From the Unpaved Road
15 years ago
22 November, 2008
Village Life
Hey Everyone, how’s it going??
I’m home tonight feeling a bit sick (queasy stomach and mild cramps) while everyone else is out having a party with the mozambiqican pastoral students, and after having spent all day yesterday making chocolate cakes I must say I’m a little disappointed. Not so much that I will miss desert, which is a real treat here, but I’ll miss the look of delight on the mozambiqicans faces when they see it all! This is something they never get.
Just to fill you in on the pastoral training... every year there is a 4 month school held at the base for upcoming leaders and pastors from different provinces around Cabo Degado (where we are). Most of them are fairly new Christians and have come to learn how to start churches up in their own towns and disciple people. Most of them have left family and come with nothing but what they are wearing. They are very poor and some have been known to loose their families while there away due to starvation or illness. It’s a big cost for many of them. There is also quite a lot of younger men who will go back and lead youth mettings/outreaches etc...
Actually it’s quite funny. We are encouraged to mix with them as much as possible, which is hard as they can’t speak English and not many of us speak Portuguese or Makua (the heart language) but at the same time if you spend more than 10min talking to them, the talk of marriage comes up and you almost have a proposal! It’s a very hard concept to get your head around and as I love working with teenage boys, has been quite hard. I just don’t worry about it and am careful with my words. :)
On that same note though I think I have a little 13 year old boy attracted to me! I meet this boy the first day I arrived and feel in love with him (not literary). He was so cute and quiet natured. He spoke good english so we were able to communicate well straight away. He won a place in my heart and I would talk to him everyday and got to know his friends. I’ve even meet his uncle as his parents both died when he was 9. But just last night he gave me his necklace to wear till the end of school and was trying to lie all over my legs, which I believe in this culture is quite sexual. Its so horrible to think at this age he would be pursuing someone over twice is age. In saying this he is always trying to find me a husband too, maybe he thinks I’ll take him home with me. I’m got some talking to do with him I think ; )
so... I went on outreach last weekend. Whoa, talk about a HEAVY spiritual atmosphere. It was depression central. Firstly 30 of us piled into the back of a cameo (flat bed truck), 10 students, 10 pastoral students and a group on medical outreach.
We drove for 3 hours along the main road, occasionally having to try and hold a huge tarpaulin over us when the rain came, while speeding along at 90km/hr, quite entertaining. Then we pulled down a dirt road/path and drove another 20km or so into the bush bush. There in the middle of no-where was a village with nothing by mud huts, a few mango, papaya, banana and coconut trees and hundreds of dirty malnourished children running after us as we drove by, giving us big smiles and waves. Children yelling out koonya, koonya (white, white) as we drove past. When we finally stopped it was a very quick unpack and stick up the tents in fear of rain coming. Thankfully only a few drops feel, otherwise we may never have gotten out on that road.
As we are setting up tents on the local pastors land the kids just seem to keep coming and pretty soon we have about 100 kids lined up around the fences watching us. What a site!
The first thing I noticed about the kids was their tummies, sticking way out. So so many malnourished children. Then it was girls as young at 8 carrying around infants on their back, hopefully there siblings. There are no parents anywhere. Kids just run around all day with each other. They carry knives and machetes, kids maybe only 5 years old, not as weapons, but to get into coconuts or kasava (there staple diet, somthing like a chalky taro that they often eat raw and has no flavor) etc...! They are all looking after each other in a sense, while their parents are at home working or sleeping.
There was a really sad feel to the place.
So after unpacking the leader set up the screen ready to show the Jesus film and others set about preparing our traditional outreach meal of tuna pasta. Others went out to roam the village or play with the kids. I hung back a while to process things but then this drunk grandma came in and starting asking us for clothes supposedly for her daughters, yet just outside was a shop selling clothes. The only shop I saw in the whole village and probably all stuff sent over my some aid organisation that was meant to go to the people but ended up in the wrong hands! She was quite annoying and I wasn’t getting a good vibe about her. Then she started cursing us and telling us all to go home, then she would laugh and then she wanted to take us to her home next door .... In the end I just started talking to her about Gods love for her, in English, knowing she couldn’t understand but hoping her spirit would, and I tried speaking in tounges, hoping she would hear it in her own language, but she didn’t. ( you can join me in prayer for that one!) I had someone remind me to stop for the one, so thats what I did. Even if we didn’t understand one word spoken to each other I believe God could still communicate to her if she was open. As it turned out she kept cursing us the whole weekend and on the last night there while we were all sleeping you could hear her yelling over us from outside for about an hour. Apparently she was saying Koonya a lot so I believe she was cursing us. I just had to laugh. Our God is SO much Bigger!
So the outreach consisted of us showing the Jesus film the first night and praying for people to be saved and for healing. The film was quite old but for some of these people it was the first time they have ever heard of Jesus. We prayed for a lot of people that night. My most memorable moment though was when these 3 boys came up for prayer for drunkenness. The one I was praying for looked so cocky and it was almost as if he had just come up to be near us white girls. He looked like he had a bit of history, not nice history, so I just started breaking things off him, giving him a really stern look the whole time and his whole persona changed. Instead of being this cocky arrogant man it was like fear took hold of him everytime he looked at me. I loved it. I had someone at the conference in Beira prayer that the fear of God would surround me and protect me and I felt like that was just what was happening. It was very encouraging for me to see and I really believe God ministered to that young man in some way that night.
It was actually really horrible just how many drunk people were around. Here are a people with no food drowning away their sorrows with alcohol, while their children die. I also felt there was a strong spirit of apathy on the place and of sexual impurity. It was really strong and I think it kept effecting all of us. The second day in the village was really tough going because of it, but once I realised what it was and broke it off me I was able to go about with a bit more energy, it was a constant process though. The heat didn’t help either. It’s still spring and temperatures are in the 40's sometimes! And in that village there was NO breeze so the day dragged on SO slow and for about 4 hours we just couldn’t do anything but sweat in the shade!
The morning of day two we held a meeting in the mud church and then broke off into groups of women, men and children and held some discipleship classes. Ours ending up a prayer session though as one of the mothers brought her little 8 year old girl with her that constantly suffered seizures, which I believe were demonic. Whichcraft and the demonic is huge here. You have no idea. Even in the medical clinic that the other team were running they where finding that about 80% of cases were demonic and the symptoms often left as soon as prayer was administered. For instance one man had sufferred back ache and headaches for 3 years and after a prayer of repentance it all left! So anyway we started praying for this girl and as soon as we did she started having a seizure. It looked very painful for the poor girl. We had her start repeating the name of Jesus, which to start with she couldn’t do and then all of a sudden her whole face changed and she started looking around, and for the first time in maybe her whole life she was able to distinguish people. It was like her mind had been confused all the time. With joy she started pointing out all the koonya’s and her aunties, clapping her hands and laughing. It was the best sight to see. Then she got up and tried walking. To start with her legs would hardly even bend but by the time we left the prayer hut she walked home. It was such an awesome miracle. Unfortunately she was still having seizures so we decided a team would go visit at her house later in the day and pray over the house and family etc...
I wasn’t in the second team but I heard the whole family fell to their knees and accepted Jesus that afternoon. The fact they knelt shows true repentance cause this town was really spiritually dry! We continued to pray for the girl and the next day, Sunday she started having her seizures again at church so some took her out and continued to minister to her. I pray she will be set totally free as her family continues to pray.
I didn’t get to see a lot of the healings that weekend since we had the medical tent set up and they dealt with most of the sick, but we prayed for hundreds of people and MANY were healed. Praise God!
The saddest thing about the whole thing though was that the weekend we were there it was the initiation for girls about 15/16years old. The teenage girls were all hidden away in there homes and weren’t allowed out till night where they could dance with the women in their homes or with the men outside. What I learnt that really disturbed me though was the fact that these young girls are allowed to be abused on this day by anyone! Sick! What kind of lurid tradition is that! So thats why there were so many drunk women around, probably trying to forget about what was going on behind closed doors. In these villages children are often promised off to husbands in their early years. No choice in the matter and once they reach ‘womenhood’ they are taken and married to men that can be like 3 times there age. It’s cruel. So I guess maybe this is the night where anyone can have them before they go get married. (I guess thats why we felt such a strong sexual spirit over the place when we arrived!)
It can be a sad existence for people here, and unfortunately it’s all they know. There are so many things I still don’t understand, about their culture and way of doing things. To us it seems like the most disorganised, backward society. There whole way of thinking and looking at things is completely different, their world view is completely different. It’s frustrating to the western thinker and I have to just go to God for understanding and pray He will show me His heart for them.
So Im sorry this is so long. Hopefully you have found it interesting enough to make it to this point without having to skim read. : ) I really appreciate all your support and prayers, I know I have a lot of people interceding for me which is very comforting.
Please continue to pray that I can die to myself daily and that my intimacy with God increases daily. You really realise how much you need God in a place like this, and believe me, He really does answer prayer!
May God bless you all richly!
Love Amy
PS. Happy belated birthday Jana and Vanessa. I was thinking of you and hope you had a wonderful day!
I’m home tonight feeling a bit sick (queasy stomach and mild cramps) while everyone else is out having a party with the mozambiqican pastoral students, and after having spent all day yesterday making chocolate cakes I must say I’m a little disappointed. Not so much that I will miss desert, which is a real treat here, but I’ll miss the look of delight on the mozambiqicans faces when they see it all! This is something they never get.
Just to fill you in on the pastoral training... every year there is a 4 month school held at the base for upcoming leaders and pastors from different provinces around Cabo Degado (where we are). Most of them are fairly new Christians and have come to learn how to start churches up in their own towns and disciple people. Most of them have left family and come with nothing but what they are wearing. They are very poor and some have been known to loose their families while there away due to starvation or illness. It’s a big cost for many of them. There is also quite a lot of younger men who will go back and lead youth mettings/outreaches etc...
Actually it’s quite funny. We are encouraged to mix with them as much as possible, which is hard as they can’t speak English and not many of us speak Portuguese or Makua (the heart language) but at the same time if you spend more than 10min talking to them, the talk of marriage comes up and you almost have a proposal! It’s a very hard concept to get your head around and as I love working with teenage boys, has been quite hard. I just don’t worry about it and am careful with my words. :)
On that same note though I think I have a little 13 year old boy attracted to me! I meet this boy the first day I arrived and feel in love with him (not literary). He was so cute and quiet natured. He spoke good english so we were able to communicate well straight away. He won a place in my heart and I would talk to him everyday and got to know his friends. I’ve even meet his uncle as his parents both died when he was 9. But just last night he gave me his necklace to wear till the end of school and was trying to lie all over my legs, which I believe in this culture is quite sexual. Its so horrible to think at this age he would be pursuing someone over twice is age. In saying this he is always trying to find me a husband too, maybe he thinks I’ll take him home with me. I’m got some talking to do with him I think ; )
so... I went on outreach last weekend. Whoa, talk about a HEAVY spiritual atmosphere. It was depression central. Firstly 30 of us piled into the back of a cameo (flat bed truck), 10 students, 10 pastoral students and a group on medical outreach.
We drove for 3 hours along the main road, occasionally having to try and hold a huge tarpaulin over us when the rain came, while speeding along at 90km/hr, quite entertaining. Then we pulled down a dirt road/path and drove another 20km or so into the bush bush. There in the middle of no-where was a village with nothing by mud huts, a few mango, papaya, banana and coconut trees and hundreds of dirty malnourished children running after us as we drove by, giving us big smiles and waves. Children yelling out koonya, koonya (white, white) as we drove past. When we finally stopped it was a very quick unpack and stick up the tents in fear of rain coming. Thankfully only a few drops feel, otherwise we may never have gotten out on that road.
As we are setting up tents on the local pastors land the kids just seem to keep coming and pretty soon we have about 100 kids lined up around the fences watching us. What a site!
The first thing I noticed about the kids was their tummies, sticking way out. So so many malnourished children. Then it was girls as young at 8 carrying around infants on their back, hopefully there siblings. There are no parents anywhere. Kids just run around all day with each other. They carry knives and machetes, kids maybe only 5 years old, not as weapons, but to get into coconuts or kasava (there staple diet, somthing like a chalky taro that they often eat raw and has no flavor) etc...! They are all looking after each other in a sense, while their parents are at home working or sleeping.
There was a really sad feel to the place.
So after unpacking the leader set up the screen ready to show the Jesus film and others set about preparing our traditional outreach meal of tuna pasta. Others went out to roam the village or play with the kids. I hung back a while to process things but then this drunk grandma came in and starting asking us for clothes supposedly for her daughters, yet just outside was a shop selling clothes. The only shop I saw in the whole village and probably all stuff sent over my some aid organisation that was meant to go to the people but ended up in the wrong hands! She was quite annoying and I wasn’t getting a good vibe about her. Then she started cursing us and telling us all to go home, then she would laugh and then she wanted to take us to her home next door .... In the end I just started talking to her about Gods love for her, in English, knowing she couldn’t understand but hoping her spirit would, and I tried speaking in tounges, hoping she would hear it in her own language, but she didn’t. ( you can join me in prayer for that one!) I had someone remind me to stop for the one, so thats what I did. Even if we didn’t understand one word spoken to each other I believe God could still communicate to her if she was open. As it turned out she kept cursing us the whole weekend and on the last night there while we were all sleeping you could hear her yelling over us from outside for about an hour. Apparently she was saying Koonya a lot so I believe she was cursing us. I just had to laugh. Our God is SO much Bigger!
So the outreach consisted of us showing the Jesus film the first night and praying for people to be saved and for healing. The film was quite old but for some of these people it was the first time they have ever heard of Jesus. We prayed for a lot of people that night. My most memorable moment though was when these 3 boys came up for prayer for drunkenness. The one I was praying for looked so cocky and it was almost as if he had just come up to be near us white girls. He looked like he had a bit of history, not nice history, so I just started breaking things off him, giving him a really stern look the whole time and his whole persona changed. Instead of being this cocky arrogant man it was like fear took hold of him everytime he looked at me. I loved it. I had someone at the conference in Beira prayer that the fear of God would surround me and protect me and I felt like that was just what was happening. It was very encouraging for me to see and I really believe God ministered to that young man in some way that night.
It was actually really horrible just how many drunk people were around. Here are a people with no food drowning away their sorrows with alcohol, while their children die. I also felt there was a strong spirit of apathy on the place and of sexual impurity. It was really strong and I think it kept effecting all of us. The second day in the village was really tough going because of it, but once I realised what it was and broke it off me I was able to go about with a bit more energy, it was a constant process though. The heat didn’t help either. It’s still spring and temperatures are in the 40's sometimes! And in that village there was NO breeze so the day dragged on SO slow and for about 4 hours we just couldn’t do anything but sweat in the shade!
The morning of day two we held a meeting in the mud church and then broke off into groups of women, men and children and held some discipleship classes. Ours ending up a prayer session though as one of the mothers brought her little 8 year old girl with her that constantly suffered seizures, which I believe were demonic. Whichcraft and the demonic is huge here. You have no idea. Even in the medical clinic that the other team were running they where finding that about 80% of cases were demonic and the symptoms often left as soon as prayer was administered. For instance one man had sufferred back ache and headaches for 3 years and after a prayer of repentance it all left! So anyway we started praying for this girl and as soon as we did she started having a seizure. It looked very painful for the poor girl. We had her start repeating the name of Jesus, which to start with she couldn’t do and then all of a sudden her whole face changed and she started looking around, and for the first time in maybe her whole life she was able to distinguish people. It was like her mind had been confused all the time. With joy she started pointing out all the koonya’s and her aunties, clapping her hands and laughing. It was the best sight to see. Then she got up and tried walking. To start with her legs would hardly even bend but by the time we left the prayer hut she walked home. It was such an awesome miracle. Unfortunately she was still having seizures so we decided a team would go visit at her house later in the day and pray over the house and family etc...
I wasn’t in the second team but I heard the whole family fell to their knees and accepted Jesus that afternoon. The fact they knelt shows true repentance cause this town was really spiritually dry! We continued to pray for the girl and the next day, Sunday she started having her seizures again at church so some took her out and continued to minister to her. I pray she will be set totally free as her family continues to pray.
I didn’t get to see a lot of the healings that weekend since we had the medical tent set up and they dealt with most of the sick, but we prayed for hundreds of people and MANY were healed. Praise God!
The saddest thing about the whole thing though was that the weekend we were there it was the initiation for girls about 15/16years old. The teenage girls were all hidden away in there homes and weren’t allowed out till night where they could dance with the women in their homes or with the men outside. What I learnt that really disturbed me though was the fact that these young girls are allowed to be abused on this day by anyone! Sick! What kind of lurid tradition is that! So thats why there were so many drunk women around, probably trying to forget about what was going on behind closed doors. In these villages children are often promised off to husbands in their early years. No choice in the matter and once they reach ‘womenhood’ they are taken and married to men that can be like 3 times there age. It’s cruel. So I guess maybe this is the night where anyone can have them before they go get married. (I guess thats why we felt such a strong sexual spirit over the place when we arrived!)
It can be a sad existence for people here, and unfortunately it’s all they know. There are so many things I still don’t understand, about their culture and way of doing things. To us it seems like the most disorganised, backward society. There whole way of thinking and looking at things is completely different, their world view is completely different. It’s frustrating to the western thinker and I have to just go to God for understanding and pray He will show me His heart for them.
So Im sorry this is so long. Hopefully you have found it interesting enough to make it to this point without having to skim read. : ) I really appreciate all your support and prayers, I know I have a lot of people interceding for me which is very comforting.
Please continue to pray that I can die to myself daily and that my intimacy with God increases daily. You really realise how much you need God in a place like this, and believe me, He really does answer prayer!
May God bless you all richly!
Love Amy
PS. Happy belated birthday Jana and Vanessa. I was thinking of you and hope you had a wonderful day!
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