More Maputo Memories

 


Our closest missionary friends in Mozambique in the mid-1980s were Lucio and Rosalee Guimaraes. The Guimaraes family arrived from Brazil the year before we moved to Maputo. No one told them that the road from Nelspruit was too dangerous to travel even in daylight. I can only imagine the guardian angels surrounding their car as they drove through the war zone with their three young children, arriving in Maputo well into the night. (The first time we drove that road was after peace had come in the early ‘90s. The girls counted 108 burned out vehicles. Erika’s comment about having grown up in Mozambique during the war was, “Do you mean we were having an adventure and didn’t even know it?)

The Guimaraes girls were the same age as ours. Lucio, like Steve, was committed to leadership training. We four adults prayed together once a week, and the children turned every occasion to be together into a ‘festa.’ It wasn’t uncommon to hold ‘theological education conferences’ around the grill in our backyard with a Mozambican Methodist theologian who had married a Brazilian girl. I taught Rosalee’s children English, and she taught mine to read and write the Portuguese Katie and Erika had picked up in conversation.

 
Lucio and Rosalee now live in Cape Town where he pastors a Portuguese church and gives pastoral support to Brazilian missionaries in Southern Africa. Their daughter Eunice and her husband Marcos (the son of good friends of ours in our Brazil days thirty years ago) joined them to teach music and Sunday school.
Easter weekend we traveled to Cape Town to welcome the next generation—Davi Guimaraes Rodrigues.
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Our closest Mozambican friends during those same years were Andre and Adelina Malombe. They paid a formal call to greet us our first week in April 1985. Adelina was an enthusiastic and gifted Sunday School teacher. Andre was assigned to teach with Steve, who soon discovered he was working with one of the most gifted teachers he had ever met even though Andre had only an eighth grade education.

The Malombes soon became our closest African friends. Their children were welcome playmates of ours. We arranged scholarships for Andre and Adelina at the Brazilian seminary where we had worked. Both finished bachelor degrees and eventually earned Master’s degrees from a Brazilian distance learning program while teaching in an Angolan seminary. Over the years we have remained close friends.

March 30 their son Elias was married. African weddings are long drawn out affairs with a church ceremony and day of festivities with the bride’s family one day and a second feast with singing and dancing the next day at the groom’s home. We drove across from Johannesburg for the second day of festivities.

 
Elias married a girl in the church whose mother is the director of women’s work for the southern region of the country. She too grew up in a strong Christian home. Many young people these days find it difficult to separate the economic development of the country from the lifestyle of sex and alcohol that they see on television or from the South African tourists who flock to the beaches. Elias and his bride have a challenge before them to build a godly marriage in a world very different from the one in which they grew up.
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Born in Brazil, raised in Mozambique…My children have grown up. They too have married and Katie has given us a grandchild. It is not surprising that their playmates have grown up too. But I look at Elias and see a little boy delighted by pin-the-tail-on-the donkey at a long-ago birthday party under the mango tree in our back yard. I look at Eunice and think of four little girls, dancing and laughing long ago in a crumbling city of broken glass and random night-time shooting.