Maputo, Mozambique

6- 7 September, 2007

“A luta continua” was the Mozambican political slogan during the civil war. “The struggle continues!” It was written all over this city when we lived here in the 1980s. Seventeen years have passed since we moved away. I remember sitting on the plane ready to take off, making a list of things I wouldn’t miss: potholes, garbage in the street, the sound of gunfire at night, etc. After filling a couple pages in my notebook, I felt guilty and made a short list of things I would miss—a very short list—mostly people. Many of those people have scattered in the intervening years, but we had lunch with André and Adelina Malombe, our closest Mozambican friends, and shared the ups and downs of both our ministries and our family lives.

How the city has changed since peace came in 1992. In our day 97% of Mozambique’s food was imported. Every two or three months we went grocery shopping—in the neighboring country of Swaziland. Soon after we arrived in Maputo we were excited to see a restaurant with a big sign: Pizzaria. But when we went in, the waiters didn’t know what ‘pizza’ was. I don’t recall whether they had any food that day or not. It wasn’t uncommon for a restaurant to have nothing but bread and broth to serve, not even butter to put on the bread. Communist laws didn’t allow for the dismissal of employees just because there was nothing for them to do.

Today the city is full of restaurants catering to South African tourists come to enjoy the beach. Shops and markets overflow with fruits and vegetables, blue jeans and athletic shoes, instead of the few carefully arranged items they used to hold, marked “Sample only. Not for sale.”

The sand road to the seminary at Laulane has been paved. The training school we helped to set up is undergoing a face-lift in preparation for a new group of students arriving in January. Our SIM colleague, Mattias Hoffmeyer, now lives in the mission house. The cushions of our old couch could use recovering. We slept in what was once our daughters’ bedroom and ate at the dining table we used to race each other around, making a game out of collating Theological Education by Extension materials. Even one of the German shepherds Mattias keeps could be the twin of our Snoopy.

Our years in Mozambique were undoubtedly the most difficult of my life so far. (See my novel The Wooden Ox to get a feel for the stress of those days.) But there were good times, too. The black paint of the chalk board we used for school is still on the wall of the garage although it is flaking, and the girls’ last math assignment can no longer be read. The mango tree still towers above our roof where Katie used to terrify me by hanging by her knees three stories above the cement yard. The sidewalk where Erika learned to ride her two-wheeler still circles the house although the branches of the lemon tree have grown low, and she would have difficulty riding under it even if she hadn’t grown taller than her mother.

As I walked down the hall to leave, my eyes grew moist. How easy it is to focus on the difficulties of those days and forget the taste of passion fruit from our vines, the brilliant magenta of the bougainvillea hedge, or the sound of children’s laughter in the back yard.

The neighborhood children no longer shout “Mae da Catarina” when they see me. The ones who played with my girls have grown up and moved away. Undoubtedly some have contracted HIV. The political war ended in 1992, but a spiritual struggle for the people of this land is still going on. “A luta continua!”