I was irresistibly drawn to the river in Tete. It was so beautiful. And there was almost always a nice breeze blowing up the river. Picturesque canoes worked up and down the river. They floated down to town with tomatoes and onions from the farms. And then poled the canoes back upstream. The physiques of the people along the river were amazing. The men were amazingly buff from years of heavy lifted, rowing and poling their canoes upstream. The women were pretty tough as well. They would come down to the river in the morning with baskets of clothes on their heads and spend the morning scrubbing and wringing. This created some embarrassing moments for me because I spent a lot of time bird-watching when we lived in the Hippo House. Unfortunately, the birds were quite often in the vicinity of the bare-chested women washing clothes. One time I was watching a particularly interesting bird when I saw a hand waving at me. With my binoculars, I followed the hand down the arm to the smiling face of a naked woman amused that I was enjoying the show. I really did try to avert my gaze when scantily clad women were around. Honest. But their idea of naked and our idea of naked are different. Boobs were a big deal when I was growing up. They were hidden away like sacred treasures and only revealed in naughty magazines and the Human Body article in the World Book Encyclopedia. Growing into young adulthood I was conditioned by advertising and cinema to think that boobs were really something sexy. if you think about them, and we thought about them a lot, but not in this way, they’re really just bags of fat with some glands that secrete milk for the purpose of nourishing infant humans. In Mozambique, boobs are just body parts like elbows. Women generally cover them up. But if they are washing clothes by the river, or nursing a baby they whip those things out without a second thought. This causes a lot of distraction for a young preacher newly arrived in Africa. Half the women dancing in the aisle at church have babies tied on their hips and these babies are vainly lunging at a bouncing breast in hopes of latching on for a snack. I’ve been told that while boobs are not considered sexy, hips are. So women spend a lot of time wrapping capulanas around their hips so as to not dress in an overly provocative way.

Boobs were just one (or two) ways that the African way of looking at the river and our way of looking at the river were different. I thought the river should be beautiful and natural. But Mozambicans thought the river was a place for getting work done. Women were washing clothes. Men were chopping down river reeds to make baskets. The entire riverside was carved into garden plots. I didn’t want garden plots. I wanted waving grass and beautiful birds. The river was also frequently used by men for bathing and as a toilet. While women don’t mind flashing their chests, men can’t seem to visit the riverside without dropping their drawers, squatting and pooping on my idyllic vista. This rather spoils the view and the smell of the riverside with women draping drying laundry over all the riverside plants and men pooping all over the place. And when a man wants to take a bath he just strips it all off and stands in the shallows soaping himself up for ages. If I was embarrassed that the women thought I was staring at them I really didn’t want the naked men to think they were being ogled by the missionary.

The other thing that interrupted our idyll was of course the restaurant next door. They played their music really loud. Really, really loud. And it wasn’t some kind of cool marrabenta music, it was this pop junk in Portuguese with a boring synthesized beat that just pounded on and on and on. The thing I couldn’t get my head around in Tete is that I was the only one bothered by the loud music. Everyone else seemed to take it as a favor that the neighbor was sharing their music with all forty of the huts packed in close proximity with one another. Loud music is often used to let people know that there is home-brew booze for sale. So on a Saturday you can listen to dozens of competing sound systems, all with blown speakers, some with the speaker mounted high on a pole overhead. They all are scratchily blasting music all day long and no one complains. Except me. I didn’t come to Africa to complain about music. I came here to translate the Bible. But if you think about it, the art of translation sometimes transcends the actual words and depends as much on the medium as the message. So as you might imagine, the city churches that can manage buy an electronic keyboard and big speakers and lots of microphones and they turn it all up to ten until all the neighbors can hear it. One of the terrific things about music in Africa is that it isn’t led from the front. Instead, it’s led by the congregation. Everyone joins in. Everyone takes turns leading a song. If there’s the least bit of a lull, someone will start singing. If you are a musician in this situation you have to figure out what key the singer is singing in and try to match that. It’s the complete opposite method of “worship leading” from what we have in the US. At my home church, the music minister picks out the tunes. He rehearses them with the musicians. The audiovisual people sitting in the sound booth do sound checks and monitor sound levels. Somebody with a computer sends the lyrics onto two big screens that tower over the platform. Just imagine singing out with your own song in that situation! Total chaos. The musicians wouldn’t know what key you were playing in. The guy on the computer would be scrambling through the list on his hard drive trying to find your song. The congregation wouldn’t know the words since they’re not used to singing without reading off the screens. But in Africa its better than that. If you’re in a church in America you at least know what song the person is going to sing in. In Africa, it could be anything. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been humming along with an incomprehensible song in church only to discover that they are in fact singing in English. We came to Tete supposing that in a Nyungwe speaking area people would sing in Nyungwe. But they sing in everything but Nyungwe. Chewa, Shona, even Shangan from a thousand miles away. If you’re visiting from another region it doesn’t matter. Just start singing out and eventually everyone will join in like they’ve been singing the song all their lives.

That doesn’t mean that anyone understands what they’re singing. In fact, meaning is a secondary consideration. In a Mozambican church it’s all about togetherness. We’re dancing together. We’re singing together. We’re amen-ing as the pastor preaches. We’re sitting together crammed into a too small space with too many people. But we’re together. This is cibverano. Cibverano means something like “mutual understanding.” It’s the deepest and most revered trait of Nyungwe culture. As long as we’re together it’s OK. A similar phrase is, Tiri pabodzi. It’s used as a statement, as a question, and as a discourse marker. It means simply “We are together.” But it is such an essential concept that it has to be repeated over and over again. We’re together. We’re together. Are we together? We’re together! The unity of African culture extends beyond the family unit and beyond the circle of friends to include your neighbors and everyone from your church and all the people you’ve ever met and their friends. The togetherness of Mozambican culture entwines the average person in a safety net that holds them from birth to death and  beyond. Africans are never alone. And if you prefer to be alone watch out that you don’t get eaten by a hyena. The story goes that a man preferred to live alone so he built a house for his wife way outside of town and left her there every day while he went out to work in the fields. The hyena noticed this and one afternoon before the man got home, the hyena knocked on the door. When the woman opened the door, the hyena jumped on her and ate her leaving only her hands. When the man returned home that evening, he discovered his wife dead, eaten by a hyena with only her hands left. There was nothing he could say. So, your neighbors may be noisy. The sewage from their outhouse may overflow into your yard. Their kids may steal thatch off your roof and your wife may be seduced by your neighbor. But you better not try to live by yourself or the hyena will get you. Missionaries are a lot like that man. We’re always trying to live in big houses on the outside of town. We hide inside our houses to eat and we refuse to attend four-hour church services. In fact the word azungu is related to the word for “to visit.” We are just visiting. The Nyungwe proverb says, Mulendo ni mame. The visitor is like the mist. We are transient, impermanent and prone to disappearing when the sun comes out.

Paradoxically, the great hero of Mozambican folktales is the rabbit. We don’t understand rabbit because he is so bad and yet everyone loves him. He does everything he shouldn’t. He refuses to help dig the well but he sneaks in at night and drinks the water and then muddies it with his big feet. He sneaks into a party for animals with horns by gluing horns on his head with beeswax until he gets thrown out again. He does hundreds of naughty things and always escapes. But what we as outsiders don’t understand is that while Africans love rabbit and laugh at his antics, every story just reminds them how good it is to be part of an extended network of relationships. For the word which we translate as “escaped” really means “alone.” And no amount of antics are worth the price of not being together.