Recently Mercy Air flew an Education Ministry team to teach for a week at a YWAM DTS that was
being run north of Marromeu on the banks of the Zambezi
River in Mozambique.
The team
taught the students how the ‘classroom in a box’ could be used to reach some of
the communities that they will work with in the future.
At the end
of the week MAF flew some guys down from N. Moz
for the weekend to see and discuss the education work with a view to using it
themselves in their ministry.
Accomodation was pretty standard for this
type of trip. Nine days sleeping on someone's porch with their cat and
pregnant dog!
Nensa,
where WYAM are based, is in the bush about an hours drive from Marromeu (which
itself is eight hours drive from the nearest town of any useful size). One
hour’s drive further on is Chupunga where Mary Moffat is buried. She was Dr.
Livingstone’s wife. Dr. Livingstone is best known as an explorer and having
someone once greet him with the words ‘Dr. Livingstone I presume’. There is a
lot more to him than that though. He was a very principled man and his three
driving passions were Christianity, Commerce and Community. The first of these
was what drew him to Africa in the first place and his passion for the Zambezi
was the vision that it would eventually be used as a highway to transport the
Gospel into southern Africa. This had only
moderate success as he ended up spending more time discovering large lakes and categorising
plants and animals than he did preaching.
I’m not
trying to suggest we are taking over the baton – his legacy leaves far
too
large a baton to carry anyway, but by working in this area we do feel
somewhat proud to be a very small link in continuing his dream albeit
150 years later.
Anyway,
Mary is buried in Chapunga where there is now a Catholic church.
Just down a
small lane in an unkempt graveyard by the River Zambezi is her grave.
Cell phone
reception in Moz is improving dramatically but there are still huge holes where
reception is non existent. The YWAM base at Nensa would fall into this category
but gets a ‘marginally unreachable’ tag due to a handy mound of dirt where the
faintest of cell phone signal was discovered. It became so popular it was
almost worn away so they built it up with a few bricks.
One day soon it
will get a thatch roof to stop people getting frazzled by the sun as they
frantically type sms’s and then hold their phones in the air to get reception.
Two of the girls who work with YWAM live in Marromeu
and just happen to have a war relic in their back garden - as you do.
Not sure but I think it's a Russian T38 tank.
It's become a bit of a feature but more specially with the kids who think it's the best climbing frame and swing ever.
Mercy Air team
