Someone told me that one of the most expensive flights you can take is one to Mozambique.
“How much do they cost?” I asked.
“Like, ten thousand dollars, or something,” I was told.
“Why?”
“Because no one goes there.”
Also, Jayce and I met a fellow Adventures in Missions team leader at our hostel in Lilongwe last week who had just come from Mozambique.
“We started calling it ‘No-zambique’ because it was so hard to get in,” she said. “The visitor’s visa is over eighty dollars, and you need to have a letter of invitation written by someone in the country, and it needs to be printed on a church letterhead, and notarized. I didn’t even know people notarized things outside the US. But with all that, we still had a hard time because the country didn’t know whether we missionaries belonged to the Religious Affairs or Tourism Departments.”
“So, did you get in finally?” we asked.
“Yes,” she said, “but a week later they told us we had 24 hours to get out of the country with a police escort.”
“You got deported?”
“Yeah,” she said with a grin. “We got deported.”
We left our home for the month, Mzuzu, on Monday. We traveled south to Lilongwe to bid our Exposure girls farewell and prepare for the complicated process of traveling to Mozambique on Wednesday. But in an effort to get us all across the border smoothly, our squad’s logistics people spent an extra few days at the embassy, double checking our visas and filling out stacks of paperwork. On Friday, finally, we were cleared to leave for the border. 41 shiny new visas were plastered in each of our passports.
The bus ride to the border took about eight hours, which wasn’t too bad. But the vehicle itself seemed designed for short distances, not long rides in comfort: its floors were dusty and its seats were hard and straight-backed. Most had the added thrill of not being attached to the chair frames, so by the end of the ride the center aisle was littered with wooden and linoleum staple-gunned cushions.
We ditched our bus at the Malawi border. The plan was to take all of our luggage off and cross into Mozambique on foot, then meet up with a church contact who had organized our rides from there. After filling out forms that allowed us to exit Malawi, we loaded up and walked several hundred yards across a bridge, into Mozambique.
Three hours doesn’t seem like a long time to spend in a country, but when those three hours are spent sitting on concrete wondering if your passport will get a stamp, it’s a different story. For three hours we waited outside customs while our squad leaders turned in the applications and notarized, church letterhead-ed invitations and fees that proved they had jumped through all the required hoops.
We watched other people glide across the border on bikes. It started to get colder and darker. We put on sweatshirts. We made sandwiches for dinner. We looked for bushes to use as toilets. A squad leader would periodically tell us to pray.
The border closed at six o’clock. And at six o’clock, we were informed that we would not be allowed into Mozambique because last week, the country had changed its entry requirements and our paperwork was therefore unacceptable. I’m not clear on all the details, but I know that our invitations needed a signature from Religious Affairs in the capital, Maputo. Also, everything needed to be in Portuguese.
Since we got owned by Mozambique’s crazy bureaucracy, we had no choice but to walk back over the border to Malawi. The Malawian border had also closed for the night, and the few remaining employees told us that we would not be allowed back into Malawi.
Our bus had left us anyway, so we were convinced that we’d have to spend the night there. But not even that was possible.
“Since you’ve already been given an exit stamp, you are under the control of Mozambique, and they are responsible for you,” a guard told us.
“But Mozambique won’t allow us in, so we need to be back in Malawi,” we explained.
“But you can’t go back to Malawi because you are not our responsibility anymore.”
“We understand. But it is impossible for us to be in Mozambique now, so we need to get back into Malawi, or else we’ll spend the night here at the border tonight.”
“You cannot spent the night here at the border because you’ll compromise our safety. If you stay here we will have to chase you off.”
“We understand. But there’s nowhere for us to go. That is why we need you to let us back into Malawi.”
“You cannot go back into Malawi. You have your exit stamp already.”
The infuriating cycle continued until our squad leader Bre finally convinced a guard to make a phone call to an employee who had gone home to return and try to let us back over the border. A call was made to our bus, which was well on its way back to Lilongwe. In the meantime, we compromised the border’s safety and sprawled on the sidewalk in the dark. We ate more food. We got cold and huddled together. There was nowhere on Earth we could legally be.
Kelsey, Nicole, and I hiked through some bushes behind the now dark customs office to take care of some business. In medias res, I shined my headlamp straight ahead and it landed on two glowing chrome eyes. The face underneath the chrome eyes started barking fiercely, and the body underneath the face started jumping against a chain link fence.
“There’s a dog!” we whisper-shrieked. But we couldn’t move yet. We were stuck there, in the bushes, taking care of business.
A second later we realized the dog was fenced in and wouldn’t get to us. But the shadowy person approaching us in the dark with a gun could.
Kelsey and Nicole were still in the bushes, so I ran up to him.
“Hello! Hello, we’re just, uh…”
Every country talks about doing what we were doing differently. It’s one of the things you have to figure out whenever you go somewhere new. In that moment I had to choose which term to use, and I had to choose quickly. Were we going to the bathroom or relieving ourselves? Would “WC” suffice to explain the situation, or did I need to be blunt and say we were peeing in the bushes? I decided to go with the most seemingly universal and easily-recognized word.
“We’re using the toilets here,” I sputtered quickly. I looked at what I thought had been the guard’s gun. It was just a club. I mean, it was still a weapon. But it wasn’t on the side of the fence that could threaten us yet.
The guard said, “Oh.” I wanted to make absolutely sure he understood what was happening.
“Is that all right? My friends are peeing rightthere. We are just using the toilet.”
“Oh,” he said again. He didn’t move.
“Is that all right?” I wanted him to go away.
“Yes, it’s all right.” He didn’t move.
“Thank you, sir,” I said. I looked over. Kelsey and Nicole were heading over quickly, trying not to laugh. The guard watched us walk back to the sidewalk. He didn’t move.
Safe and relieved, we had an incredible view of the stars. The power had gone out, which made us all feel both vulnerable and awestruck. I don’t know if I have ever seen the Milky Way in the States, but we see it often here in Africa and every time we see it, we tell one another, “That’s the Milky Way! Do you see it?” And we reply to one another, “Yes! I see it!”
Hours later, we were finally cleared to go back over the border and we loaded our bags back onto the exact same bus. It was a miserable, sleepy, cold two hour ride backwards to the city of Blantyre, where a World Race contact had agreed to let us crash. I kept expecting the ride to be over every time I saw a church. But we kept driving by churches. Once, our bus slowed down by a religious-looking building and I sighed with relief, until I realized it was the wrong religion. I looked through the mosque’s warmly lit windows at the cushions inside and ached to lie down and sleep.
Only a few minutes later we arrived and unloaded again and set up camp in a tiny church school. Eight of us ladies crowded into a 10 foot by 10 foot room, one of us sleeping halfway in the hall. It was cramped. It was stressful and claustrophobic. It was exhausting. But it it was sleep.
On Saturday we were still stuck at the school. On Monday (today, as I write this), there was to be a meeting in Mozambique where they would decide whether to admit us into the country. Until a decision was reached, we were stranded in Blantyre.
So we have been making the best of it. On Saturday a group of us went to see the Malawi Flames beat Benin in a football match, which qualified them for the African Cup of Nations for the first time in ten years! The celebration, crowd, noise, and red, black, and green face paint was unforgettable and strangely relaxing compared to the cramped accommodations we had to return to.
Well, the cramped accommodations weren’t that bad. We got to watch movies together. There were a lot of cute neighborhood kids to play with. And our sleeping pads were so close together that the scorpion living underneath couldn’t get up to threaten us. And when we packed our pads away, I stepped on him. My first scorpion kill of the race.
On Sunday we did a little bit of ministry–some walking, some talking (more on that in an upcoming blog), some preaching and singing–and moved to the house we are staying now. It’s a beautiful house with a terraced back yard that people rent out for weddings. It has a shower and a kitchen and a living room with a big screen TV that was playing Love Comes Softly last night. It’s a good place to wait at.
We’re hoping the Mozambican government will let us into the country so we can head to our new ministry sites this week. Team Oak has a fantastic month ahead of us at a boys’ home near the city of Beira, and we cannot wait to meet our new ministry hosts! But for now, we are in Beautiful Blantyre (it really is a beautiful city), all together, living in a ridiculous story about trying to enter No-zambique. At least we didn’t arrive by plane.
