Milford church reaches out to African friends

from the Cabinet Press

A great story about a woman's mission trip to Angola. A church in New Hampshire helped to arrange the trip. - Kale

By ELIZABETH ROTCH

“How was your trip?”

We went to Africa. Of course people want to know about it. By now I should have prepared a ready answer, but I have not.

I try to respond: It was eye-opening, heart-rending, exciting, humbling … awesome! But the words seem so inadequate.

Six members of the Church of Our Saviour, Milford — Martha Manley, Frank Manley, Dawn Formica, Richard Formica, and the Rev. Chip Robinson, and I, accompanied by Susan Lassen of Portsmouth, director of NetsforLife — were on a mission. A mission to see and learn more about our companion parish, St. Andrew’s Anglican Church in Ondjiva, Angola.

We have been working toward this for so long. Waiting six weeks for a visa – it arrived less than a week before our departure – only added to the nervous anticipation.

It has been two years since we agreed to enter into partnership with St. Andrew’s Church, and a year since Cynthia Efird, then the U.S. ambassador to Angola, visited Milford.

An Angola study group, about 20 members of the parish, has been meeting monthly this year. We’ve had book discussions, shared menus, watched movies, hosted an Angolan student from Southern New Hampshire University and plied her with questions. And still, we had very little that told us what to expect.

Angola is not a tourist destination. Its 27-year civil war ended in 2002. More than 1.5 million people were killed, 4 million were displaced, and much of the infrastructure was damaged or destroyed. Although it produces more oil than any other country in Africa, most of Angola’s people live in extreme poverty. Its infant mortality rate is one of the highest in the world.

I went to an online tourism site and typed in Ondjiva, Angola, where I found “There is nothing to see in Ondjiva.”

That is not true.

We found generous and hospitable people, congregations worshipping with joy and enthusiasm under trees and in the most primitive buildings, and an Anglican church that is working hard to make life better for the Angolans, through malaria prevention education, distribution and training in use of mosquito nets, HIV/AIDS education, loans for micro-enterprise projects, and wells, bringing water to neighborhoods whose residents had walked literally miles to fetch water for their families.

After almost three days on airplanes or in airports, we arrived in Angola’s capital city, Luanda. Diocesan staff met us and shepherded us through the airport. We stayed overnight in the city, just long enough to arise at 4 a.m. to catch yet another flight, the one that would take us to Ondjiva.

That flight had no reserved seats. I was looking for a place near our group when it occurred to me that it was a little silly. There was a young mother and a baby next to an empty seat. I asked if I could sit there; she said yes. While the woman was trying to get her packages squared away, I took the baby, and held her until we took off. Like so many of the young girls we would meet, she had dozens of tiny braids, each one decorated with a pink or white plastic ornament.

Airports, no matter where they are, seem very much the same: simple enough to navigate if you know the airport and speak the language, a little more complicated if you do not. As in Luanda, the Anglicans came through for us in Ondjiva.

Mario dos Santos, the development director for the diocese, had traveled with us from Luanda. Fr. Elias Mbale of St. Andrew’s met us at the airport. He exists! Short, slight, he seemed very happy to meet us. Tony, who would be our guide, interpreter and driver, loaded us into the Toyota Land Cruiser we would come to know well over the next few days.

He took us to our guesthouse where we had breakfast – omelets, bread, coffee -- and filled out immigration papers at the office.

We wanted to change some money, and because it was Saturday and the banks were closed, Tony took us to a large outdoor market. Boys swarmed the car when they found out what we wanted, ready to sell us all the kwanzas we would buy, at 75 kwanzas to the dollar.

The business concluded, we took time to walk around the market. I wondered if those women, these children, that group of boys, would allow us to take their pictures. Allow? Once we started, we were swamped by people begging to have us take their pictures. And they were all very anxious to see the images in the digital camera.

On the way back from the market we stopped to meet Gabi and to see the well at his home. The water needs to be treated with purification tablets, but it is right there. Drop in the bucket and pull up water!

We had a chance to rest for a little while before we went to St. Andrew’s. I had a room to myself, a real treat. I had expected much more primitive accommodations, at least a shared bathroom. The room had two beds, a private bathroom with running hot and cold water and a shower, and electricity. I had an outlet where I could charge my camera battery. I also had a television I never watched, an air conditioner I never turned on, and a refrigerator I never used.

I took a silk sleeping bag liner, which I used, not because I did not trust the sheets provided, but because it felt so good to slip into the silkiness at night after a hot day in the bush. I was glad that I had packed my small, fluffy pillow, and my shake-up flashlight came in handy once or twice when the power went off for a few minutes.

But enough of that. We were off to St. Andrew’s, where we were met by two or three dozen people of all ages, singing and dancing. We were greeted, we were welcomed, we were urged to dance. We were deeply moved.

There is a school next to the church, built by the Germans. A couple of days before our arrival the wind took off the roof. It’s almost an abstract sculpture, the corrugated zinc making a dramatic curve above the building.

We went to Fr. Mbale’s office and saw the fax machine we had bought for him. Although we had thought it was not being used – we had not had a fax from him, after all – we discovered it is a valuable tool that has proven very helpful in his work.

On Sunday, we attended church at St. Andrew’s, a service that lasted four hours.

Fr. Chip presented the altar cloth. Then he gave Fr. Mbale the stole and chasuble the women of Church of Our Saviour had stitched. I believe it is the first chasuble he has had. He seemed very touched.

Fr. Chip was the celebrant; Martha assisted as the LEM (Lay Eucharistic Minister). Not more than a dozen people took communion, and that included our group. I believe that no one who had not been confirmed could receive communion. However, every child in the congregation came forward to receive a blessing, and they were soon joined by adults. The line went on and on. Following that, there was another long line for those who wanted a healing prayer.

Not a lot of men attended church. Busy? Not interested? Lost to war?

Fr. Chip also baptized eight children.

The offering was another opportunity for worshippers to show their generosity and joyous worship. No, the plate was not passed. Rather, each person came forward, singing and dancing, to put money in the basket. Then a parade of women brought baskets of gifts to the altar: eggs, sorghum, peanuts, soda, grain.

The Peace took forever, because everyone shook hands, if not with each other, with us.

We decided we had enough paper doves to give to everyone, not just the children. The doves were made by members of our parish, each with one of the gifts of the Spirit written in English and in Portuguese. They were very well received. Women attached them to earrings, girls put them on their skirts, boys tied them to buttonholes. Even on our last night in Ondjiva, some people arrived with their paper doves.

It was quite an experience, being surrounded by people reaching for these symbols of the relationship between two such distant and disparate parishes. The partnership was becoming real. Even as we prayed for St. Andrew’s every Sunday, it was a nebulous concept, names we recognized, but without substance. Now we were putting faces to the names, and so were the Angolans.

We had been invited to a feast following the service. The table was set up in the NetsforLife building, with lace tablecloths, dishes, silverware. We had boiled potatoes, French fries, rice salad and meat. Pig? Goat? I thought it was the goat we saw in the yard the previous day, but the ribs seemed too big. There was plenty of bottled water, soda and wine.

Nightfall comes early and quite abruptly; there is no long twilight period. But, oh, there are stars in the sky. With so few lights on the ground, we could see the stars clearly. I wish I could recognize some constellations besides the Southern Cross.

Fr. Mbale has 16 congregations, stretched across Cunene Province in southern Angola. We visited several of them. In Namacunde, we went to the Church of St. Simon and St. Jude, under a tree. The altar was set up with linens, flanked by plastic chairs for the visitors. Logs provide seating for the congregations under the trees, as they did for the churches like the one we visited at Ombwelwa and at All Saints that are, well, stick buildings.

There must have been 80 people at All Saints. Where did they come from? We rode through nearly trackless bush to reach the church. We saw very little evidence of habitation, and yet, everywhere we went, people showed up. (There was just one exception. When we arrived at Santa Clara, there was a generator and sound system, but very few people. Someone’s timetable was skewed.)

Everywhere we stopped, we were welcomed, not by a polite greeter standing at the doorway, but by every single person. The women, especially, sang and danced and ululated. All of the congregations had choirs that performed most of the time we were there. Clearly they had practiced, and some of them were very good indeed.

Every congregation we visited offered us food. Food provides nourishment, but in our experience in Angola, food meant hospitality.

In a place where 60 percent of the population lives in extreme poverty, and the average income is maybe $50 a month – and while each of us carried enough cash to take us through Angola and home again – we were fed an array of dishes and beverages. Even in the bush, there was a spread: foufou (a sort of thick porridge-like dish made of maize or sorghum, often eaten with the fingers) with a sauce for dipping, meat or chicken, some sort of fermented drink. We could only guess the level of sacrifice the gifts represented. It was humbling.

From churches in the bush to the Bishop’s house in Luanda, never were we offered food without being provided with a basin of soap and water with which to wash our hands. (How often in this country do we stop somewhere for lunch, and think about washing only after we have eaten and our hands are sticky?)

Ondjiva is in Cunene Province, near the Namibian border. In Ondjiva, there are not a lot private cars; there are taxis. Vehicular traffic on the roads leading out of town is light, although there are always people walking.

All that changes near the border. Huge trucks queue up to cross into Namibia, cars wait to fill up at the gas station, stores and banks line the road, and people stream by in both directions. People on foot head into Namibia, crossing the border empty-handed and returning heavy-laden. Multi-tasking women, toting their loads on their heads, and their babies on their backs or at their breasts. Men and women, boys and girls, all carrying great loads. We saw a boy on a bike with two huge net bags of cabbages, and two people each carrying a mattress, and of course, lots of young money changers.

When we stopped to buy water and oranges for lunch, Tony had us close the windows. Too easy for someone to grab a camera or snatch an earring, he said.

Our last night at St. Andrew’s turned out to be a real celebration. Tony had told us there would be music. He did not tell us that he was a master of ceremonies extraordinaire. There was a sound system and lights. Long before we went into the church we could hear the music and singing. Probably they could hear it in Namacunde!

We had a service: singing, prayers, some words from Fr. Chip. The Angolans sing “Gloria hallelujah” so we sang “the Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and everyone joined in for the chorus. Much better than “Amazing Grace” that we had attempted earlier.

Susan Lassen presented the 10 chairs a donor had purchased for the church. Frank Manley spoke about our promise of continued commitment to St. Andrew’s, reiterating the fact that it is a partnership between parishes, not just the individuals who made the trip. Dick Formica was surprised by Fr. Mbale’s request that he lead a prayer, but he did us proud.

We received gifts, cloth and carvings, including one for Bishop Robinson. The singing continued, with “Happy Birthday” to Fr. Mbale in two languages, and we all sang and danced for a long time. Yes, we all danced and sang, and shook hands or hugged everyone in the church. It was a wonderful, joyful, uplifting way to end our visit to St. Andrew’s.

Our final dinner in Ondjiva was at Fr. Mbale’s house, where we dined on goat that had been cooked on a charcoal fire in the yard. Issa, Elias’s wife, did not eat with us -- none of the women ever has – but neither did she join in the general energy and joy of the other women who danced in the doorway the whole time we were there.

Fr. Mbale, Issa, Johanna and Julia were at the Ondjiva airport to see us off, and again, Tony and Elias helped us navigate through the bureaucracy.

Luanda is a pretty depressed city. On the one hand, there are tall, modern buildings, and a harbor filled with oil tankers. There are also lots and lots of shacks with cement block walls and corrugated zinc roofs. There also are many satellite dishes, for the same reason everyone has a cell phone. The infrastructure we take for granted does not exist.

Traffic in Luanda is amazing. The roads are jammed, with only inches between cars, or between cars and bicycles or for that matter, pedestrians, but without the aggressiveness I would have expected. Drivers allowed others to merge, to cross an intersection, to get into the roundabout.

Our hotel had a rooftop patio, which provided us with a place to sit and relax. We were very close to the beach, overlooking acres of shabby homes and shops.

The first night we went to a nearby hotel for dinner. It was large, clean, with a pool and an elegant restaurant. How easy it was for us to step away from the poverty and the foufou and the tough meat. We must not forget that others do not have our choices.

The highlight of our time in Luanda was the Sunday service at Mario dos Santos’ church, St. Peter’s. It was the feast day of St. Peter and St. Paul, and the 25th anniversary of the founding of the church, so it was a big day. Bishop Soares, who served the parish before his consecration, was there in full regalia, with four priests, including Fr. Chip. The service lasted about four hours. Probably a dozen choirs performed, including one from the Evangelical Baptist Church of Angola. People came and went; we have pictures of youngsters peering through windows. As at St. Andrew’s, the offering was a lengthy, joyous dance that included the entire congregation and most of those serving at the altar. At the end of the service, those with birthdays received birthday cake, and the Bishop was presented with a goat.

How was our trip? It was eye-opening, heart-rending, exciting, humbling … awesome.

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