A Truck, a Footpath & Fire Ants!

Such is the communication here that I was told on Thursday that I was going on a weekend outreach, leaving at 11am on Saturday, my only day off per week! I did try and get out of it, but in the end I guess I realized that it is my job as the sound person to do sound…

I got all the sound stuff ready, I was packed, I borrowed a tent, a sleeping bag and even got a fancy little blow up mat to sleep on! I tested the sound system and made the cables to go with it. All ready.

On Saturday morning at about 10:30am (we are meant to leave at 11) I run into Pastor José, the man in change of this outreach. I had suddenly realized that I didn’t know who else was going on this outreach and if I am the only girl then I cannot go – He speaks absolutely no English. This is going to test my Portuguese to its full extent!

No worries, he would like 8 of our visitors to go along – problem is we have no visitors at the moment…

I saw Susi, our ‘International Cross Cultural Training Program’ (a.k.a. Mission School) co-ordinator and begged her to find me 7 people (at least one being a girl) to go on the outreach, now scheduled to leave at 1pm. No problem, as long as they are back in time for class at 8:30 Monday morning.

She calls me later and says there are 4 guys and 2 girls, bravely volunteering to go on this impromptu outreach, they are all packing and will be ready to leave at 1.

By 2:30 we are all loaded in the camião, waiting in the scorching sun.

3:30…

4:30…

5pm… Off we go, only 6 hours late! (I could have spent the day on the beach!)

We are going to Chiure, about 2 hours from Pemba. We arrive in the dark and start with the sound system, the camião leaves to fetch some people.

The very first obstacle we hit is the screen: usually on the outreaches all the visitors and the pastors set it up, so I have never really had to figure it out – but with this outreach there were only 3 pastors and 7 of us… and the frame is broken. We tried taping it, we tried tying it with rope, the locals laughed at us and said our rope was ‘new technology from America!’ Then they set to work with 2 pieces of bamboo and some dried palm fronds that they wet to make into rope – I laughed and said that it is the ‘new technology from Africa!’ and they laughed at my compliment, because of all the things we had tried this was the only one that worked!

Finally the screen was up (leaning a bit to far forward, but it would be fine). Then I switched on the system and played our up beat African music to get the crowds in. Only one problem – the speakers sounded terrible… then the next disaster struck, one of the power rolls (made for ‘office use’) decided to melt. OK. Not a problem, we can use only one speaker and we don’t need the lights while the movie is going so we are fine. Its OK.

The movie starts and the crowd settle down. Its 8:30pm already, so we are in for a late night. I had brought the better of our Makua Jesus DVDs, this one only has a little scratch on it and causes it to skip 4 mins of the film, but you have to sit and wait for it then press the ‘skip forward’ button to make it go on. Usually a very simple thing, this time however it just refused to move. We had to power down the DVD player and try again…

The movie went quickly after that – we pitched our tent in the yard while we waited.

Because the camião had left to pick up more people the screen was standing alone (usually we lean it against the truck). All through the film the kids would jump up, run under the screen and pee just behind it – and from where I was sitting I could see it all! It was funny! The culture is so different!!

As soon as the movie ended the people scattered, there were maybe 50 that stayed to listen to the preaching and for prayer. This is highly unusual – maybe it was because it was quite late, but still, they weren’t very interested. The students prayed with people and they saw some healings, which was totally awesome, and when we had a talk afterwards while we ate they all agreed that this was the best thing that they have ever done, they really enjoyed it – frustrations, delays and all!

We were all in bed by midnight and fell asleep quickly. Then at 3am there was a huge dog fight quite close to the tents, it sounded really bad, I didn’t want to look.
Then at 5:30am the camião returned packed full of singing pastors from the surrounding area. 5:30am. It was f-i-v-e t-h-i-r-t-y in the MORNING. Needless to say we didn’t fall asleep again.

Church was scheduled at 9 and we had a nice breakfast of grass tea and a bread roll. The tea is really made from grass. They pick a certain type of long grass in the field, break it into 3 or 4 pieces, tie many into a bundle together and boil it in a huge cauldron of water. It was really nice! While we were eating they were butchering the goat for lunch…

I wont go into the whole church story – if you read my ‘food distribution’ article then you will know my views on Sunday church – this wasn’t too bad. Just 4 hours.

After church we ate a lovely lunch, they had made rice and shima (the ground corn) and goat – I really like the shima!

We were not staying at this village for another night, we were going to a place ‘not far away’ to do an outreach there for the evening, and seeing that we had to get the students back intime for class the next morning we will leave to drive back to Pemba as soon as we are done. In the meantime 2 of our long termers from Pemba showed up – they were on their way to another village when they took a wrong turn and ended up at ours! This was actually a really good thing – we are having a conference in Nampula from Wednesday and they needed our camião, so it left. We were stranded – fortunealty another camião showed up and with the landrover of the long termers we were good for transport.

Heidi had been scheduled to come to this village to give a seminar to all the local area pastors – that was the group of people that showed up this morning at 5:30am – but now Heidi wasn’t coming anymore so we had to take them all back to where we picked them up from. It was all a huge complicated saga. I was never really sure what was going on cos things were changing so quickly, but that is the African way I guess.

We get loaded into the camião, and a whole bunch of people jam in with us. We set off, no one really knowing where we were going or how long it would be till we got there!


We are on the tar road, then we are on a wide dirt road, then we are forging our way thru a tall elephant grass as high as the canopy of the truck and we are driving down a footpath!

The Moçambicans started singing, they sang and sang and sang - We suddenly heard a gasp and I looked to see what had caused it. One of the younger girls had motion sickness and had been sick all over the little boy sitting in front of her. Bless him, he just sat there, didn’t make a scene or even say a word. He just waited patiently looking fairly bewildered until someone wiped him down with a capalana. The girl carried on being sick, but they held a capalana infront of her mouth, so it was all good.
And they never stopped singing.

Every once in a while we came across low hanging tree branches, the truck would just carry on at the same speed while all of us at the back ducked to avoid the leaves and twigs that burst into the back. We had gone thru about 5 of them when suddenly we hit the branches and instead of just twigs and leaves we were covered in huge red biting FIRE ANTS! They were everywhere, on our luggage, on us, in our clothes, biting biting biting. One girl was in tears. It hurt! We squashed and flicked and brushed away as many as we could and finally we only had the occational bit on the bum, but it was bearable.
And they never stopped singing!

Finally after 1 ½ hours we were there. As people started getting out the truck I looked down and the floor was covered in vomit, dead ants and something that resembled diarrhea…

Setting up this time went quickly and we got the movie going at 5:55pm! 5 minutes earlier than I had planned! Yay!
The team spent the entire movie ontop of the landrover praying for the time after the movie, they are such a great bunch!

The movie ended and nearly everyone stayed to listen to the preaching, and there were many responses for salvation, even a man wearing a muslim cap raised his hand! The students prayed for loads of people for healing and the response was overwhelming!

The only real disappointment/shocking thing was at the end when we asked people to come forward to share what God had done for them, there were a few people that came forward and just mocked God! It really soured the whole evening, but I know that they are only a few, and that a large majority of the people really encountered Jesus.
We packed up and it was decided that since the camião wasn’t back yet we would leave the sound system there and go back in the landrover, just taking our luggage with us. The ride back was much quicker then the ride in, and the landrover is so much more comfortable than the truck!

We got home at midnight and totally exhausted I went to bed! But overall it was a really good outreach, I enjoyed it, and the students loved it! I am glad.