FBC Missions

Well, today was definately an I love Africa day. Some days… not so much. I woke up this morning realizing (almost like a lightbulb went on) that God has given me the amazing gift of being here… so that might have helped : ) We spent half the day cleaning, organizing, baking, doing laundry, and making beds to get our house ready for the team and the other half we adventured!

Today was the 2nd year anniversary of the Baptist church that Jim and Corinne work with- Igreja Baptista. They work with the church in an area called Alto Mae (the area where we also visit families and teach a VBS to the kids) but there are other branches that have begun over different regions of the city also. Today they all came together to celebrate two years of fellowshipping as a church.

After a quick clean up and lunch- Brooke, Corinne and I along with our Mozambican friend Ortencia and her two neices made the drive outside of town to an area called Juba. As we drove I was struck by the slow but steady change of scenery from city life to country life and by the strange sensation that it’s become a normal sight to my eyes; to see the women walking along the street in their traditional kapulanas and headscarfs carrying absolutely anything and everything on top of their heads…. to see the makeshift kiosks that are set up along the road where many people make barely enough to live selling their goods…and to see the beautiful dusty Mozambican landscape made up of little barebones huts, the vast Indian ocean, and littered with a lot of lisheu (trash)- yet the land speaks for itself… it’s still beautiful. After awhile we turned off onto a dusty road, rounded the bend and arrived at a large, newly built building…. with everything but the roof : ) They held the celebration out back in a huge tent. It was really cool to be there and see people that I knew from all the different churches that we’ve visited and worked with- in the same place- altogether- united as the body of Christ. After a bunch of singing, sitting, and a little more singing we all dispersed out of the tent to eat cake and just hang out. There were little kids running around everywhere, jovenes (youth) playing futbol of course, and then Brooke and I trying to have a conversation in Portuguese with two Mozambican girls. They rode back in our car with us to the city and we had a great time teaching them english and learning more portuguese along the way. It was really special because one of the girls, Berta, is 16- the mother of a newborn- and one of the people we’ve been visitng in Alto Mae. She lives in a tiny shack made of tin and is struggling to be a mom, had to dropout of school, and I just feel like God is really trying to love her and get through to her. So it was cool to spend more time with her and make a connection.

So in conclusion; today we loved Africa. Today it was easy to love… tommorrow who knows. But I hope for many more ‘I love Africa’ days, because those are the days that I feel the Lord reveals so much more to me about his heart for these beautiful people of whose lives He wants to… and does touch.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 12th, 2006 at 2:25 pm and is filed under Mozambique 2006 - Ashley & Brooke. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.