2018 NYAC VIM Mozambique: New Sights, New friends

Michael Birchwood, a Friend of South Floral Park United Methodist Church, writes:

Tuesday opened our first full day in Mozambique after a night of varying degree of restfulness.

Our breakfast was a beautiful, sumptuous delight, lovingly prepared by our Mozambican hostess.  The boxed manga juice was a treat worth traveling 9000 miles to attain.

This was to be a free, unscripted day.  None of our special familiarization events was planned.  Especially for the morning. But to our delightful surprise Assistant to the Bishop, Jacob Jenhuro, came by to visit.   We had scheduled to go and see him on another day, so his timing was most opportune.

We spent 3 hours or so discussing with the Assistant to the Bishop, various aspects of our educational partnerships as related to Mozambique.

Our budget was a crucial topic we both felt needing exploring. Our face-to-face lengthy discussion, in the yard of the guest house,  beneath the broad leaves of a fruit tree, was most productive.  We clarified points of mutual interests which were now, somewhat murky at times.  This was partly due to the confusion email communication can  generate.

The clarification of the budget issues accomplished,  we then took up the issue of the scholarship program.  We examined ways in which communication can be enhanced to better the program.  We also looking at ways in which we can strengthen  relationships with future scholarship graduates, and up the mentoring mechanism.  We thought designing a reverse engineering scheme would be helpful to ensuring one of the principal aims of the scholarship agenda.

We also looked at the feasibility of a pastor-to-pastor shepherding program. We were excited at the positive aspects of having Mozambicans and U.S. based pastors visit each others’ churches to lecture and mentor as well as exchange trips between the young people in NYAC and Mozambique.  We left this discussion agreeing it is something worthy of on-going review.

We capped the day with a visit to downtown Beira for a visit to a clothing material store that sales capulanas (a type of a sarong worn primarily in Mozambique).

We left the store and visited the on-going Episcopal Centre building site.  We examined the nature of the work done so far, and examined the extent of what needs to be done to bring this long, on-going project to completion.

We wrapped up the  day with another wonderfully prepared dinner.  And seemingly as a “welcome to Mozambique”, we were treated to a couple of Beira’s legendary electrical blackouts.  Though quite temporary, lasting but a few minutes each time, our hosts’ disposition during each episode, helped us to understand that despite these darks spells, there will come the light.