Cemetery Confusion

Wow, what a week again!

Let me tell you, Manga doesn't play any games. This week I got sick.  Oh man!  Ha ha!  It was a riot.  The works: no throwing up, but it did a number on me.  I'm over it now and doing better. During the time that I was bed ridden, some AC repair people came over and tried to take care of our AC.  What should have taken 1, maybe 2 days, ended up in three and the thing is still broken.  It does have a fan setting and that is nice at night!!!  Actually, that's really nice since I'm on the top bunk.  On top of that, for some reason all of our investigator families either have someone dying in their family or they have to go harvest corn 80 miles away in a different district.  You know, life stuff, and it's good.  I guess it was good that I was sick this week because they will be all back next or this week.  Just gotta roll with the punches.

I have to tell you about this experience that I had Sunday night.  My companion and I were riding our bikes into our area and there are a lot of trees and practically no lighting, so flashlights are a must.  We are riding along and my companion is trying to find this guys house.  Then the guy says he lives close to a cemetery (it's about 6 o'clock at night).  So then I tell my companion that I know where that is and we start riding to it.  We get there and we call this guy and he's telling us, no, we've passed by his house a ways back.  We start to go back and this man on this bike stops us, like he's a police man, but only they don't wear drinking shirts.  He asks us what we were doing over there by the cemetery. My comp. tells him that we were just looking for some guys house and then this guys just starts jumping to conclusions, kind of like this is a cemetery.  Nobody lives out here (duh, guy, I think I know that... just dead people cause it's a cemetery).  I was trying not to lose my patience with this guy because I thought he was drunk. I looked at my comp. and said LETS GO, in English because he understands.  What I forgot was that drunk guys in Mozambique understand English and then this guy goes off on me, looking at me like I have some other reason why I'm here at the cemetery.  Then the whole village turns up.  This really old lady starts telling us to follow her, but in her dialect, so we can't understand her. She's trying to get us to go to the Chefe do bairro, which is like the neighborhood watch person here in Mozambique. I had no idea.  Really, there was a lot of this happening without me understanding what was going on.  Meanwhile my companion was trying to call our appointment so he could come here and tell these people why we were there because they didn't want to listen to us. Finally, our guy shows up and says the only thing I didn't want him to say:  Why are you guys down here?  I told you that my house is up there. Which, he didn't, but you have to understand how people give directions out here.  Here's an example: Hey, yeah, so my house is next to that one mango tree, you know, the one right there (millions of mango trees in front of you). It's next to that little store with that one fat lady that sells food on the side of the road (every single house out here has a fat lady selling food out in front of their house). It's right next to Dona Maria's house (this one is my personal favorites because everyone in the whole world is named Dona Maria out here).  So, as you can see, nobody was understanding our situation.  That's when my comp and I decide to pray within our hearts and motion to each other to do so.  Immediately I started praying.  It went something like this: Heavenly Father, I have no idea what is going on.  The village people are angry.  I think this guy is drunk and there is an old lady speaking a language that I was not taught in the MTC.  Could you please help us get out of here?  So we then started walking in the direction of the neighborhood watch people and that was interesting.  Three old guys come out of the house and they all sit down in front of us like we are about to be put on trial.  After the drunk guy explains our story and our new investigator explains why we were there, the most intense Mozambican conversation in another language that I have ever heard, started.  It sounded kinda like  "Ibidi babadi boo", those three words played over and over again coming out of everyone's mouth at the same time. Not like a chant, but more like confusion.  Finally, one of the old guys spoke and said something to the fact that we can go.  That was music to my ears because we had other lessons to get to and I felt like this was a huge waste of time.  Before we left, my companion asked what happened.   That's when they had informed us that earlier that week, apparently some people from some other church went into the cemetery and buried a pig there and it left a really bad smell.  Others came in with sacks of sand (I am still confused about what the sacks of sand mean, maybe grave robbers?).  Anyway, the long and short of it was that they thought we were these people (they obviously they don't read name tags).  Understandably though, it had been explained to them and we got out of there to go teach our heaven-sent investigator who had just bailed us out.  The lesson wasn't as successful as our escape, but at least he knows the Gospel is here again on the earth. It was an experience to say the least. Nobody got hurt and we are all fine. Heavenly Father does protect his children.  While all this was happening, I thought about Abinadi and what he had to go through and I hoped and prayed that that was not their intention with us.  I can clearly say now that I will not set foot near and cemetery day or night in this country ever again.

So, on the lighter side of things, Skype is on Sunday at four in the afternoon my time, which should be 7 in the morning for you guys, if I'm not mistaken. So Sunday is the day.

Thanks for your letter this week, it's exactly what I needed to hear.

Lots of love and I'll talk to you on Sunday.

Elder Proksch