This time, Bertuzzi and the Forestry Association got nowhere with Rungo. Shocked by the ferocity of his action for what was, after all, a tiny misdemeanour, they did their best for us. The wood had been cut down legally, all the licence fees had been paid and we had merely been transporting our own logs down to our very own sawmill, not to a customer or another part of the country, they argued. After all, what was one DAY?
Rungo was obdurate. Our wood was his, and so was our money!
“You mustn’t be bitter,” Colin told me, when he handed over a plastic carrier bag full of Rhema tapes.
“I’m NOT bitter!” I said, grittily. “I’m angry! ANGRY!”
“You must forgive people who do bad things to you,” Betsie told me.
Forgiveness was the last thing I felt like doing when I was still raw and bleeding from all the wounds the Mozambicans were inflicting on us!
“You know,” Colin went on thoughtfully with more advice, “I think it would be best if you put all this behind you and just forgot about it. You’re only going to get into more trouble if you try to fight the system. Remember what happened to Carlos Cardoso.”
I did, indeed. Carlos Cardoso was a Mozambican journalist who had been investigating corruption in the BPD bank. He had been gunned down in a street in Maputo. Nympine Chissano, President Chissano’s stepson, was alleged to have ordered the murders.
Although it went against the grain, I knew Colin was talking sense. We weren’t in Carlos Cardoso’s league but we had obviously ruffled some feathers and made people angry with us.
The next afternoon, I emptied out Colin’s carrier bag and examined the cassettes he’d chosen for me. “God is looking for you,” I read on the side of one tape. Another was entitled “When I am weak, He is strong.”
I chose a tape called “Doing the word of Jesus” and slipped it into my cassette recorder, unaware that this small action was going to change my life - and O’D’s life - completely.
The tape was electrifying. Rooted to my chair for almost an hour, I listened to an American pastor called Charles Capps talking about God in a way I had never heard anyone talk before. “Talk to the mountain (the problem) in your life,” he told us, “and if you believe what you say, you can move it out of your life.”
“God is waiting to help you,” Don Caywood told me in another tape. “Don’t keep Him waiting till tomorrow. Go to Him now!”
There was nothing negative about the Rhema tapes. Everything was possible through God. There was no need to be a victim, passively accepting the kicks and blows of life. With God’s help, we could change our circumstances around completely and become victors. “If God be for you,” Don Caywood quoted from the Bible, “who can be against you?”
Colin’s cassettes gave a terrific boost to my wilting spirits and galvanized me into action. Things were so bad I didn’t even have an old tea bag now to dunk into a cup of boiling water.
Walking down the forest track one morning after I had finished listening to the last cassette, I looked for a suitably private spot where I could be alone and unheard. According to the Rhemas, I had to talk to God aloud (as I unwittingly used to do before Caetano’s death) and this time I didn’t want anyone else to hear me.
I stopped just past the entrance gate and standing under the leafy trees, looked up into the blue, blue sky. “We need help, God,” I said.
I didn’t ask God for revenge or even for justice. Those were not the things we needed. Rungo had brought us to our knees and we were now beyond the point of being just broke. He had not only taken what little money we had left but had put us into debt.
“We’re running out of food, ” I told God, and timidly made my request. “We need … ten million meticais.”
Always be specific when you ask God for things, the Rhema tapes had told me, and that way you’ll know for sure that He was the one who answered your prayers.
Not sure whether God was going to answer me - after all, I had turned my back on Him for more than a year now – I slowly walked back to the house.
The next day, something quite out of the ordinary occurred. Thanks to Rungo and the long year during which he hadn’t allowed us to sell our wood, our customers had all deserted us for other sawmills but in the afternoon, a pickup drove down the track and Mr. Chuabo, who hadn’t been down to the sawmill to buy timber for about three years, climbed out of it. “I need some wood,” he told O’D and handed over … yes, TEN MILLION METICAIS!
After Chuabo had driven off, I walked along the track back to the shady spot where I had asked God for help. Sunshine, brighter than bright, danced around me and dazzled my eyes. I was thrilled and filled with a sense of awe. A nonentity of a woman living in the back of beyond, I had prayed to God and the very next afternoon He had answered me by giving me exactly what I had asked Him for!
I was in the middle of thanking God when another feeling flooded through me. Along with the awe, came … fear. Taken aback, I fell silent and in that instant I realised that I had glimpsed the true nature and power of God. This wasn’t the mythical, cosy and one-sided God of love that some Western people had dreamed up to make themselves feel good. This was the real God, a God not only of love but One who had other sides as well. A God of judgment, not a God to be taken lightly or to turn your back on. Struck by what had happened, I realised I had just experienced the Biblical fear of God.
The ten million didn’t last long and in the weeks that followed, I made several more requests for money.
Standing once again under the shade of the leafy trees just past the entrance, I asked God for another ten million meticais. Again Mr. Chuabo paid us a visit the very next afternoon. This time, however, he gave O’D not ten but eleven million meticais.
For some days, I pondered on the difference in the amount I had asked for and the amount I had received. What was God telling me? Was he telling me not to limit Him and that I could ask for more?
Back under the leafy trees at my special spot, I decided to ask God for more, much more. This time, I decided to ask him for … fifty million meticais.
A day later, Mr. Chibante, who owned a large and busy carpentry shop in Chimoio, drove his lorry down to us. He needed wood he told O’D, a great deal of wood!
At the end of summer, when the leaves were beginning to turn coppery-brown, Azelia died.
One morning, when I went into the laundry room to take washing out of the washing machine, I was struck by the terrible change in her tall, willowy figure. With her back towards me, she was sitting down and ironing with the heavy charcoal iron. Her once strong shoulders had shrunk into skeletal thinness and I could see that handling the iron was an effort for her.
An infinite sadness gripped me. Azelia had worked for me for eight years and now, I knew, she too was about to die. Although she had always insisted she was suffering from asthma, I’d had the idea that this wasn’t true and that her ‘asthma’ was, in fact, AIDS. There was nothing I could do for her but there was one last little thing I could give to her.
I put a hand on the back of one of her painfully thin shoulders. “Azelia,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady and not to let her know that I knew, “how would you like to go on holiday for a month, with full pay?”
She didn’t turn around. “I would like that Dona,” she told me in a muffled voice. “When can I go?”
A tear rolled down my face and I quickly turned away from her in case she looked around and saw I was crying for her. Oh, Azelia. Oh, poor, once lovely, strong, Azelia. The last of the three people I had become so fond of and who had made my life in the Nhamacoa so much easier. I opened the door of the washing machine and started pulling clothes out into a plastic basket. “Today, when you’re finished.”
Azelia took more than a month’s holiday. One day, Lloyd met her on the forest track and she told him she wasn’t going to come back to work. A few weeks after this meeting, she died.
After Azelia’s death, Lloyd brought a young woman called Joaquina to work for me and she
couldn’t have been more different to Azelia. Small, lean and a real woman of the bush, Joaquina’s only possessions were the dirty skimpy top and capulana she was wearing. Discovering she knew absolutely nothing about anything, I had to begin from scratch and gave her some of my old clothes, a bar of soap and some lessons on hygiene. Unable to read and write or even count to more than ten, she made Lloyd and me laugh when she told us she had been six years old when her son had been born.
Lloyd left for better things in Chimoio and a tall old cook called Domingo arrived out of the blue, looking for a job. Unable to believe my luck, I employed him. He had worked in Zimbabwe, he told me, for the Colcom meat company and before that, for a Jewish couple in Bulawayo.
Joaquina and Domingo had been working for me for a couple of months when I found the strange little bottle. One morning, handing out ingredients to Domingo for a special recipe for lunch, I reached up to the spice rack for the oregano and noticed a tiny glass bottle wedged between the cinnamon and the nutmeg.
“Is this yours, Domingo?” I asked, showing him the little bottle. It was filled with something that looked like a yellowish oil.
“No, Madam,” he said.
I pulled out the tiny wooden stopper and sniffed the bottle’s contents. There was no smell. I held it out to Domingo to sniff. “What do you think it is?”
“I don’t know, Madam.”
I got the same reaction when I questioned Joaquina and when I asked the only other person who had access to the house, he looked blank as well.
“Did you leave this in my spice rack?” I asked O’D.
“Never seen it before,” he told me.
There was only one conclusion to come to. Hidden in my spice rack, the tiny bottle was the very thing Colin had warned me to look out for - a fetish from a witch doctor!
I carried the bottle to the rubbish pit and threw it in. Who, I wondered, wanted to harm us? Could it be … the witch woman? Had she talked Joaquina into hiding the fetish in my kitchen? We’d had a lot of trouble from her and her family and we had caught her son’s two wives cutting down some of our small trees. They were stealing our planks in the dead of night, I was sure, why else had they built their huts so close to us? They were like one of the mountains the Rhema tapes had talked about. I had to get rid of them. I had to get them out of our lives.
The next day, in the afternoon, using my newfound knowledge from Colins’ cassettes, I decided to take on the witch woman.
Standing underneath the avocado trees, I stared in the direction of her hut, not far from the back of our house and hidden only by a thin band of tall grass and forest. “Witch woman!” I said loudly and authoritively, “in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, I order you to leave sawmill land! Leave and go back to the place you came from! Leave right now!”
Back in the house, I sat down on the sofa and wondered what affect my words were having on the woman. Was she suddenly feeling an irresistible urge to return to her last place of residence? Was she already throwing her possessions into a capulana, tying it into a bundle …
A horrible and frightening sound broke into my thoughts. Startled, I looked up and saw an ancient, white-haired and wrinkled old woman stomping past the east-facing sitting room window. Making the sounds a rabid dog would make, she growled and snarled and snapped in awful inhuman fury.
What was this? I ducked down out of sight. Hopefully, she wouldn’t see me.
The animal sounds grew fainter and fainter and when I was sure the woman was gone, I went outside. Jonah, Alfixa’s son, was standing by the carpenter’s bench, sharpening some chainsaw teeth. I walked over to him.
“Did you see that old woman, Jonah?” I asked.
He nodded his head.
“Where did she come from?”
“Here,” Jonah pointed his finger at a spot on the ground, just in front of his feet.
“What?” Taken aback, I stared down at the spot. Was he telling me that the old woman had materialized out of the ground in front of him?
“I didn’t see where she came from,” he explained. “I was working and when I looked up, she was just here.” Again he pointed at the spot in front of him.
“Oh, I see. Do you know her?”
“No, I have never seen her before.”
Shaken, I walked slowly back to the house. Weird. How very, very weird. No sooner had I ordered the witch woman to leave, than a strange and very angry old crone who bore no resemblance whatsoever to the witch woman who lived near my house, had come stomping past my window and making horrible demonic animal sounds. This was no coincidence, I was sure. What was going on here? Was this a REAL witch woman and not the other?
In the kitchen, I lit a match and turned on the gas under the kettle. I needed a cup of tea to revive myself. What a fright the old woman had given me! In future, I told myself, I would leave these things up to God. He knew much more about what was going on than I did.
CHAPTER THIRTY
GOD’S RADIO STATION
And I will give you shepherds according to My heart who will feed you with knowledge and understanding.
I came across Transworld Radio by chance, or so I thought.
Although Colin’s tapes had been a real help, I knew that there was something missing. I needed something more than the Rhema sermons, helpful as they were.
One evening, tired of the dreary news on the BBC World Service and horrified by the awful things I was hearing on SW Radio Africa, the independent Zimbabwean radio station broadcasting out of London, I slowly turned the dial on my shortwave radio, searching for music and something to lighten my mood. I was halfway up the shortwave one waveband when my attention was caught by some words spoken by a very English voice, a voice which seemed to be speaking directly to me from out of my radio.
“You’ve just been through a terrible time, haven’t you?” I heard the calm and gentle voice of Dick Saunders say. “A terrible time of trouble and darkness such as you’ve never experienced before and which you thought would never end. If you would just put your trust in God, He’ll help you … He won’t let you down ... People will let you down … but God never will.”
I slowly sank down into a chair to listen. God …
“You probably think you’ve found us by accident, don’t you?” the English voice went on, “But you didn’t, you know. It was God who directed your hand, God who directed that dial you were turning on your radio.”
Astonished, I listened to this man on the radio who seemed to know all about my circumstances and then, when he was finished talking, a Canadian called Dr. Lutzer who had a dry and witty sense of humour began to talk about God. He was followed by others; Chuck Swindoll, David Jeremiah and the wonderful Dr. J. Vernon McGee, who was taking us on something he called his Bible Bus with his twangy Texas accent. Just when I needed it, I had found Transworld Radio - God’s radio station!
From then on, I listened every evening and every morning to Dick Saunders and the other Pastors. Apart from Dick Saunders, who was English and from Hailsham, there were Pastors from Canada, America, Australia, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Transworld Radio was an in-depth Bible teaching station, I discovered, where passages were often explained, sentence by sentence.
Like a thirsty man stumbling into an oasis, I drank in their teachings.
My Bible took on a battered look, I underlined sentences, made notes in the margins and on the inside of the covers, the gold lettering on the front cover wore off.
Why had it taken so long to find this radio station?
Something I had once read in a book about Buddhism flitted into my mind. “When the pupil is ready, the Guru will appear.” Obviously, I had been a tough nut to crack, to soften up!
Full of enthusiasm for a book I had ignored for years, I embarked on an intensive period of learning that was to last for years and was infinitely satisfying. Armed with my new knowledge, I discovered to my surprise how Biblically illiterate most of the world was. Even western Christians seemed to fall into this category. No
wonder everyone crumbled when faced with a disaster.
On the BBC World Service, I caught an episode of ‘West Way’, the BBC’s attempt at a soap opera. Here, astonishingly, I heard the ‘Roman Catholic priest’ tell a lapsed member of his congregation that, “Jesus kissed the feet of lepers.”
“He never did that!” I told the BBC sternly. “Do your homework!”
Another time, a Canadian Professor of Philosophy excitedly told the BBC that he had solved the puzzle of Jesus’ walk across the stormy waters of Galilee. “He wasn’t walking on water,” the Professor told the world, “he was walking on ice - because the water had frozen over!”
I glared at the radio. “Get real!” I told the Professor. “Can’t you read? The disciples’ fishing boat ‘was in the middle of the sea, tossed by the waves for the wind was contrary’ when they had seen Jesus walking towards them.” How had the Professor come up with the ice? And how absurd!
Eve did not eat an apple, you know, and Jesus was not visited by three wise men but by wise men who gave him three gifts. Mary Magdalene wasn’t a prostitute and according to the prophet Isaiah, about seven hundred years before Jesus was born, God did not sit over a flat earth but above the circle of the earth.
“There is no such thing as evil,” a man said on NPR, the American radio station I had found on the World Space Satellite Radio Alan Schwarz had brought to us from Johannesburg.
“Oh, yes there is,” I contradicted him. “You just close your eyes to it because you don’t want to see it.”
Isolated as I was in a tiny patch of forest in the middle of nowhere, God had taken the trouble to give me teachers of his own choice. He had invited me to join His vast congregation of unseen radio listeners who, I discovered, lived in countries all over the world. I had become a member of Transworld Radio. I had become part of God’s invisible Church.
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
THE NHAMACOA FILM CLUB
2009
When Afonso hung the DVD from the lowest branch of the mango tree in front of the shop, the word went out. “It’s Kapfupi! The Notorious Kapfupi! They’re showing ‘What goes around, comes around’ on Saturday!”
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