Our mission to Mozambique, Africa was not the typical mission trip of taking a team, building something, conducting vacation bible school, loving the people, then heading for home. This was a mission team of three, which consisted of Melody, myself and a missionary from Atlanta, Eric Owen. Eric was in Mozambique with Melody last year and is fluent in Portuguese, the predominant language of Mozambique. Our mission was to lay the foundation and develop a long term growing relationship that enables us to spread the love of Christ in a country of desperate need. To partner with Bishop Nhanala of the United Methodist Church and work towards making a better life for her people by drilling critically needed water wells, doing various construction projects, working with the Cambine orphanage and clinic, and distributing Proclaimers which are devices that play a recording of the gospel in native dialects. God blessed us with enough raised funds to drill one water well this trip and we were able to visit the locations and document the next five areas of greatest need for future water wells.
Our trip to Mozambique accomplished a lot and was a great success. The trip began on Saturday morning as we headed to Atlanta to catch a Delta flight for Johannesburg, South Africa. Our flight left at 3:45 pm that afternoon and arrived in Johannesburg some 18+ hours later. We had time to grab a sandwich and wait about an hour before catching our next flight to Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. We finally arrived in Maputo at 8:40 pm Sunday evening.
The Lord was walking by our side as we went through immigration and were waved right past customs without anyone looking at a single suite case. We still had not figured out how we where going to explain why we had three suite cases of used children’s clothing, six Proclaimers (that look like new portable radios), six soccer balls and jump ropes when we where just traveling as tourists.
We were greeted at the airport by Armindo Chauque, the mission team coordinator for the United Methodist Church, who does pretty well with his English. After all of the luggage was loaded we headed for the UMC guest house that became our home base while we were in the capital city of Maputo. When we arrived at the guest house we were greeted by the staff that ran the house and prepared all the meals. They were Luzia, Rosa, Maravilha, Albertina (Beti) and Salvado. They had prepared a wonderful meal for us which we immediately dug into. Why we did, I do not know since we had three meals on the plane and one in Johannesburg. I guess we are willing to lose a day, but not a meal. After our meal we settled in and turned in for a much needed good nights sleep.
Stay tuned more to follow...
Labels: africa, mission, mozambique, united methodist church, vanderhoff, wells
