I got a call from Dave in Harare. Yeah, that Dave. The nice guy that opened his house to a bunch of dipstick Americans that didn’t know any better than to wander around lost in one of the scariest cities in Africa. That Dave that I said rotten things about in my last chapter. I’m scum. We got settled in Tete. I was walking instead of driving because the police officer said my letter from the police in Harare is not sufficient proof that my driver’s license was stolen. So I walk all over town and this mangy dog named Mind Your Own Business starts following me everywhere I go.

Dave calls and says the police have a bunch of hoods in jail and I need to go in there and identify which ones were the ones that robbed me on that fateful night. Um, no. I don’t think so. You want me to go down-scary-town Harare and point my honky finger at a bunch of thugs that probably all look alike anyway. All the baddies always look the same. Blood-shot eyes from enough hooch to get the courage up to pull off a job. Body odor stinking like a skunk because they’re scared and desperate and got nothing to lose. I’m sorry, Dave, but I’m just staying right here in Mozambique where it’s safe. I learned later that a few months after we left Machava, some bad guys drove in and started shooting up the missionaries. Killing one nice guy.

So, I’ll leave those poor suckers to rot in the jail for awhile and in the meantime I’ll walk the streets of my new home with the sun baking my brains and Mind Your Own Business following me everywhere. We were living in the house of Dona Gloria. She was a glorious elderly school teacher who spoke in that stentorian sort of way that teachers have to do in a class of sixty kids. She rented her house to us which was tucked neatly in between a Reformed church and a pile of garbage. A crazy guy came with the house. He swept the dirt and peeked in the windows. Once I caught him trying to kiss my kids so I had to send him packing. Before I ran him out of the yard I followed him around surreptitiously with my tape recorder because whenever he swept he started singing with the most bizarre falsetto voice. The music was bewitching but not so much so that I was going to let him smooch my kids.

My first week in Tete was a dream come true, enough to wipe out the memory of being robbed (actually that’s poetic license since I think we attended the translation session, returned to South Africa and then loaded up and returned again to get robbed. But such is memory). I got to attend a translation checking session attended by very holy looking pastors. They were all wearing suits. I even wore a suit. We sat around a bunch of tables set up in the front of the Reformed church and read through the Nyungwe translation while people made suggestions. Sebastian, our boss at the time, ran the whole show. He asked questions. Someone took notes of the suggestions for improving Luke’s first letter to Theophilus. It was, as they say in our part of Africa, maningi nice. Many of the pastors came by Dona Gloria’s house and greeted us. I liked this a lot. They would always come in and pray. Then after chatting for a while they would stand, pray again and leave. Africans are also really big on shaking hands, something that us Americans find really awkward. Well, it’s better than getting kissed all the time like you do when you’re in Portugal. That weird guy in our yard would have fit right in with the Portuguese.

There were so many pastors that I was totally confused. And each pastor seemed to be the superintendent of a different church denomination. I thought that over time all these denominations would collapse and a few monolithic churches would absorb all the chaos. This was my WalMart theory of church growth. It didn’t happen. All those pastors are still in Tete. I know all their names. I still have trouble keeping their churches straight. But at least I know which of the pastors is actually Nyungwe. None of them. OK, maybe one or two. The leadership of all the churches in Tete are all from different ethnic groups. Chewas from Malawi. Shonas from Zimbabwe. Ndaus from Beira. But no Nyungwes. This made selling the idea of a Nyungwe Bible translation difficult. Nobody here was interested in adding another language to the churches. I guess it stands to reason. No Bible in Nyungwe. Ergo No Nyungwe Christians. Some bad logic in there somewhere, but I digress.

As much as we were enamored with Tete we still saw a lot of things that reminded us of hell. It was masanika season. These were little green apple-like things that tasted really not very nice. Fresh they were like chewing on raw potatoes. But the people of Tete liked to eat them even better after they had got all dried up and brown and wrinkly. The preferred method for drying them was to pile them on your tin roof so the chickens and pigs wouldn’t eat them. They would bake to a bronze rosy tint and then be kept until the hungry season which in Tete seems to be about six months long. Livingstone wrote about chinchona, “It seems quite a providential arrangement that the remedy for fever should be found in the greatest abundance where it is most needed.” It would seem more providential to just not have things like malarial mosquitoes but I’m not very providential. In Tete, it was providential that in a place that was in many ways hell-like that even the fruit should be diabolical. I nicknamed masanika, “raisins from hell.” Another thing that reminded us of hell was church. Over the centuries, Africans have developed marvelous ways of making houses out of natural materials. Most Mozambicans can build their house from the ground up with native materials without hardly expending any money. The result is cool, clean and eco-friendly. But somewhere along the way someone convinced them that they needed to build their houses with expensive cement and bricks and worst of all, corrugated tin. The result was a box suitable for baking bread but not for sleeping in. The goal of every pastor is to have a church with a tin roof. and wooden shutters and doors. Then you’re the real thing. Those that succeed however create environments of unbearable heat and noise. The roof radiates heat. The walls bounce back every noise, and in the case of Nyungwes that means four or five bongos pounded on with sticks with all the force and velocity the musicians can muster. For a truly spiritual meeting, you must close all the doors and the shutters and pray by shouting at the top of your lungs and clapping your hands over and over. So you’re baked and bongoed and buffeted for two hours or three. After one such spiritual event, one of us (I won’t say who) said, “It’s just like hell. It’s hot. It’s noisy. You don’t know what’s going on. And it never ends.” Hallelujah!

The other hellish element of Tete I’ve already mentioned. Smoldering piles of garbage are found in front of every house. Tete is a place like Gehenna, where the fire burns and the worm never dies. And every morning someone in every yard sweeps the dirt with vigor until the city is embraced in one big cloud of dust. Bad air quality but wonderful sunsets!

With such heat and dust I knew that I must live by the river. That one band of green called to me. “I was born upon thy banks, river.” (Our son, Benjamin actually fulfilled Thoreau’s prophecy that I had been quoting for decades when in 2000 he was born in the house I’m about to tell you about). I knew the postmaster, a man named Duck. He was actually a Nyungwe speaker and one of the pastors that had attended our original Luke checking sessions. We had lots of interesting names on our church council. Duck. Sheetoowee. Butter. I even met Brother Butter’s other brother. Pastor Bata (Duck in Nyungwe) was a diminutive fellow who was always positive and friendly. He loved Americans. His church had been founded by Baptists from Texas. It was a Pentecostal Baptist church. Leaving the post office I headed down toward the river. On the corner, next to the famous Monumento, a domed pump house that ceased to be used after a dead body was found floating in the water and thereafter became a sort of informal latrine nicknamed by my kids “the Poop Palace,” was this cute little house. It was small. Very small. And it didn’t look quite finished. But it had a fabulous view of the river. The riverside rolled gently away from this little house covered only by small gardens, papaya trees and ladies washing clothes. After enquiring at the house and getting the number of the owner, I passed on along the riverside to the Complexo Pemba, a cafe where I sat having a Coke and looking out at the island in the middle of the Zambezi. There on a sandbar in front of Kanyimbe Island, was a very large crocodile. People at the other tables seemed not to notice. I thought maybe someone should warn all those half-naked (top half) ladies washing clothes but I didn’t think it should be me. Maybe twelve foot crocodiles are a normal part of life in Tete. I walked our family down that evening to see the house and there in the river was a hippo doing that gaping mouth thing and subsiding underwater with a sploosh to leave only her eyes above the surface. Thus the house became the Hippo House and we moved in several weeks later.

Our romantic ideals must take precedence over practicalities. Moving into a house in a flood zone frequented by hippos, crocs and venomous snakes was not wise. But then we were not wise at that stage. We were, however, romantic. And living in a house by the side of the Zambezi was very romantic. Despite the spitting cobras in our yard, and our children occasionally tumbling into the Zambezi (Andrew was pulled out by a fisherman), we loved the Hippo House. But every Hippo House must have its Complexo Pemba. Why did God put that tree in the Garden of Eden? And why did he put the Complexo Pemba next to the Hippo House? Such divine mysteries are beyond me. We must accept them and move on. When the Complexo began to play pounding music at random hours of the day that shook our windows and made us crazy I went and talked to them. They apologized and turned down the music. And then an hour later the music was turned up again. I pondered sabotage. I tried to complain to the authorities. I began praying earnest smiting sorts of prayers. But nothing worked. Há de habituar. "You’ll get used to it.” said Lourenço who by this time was living in Tete. “I’m not going to habituate! They’re going to change!” I proclaimed. In the end, they didn’t change and I didn’t habituate. For the sake of my sanity, we moved out to a new house and a short time later the Complexo went out of business.