A Tour of Good-Byes

With only two weeks remaining before our departure, Laura and I have begun the task of saying farewell. In this culture, farewells are extremely important. And saying these farewells is a job made more difficult by the fact that we have no plans for returning, and cannot make any promises in response to people's requests for us to return.

Our new friends Dave & Ann, who have recently moved to Mozambique from the United States to start a career as missionaries, bumped into us on one stop on our departure tour and wrote the following on their own blog:

This morning we went out to Khongolote as we knew our friend Juca was preaching and we feel such a part of this church. When we pulled up, we saw Steve and Laura Kuhn’s car and were glad to see them. They only have a couple more Sundays in Mozambique and we are probably going to cry when they leave. Steve has been helping with micro-economic development programs and Laura teaches at our school. They came for a one-year assignment and what an impact they have had.

Steve and Laura simply wanted to say ‘good-bye’ to the people of Khongolote. But the church would have none of that! They were called up to the front, not once, but twice. The people laid hands on them, thanking God that they came, praying for their safe return, and praying for their future ministry. Steve spoke a short time in a mixture of Portuguese and Tsonga, encouraging the people. When the Tsonga words came out, the older ladies clicked in pleased response. It was clear that they have the hearts of the people. In the end, everyone waved their hands at them (BIG waves) and said over and over “Boa Viagem!” (Good trip!). The entire thing brought tears to my eyes and I thank God for the short time we have been able to spend with this delightful and inspiring young couple.

Thanks, Dave & Ann, for your kind words. You can read Dave & Ann's blog at this address. In their blog, they do a great job of conveying their experiences as they settle into their second career as missionaries in Mozambique.

Poverty's Differential Diagnosis

Six years ago, I stood amongst real, as-seen-on-tv poverty for the first time. I was on a two-week study trip to Managua, Nicaragua. I remember clearly standing in our single-storey hotel, or perhaps it was a compound. The man guarding the door advertised his power with a larger gun than I had seen short of Rambo movies my entire life.

I remember brushing my teeth and, out of habit, wetting my toothbrush using the strictly forbidden tap water. And I remember the terror of not knowing what was going to happen to me for having committed a breach of this magnitude. Perhaps there's a room in the basement of the hotel packed tightly with the remains of those who had committed the same grievous sin. Or perhaps the ill effects on my health would be a slow and painful reminder for the duration of my life.

This is a different world, I thought. An uncomfortable world.

While in Nicaragua, I learned things about this world, and our world -- the two are, after all, inseparably knit together; arguably, a single world -- that were so shocking that they would take several years to soak into my being.

What I remember most about the trip was a conversation with our facilitator, Pastor Jon, about what appropriate responses to poverty ought to be. We were talking about all sorts of things that we had witnessed over the previous dozen days: about the benefits and risks of wealthy countries like Canada practicing "tied aid", about the harmfulness of improving people's housing by forced relocations, about self-empowerment through fair trade and cooperatives. Our interpretations of the previous days didn't always agree. He seemed to be casting thunderclouds over the best efforts of the Western world to reduce global poverty. In our arguments, I took the pragmatic road and he the idealistic. Me the rational, and he the fanciful. And I distinctly remember the apex of the conversation, when the wisdom of all of my 22 years focused down to a sharp, irrefutable point.

I had him right in my sights, and I pounced with what I was sure would be the decisive, knock-out blow in our debate: "You're telling me that you don't want to help these poor people realize economic improvement?"

How can you stand in the midst of all of this poverty -- all of these starving children with threads of clothing hanging off their stick-thin bodies -- and reject economic development as a solution?

"That's exactly what I'm saying," he calmly replied. And with that, he wriggled out of my trap.

* * * * *

Fast-forward six years into the future (I've wisened up enough to know that I don't have all the answers anymore), and I'm again standing amongst a similar degree of poverty, albeit in a different tucked-away, nearly-forgotten corner of the world. Only now am I beginning to understand what Pastor Jon was trying to say.

He was, perhaps, trying to be a little provocative. No, he didn't want those children to waste further into the gutters of history. Instead, he was opening my eyes to an interpretation of poverty that goes beyond a lack of stuff.

With his comments percolating in my mind over these past six years, I am finally prepared to agree with his wisdom. Poverty is not always about a lack of stuff; Pastor Jon would argue that it's never about a lack of stuff.

The solution that we find to poverty will necessarily be determined by our own interpretations of its causes. Bryant Myers proposes some cause-response pairs as examples:

If the poor lack things, the response is relief and social welfare.

If the poor lack knowledge, the response is education.

If the culture of the poor is flawed, then they must become like us.

If the social system makes them poor, then the system ought to be changed.

If the poor are sinners, then they need to be evangelized.

If the poor are sinned against, then we need to work for justice.

But even our worldview interprets for us our reading of these cause-response pairs. There is something more fundamental underlying each of these pairings: does the locus of control for reshaping this world lay with us, or with them? Does it flow necessarily from my desire to empower the poor that I'm suggesting that I have power that they lack, and can pass it on to them? Perhaps so; perhaps that's the truth. Or perhaps not.

The responses that we so often bring to the developing world reflect our god-complexes: that we hold the key -- the power -- to progress, and once we deliver this key to the developing world, they'll become more like us. More forward-looking. They'll improve.

These god-complexes suggests that we have all of the answers, and the developing world need only sit and listen attentively, take good notes, and all will be fine.

Even the labels that we choose to apply connote this interpretation: the developing world is behind us, but they're developing. Soon they'll catch up and be just like us. The First World is, after all, Number One.

What is required is a differential diagnosis. That's a label that doctors use in complex medical situations (as popularized by the maverick television doctor, Gregory House), and which Jeffrey Sachs has borrowed for international development. The complex label makes this simple statement: there is no single cure for poverty.

People experience poverty in different ways.

People are poor for different reasons.

A one-dimensional understanding of poverty will, by necessity, be an incomplete understanding.

On Driving and Culture

In Mozambique, drivers drive on the wrong side of the road -- that is, the left side. Of course, it is not uncommon to see a driver, impatient with the progress of traffic, turn on his hazard lights and bully his way down the lane of oncoming traffic.

Chapas, the local name given to the swarms of privately-operated transit minibuses, are notorious for doing this. They will make a centre lane in traffic, and flash their headlights, indicating to oncoming drivers that they had better get out of the way, because the chapa is not going to give an inch.

The chapas always win. The drivers rarely own their minibus, and abuse them accordingly. The Portuguese word, “chapa”, has a more general meaning as well: sheet of steel. And that seems to be the only requirement for registration as a minibus. Certainly having a windshield is not a requirement. Neither is having all four tires firmly bolted on. Nor having a working set of brakes.

Forget about seatbelts, too. If they are all working, there may be eight of them. Certainly not enough for the fifteen or more sweaty people shoehorned inside.

Traffic becomes most interesting when the game becomes chapa-versus-chapa. Winner-takes-all. Chapas aggressively pursue passengers, competing against each other in a high-stakes, flying steel match of leapfrog. The driver’s helper opens and closes the door, and provides extra eyes and ears on the road. He also shouts destinations, and pounds on the chapa’s rugged sides.

I recently watched a chapa up the ante to beat his competitors. Already overflowing with passengers bashing their heads on the roof with each bump, the chapa driver hopped the curb and raced down the sidewalk, splitting pedestrians like a combine harvester working a wheat field. His door helper had to run alongside to keep up; so too did a passenger desperately – for some unknown reason – wanting a ride.

In the end, the chapa driver was forced to concede defeat, retreating to the paved roadway behind the victor.

It is easy to think that riding a chapa requires an unnecessarily high degree of risk. Risk not worth its reward. But entering the streets of Maputo is a high-risk venture regardless of method: walkers, drivers, cyclists, transit-riders. We are all at risk.

When I first sat behind the wheel of a car here, I did not understand what I was seeing. Driving on the other side of the road, traffic seemed to flow backwards. Red lights did not seem to matter much, and they were hard to interpret: sometimes they would flash yellow before green, sometimes after. Missing are the familiar patterns and timing of home. Often, they do not even work, reducing intersections to life-threatening chaos.

Before understanding the rules and being able to decode the hidden order behind the chaos, driving was scary and stressful.

“Just find a hole, and drive through it,” was the advice that I received. There is barely a soul who will stop and let another driver through. Occasionally drivers will be honked at for grid locking an intersection. They will almost always be honked at for not grid locking an intersection.

I quickly got used to chapa drivers who would go around me while I was stopped at a red light and drive straight through the intersection ahead. I can count on that happening every day. What really set me back was when a pickup truck full of impatient police officers did the same thing. There was no emergency, but neither was there oncoming traffic so, apparently, no reason to stop.

I often run red lights, not because I am in a hurry but because I fear that not running the red light will result in the unexpecting driver behind me to run into the back of my car. Up to half a dozen cars run the red light at each change. Green lights, by consequence, do not signal clear passage.

Traffic is often terribly backed up, often traceable back to poor or selfish decisions by drivers or pedestrians. But now that I am comfortable with it, driving is enjoyable. For the most part, other drivers rarely react in anger when I make a mistake, perhaps only because "mistakes" are so common. And some rules are innovative: like extra-wide shoulders on highways so that slower drivers can pull off the road without inconvenience and allow faster drivers to pass.

It is easy to think that the roadways would run more smoothly if they would just adopt some of our rules from home. But whenever engaging new cultures, we must always strive to be quick to listen, and slow to speak. On the roadways and in the culture, it has been useful for me to step back and understand the structure behind the chaos before rolling up my sleeves to try to "fix" things.

All Mixed Up

It is incredibly unfair for you to impose yourselves on a village where you are so linguistically deaf and dumb that you don't even understand what you are doing, or what people think of you.

Ivan Illich,
"To Hell With Good Intentions" Speech, 1968

When we first arrived in Mozambique, we sat at a restaurant and did our best pointing job to order a great meal. When it came time for dessert, Laura asked the waiter to describe the ice cream dish (a bold move, given the few words of Portuguese we could understand at the time). He said that it contained maça. Apple. Sounds good, Laura thought, and ordered it.

Except that he didn't say maça. He said massa. Spaghetti.

Strange. Even stranger that it's on the menu at all. We've seen it at several restaurants since, though we haven't been able to find a single Mozambican who confesses to eating the stuff.

Not long after Laura's spaghetti incident, I was helping out at the seminary construction project. Geraldo asked me for some massa. This time, I was on the ball. I knew he didn't want an apple. But did he want me to buy him a plate of spaghetti?

Turns out that massa -- which literally means 'mixture' -- is also mortar for bricks.

For better or for worse, I'll never know all the mistakes that I've made trying to speak Portuguese. Once in a while the confusion is unearthed and corrected. One of the most memorable occasions happened while having a conversation with Jeronimo, a non-Christian. Wanting to learn more about me, he asked a simple question: "Why is it that you are a missionary, but don't attend church?"

"I don't attend church?" I asked, confused. How would he have that impression?

"You told me a couple of weeks ago that you don't attend church."

Why would I tell him that? Surely I didn't. Or maybe I had meant to tell him that I didn't attend church that particular Sunday.

And as simple as that, an innocuous (though significant) misunderstanding takes root, merely because I apparently used the wrong verb tense in a long-forgotten conversation.

Ivan Illich was a combative social thinker who was infamous for his biting critiques of missionaries and other "dogooders ... pretentiously imposing" ourselves on foreign cultures. His critiques are most painful when he succeeds at digging his teeth a little too close to the truth. The truth is, we have often felt linguistically deaf and dumb this year. The truth is, our lack of fluency has stunted the growth of our relationships both in depth and breadth.

Language is a barrier that has prevented us from getting to know more than a handful of Mozambicans really well.

Unlike Mr Illich, I don't think that linguistic and cultural barriers are insurmountable. I don't think that missionaries are necessarily living in their adopted countries as invasive salesmen and unwelcome propagators of Western culture.

Some are, sure. But not all. I've witnessed some good examples of "my-way-or-the-highway" theology, but I've also witnessed some better examples of people who love the sick, who love the forgotten, who love the poor. People who spend their time learning about their Mozambican neighbours, sharing meals with them and tears with them, learning from them and only when necessary teaching them. Like a friend, a nurse, who helped a mother through toxemia and taught her to feed her pre-mature child when the hospital couldn't provide adequate care.

We can't love our neighbours without knowing our neighbours, and we can't know our neighbours without learning to talk to them. But the very act of learning their language builds bonds of trust.

Yes, it's difficult. Yes, it takes time. Yes, we'll look foolish at times. We might even bring construction workers a surprise (but welcomed) plate of spaghetti once or twice. If that's the price of friendship, let me look foolish.

Calamity's New Face

A journalist reporting in the midst of Mozambique's brutal civil war once wrote about a young girl who, standing near him, pointed to the sky and whispered, "calamidades." Calamity. The year was 1988, and the journalist was in Morrumbala in the province of Zambezia. By the journalist's account, he didn't know what to expect. Perhaps the keen young observer was tuned into the early rumble of an incoming war plane, or perhaps warning of the onset of a torrential downpour that could lead to an equally devastating flood.

The journalist looked to the sky, to the southeast where the girl's small finger pointed, and saw nothing.

The rain fell gently. The child, thin, shivering and clad in burlap, continued to point to the sky, repeating the word: calamidades.

Calamidades was the child's shorthand for the Mozambique government's Department for the Prevention and Combat of Natural Calamities, and what this particular child noticed was a distant airplane approaching their airstrip near the Morrumbala mountain. (1) The calamity, as it turned out, was already present in her starving body, and her ears were acutely tuned to the hum of relief approaching from a distance.

Nearly 20 years have passed since that plane arrived in northern Mozambique bringing food and clothing to that weary child and her family. In June 1999, with civil war comfortably behind the country, the corrupt and discredited "calamity department" was replaced by a slimmed-down and modernized National Institute for the Management of Emergencies.

These children, now grown, still talk about calamidades, except that in urban Maputo, the colourful word has taken on a slightly new meaning.

With $100 a month, a Mozambican need not be too concerned about where his or her next meal is coming from. That level of income even leaves a little extra to spend at the local used clothing stores, shopping for calamidades, the word now used to describe the boatloads of used clothing donated by wealthy nations and sold in poor ones.

Timoteo showed me his shoulder bag, a stylish grey bag with the initials DKNY branded on its top. It's in good condition, which also means that it wasn't cheap. Calamidades, Timoteo said, are becoming very expensive. He spoke as if they have a cool allure about them, not unlike, I suppose, teenagers at home who shop at the local Value Village in search of the prized bowling shirt with some stranger's name embroidered on the breast pocket.

He pointed at the running shoes on my feet. Another example of something that he could buy at the local calamity shop, he said.

For those living in the city, Mozambique has taken a small step back from the precipice of poverty. Enough of a step back that these children have now grown up and purchase their calamidades at local shops rather than waiting for them to arrive by air drop.

A tentative step, but a hopeful one.

In urban Mozambique, calamity has become a good thing.


(1) William Finnegan, A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

A Motley Crew

Time – the precise time, anyway – may not be important in Africa, but that is not to say that no matter is urgent. That little lesson was reinforced as I sat at a local church meeting with Mario and Samuel about some project details.

I had been expecting a call from our landlord for the past several weeks, ever since he asked Laura if he could take some of the bars off of our windows to re-use them in another apartment. They are redundant so I did not mind, though I am not sure in Mozambique whether or not I would have legal ground to argue even if I did mind.

Weeks later, this is the day that he finally called. “The workers are here now,” he said, “Could you be home in 10 minutes to let them in?”

I have waited for this call for weeks, and now you want me home in ten minutes?

I was planning on returning to work out of my home office soon. “Give me forty minutes,” I replied. That gave me enough time to quickly wrap up the work I was in the middle of at the church and get home.

When I arrived at home, I was greeted by the crew that the landlord had hired to remove the bars. Three young men, none of them yet 20, all wearing tattered street clothes. One held an old and well-used screwdriver, another a hammer and the third a standard kitchen knife.

Under any other circumstances, I would have been afraid.

Once inside, they asked me for a screwdriver that would actually fit into the heads of the screws they were trying to remove.

Remember, labour is cheap. The proper tools are not. I did not have a proper screwdriver either.

They hammered and chiselled away at the stubborn screws. Several times, I was sure they were going to slip and shatter the window. The thought had occurred to them as well. They debated amongst themselves leaving the most difficult of the three sets of bars, and forfeiting the $2 prize that they stood to split between them once they had successfully completed their mission.

Doubts aside, they persevered. Eventually. “It will just take 20 minutes,” the landlord had assured me over the telephone, “and then you can be back on your way.”

It was at the hour-and-forty-minute mark that I looked up to see that the motley crew had woven my clothesline through the bars and were yanking furiously to try to free them from the window opening.

That was just 20 minutes after I had looked up to the sight of the boy who appeared to be the foreman standing precariously, partly propped into the air by a windowsill, and partly by the shoulder of his crew member. I got a ladder from the other room, and they thanked me.

When the crew was finished their assignment, they promptly left. Their work may have been urgent, but those three panels of iron bars are still sitting in my home, though no longer affixed to the window. I do not know when the landlord will come to pick them up. He will probably need them urgently next month, when I have long since forgotten that they are sitting there. And no doubt my phone will ring when I am doing something somewhere else.

Unwanted House Guests

We have a spare bedroom in our apartment, and on some occasions we've even had the fortune of having people use it. We particularly enjoy visitors from home -- not even necessarily people we know, but people passing through from familiar parts of the world.

And, this being Africa, we also have our share of unwanted house guests.

Ants are a common problem. There are hoards of them. Laura keeps a special towel in the kitchen, reserved for ant removal. I have to remember not to dry the dishes with that one.

And we have to store all of our open food in plastic containers.

The most recent intruders have been dining away at our table for the past week, despite our best efforts to eradicate them. The termites are literally eating the wood of our table, leaving little piles of sawdust on the floor below.

We have a smaller bedside table wrapped in a garbage bag in our freezer. If the kitchen table is the termites' home, the smaller table was perhaps their summer cottage. And judging by their activity, they liked their summer cottage best.

They don't help out around the house, and are really quite a nuisance. They've really been enjoying a novel Laura recently borrowed; it's such a good book that they've devoured the first 50 pages.

There was also a time a couple of weeks ago when a gecko came to visit. The harmless lizard sat on our wall, apparently hoping that we would watch something on television, but we rarely do. When we tried to show him the door, he hid in a crevice of our sofa, so we put the whole sofa on the balcony until the gecko had moved on. (Or had he merely found a better hiding place, deeper within the chair?)

Mosquitos are common back home, but here we have to worry about malaria, which infects nearly half a billion people a year and causes millions of deaths in this part of the world. We take precautions, but I worry about the impact on our health of those precautions, like the little chemical pads that we heat beside our bed to ward them off or the anti-malarial medication that can cause hallucinations.

At least they can't be as harmful as the chemical patch I saw for sale in South Africa. The one that works by seeping repellent into your bloodstream and "turns your urine dark brown and odourous," according to the warning printed on the packaging.

And then there are times that the unwanted house guests don't even have the courtesy to show themselves. We just look at our arms or legs and see the little -- or big -- red swells that they have left behind. Little housewarming presents most recently courtesy of spiders roaming our bed while we try to sleep. Small tokens to say that they appreciate our hospitality.

A Fractured Understanding

Later today, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor will be awarded the $1.5 million Templeton Prize for his lifetime's work of arguing that problems such as violence and racism can only be solved by considering both their secular and spiritual dimensions.

This award will come as a surprise to many who draw a sharp line between the secular and spiritual realms. Many Christians in the West compartmentalize our lives in this way, limiting prayer to spiritual problems and our own intelligence and hard work to solving "real" problems. Atheists dismiss prayer as a psychological exercise at best.

"We will pay a high price," Taylor says, "if we continue to allow this muddled thinking to prevail."

Taylor's work would be received by most Africans as being, well, obvious. He might as well have won a boatload of cash for arguing that the sun is hot or that the rain comes from clouds.

Africans readily accept the role of spiritual influences and causes underlying physical events. Many access traditional spirits for protection, divination, and healing from witchcraft.

Several people have impressed upon us that these practices are "very, very common," and every time I'm struck by the emphasis that they use. A Mozambican woman with whom Laura works was bold enough to say that easily 95% of people still practice traditional beliefs. "If they say they don't, they're probably just hiding it."

Mario's mother recently asked to borrow money from him to buy a goat to bring to a sangoma. He wouldn't lend it to her, but faces pressure to abide. Sangomas often ask for goats or chickens. They use the heads and feet to make healing potions, and keep the good meat for themselves. It's a good deal for the witch doctor, Mario thought. They're well-fed.

Africans who engage the services of such traditional spiritualists are often looking to detect and cure physical or spiritual ailments, looking to foretell or alter the future. Perhaps they want to identify and punish someone who has committed a crime against them.

The practice is pervasive, though often hidden beneath society's veneer. I've heard stories of Christian ministers consulting these practitioners in an attempt to secure leadership positions within their churches. I've heard similar stories of government leaders.

This inclination towards seeing the world in its unfractured reality leads African Christians to be very spiritual people, and leads Africans of many faith practices to be keenly interested in discussions of gods and spiritual powers -- often moreso than the Western missionaries who have come wanting to teach them.

Some African traditional practices, like divination and witchcraft, are clearly inconsistent with Christianity, just as those of us in the West who rely on rugged individualism rather than on God are similarly inconsistent.

That notwithstanding, African Christians struggle to see why some Western missionaries preach that reliance on God is incompatible with healing using the natural restorative properties of tree roots and bark, while these same missionaries can themselves pop a Tylenol Gelcap to soothe their own aches and pains. Africans wonder whether Westerners dance dangerously close to an idolatrous devotion to science, while Westerners believe that tradition-adhering Africans are themselves tapping their toes clearly in the polytheistic danger zone.

Each group, focused on the faults of the other, believes that its own practices are safely within the acceptable bounds of Christianity.

Charles Taylor is onto something. But it's not enough to look at the world through our own physical and spiritual lens: we must try to look through our neighbour's as well. Even those of us, like Charles Taylor, who acknowledge an integrated spiritual-physical world, lack the wisdom of God. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror.