Nampula!

Well, I have been in Nampula for a few days now, and I’m beginning to see how life works here. Many of the people who work with Wycliffe live here on the compound, but a few people live in Nampula city. Our compound is just on the edge of the city – a ten minute walk off one of the outer roads of Nampula. There is a wall around our entire compound and it is guarded day and night, so it definitely is a safe place to be. Some of the missionaries have lived here for 12 years! For now, I get to have my own room but I probably will be moved while some conferences are held here. Here is a pic of my room!

I haven’t seen poverty like this before. In Nampula, there are two ‘parts’ to the city – the ‘cement city’ and the barrio (not sure if I spelled this right). The former consists of buildings made of concrete (most were built when the Portuguese were here) and the latter is the residential areas. This is where the poverty is, although it’s really all over the city. Streets (other than the ones in the ‘cement city’) are just sand and houses are just shacks made of mud or sticks or other available materials. You pretty much need a 4x4 here because the rainy season has transformed the sandy roads into huge sand dunes, and there are potholes everywhere in the paved roads.

On Saturday, a group of us went to an event called the English Olympics. It was a chance for the post secondary schools in Nampula to compete in their English speaking abilities. One of the girls with Wycliffe here is a teacher and she happened to be asked to help judge the competition. It was neat seeing these kids get so excited about my language! I also learned a bit of their culture through certain poems and dramas they performed. It was a good way to ease myself into life here because although it was in English, I got to observe the Nampula kids.

Yesterday I had a chance to go to a church in the barrio and see what a typical service is like. We walked for about half an hour to get to the small stick-and-straw shack with half a dozen benches. There were probably 40 of us crammed into that little thing the size of my family’s laundry room or smaller, but everyone was so happy to be there and they sang with all their might! The service was in Portuguese (the national and trade language) and Makua (the most widely spoken language in northern Mozambique) and one of the Wycliffe girls translated for me. Everyone was so welcoming and tried chatting with me despite the language barrier, and I was grateful for their friendliness!

This week I will find out what kinds of duties I will be doing here. I’ll keep you posted!