Traveling south to north through Zimbabwe you cruise through dry but beautiful scenery. The mountains are enormous domes like overgrown pebbles. The highway is straight and smooth. Donkeys, always in pairs, graze along the shoulder. We often stopped at the Golden Spiderweb, an idyllic spot halfway between the border and Harare for tea and cream scones served on china with lace everything from curtains to table mats.

We were never very regimental travelers. Itineraries were always something to discover as you went rather than map out in advance. So on this visit to Harare we sailed into town with a vague idea of staying in a Baptist guesthouse somewhere in George. I remember feasting on pastries and aromatic coffee at the Italian bakery. Sitting on the marble steps outside while the children jumped and chased and banged into tables. As we cruised through town in the afternoon, pale pink light filtered through the lines of trees on the avenue. On the radio, Rod Stewart was singing, “Have I told you lately that I love you,” and my heart swelled with love for my family and that feeling of really having stumbled into a good thing. George was some suburb out by the airport so we wandered around a bit trying to find it. The sun was setting when we arrived at the gate. Or we thought it was the gate. Nothing was very clearly marked. Maybe these were covert Baptists and their guesthouse was strictly on a need to know basis. We tried several of the big gates, banging on them, honking the really macho Land Rover horn, and calming the kids who all needed to pee after indulging at the Italian bakery. Finally, one of the gates opened up and let us in. The place was deserted and quiet. As we piled out of the car and started to unload, Henry and Ellie started climbing a tree and Andrew just sort of toddled around. A young guy walked up to me and flashed a toy gun at me. I smiled in that half-dumb way that Americans have when confronted with foreigners acting weird. Only it wasn’t a toy. Pretty soon two guys were pointing guns at us while another two waited like hyena’s at a lion’s feast. With the car half-unpacked, bags all over the place, kids toddling around, it was just a bad time to get robbed. The kids needed baths. We were headed into Mozambique the next day to begin our blessed ministry of Bible translation. Being held up by nervous punks with guns was wrong, all wrong. I was doing the non-confrontational thing. No problem. Take what you want. Try to avoid eye contact. Hilary started going all cowboy on me. The punks had grabbed her bag and she wanted our passports back. Finally I had to shout at my own wife to lie down and stop looking at these guys. I remember Henry going over and lying down next to his Mom. Even during a violent crime, kids are so dang cute. I told the guy with the gun in my face to hold on because I had some cash. I reached behind the front seat and pulled out an envelope with more than a thousand dollars in cash. He took one look at that and they were heading out of there fast. The leader told me to come along and I kind of dragged my feet so he gave me a half-hearted punch in the jaw and I pretended to fall down and they all ran off, jumped into a little white car and were gone. The punch didn’t hurt. Honest. I’m a really tough guy despite my gentle appearance. I was always getting punched in grade school for no good reason and I don’t remember the punches to my head having any effect.

Hilary was really mad. Probably crying. “Those guys were scared to death. Couldn’t you see the gun shaking in their hands. And they took our passports and DIREs.” (A DIRE is a Mozambican residence permit) My more immediate concern was that they had taken both sets of car keys and buttons for the immobilizer. So now we’re stuck at the scene of the crime with a dead Land Rover, no paperwork, and three kids that thought the whole thing was some sort of big make-believe. Hilary rummaged around in the console of the car and discovered that our passports and DIREs were in there. So that was a relief. We managed to call an MAF pilot in the area who came by (drove not flew), disconnected the differential on the vehicle and dragged us through town to the home of Dave, a Zimbabwean farmer that had given up plants to cultivate pastors. He and his wife did this from a palatial home in a tony neighborhood of Harare. The irony of this was lost on us. We were just glad for a place to hide. The walls were high. The guard dogs were big and black. Our room was comfortable and we just laid on the bed and trembled. Getting robbed was not fun. While it was taking place I was cool as a cowboy. But days later I would shake and jump and jitter. Scary world out there. Somebody points a gun at you and steals your peace of mind. And robs your theology of all its foundations. No more, “God didn’t send us to the mission field to fail.” Instead of Joshua I started preaching from Exodus, “At a lodging place on the way, the LORD met Moses and was about to kill him.” Yep, been there, done that. Luckily, Hilary didn’t grab a flint knife and cut somebody’s foreskin off so that the Lord would leave me alone. Our unfortunate occurrence provided a great opportunity for the MAF pilot to shine. His international supervisors were in town. As we drove through town with the Land Rover dragging behind, one of these slick business-types was saying, “Man, you’ve gotta tell your supporters about this.” It was as if getting robbed was really going to be the best thing that ever happened to our ministry. “No,” I said. “I’m not going to tell anybody about this.” He was insistent. The other guys started swapping gruesome stories about missionaries being robbed, and suffering in car accidents, and being eaten by lions, etc. This was making Hilary and me more and more freaky. Finally, I said, “Can you guys talk about something else?” In the next couple of days, a mechanic re-keyed the Land Rover. I managed to get into town and take out a huge pile of Zimbabwe dollars from the ATM machine, all the time with my heart pounding for fear that I’d get robbed again. Within a few days, the Landie was running and we were ready to get the heck out of there. No more driving at twilight for us. We left town at high noon and drove under the blazing sun to our destiny.

I forgive those jerks for robbing us on that evening. We were stupid to not have our guesthouse located before sundown. Sipping cappuccinos while some desperate dudes in a little white car pondered following us home and relieving us of our wallets. Doesn’t get much dumber than that. Well, I’m blaming the victim. In a “tales of missionary amazingness” style story the four guys run home, count their money and start partying. They squander all the money. One of the guys ends up in the gutter with the only thing left over from the crime: my little Gideons New Testament. He reads the plan of salvation in the opening pages and then devours the Good News and repents of his wicked ways. Years later, while attending a church meeting he shares his testimony of how through a life of crime he found the light thanks to a Bible he stole from a missionary on a cold night in George. After the service an old man walks up to the former thief who is now a pastor preaching the Gospel in the most remote of locations. The old man walks up to him and says, “Son, that was me you robbed on that day. Praise the Lord that he turned your evil deed into a chance to spread the Gospel.” The young minister would then fall at the feet of the old man and beg forgiveness and the old man would forgive him and call him brother and they would both get their picture in Guideposts. Something like that would be great. I’m still waiting.

“I’m from Tete!” he replied in amazement. “What are you going to do there?”

“We’re helping translate the Bible into Nyungwe.”

”I speak Nyungwe!” he said. I looked at this guy and got interested.

I asked, “What are you doing in Machava?”

“I just graduated from Bible college and I’m looking for a job.”

So Lourenço became my first Nyungwe tutor. He and I studied “Translating the Word of God,” or TWOG as insiders like to call it, and began working our way through the draft of the Gospel of Luke in Nyungwe. Unfortunately he had been out of Tete for more than a decade so his Nyungwe was pretty weak in some parts. With the help of the Nyungwe version of Luke and a Nyungwe dictionary his language skills quickly improved.

God had brought us together with a talented translator and we were blessed with a lot of other people who were working on our behalf to get us ASAP to Tete. During the week, we didn’t really have any worries. Efficient people in Maputo were taking care of all our residency permits and I only needed to travel to town once a week or so to sign papers or check email. Maputo is not what gave me stomach ulcers. The road to Machava gave me stomach ulcers. It was rainy season and the sandy road was a long undulating path that through the passage of time had developed enormous potholes, or slaggat as the Afrikaners like to say. Slaggat is a wonderful word for potholes. It sounds like an expletive. These slaggats were something worth swearing about. They were sometimes twenty or thirty feet long, sometimes more. Shoot they were miles long. Deep, too. In our low rider VW Double Cab Combi I would drive in one side and sink slowly until the wheels were covered and we’d just chug through the puddle like a tugboat until we came out the other side. For a brief moment I’d be on top of a sand mound before descending once more into the next inland ocean. This was a skill I never learned at pre-field orientation: “How to drive a car underwater.” The local people were resourceful. In order to increase traction in the potholes, they would fill them with locally available materials. Since there was a Coca Cola factory nearby, there was an excess of broken bottle glass. So they filled the slaggats with broken bottles. I was sure this would pop my tires but for some reason this was smooth broken glass. The other material they used was branches from thorn bushes. These were put in the potholes I suppose so that if the glass didn’t pop your tires the thorns would. Amazingly, in four months of living in Machava I never had a flat tire on that road. This was the new world I lived in. A place where cars are boats, roads are lakes and sharp objects are placed under your tires as a favor.

The one flat tire I did have during that time took place in a game park in Swaziland where we had gone to spend the day since in order to get our permanent residence visas we had to leave the country and come back in on our new visa. The game park seemed to specialize in ostriches. Everything else was hidden behind grass that grew higher than our heads. We couldn’t get out of the vehicle because of lions. I didn’t see any lions. But when a rock in the road banged into my tire, I got to change my tire hurriedly, always wondering when a lion would leap on me out of the grass and give me a good story to tell in my missionary newsletter.

Before heading overseas I rather fancied myself to be a clever “desktop publisher.” My newsletters had clipart. And fancy fonts. When we were raising funds for our vehicle I made a little graph of a Land Rover climbing a hill toward 100% with Mozambique at the summit. It was hard to get photos into my newsletters since all my cameras were old-fashioned. I spent a lot of money on a gadget that could capture still frames from my video camera. Once we went overseas, our newsletters were more difficult to write. We wanted people to think we were doing something somehow ministry related, but sitting in a classroom, or standing in a line, or studying “Translating the Word of God” are not very photogenic activities. So we mostly included pictures of our cute kids. Thankfully, it was the cute kid shots that people wanted anyway. For years after we were in Mozambique we would get emails from people thanking us for the photos of our kids “and God bless you in your ministry in Madagascar.” Do prayers for our ministry in Mozambique count if they are about Madagascar?

Ellie and the Bob Bus.	Cute kid shot: Andrew
Figuring out the gadget	Bedtime story

So our newsletters were pretty fancy. But I learned later that this can backfire. Supporters don’t want to send money to missionaries that spend all their time fiddling around with fonts on their newsletters. They want rough and ready missives full of inspiring stories, preferably printed on recycled paper for economy’s sake. The irony of prayer letters is that when you really need the prayer you’re too busy to send letters. When we started, it was before the advent of email. Or at least it seemed that way to our prayer partners. So we needed to produce something on paper, get it checked by the censors, put it in an envelope and send it by mail. It was slow and really expensive and by the time it got to your mailbox I would already have been eaten by a lion. Even if you did know I was being chewed on by a lion you might pray for me in Madagascar and the guardian angels would rush off to the wrong place. Nowadays, supporters know everything I’m doing as I do it. For example, I just posted on my Facebook status, “I’m writing about our life in Machava ten years ago.”

While I was riding the Glass Thorn Roller Coaster and rescuing implicit information from translational obscurity, Hilary was dealing with dangers of a domestic kind. It was hot season, so we kept all the windows open and the fans blowing, but in the night rain storms would blow in from the Indian Ocean to disturb our sleep. A rainstorm in Oregon is like the white noise on a TV it just shushes for hours. But a rainstorm in Mozambique is like a car wreck, or an avalanche. Suddenly your running like crazy all over the house, closing windows, and setting out buckets to catch rain that fall unimpeded through multiple holes in the roof. The other watery thrill in our house was the shower which was somehow hooked up to the electricity. If you took a shower when the power was out you could be certain of being spared electrocution. Otherwise you had to step on a wooden platform and avoid touching the faucets without rubber gloves on. In addition to water, this shower sprayed you with electricity. None of us died from the experience but it was electrifying.

What woman hasn’t dreamed of having a maid to take care of all the household drudgery? In Mozambique all your dreams can come true. In fact, it was a social sin or a sign of stinginess to not have a maid. So Hilary had a maid. I think her name was Rosa. For some reason most of our maids are named Rosa. Maybe it goes with the job. We needed Rosa because we had no machines. In America, machines do all the housework. Washing machines, driers, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners. Maybe that’s why I’ve never met anyone named Rosa in America. But in Mozambique there are lots of Rosas. Some of them are quiet. Some are chatty. Some polish the glaze off your dishes. Some of them are so lazy that you have to tell them every step of their routine. I thought it was great having a maid. I wanted a butler. When I got to Tete I ended up with Alberto, a cantankerous nine-fingered chain-smoker who killed snakes in our yard and chased off more thieves in a single evening of duty than the rest of our guards did in a month. Hilary did not like having a maid. She didn’t want another woman in her house. Maybe this is some woman thing. They mark out their territory and chase off competitors. Whatever the case, Hilary didn’t enjoy having maids. I loved it because I didn’t have to feel guilty for not doing the dishes. In fact making dirty dishes was helping to support someone named Rosa and her husband.

The thing I was most excited about in Machava was my new Land Rover. OK, I was most excited about bringing God’s Word to someone in their own language. But after that I was really excited about my Land Rover. The only Land Rover we could afford was a two-seater utility vehicle with all the aesthetics of a breadbox. The lack of seats didn’t matter since as soon as we got the vehicle we drove it out to Nelspruit, South Africa and had a welder add seats, a roof rack and the coolest bull bar I’ve ever seen. Unlike most bull bars in the US, my bull bar actually got used on a bull. It bent the bar but it killed the bull so it really worked!

In order to keep my Bob Bus in Mozambique I would have had to pay $1600 in import duties. Instead I sold it to another up-and-coming missionary. Almost as soon as he purchased it, the Bob Bus completely fell apart like a cartoon vehicle whose tires pop off and motor sends out big plumes of smoke. I felt so bad that I gave the missionary back some of his money. In 2001 I saw the Bob Bus for sale in a car lot in South Africa and I fantasized of picking up a second vehicle. With the Bob Bus gone, a new rumbling Land Rover decked out with all sorts of protective armor, and our residency papers in our pockets, we headed north via Harare, Zimbabwe where we stopped long enough to get robbed at gunpoint before proceeding with our mission.

Greater smoothness of diction and a saving of time might have been secured by the employment of a person accustomed to compilation; but my journals having been kept for my own private purposes, no one else could have made use of them, or have entered with intelligence into the circumstances in which I was placed in Africa, far from any European companion. Those who have never carried a book through the press can form no idea of the amount of toil it involves. The process has increased my respect for authors and authoresses a thousand-fold.

David Livingstone: Preface to Missionary Travels, 1857

Hilary and I found ourselves sitting in a dimly lit room surrounded by a circle of benevolent old men. These were the veterans of our mission, hardened and wizened by years of living in Mozambique. We sat, amazed to be in the company of such Livingstonian legends and awaited our fate. We were really nervous. Each of them had their reasons for wanting us to serve as Nyungwe translators. We had no idea what we were getting into. But they thought it was a good idea so who were we to disagree? After that late night meeting in a damp guesthouse in Harare, Zimbabwe, we made plans to visit the language team already located in Tete, Mikael and Jeni Bister. They were likewise legendary. They met in Maputo like a modern day Ruth and Boaz. Soon their separate paths came together and they were rumbling across the Mozambican wilds together doing language survey.  We celebrated Christmas together in their house in Tete. The seasons are contrary in Africa so all the Western holidays feel wrong. Thanksgiving falls during the hottest, hungriest time of year. And Christmas is celebrated by us Americans behind closed curtains with the air con blasting in hopes of creating a slight chill in the air to match the artificial tree and pile of presents. Christmas was celebrated by the Mozambicans as well. Children would greet you with Boas Festas!, literally “Happy Holidays,” but which meant, “Give us some money.” And the churches celebrated Christmas by keeping an all-night vigil in which the purpose was prayer but the result was always a building full of sleeping saints.

The drive from Harare to Tete is only about three hours. It was like driving from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to Dodge City. Still, we were fascinated by everything. Along the side of the road, huge baobab trees caused us to stop the Bob Bus suddenly and take pictures. The land was dry and brown and dusty, but beautiful, too, in a dry, brown, dusty way. As you descend toward the Zambezi River, the municipality of Tete in its wisdom has located the city dump alongside the road to greet you. This is a good thing because it improves Tete in comparison. Passing through mounds of smoldering garbage you see Tete through a haze of smoke and heat waves rising from the thousands of tin roofs. The only relief from the earth tones is the green serpentine band that squeezes up against the muddy Zambezi, a band of papyrus and river grass frequented by bright yellow and red bishops, African jacanas and the occasional water rat, venomous snake, crocodile and hippo. This is Tete with Kalawera mountain on one side and a muddy brown river on the other. Even when David Livingstone visited in 1856, he commented, “Tete is now a ruin.” The remains of the military fort that he visited then are still in existence but very little else remains as monument to more than 500 years of Portuguese habitation.

Above Tete the avenging sun smites the heads of the inhabitants leaving them torpid. In counterpoint to the hot city, a beautiful bridge spans the river and people walk cheerily across, the river breeze whipping at their clothes. Suspended above the brown Zambezi and momentarily freed from the concrete jungle, they seem happy and carefree, an enormous line-dance of Mozambicans traversing that fragile space between heaven and earth.

In town, however, it is really hot. Really, really, really hot. Hot! Breathtakingly hot. Make you panic and not know where to run kind of hot. Sit in the bank because it’s air-conditioned hot. Drink water faster than the filter can produce it hot. Kids pass out in the afternoon and sleep through the evening, through the night and until the next morning kind of hot. Amazingly, we were not immediately impacted by the heat. I don’t remember noticing the heat. I was just so fascinated by it all. Hilary and the kids actually ventured outside Mikael and Jeni’s house and went for a walk. During the day. When it was… hot.

The Tetenses appeared impervious to the heat. While we hid beneath large floppy-hats and layers of sunblock, I kid you not, I saw Teteans standing out in the sun and just talking. Not running for shade. Not even sweating. But I’m probably jumping ahead. At that stage I probably didn’t notice anyone standing in the sun. I was too amazed to actually be in THE PLACE. THE MISSION FIELD. This was it and no newlywed has ever been as impervious to the imperfections of their new spouse as we were to the unusual characteristics of our new home.

I wasted no time learning Nyungwe. A man came by to fix something on the house. I got out my notebook and asked, Como se diz ‘bom dia’ em Nyungwe?, “How do you say ‘Good morning’ in Nyungwe?” He replied, É ‘bom dia.’ Yes, I replied, that’s how you say it in Portuguese, but how do you say it in Nyungwe. É o mesmo. “It’s the same.”

Well, this wasn’t working very well. I thought about trying to find someone else that was a better speaker of Nyungwe. But they all seemed to be standing out in the sun where I was afraid to go lest I instantly burn up like a white moth in a candle’s flame.

Our Christmas celebration was a lot of fun. We are still the best of friends even though we’ve since escaped Tete and the Bisters are still there working on the Nyungwe translation. But I shouldn’t give away the end of the story when we’ve hardly begun.

It’s amazing now how little I remember of this time. On that day when I leave this earth with a yelp or a sigh will my life flash before me as a fuzzy recollection of not much? How important is it to remember? On that long timeline of history if you zoomed in close enough with your microscope how minute would your examination have to be before my life in Tete appeared? Through the long lens of even our own brief lives what needs to be said beyond “the Kers lived in Tete for ten years, helped the Nyungwe Bible translation get started and weren’t eaten by crocodiles?” I have a box of handwritten journals covering this entire time. Cryptic notes containing names and acronyms, a record of the temperature and the kinds of bugs that were bugging us, philosophical musings about the Bible. Photos exist as well. Left behind from those pre-digital days are envelopes of negatives and albums of photos whose pages crinkle when you open them. A decade later, the information is not scarce but excessive. TMI, Too Much Information, is the trademark of our times. Instead of one photo of our children we have hundreds. Instead of mysterious scribbles in a black notebook we have an electronic trail of photos, blogs, email and social media detailed enough to reproduce our daily routines with tedious accuracy. All those grains of memory accumulate on the beach. They’re worn smooth by the tide of time. Walking along the shore of remembrance there are only a few stones and shells that we notice. And like seashells our memories sit out of context without knowing the history of the beautiful thing that we hold in our hand.

     Hallelujah to the son of Mary.

Fill this silence with sounds of praise.
Not for the birds alone to greet the dawn with singing.

     Hallelujah to the son of God.

Clap your hands, our laughter will be a song.
Joy-filled mouths aren’t prone to grumble.

     Hallelujah to the Christ, our brother.

Racing to start the day, hum a hallelujah chorus.
The soundtrack of our lives will swell with blessings.

     Hallelujah to the Lamb, our Lion.

We are most like angels when our voices soar.
Even an off-pitch instrument is melodious when praising.

     A new song I give to you. A command that you should follow. 
     Sing of salvation. Praise the Savior.

Heaven’s harmonies will save the world.

Rage is the prince of demons in South Africa. Anger seethes below the surface and adds a prickly sensation to every encounter. The Afrikaners fiercely cling to their culture and language despite centuries of being threatened with extinction. The blacks are insular and unknowable and years after Apartheid’s end still find the glass ceiling very low indeed. The Rainbow Nation also contains “coloureds,” an ancient amalgam of mixed Afrikaner and African ancestry and a small Asian population completes the picture.

It was in South Africa that I first discovered the white bubble. I suppose I noticed the isolation we lived in while in Portugal and England. But things were a lot more color-coded in South Africa. Even after more than a decade of visiting South Africa, we still wander into a store not realizing that it’s for blacks. But in general, while in South Africa, we move in a white bubble: a white guest house, white missions, white churches. The exception is the schools where students are thrown together regardless of race and required to be fluent in two of three languages: English, Afrikaans, and an African language, usually Xhosa or Zulu. Such is the unspoken segregation even today that although only 9% of the population are white, 90% of the people I socialize with are white. It’s not that way everywhere in Africa. In Mozambique, we spend most of our time with blacks. I’d break out of the bubble in South Africa if I knew how.

Our first order of business was to get a set of wheels before December when our mission was having a conference in Harare, Zimbabwe. Tom and Jan (the kids called her Aunt Jam) were settled here in Johannesburg and we borrowed their car to get to Nelspruit where we shopped for a vehicle. The car that chose us was a 1982 VW Double Cab combi which we dubbed the Bob Bus. The Bob Bus was a bizarre looking vehicle with a canvas canopy on the back, but it had more places to smuggle goods across the border than any vehicle we’ve ever used since. There was a huge box under the back seat that no customs official ever thought to look in because our three squirmy cute kids were sitting on top of it strapped into huge car seats. And under the cargo space there was a cavernous cubby hole large enough to smuggle two or three people across the border. We weren’t really hoping to do smuggling. But it was a lot easier to hide away any personal possessions like CDs and computers rather than declare them every time at the border.

Sputtering down jam-packed freeways while sports cars and 4×4s screamed by us was a strangely comforting activity. Life was passing us by in Africa but we were taking it slow, at the speed of a VW with a Toyota engine hidden under the hood. We even had a song: “In the Bob Bus you can have a lot of fun. We’ll go driving in the sun…” I think we thought these songs were meant to comfort our children and create a little light-hearted fun in the midst of a strange country where cars came up behind us and flashed their lights at us until we pulled over and drove on the shoulder. But of course the kids never knew that what we were doing was anything but normal.

In Portugal I could facetiously pretend to be Icelandic but in South Africa you’re not fooling anyone. The blacks knew we were white. And the Afrikaners knew we were rooineks, red-neck English. As Americans we were interesting but not particularly loved. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much the case all over the world. Now Canadians, they are loved by everybody. Americans might not even notice that there’s another country north of the border, but Canadians are known and loved everywhere I’ve ever lived. For ten years, the logistics and hospitality personnel for our mission in South Africa were always Canadians. At first I thought it was a coincidence. But as one Canadian couple after the next came to live and work in South Africa I realized that they were a special caste trained in the secret arts of airport pickups and making tea for wiped out missionaries.

The violent crime in Joburg is bad. When a company came out with a device that sent flames out from under the sides of your car to deter carjackers, the first person to have it installed was the Johannesburg chief of police. The key to safety in South Africa was to move to Australia as soon as possible. Failing that, many South Africans created locked down prisons out of their homes with high fences, razor wire and big black dogs snarling at you. Everyone hides in their home at night watching SABC TV in Afrikaans and Zulu. After the news, the most watched show is Walker, Texas Ranger starring Chuck Norris. We couldn’t believe how many times a night Chuck Norris was on TV. South Africans have some sort of appreciation for the thespian skills of this man that the rest of us fail to detect. Obviously in a country where crime is so dominant it must be a vicarious thrill to watch Chuck giving a roundhouse kick to the baddies. It helps that his sidekick was African-American, Clarence Gilyard.

There is so much to love about South Africa. The food is terrific. The people, when they’re not screaming at you or stealing your car, are really friendly. The music, dance, art, culture, wine, you-name-it are fantastic. We love visiting South Africa. It’s a bit like Los Angeles with lions. There’s a buzz and excitement resulting from an old country being reborn after Apartheid. The ethnic diversity will always be edgy and tense. But I suppose the legacy of segregation and white-minority rule is already casting a fading shadow. We arrived in South Africa toward the end of Nelson Mandela’s tenure as 1st President of South Africa. I suppose we had an inkling of the convulsive events that preceded our arrival, but in general we moved freely through the Republic of South Africa without fully appreciating how much suffering had brought this country to where it is today.

If I thought about South Africa at all before coming it was probably because of Paul Simon’s Graceland album. I listened endlessly to the babble of postmodern lyrics over the burbling guitar of Ray Phiri. Graceland exemplifies everything that’s best and worst about world music. The album is the sweetest of ear candy. It opens your vistas to music that is so far superior to the monotonous garbage on American radio stations. But on the downside it is a caricature and a hash of indigenous music. World music has been called cultural plagiarism. But at the end of the day, African musicians are just as likely to borrow influences from the West, the East, and, e’er the twain shall meet, it makes for great music. It’s the sound of humanity trying to sing together.

Doug was kind enough to tag me on an interesting meme:

List 5 doctrines that are taught within the Christian church that you believe to be deeply de-Christian.

De-Christian? This makes me think of defrost, deceive, denounce, delight, determine. What exactly is “de-Christian?”

I think the term anti-Christ might be closer to the spirit of the New Testament writers. Interestingly, while we might think that the spirit of the antichrist is the denial of Christ’s divinity, it’s actually quite the opposite:

Many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world. Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist.

2 John 7, NIV

I often marvel at how hard the Gospel writers work to show Jesus’ humanity. People in the time of Christ had no trouble believing in gods taking on the appearance of a human, but the idea of a sinless divinity residing fully in sinful flesh was tough for them to swallow.

After looking at other people’s answers I’m having a hard time thinking of anything else to add. One position on this topic is that Christ said he would build his church so anything Christian is how he intended. There’s something appealing about such diversity and also it accords with actual experience and is a good reason not to judge others. Not sure I buy it, though.

Let me try to throw some cats in the dog house:

1. The Hebrew Bible is pre-Christian: Finding Jesus in every passage of the OT sometimes requires a lot of twisting.
2. Expository preaching: The NT model of preaching is very Christ centered. OT is backstory to the Good News of Jesus Christ.
3. Clown evangelism: I suppose even clowns need Jesus…
4. Church building programs: The hillside and the dinner table worked for our Lord, why do we need multiplexes?
5. Personal devotions: “When they were all together in one place…”

I’m not sure I even think these are all “de-Christian.” But it’s interesting to think about.

If you’re a reader of this blog consider yourself tagged. I always like to hear what other people come up with on strange questions like this.

I seem to remember that there is a rule in our organization against writing memoirs so if this blog disappears you’ll know that I’m being held in a cell somewhere by the missionary police.

Read: November Novel

Our mission had a long tradition of throwing new members into the wild for endless weeks of Jungle Camp. This meant learning to cook for yourself, keeping yourself and all your belongings clean while surrounded by dirt, and meeting natives to engage in cultural interaction. At least I’ve always heard about these events. And old-timers proudly claim to have been “in Mexico in ‘82” or something similar. Maybe they just make it up. I on the other hand am understating everything. There’s no way to over-exaggerate how truly awful living in a tent with 40 other families is. And once you finish. If you finish. You’ll get to begin your work living in a third world country in a situation that doesn’t faintly resemble a single thing that you did for ten weeks. Another theory about these Jungle Camps is that they are a “weeder course” kind of like the Advanced Calculus class that I had to drop out of my freshman year so I wouldn’t flunk. Africa Orientation was a weeder course to separate the evolutionarily challenged missionary wanna-bes from the hardy resilient types. I heard that they no longer do these things. I certainly can’t imagine any of today’s young people surviving for a single day in rural Africa. No Facebook! No cell phone. Cooking food that isn’t wrapped in plastic! Wimps!

The best part of our Africa Orientation was the village living stage. Our family was assigned to a family who were school teachers in a remote village in the Kericho area. They lived in a cute house surrounded by tea fields, rolling hills, occasional Jacaranda trees. It was incredibly picturesque. These people were warm and hospitable. So much so that they actually built a house for us. It was bare boards and our bed was so narrow that had I not been a gentleman I might have made Hilary sleep on the floor. But it was a house. Soldier ants swept through our house at one point and attempted to carry us away but we survived that. Each morning the teachers would head off to school but not before leaving us a thermos of hot sugary millet porridge and a bowl of hard boiled eggs. It was a glorious breakfast. I can’t remember what I did for coffee back then. Maybe I wasn’t a wretched addict like in later years.

I tried out my TPR tricks on these folks and it just plain didn’t work. I tried transcribing phrases like I’d learned in phonetics. I came up with gibberish. This was one really weird language. Tonal. And probably written from right to left. I vaguely remember that before I arrived I had devised a fifteen day curriculum for mastering the basics of any language. Fool!

Every evening the parents would gather their children for evening prayer. Sitting in the dark with a single candle we listened to little children’s voices singing sweetly, “Home, sweet home. Jerusalem is my home.” Here in a back corner of the world, simple lovely hearts and voices praised their Savior. I loved the music. I was holding my cassette recorder in anyone’s face who dared to say anything in my vicinity. I wonder whatever happened to all those cassettes? When I asked the family to sing the Doxology in the local language, the parents knew the words but the kids just looked slightly stricken. It was in the church in this village that I first heard European hymns transformed into African. Not translated, mind you. But transformed. Worn smooth like the wooden benches. Multi-layered harmonies and call and response. Songs that had settled so deeply into the local idiom that I often listened for several verses before I recognized, hidden within an exotic African chorale, an old-fashioned hymn left behind long after the white missionaries had faded into the misty paths of memory.

Ana, the woman of the house, despite living in this far out place, was a bit of a priss. She informed Hilary that she had never killed a chicken. This caused me considerable difficulty in later years since in those instances when a chicken needed to be killed, Hilary would look at me with all the authority of Ana Mutai backing her up and say, “That’s a man’s job.” Killing a chicken is yet one more thing that they didn’t teach me in the early weeks of my orientation. Chickens may run around when their heads are cut off. But first you have to actually separate their heads from their necks. My method was to cover the head and body with a rag and cut through the neck with a sharp knife. This was effective I suppose but still involving killing a living creature and having blood and feathers get all over your knife. And then you had to pluck the bird. By the time you finished, the fowl creature was the size of a chicken McNugget.

When we returned from the camping phase I remember being so grateful for the hot shower that I just sat down in the shower and let the water wash off all the grime worn into every groove of my calloused and blistered hands and feet. This ten weeks living rough in Kenya had taught me that I didn’t know diddly-squat. Thirty years of pampered existence in the US had left me completely unable to fend for myself in the real world. The irony of my position as an agent of change coming to help the helpless became increasingly transparent. I was here to help and I was helpless. I was the one with all the training, and I didn’t know how to do anything. Surrounded by self-sufficient, polyglot Africans, here I was a fumbling bilingual moron. I didn’t think about quitting at this stage. Probably because, to get to this point, we had invested years of training and all the earnestness of a divine calling. What would I go back to? What would I tell our supporters? Plus I was had received a letter half way through our time in Kenya that had an invitation to participate in a fast-moving translation project for some language in Mozambique called Nyungwe. While the normal course of events was to spend several years doing linguistic analysis in preparation for an eventual Bible translation project, I was being asked to skip all that hard work and jump right into a Bible translation in progress. Naive nerd that I was, I accepted. If I had only known. The shortest path in Africa is often the most winding. That grimy printout of an email from my future boss might have been just the encouragement I needed to keep on instead of calling it quits before I even got started.

All my gadgets failed as soon as I got to Africa. I had a flashlight that ran by squeezing the handle. It was worse than worthless. Try cranking a flashlight with one hand while cleaning up baby puke with the other. Try walking down a trail at night while constantly cranking on your flashlight until your hand is cramping. My friend Hessel had a maglite the size of a baseball bat with who knows how many fat D batteries in it. This was my first experience of flashlight envy. I also had this idea that I should carry along my collection of classical CDs and a small CD player. So I had a battery charger that ran off a solar panel the size of an envelope. It didn’t work in the shade. You couldn’t leave it unattended in the sun. It charged very slowly. I was determined to drink tea while listening to Chopin. This we did for about five minutes per day but the rest of the day I was the harried slave of my technology. Another useless gadget was this little syringe for purifying water. It made a mouthful of water with every plunge. But when you have six mouths to fill that’s not very efficient. The leaders of our jungle camp had huge barrels filtering through ceramic and charcoal “candles” that produced rivers of pure water. In summary, the general rule is: if you find it for sale in a catalog or an outdoor store it is probably worthless in real life. This brings up the positive rule: AAA, When in doubt, Ask An African. While the muzungus were showing up to breakfast with wrinkled clothes, bloodshot eyes and leaves in their hair, the Kenyans were fresh, clean and wearing immaculate outfits. How did they do it? I never asked.

The incessant rain was my salvation (although it killed our vegetable garden) since shortly before leaving Portugal for England, during one of my daughter’s panic attacks in the middle of the night, I had lost a hearing aid. Or maybe a lion ate it. But the result was that my brain stupidly tried and tried to get more sound to come out of the left side of my head without success and so tinnitus tormented me with ringing and hissing until I was almost desperate. The training centre where we were staying had a nature trail around the perimeter and when it rained I would walk slowly under the trees and the hiss and drip of the rain among the leaves would mask the ringing in my ears and give me relief for a brief while.

But even with the hearing aid replaced I still couldn’t understand anything anyone was saying. From the moment we arrived at Heathrow, friendly Brits kept greeting us and giving us important pieces of information that we should follow. But we couldn’t understand anything. This was our first exposure to English. Not the English of Dan Rather. Instead, the English of a mouth full of licorice allsorts. In fact, there were more englishes than I had ever imagined. Just when we got our ears attuned to the Pakistani taxi driver, the next taxi driver spoke London cockney. Or maybe this was just a big joke. The English were certainly cheerier than the Portuguese, even though we were dismayed to discover that we could understand Lisboetas better than Londoners. Perhaps it was just a countrywide scam, a Monty Python skit grown large for the sake of having one over on the tourists. The Country of Funny Talks.

Despite all the friendly natives’ best efforts we eventually reached our destination. It was a great day for me. Back in 1992 I had actually written to this school and requested information on enrollment. I had heard that the school was located in Bucks. So I asked for any information on Bucks. Was Bucks far from London? What kinds of things could you do in Bucks? A very English letter arrived at the Taj Mahal in Saltillo, Mexico (a story for another time) informing me that it might be better for me to attend a school in my home country. And (by the way) Bucks. is an abbreviation for Buckinghamshire (you twit). Well, the letter didn’t actually call me a twit. But I felt like a twit. Americans always feel like twits around the British. Why is that? Is it because we don’t have a queen? Or because we think digestive biscuits taste gross? That funny way of talking that the English have is such a sign of culture and refinement. It’s so classy. We Americans just speak English without sounding all hoity-toity. Well, some folks from other parts of the US speak English like hicks, but most of us, especially on the West coast, except for California, Washington and eastern Oregon speak clear cool English. So, whoever this Brit was made me feel like a dope even though he probably wasn’t trying. I bet he laughed his head off when he got my letter. Bucks! Hey Love, pass me the digestive biscuits and read this letter. Haw haw.

When Hilary heard what they were expecting of her for the phonetics class (two hours of classes and four hours of office hours—per day!) she refused. Well not in an adamant “take this job and shove it” sort of way. But she did hide in our flat and refuse to come out. I got asked to teach phonetics again. Thankfully I also refused. And amazingly they didn’t kick us off the campus but let me teach language acquisition, although one crotchety old veteran when he heard that I only spoke Spanish and Portuguese said, “Well, they shouldn’t let someone teach who hasn’t learned a real language.”

Language acquisition methodology is like teaching a dog to sit and roll over. Only you’re the dog and you’re trying to get someone else to tell you to sit up and beg. When you say, “Muka!” I’ll stand up. And when you say, “Khala pantsi.” I’ll sit down. The method is called Total Physical Response or TPR and it’s actually a really fun way to learn a language if you can convince your language assistant that it’s a method worth trying. The head instructor for our course was the infamous Carol O, and she was a master at giving future linguists the skills to stand and sit on command.

I don’t remember much else about England. We toured a lot of castles. I attended the Proms. I suffered agonies walking through London in a pair of English shoes. On the 4th of July I took the kids out of the house so Hilary could have an afternoon of peace and quiet. In High Wycombe we found ourselves in the middle of a 4th of July celebration. A group was square dancing in elaborate western costumes and the caller was singing “You can’t hide those lying eyes” and making a very English attempt to sound American. My kids started dancing so vigorously to the music that they stumbled into the middle of a group of square dancers and almost brought the whole group down in a heap. We Americans love to interrupt a British party. I think the only 4th of July I enjoyed more was in Nelspruit, South Africa where a group of Americans broke spontaneously into “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” and one of our British colleagues sniffed, “They kyped our song.”

At the school that summer I got to meet real Africans for the first time. Growing up in rural Oregon I had never met even an African-American until i went off to college. Even when I had got up off my knees at an altar call after devoting my life to missionary service in Africa I didn’t have a very clear idea of what Africans were except for black. Sure we were racist in my hometown but it was a half-hearted racism based on bad jokes and a gaping ignorance of any of the eccentricities of race and culture that are really worth joking about. I do remember having a dark foreboding of doom when I saw a photo of a white missionary standing next to some of his African colleagues. They were all wearing suits. And ties. Despite this they looked happy. Surely this must be a sign of something basically wrong with Africans and possibly the missionaries who worked among them. The only suit I had ever owned was my birthday suit and I seldom wore that in public. The thought of being trussed up in a blue suit, white shirt and tie gave me just the right feeling of righteous martyrdom that a person needs before heading off to the dark Continent. Yes, Lord. Even this would I do for you. But the Kenyans that I met that summer in England weren’t wearing suits. Instead, they had raided the giveaway closet at the school and swathed themselves in layer upon layer of shirts, sweaters (what the English call jumpers for some reason) and heavy jackets for protection against the hostile elements of an English summer. One of them had found an oversized lady’s coat complete with fur-lined hood. I became good friends with one of the Kenyans. He was my student but I soon had him tutoring me in Swahili. Kipnyango was less flamboyant in his dress than the other Kenyans but his skills were crazy. He was a Greek Orthodox priest whose special ministry was icon painting. My co-teacher in the course, also named Dave, took us out to the Proms together with a German friend and we all slept through the first movement of Brahms’ Symphony 1. Kipnyango had a blast.

Kipnyango did something I didn’t like on the day we left. He asked me for my t-shirt. What a bizarre request. How undignified! I’m sorry to say that I refused to give him the shirt off my back (It was a fundraising shirt from the church that purchased our Land Rover and had an outline of the continent of Africa on it). I was very sensitive to not being patronizing to Africans. Why would this dignified priest act like a beggar. I only learned later, much too late, that his act was a gesture of friendship. If I could only find him now, probably in some monastic cell painting icons of saints in the highlands of Kenya, I’d give him my shirt and ask for one of his icons.

While the Portuguese of today were hiding behind barred doors, and the Portuguese of yesterday were singing love songs to seagulls, strangers and refugees like ourselves were rattling around on the windy streets and meeting in a basement on Sunday for church. Church in Carcavelos was a clandestine affair involving people joined only by their need to be in church and the Portuguese language. There were hardly any Portuguese. But the place was full of Brazilians, and Cape Verdians, and Angolans, and New Jersey Portuguese. The songs were all loose translations of whatever people were singing in English-speaking churches. Perhaps had I been Catholic I might have met a Portuguese worshipper. Still it was a joyful time to be with these happy people with the lively lousy music and forget for a while our diaspora existence.

Driven frantic by our suburban solitude, Hilary and I took to heading out on adventures with all our clothes, sippy cups, maps, camera and crackers stuffed into the double stroller, and going somewhere. Anywhere! We had no car so we traveled by train. We visited the ancient walled city of Obidos. (Jim scolded me for pronouncing O like O. Its AW-bi-DAWSH). We went to Evora, and wandered the streets in search of housing and pizza. I fancied myself as a photographer and tortured myself to get up the courage to take pictures of people. My first solution was a telephoto lens with a 2x coupler allowing me to snap surreptitious shots of people without their knowing it. This made for a lot of blurred photos as I would focus hurriedly, shoot and then snatch the camera beneath my jacket. The other method was to let my kids play in the foreground and pretend to take pictures of them while getting the lively expressions of Portuguese people laughing at my children’s antics. If I had thought about it, I might have reasoned that we don’t exactly like strangers to take pictures of us. It’s one of the glories of being a tourist that you can shove your camera in anyone’s face and steal their soul. Some of these people were so picturesque. Especially in the villages. Little wrinkled ladies dressed in black. They were practically ethnic. On the Lisbon shoreline I caught a picture of an old man with a flat cap looking exactly like a fisherman. Quaint! Had I only known that the lifeblood of a photo is the brief connection between photographer and subject: the hopeful glance of the photographer and the resignation and revelation of the subject.

Our kids were oblivious to culture shock, Portuguese coldness, or uncomfortable mattresses. They tumbled around on Roman ruins, Made friends in every playground in our suburb and charmed the scowls off every face in the vicinity. Elle, Henry and Andrew were quite incapable of being stopped by a language barrier. They chatted and giggled their way through the dark night of their parents’ soul never realizing how rotten life was. Thanks to some easygoing babysitters, Hilary and I finally got out of our funk and attended a real Portuguese class in a real school. It was a real-ish school. The attendance was low so we got grouped in with the beginning class whose sole student was a Korean who spoke English even more impossible than our American dialect. Our tutor was a true Portuguese patriot. She loved her country, its cuisine, its music and art in a way only a zealot can. She glowered at us from the precipitous height of her black leather boots and winced every time we did harm to her beloved tongue. Classes settled into a comfortable pattern of our teacher lecturing on the glories of the Portuguese language and then asking me or Hilary to translate what she had just said into English for the Korean fellow. We only lasted in the course a month, but our tutora still hovers in my subconscious daring me to misconjugate the language of Camões, or say something snide about Portuguese cooking.

During our nine months in Portugal, we had a regular stream of visitors. Grandparents on both sides visited to see their babies and sample exotic Portuguese culture. My sister and her husband came for the World Fair and had fun, I think. I arranged for our relations to stay in a palace in Sintra while our family stayed in a more modest pensão called Casa Alegre, “Happy House” which was run as you might expect by a very dour man named Mr. Happy. Our future directors, Tom and Jan, visited us for a few days and we discovered that salmon steaks were the same price as ground beef so we had an enormous feast with all the other future Bible translators who were tucked into various corners of the Lisbon metropolis. That was just fine with Tom and Jan. They loved Portugal. They had visited here for three months and had a terrific time. Their visit was on the heels of our language supervisor’s visit but their recommendation was simply, “Enjoy Portugal!” We did our best, visiting palaces, eating pasteis de natas at the Monastery of Bethlehem. I dutifully collected a stack of Portuguese pop music Cds that were given away in the Sunday papers, and hunted for a complete set of Portuguese-language Tin Tins and Portuguese translations of Maigret mysteries. I fell in love with the poetry of Eugenio Andrade and the voice of Dulce Pontes. After several months of battle, I successfully learned how to pronounce, eu the personal pronoun, “I.” It is not YO, like those crude Spaniards would have it. It’s not AY-YU like some robot might say it. Eu is in fact a four syllable word pronounced without either opening or closing your mouth. It is the sound of the tide among the rocks, and the sound of a seagull’s wings. Eu is a mixture of pain and delight and the sigh of isolation you can only feel among the ghosts of an old city.

Just as the weather was improving I got it into my head that we had learned enough Portuguese and should go to England for the summer. It was a fatal mistake. We missed the most beautiful time of the year in Portugal. Well, not in Lisbon where it is stifling and dusty and all the residents have fled to the mountains. But we also missed the time when our language skills were really starting to show. Not only that but we went to England during a time they call “Summer” which is almost as wet as a Portuguese winter but without the consolation of being able to sing fado to relieve your misery.

Image: Our family photo taken in Oregon, August 1997 before leaving for Portugal. 

The dark character of the Portuguese soul was evident everywhere we turned in Lisbon. The shoe stores only carried stiff leather shoes in black or brown. The standard Lisboeta breakfast was consumed standing up at a little metal booth on the street. Dressed in brown or black the dark haired Portuguese consumed a bica, equal parts bitter coffee grounds, white sugar and just a smidge of water so that you could stir it manically with a tiny tin spoon. In your other hand you held a smoldering cigarette. And on a plate in front of you – a greasy cream filled donut. I wondered at the gloomy personality of the Portuguese. Despite straight white teeth, they seldom smiled. It could be the centuries of oppression by the Spaniards. Or the fact that the BBC always insisted in calling them “the poorest country in Europe.” I think part of the problem was gastrointestinal reflex disorder. The Lisboeta never eats dinner before 10PM. And this heavy meal is consumed with a cigarette between every course and a vinegary glass of vinho de mesa always at hand.

My first language tutor was a diminutive balding school teacher named Luis who could only fit me in after 8PM and continually tried to take me out to dinner. The first words I learned from him were deprimido and deprimento, “depressed” and “depressing.” He was a nice guy but kind of gloomy. I was thrilled to discover that my fluency in Spanish allowed me to understand the wrong half of anything he said. The principal problem was the vowels. In Mexican Spanish I had mastered the cardinal five: AW EY EE OH OO, El Burro Sabe Mas Que Tu. But in Portugal, evolution had rendered all five of these sounds obsolete and the Portuguese did all their communicating with a single back unrounded UH. In our first Sunday in church, the leader sang, Enche me de te e eu serei teu para sempre, “Fill me with yourself and I’ll be yours forever.” But with all the vowels shifted to the back it came out, “UNCHUH MUH DUH TUH…” Beyond the difficulty of the vowels, our immediate problem was that the Portuguese refused to speak anything but English with us. My LAMP language manual had taught me to say, “This is all I know how to say” as one of the language power tools. But with the help of my dictionary I pieced together another phrase, “I’m sorry I don’t speak English. I’m from Iceland.” Being Icelandic had the advantage of shaking my interlocutors for a moment, long enough for me to try out some of my other stock phrases.

I had cheated before coming to Portugal. I had the cassettes from the Living Language learning system but they were unfortunately recorded in Brazil. And I could sing along with a large collection of Roberto Carlos and Caetano Veloso songs. But Brazilians speak Portuguese like Americans play cricket. The rules are incomprehensible so they just make up their own. But the Brazilians are fun. They love to party. They smile all the time and have great music. Portugal is kind of like Brazil’s grumpy uncle. It was only in Portugal, after a college degree and quite a few stamps in my passport that I discovered that I speak English with an accent. I had always thought that people in strange places like England and Texas speak English with an accent while most people, specifically myself, spoke the language in its pure form. So even though I didn’t speak Icelandic, the Portuguese found my version of English to be just as incomprehensible as if I had been from Reykjavik. It didn’t sound anything like the cassettes that they were listening to while trying to learn English. This proved a big advantage on the comboio, the train that ran along the coast between Lisbon and Cascais, since although everyone could eavesdrop on what my family was saying, and they were sure we were speaking English, they couldn’t tell what we were talking about. Had they understood they might have heard us saying things like, “Sit down.” “Stop pushing your brother.” “It’s your turn to change a diaper.”

Diapers. Although my wife and I had been sent to Portugal to learn the language we had a secret agenda: To not crack up. Or at least, “Only one spouse can crack up at a time and it’s my turn!” While other future missionaries were traveling on the subway, attending classes at the Univ, and staying up late hanging out at the fado bars for Portuguese “immersion,” we were changing diapers, and the few times we managed to get all three babies out the door with two in a double stroller and one on my back, we attempted to not get run over in traffic.  Thanks to our adorable blond babies we learned lots of Portuguese vocabulary like “fofinha” –adorable, “"louro” –blond, and bebés ‘’babies.” Our LAMP manual, “Language Acquisition Made Practical” was quickly rendered impractical because it depended largely on going out in the neighborhood and trying out monotonous phrases over and over on friendly natives. Trouble was, we had no neighbors. They were all gone in the morning commute by 7AM and never home from dinner until after midnight. Despite the failure of the LAMP method, I somehow became internationally known as a LAMP expert and I still get occasional emails from people seeking my advice on this method.

We did have some neighbors in the flat above us. We lived on the ground floor of a marble-floored icebox of a house with a compact little yard just perfect for our small kids to play in. Ellie and Henry took to climbing the pepper tree and hanging from the branch until they dropped down like gymnasts at the end of a routine. This scared our upstairs neighbors, or neighbor, I should say. Isabella was a florid, friendly loud-spoken geriatric. She shouted most times because her husband, a wizened old man whose face was concealed beneath an enormous pair of peppered eyebrows, was stone deaf. They didn’t seem to mind our baby Andrew crying, or the two older kids crashing through the house and sliding around corners on their socks. But Isabella was deathly afraid that the sun was going to give our kids constipation. Constipação it turned out was the common cold but also a dread illness that strikes down children who don’t wear their hats when the sun is out. Our marble mausoleum of a house was a perfect echo chamber and every sound from upstairs channeled itself down in sometimes surreptitious ways to the lower floor. For several weeks, Ellie suffered night terrors and woke screaming in the night and would only be consoled if an adult was sitting on her bed close enough to touch. The problem, she assured us in wide-eyed terror was lions. We prayed. Cast out demons. Sang lullabies. Bound territorial spirits and just about anything else in hopes of making these lions go away. It was only when Isabella and her husband went on a trip to visit family in Coimbra that Ellie slept through the night. Maybe the lions were the old man’s snoring.

Although we were virtual prisoners in our house living in splendid isolation from anyone that might actually speak the language, fate worked in our favor because Jim, the mission representative who was supposed to evaluate our progress, was called back to the US for family reasons and only came back to Portugal once. He was a grandfatherly fellow with a penchant for giving out evaluation forms and asking about our progress. He only visited for five days and happily my only other memory of him is taking me out to lunch at an ancient restaurant in downtown Lisbon with cracked and hand painted azulejo tiles on the walls and the only decent bacalhau I ever ate. Bacalhau. BAW-CALL-YOW. That about says it all. Norwegian codfish hypersaturated with salt that had somehow established itself as the national dish of the Portuguese. The runner-up was probably migalhas, breadcrumb soup. More reasons why the Portuguese are so grumpy. The national cuisine, according to my second Portuguese teacher a stern, fiery no-nonsense lady, was second to none and far superior to the awful food in France. Such is patriotism.

No one seemed to notice that we weren’t actually attending a language school, so Hilary and I got into a routine of having a young lady come by and tutor us several mornings per week. We had four tutors, all lovely ladies and different from each other as the four seasons. Lourdes, Amelia, ZZZZZZZZ and Antinea all tutored us on and off depending on their availability. Lourdes was a lovely Portuguese lady who had married an American music producer who had some sort of mission involving producing music. Lourdes was kind enough to enlighten us on why the Portuguese never invite Americans to their homes. Being invited to a Portuguese home for dinner was a holy grail of enculturation for language students like ourselves. For some reason, we all desperately wanted to get invited into a Portuguese home. I’m not sure what we thought we would do once we got there. Eat, I suppose. After a year of living in Portugal, many of us had still never done it. We were on the outside wondering what we had to do to link up with real Portuguese people.

Sure, I interacted with Portuguese people every day. Mostly at the office supply store. I developed a bizarre compulsion to buy ever more complicated and expensive fountain pens. Three imposing Portuguese women stood behind the counter daring me to speak to them in Portuguese. I turned it into a LAMP-style language learning opportunity. Since in Portugal you couldn’t actually pick up and handle the merchandise without it being handed to you reluctantly by a clerk, I had to ask for each pen by name. And since my tastes were becoming increasingly arcane this resulted in some amazing opportunities for deepening my vocabulary regarding words like “nib” and “ink.” These ladies were probably nice. And if I had a chance they might have invited me and my wife and three small children to their house for a late-night dinner. We never got past the, “Can I see that pen over there on the left. No not that one. Up higher” level, so our relationships remained necessarily formal and superficial.

Formality is something that we as Americans were not good at. We didn’t know that at the time. But our every gesture, our carefree bonhomie and our continual stupid grinning freaked the Portuguese out. If we had known, we would have grinned less, worn more brown, maybe smoked a few packs of cigarettes at the dinner table. Anything to somehow ingratiate ourselves to the cold inscrutable Lisbonites.

Instead of writing a novel this month I thought I would write a memoir of the last ten years or so. I’m unsure how much I can tell you without getting seriously in trouble. Would you like to hear more or should I just go back to ranting about cats?

What I leave behind.