hidden among the land mines and the malarial swamps and the traumatized child soldiers are beautiful people and cultures that await the one who would come to listen and learn.

Missionaries are terrific liars. Artful, even. So fervently do we believe in our mission that sometimes our imaginations become fanciful. And our supporters, dear old ladies who pray for our safety and prosperity every day, leave us humbled and wanting to give evidence of a return on investment that isn’t really there. But how do you measure changed lives? Translation of the Bible is nice in that way. We can tell you how hard we have worked. We can count the verses and catalog the publications. Whether that translation does any good is hard to tell. I suppose that’s where faith comes in. “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place he would later receive as an inheritance, and he went out without understanding where he was going.” (Heb. 11:8, NET) Faith and obedience sound quite noble. It’s that “not understanding where he was going” part that doesn’t make for very gripping narrative. At least you can rest assured that in this narrative I have always told you the truth even when I could have improved the tale through embellishment.

The plot of our adventure began to unravel in 2000. We had two sharp young Mozambicans working on the translation. We had an office for the Nyungwe translation in the Predio Nhungue. And our family was happily settled in the Hippo House. But something was wobbly. And I had a queasy feeling that it was me. I didn’t have enough experience living in Mozambique to handle two full-time employees, not to mention cranky old Alberto and his cohorts. I seemed to be employer to a mob of brick layers, electricians and plumbers. Getting the Hippo House habitable had done wonders for my Portuguese and Nyungwe language skills. I had a rich and varied vocabulary for talking about rocks, sand and cement. Some words eluded even the brick layers. “Straight” and “level” seemed to be unknown to them. I explained to the pedreiro that the angle of the bathroom floor should be such that water doesn’t flow out the door and into the hall. When I had paid their fee just to get them out of our house, the very next day the washing machine overflowed and the water flowed into the hall.

I was the patrão. I rather liked this word in the beginning. I was a patron, like Medici, and the Hippo House would be my Sistine Chapel. But I quickly came to dread the nasally apologetic sound of that word. It meant that someone needed money or wanted to know what to do. Of course, I wouldn’t let the translators, Lourenço and Branco, call me patrão. We were after all brothers in Christ. In fact we were close enough in age to really be brothers. And so I had a certain Napoleon complex working with these two. In almost everything we discussed they knew more than I did. Their language skills were better than mine. They knew how things worked in Mozambique and I didn’t. They eagerly awaited my lead but I was wandering. Checking the translation was absurd. I had been thrown into this project without the training to do my job so I spent a lot of time improvising. My job was translating the Bible from a language I couldn’t read into a language I couldn’t speak using methods I didn’t understand in a culture that was completely alien to me. So I ask for your forgiveness if our initial efforts were crude. Even now I look at the translation of Luke with a sense of embarrassment. I would like to redo it. It’s a very patchy translation. There are parts that sing but many more that mumble. That hasn’t stopped it from being a very popular publication. When we were preparing the publication, I asked the church council what color the cover should be. They insisted on pink. I really didn’t want a sissy color like pink. But even colors have their own language from culture to culture. The cover should be pink, the council told me, because they wanted God’s word to shine. Years later, I still see editions of Luke in the homes of Nyungwe believers that I visit. I got my wish. The cover is no longer pink. It’s a beautiful shade of brown. The color of the dust in Tete. And the hands of those who have reverently turned its pages.

Working on the translation in that first year, I developed a policy of simply making all implicit information explicit. This seemed to be the best way to make sure we didn’t miss anything. I was wrong. An explicated translation is plodding and dull. When you tell somebody something they already know they assume you are trying to emphasize that thing. So implicit information, often background info, suddenly becomes focal. Well, there I go lecturing. Thanks to the Gospel of Luke I know a lot about how not to translate, and how not to manage a translation project. I’ve got all the moves now.

More was amiss than just the underemployed translators and the bumbling missionary. The translation came unstuck from the churches. There were several reasons for this. First, the churches hadn’t been very eager to have a Nyungwe Bible in the first place. This isn’t uncommon. Many times a new translation arrives in a crowded market. In Tete there were already Bibles in Portuguese and Chichewa and Shona that were well respected and well-used. Most people in Tete didn’t understand these languages. But the Bible, like the Koran, is a book with power even when it’s incomprehensible. In fact, the Bible is quite often powerful because it is incomprehensible. Religious truth becomes more potent when it is concealed beneath difficult language. Then the authority of the Bible is transferred to its interpreters since no one else can understand it. I soon learned that the Nyungwe people had a reputation for being difficult to reach with the Gospel. Fellow Mozambicans considered the Nyungwes to be dangerous practitioners of witchcraft. The correlation between their ignorance of the Good News and their reliance on traditional expressions of spirituality did not escape me. The evangelized Zimbabweans and Malawians had had the Bible in their language for more than a century. The results were obvious. But the Nyungwes, if they thought about Christianity at all, identified the God of the Bible with the Catholic church which had been based in this region for almost five hundred years. For this reason, the Nyungwes, especially in the city, considered themselves Catholic. The “father of the Nyungwe people” was Padre Ferrão, a kindly old priest, himself a Nyungwe, who had translated many catechisms and daily readings. The Catholic churches in the area, unlike the Protestant churches, always conducted their masses in the language of the people. Was it any wonder that the churches led by Malawians were full of Malawians but that Mozambicans steered clear?  Padre Ferrão was a part of our original translation steering committee and often said he would share his translations of sections of the Bible but passed away before fulfilling that promise.

Another reason that the Bible translation wasn’t very connected to the churches is simply that they trusted us. Our mission appeared competent and well-funded. We agreed to help them with the translation and they were confident that we would do a good job. Africa is a land of scarcity. Resources must be allocated by everyone with much thought and precision. If a high-powered mission appears and promises to produce the translation of the Bible it frees you up to do other things. Why should you assign your church members to a translation project that employs two full-time staff? Why do the missionaries keep asking us what to do next? Aren’t they the experts? In those years we were working hard to achieve “partnership” on our terms and with all the resources on our side. Only when the poverty of our approach became evident did the Mozambicans begin to offer help.

Somewhere in there during our first year, Hilary became pregnant. We were not pleased. Of course the thought of new life is wonderful and miraculous and all that but… Our fecundity frightened us. After three children in quick succession, Hilary had begun to lose her resolve to have a large family. Living overseas. Kids puking in tents. Meals. Diapers. Always traveling. It was a lot of work. But we slowly got used to the idea and began to at look forward to having another daughter to make the numbers even. Hilary was getting huge. Tete was getting hot. My mother was going crazy. So we decided to visit the US for the Christmas holiday. This was really dumb. Insane even. Americans spend the four weeks from Thanksgiving to New Years in a frenetic blur of parties and shopping and “family time” that swept us away like a sneaker wave when we got home. Two years away from America and we had grown accustomed to another lifestyle. Life in America was fast and expensive and over-stimulating. The first time Hilary walked into a supermarket to go shopping she walked out again and with a stunned look on her face said, “There was just too much.”

It was the height of the Y2K scare. I hadn’t been aware that things were so serious. Computers were going to crash. Airplanes were going to fall from the sky. Polar bears were going to move to Antarctica. I laughed it off until my pastor mentioned it from the pulpit. I got a creepy feeling. This could be the Armageddon event promised by all those scary movies. My Dad bought extra canned food. And for him that means a lot of canned food. We waited in a state of prayerful resignation. The New Year came. And passed. And nothing happened. It was most disappointing.

By the time we got on the plane to head back to Africa, Hilary was impossibly large. The airline made her sign a waiver. We actually overnighted in Milan so we could race through the streets pursued by albino nuns. Whoops, wrong story. We raced through Milan in search of the Last Supper, saw it and were unable to find any place open to serve us dinner. We slept hungry but artistically inspired.