Charity No.3: Chicumbane, MZ

(Here's another story from my time to Mozambique! You can read my previous posts about the trip here, here, and here.)

Between eight team members, two missionaries, and three MKs, we easily had (at the very least) nine cameras and 2,000+ photos of our twelve days in Mozambique and South Africa. There is one day of photos, however (the second Thursday, to be precise) when yours truly mysteriously vanished. Was I on a spiritual walkabout, communing with God amidst the beauty of the African bush?

Haha. I wish.

I was actually sick as a dog, holed up in my tent, and wishing Bert was there to make me toast and tea. (The thought of eating and drinking was revolting, of course, but the idea of having him close by was comforting.) That’s right: I was the team’s lucky and sole recipient of the self-titled “24 Hour Bush Bug.” Go Team Sarah.

After spending a few nights in Maputo, our team camped for a luxurious three days/four nights next to a church in a small town called Chicumbane. We spent one full day there, then drove deeper into the bush the next morning for the day. (This was the day we spent in Manjacaza.) That night, while driving back to camp over teeth-jarring roads that make PENNDOT look like God’s gift to transportation, I started to get a headache.

Now, in and of itself, that is a fairly normal occurrence. I get headaches all the time. I even have an app on my iPod to track them and rank them according to how bad I want to die. On a scale of “Nothing” to “Give Me a Lobotomy,” this was somewhere around “Did I Just Run Into a Brick Wall?,” but given the bumpy ride and the long day we’d spent out in the sun, I brushed it off and tried not to think about it.

Everyone was tired by the time we got back to camp, but I was exhausted. As in, "too exhausted to eat," which is not something I usually suffer from. (They don’t call me Hoover for nothing! And yes, unfortunately, they do call me that…) Upon our arrival, I immediately went to bed and slept straight through till six the next morning, quite the feat considering the roosters start yakking around three and the witchcraft drummers never stop.

I woke up feeling tired, more headache-y, and – fun! fun! – nauseous. I got up and went through the morning routine, hoping I'd feel better if I started moving around, but to no avail. (For some reason, I always think this will work. It never does.)

Well, to shorten a long story full of too much information, we all decided I should just take it easy that day. (Decided? That makes it sound like we sat around and discussed it. No, I physically could not get off my air mattress and they refused to bring it in the 4x4s. So that was kind of the kicker. ;)

One of our resident missionaries, Adrienne, stayed behind with her munchkins to keep an eye on Gimpy and to give the kids a break from the car. (Adrienne is like the African version of the Pioneer Woman, although she is very modest and would never tell you that. ;) She closed my tent when it was cold, opened it when it was hot, and made me sit up and get some fresh air halfway through the day.

And it worked. (Super Moms are the best. I hope I’m like her someday.) My nausea went away sometime mid-morning and I slept till about four (minus my “fresh air break”), despite the bands of children staring into my tent and wondering what was wrong with the white lady in her funny pajamas. The rest of the team did not get back until long after dark, so I spent the rest of the evening in my tent journaling, playing solitaire on my iPod, and munching on bits of Portuguese rolls. (Fun Fact: Mozambique has an amazing supply of carbohydrates. Many thanks to the Portuguese for infusing this bit of Western culture.)

All this has been a very long explanation to explain why I was in my tent, alone and in the dark, when choir practice started.

Now, I've said before how much I love African music. I don’t think I need to explain that much further. So when choir practice started up a mere twenty feet from my tent, I was glad. The chorus of foreign female voices permeating through the dark and quiet camp was beautiful and calming. And strangely familiar.

Where have I heard this before? (And yes, that question is as crazy as it sounds considering I was sitting alone in the dark on a continent I had spent a grand total of three weeks on. But it is not crazy when you remember I was kind of sick. ;) Technically speaking, I had not heard it before.

But then it came to me. When I lived in the Berkshires, my friends and I spent several weekends at the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Regina Laudis is a Benedictine community famous for – among other things – their Gregorian chants. The Abbey observes the full, eight hour Divine Office, which begins with Matins at 1:50 in the morning and ends with Compline sometime around 9.

Over the span of two weekends, I think I made it to Matins only once – must be in the middle of an REM cycle ;) – but it was well worth it. Even though the chants are in a different language (Latin), the sonorous chorus of women praising God in the quiet dark is not something you easily forget. Nor is it something I expected to find thousands of miles away smack dab in the middle of a culture equally as far removed from the hills of New England.

There is no moral to this story and I have no punchy point to end on. Only the thought that as I lay in my tent and listened to these women sing in the dark of the light, I marveled at how true worship sounds the same in pretty much any language. And that is an awesome, awesome thing.