Pilot's Logbook: Ecclesiastes 3 – Seasons, Birth, Death, and Change

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die…

Included in this blog are some of our fun wildlife pictures that we took while in South Africa in July. We get lots of questions about the African wildlife…so here you go!

Here in Nampula, the cool season is over (we had a couple of months where it was in the 70s and 80s) and now it is getting hot (it is usually in the high 90s). It has been extremely dry and dusty since the rain stopped in May, but this morning we had our first rain in a long time. We will slowly start getting more rain, and by January we will have regular rain. In a way we are dreading the rain because the roads become a muddy mess and so do our feet. On the other hand, right now the roads are almost sandy in some places and there is a layer of dust on everything that you can’t get rid of. As the dry season has gone on, we haven’t been getting water at our house and for the last three months we have had to have water hauled to our tank. With the rains, we can begin collecting rain water to fill our tank and water will probably be more readily available from the city as well. It makes me hum that 80s song “the rains down in Africa” (thanks Jess!).

waterbuck

We have had some interesting cultural lessons this past week. Both of the guards we employ had babies in the last week and needed some of their paychecks early so they could pay medical bills. Armando, our part time guard, had his first baby, a boy. Amisse, our regular guard, had his fifth child, a girl. It is a custom to have someone in the family, oftentimes an uncle on the mother’s side, name the baby, so it will be interesting to see how these babies are named.

During our language lesson yesterday, we heard wailing noises pass by our house and our language instructor said that someone died. As we left after our lesson, we saw a group gathering at the house across the street where a nice Muslim family lives. Later in the day, we went in to town and I picked up some food items to take to the family. We changed into nicer clothes and walked over (this time with some appropriate Portuguese condolences) and learned that one of their children (a 15 year old girl) had been sick for a long time and had passed away. And so, for the second time in our neighborhood we have seen families lose someone dear to them much too young.

Lilac-breasted roller

Dave has been overseeing some welding work being done at the MAF houses and at the hangar. One interesting difference here in Mozambique when hiring this kind of work is that you need to go buy all of the supplies and provide a lot of the equipment needed to do the job. Dave spent many hours running to different stores trying to find the right size metal, etc. needed for the job. He is now quite skilled in Portuguese when it comes to talking about metal and welding! On more than one occasion, he has gone to the home of the welder, Joaquim, to give him a ride with his equipment. On one occasion, Dave met the whole family and they said they would like to meet me as well. So yesterday, we went to their house and visited for about an hour. I told Fatima, Joaquim’s wife, that I needed to learn Portuguese first, but that I wanted to learn one new Makua word. By the time we left, she had taught us probably ten Makua words, but one is all I stored in my brain!

A week from today we leave on another adventure! We are headed to Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, to take an intensive Portuguese course for one month. We will fly to Maputo (a good three days drive south), and stay at a Christian guesthouse run by two “retired” missionary ladies. The house is close enough to the school to walk, and they provide most meals. Our language studies up to this point have been very good and rich with culture, but haven’t really included the grammar structure of the language. The course we will take in Maputo will give us more structure but will still emphasize talking. We hope this will give us a big boost in our communication abilities before we take on other responsibilities with MAF. Because Maputo is the largest city in Mozambique, we will be exposed to a different type of Moz culture and are excited about this opportunity! We don’t know what our internet situation will be in Maputo, but we will try to post some cool photos once we get down there!