Reports of recent Trips and Work by Godspeed Missionary Care

Reports and Experiences of the Godspeed Staff

"Differences"

Witrivier, South Africa, Monday evening…

As Karen and I have spent the past four days meeting with a cross-cultural team of missionaries who serve in Mozambique (four North Americans, two Mozambicans), we have been richly blessed --- blessed not just in seeing how God is working in and through these His servants, but also blessed by the sanctuary of where we have been meeting. This team has come out of Mozambique these few days to be in a place of rest and restoration in the northern region of South Africa. The small hotel where we have stayed is located in a rural setting, serene, with excellent food and gracious service, almost too gracious to put into a letter about serving on the missionary field; not much suffering on this trip…

For all the comforts, there are a few differences noted:

• A visit to the local mall finds the ubiquitous McDonald's restaurant. The same Big Mac, the same fries…the difference: your choice of regular sauce or Monkey Gland sauce with any order (it isn't what it sounds, but a rather catchy name).
• Had I brought my golf clubs, I could have played a most affordable round at a nearby course. Thanks to the favorable exchange rate of dollar for Rand, 18 holes on this lovely course would cost the equivalent of $12. The difference: antelope and gazelle graze the fairways, and searching for a ball in the water hazard can disturb the hippopotami. A local who played the course last month describes having to exit the course temporarily as a leopard drug its fresh catch across the green; they had to wait until it munched its lunch in a nearby tree, before they could resume play.
• To continue on the food theme, we had lunch with the team at a nearby game park, eating under one of the large thatched roof pavilions to get out of the hot sun. The food was familiar, and as I was sipping a familiar soft drink, I noticed the difference: hanging from the center of the roof, about ten feet above our heads, were five bats the size of small cats (epauletted fruit bats, I was told; no apparent danger to man other than the shock value of seeing them in one's dining area).
• A fascinating South African ex-army paratrooper whose is known by the name of "Jungle" guides us through the game park. I ask him if there are differences amongst the different nationalities he escorts routinely; he replies that there are one or two nationalities that most guides find the most difficult. I offer a guess of another culture as the worst candidate; the difference: he informs me that it is my own. Americans complain the most and demand the most. A similar theme arises during team prayer time: one of the Mozambican members mentions how he has trouble understanding how Americans pray for things that he considers perhaps not fit for Kingdom attention. In our being accustomed to comfort and an abundance of blessings, our prayer requests tend at times to be about what appear to others to be rather minor conditions. As the Mozambican team member put it, "In a country where headaches happen every day, we would not pray to relieve a headache…"
• We drive from South Africa to Maputo, the capital city of Mozambique. The road has been recently widened by a French road paving crew, and is now much smoother and more "western" than before. The difference: on the Mozambique section of the road, some sixty miles of driving, I notice not one road kill, not a single small animal in sight, dead or alive in this mostly rural section. A country where twenty years of war ended only recently, and where poverty and hunger are still rampant, small animals' contribution to the food chain extends further than one would usually expect.