The Website of Miah and Michelle Collins

Mozambique and Zimbabwe

Over the past month or so Michelle and I have visited two of South Africa’s neighboring countries, Mozambique, a previously Portuguese colony, and Zimbabwe.

Mozambique was a holiday trip. We had two friends from Durban and a college friend of mine from the States join us in a road trip out to the east coast of Africa. We stayed on some beautiful beach campsites and ate lots of wonderful, cheap, fresh fish every night.

A highlight for me was connecting with an old friend of mine, Arnaldo, in the capital city of Maputo. He became a follower of Christ when I was there on a mission trip in 2003. This was the first time I was able to see him since then and its amazing to see what an incredible man he has become. He gave us such an awesome tour of the city that by the end we were encouraging him to become a tour guide. He also has a fiancée (they cannot be officially married until he comes up with about $1000 for the “Labola” or dowry) and a one year old son named baby Jesus! Yes, gotta love Portuguese culture!

After about a week back at home Michelle and I went out to visit a team we are overseeing in Tzaneen. Check out the picture of us with them at the giant Baobab tree.

From there we joined some other J-Life staff for the long trek out to Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. We met with the J-Life national director, Tarisayi, who is doing some really great work there. In Harare, we helped him train 40 youth leaders in a course called Strategy, which looks at the process of making disciples based on Jesus’ life. We spent the next week checking out the country, meeting with pastors, and interviewing possible team members for next year. Due the economic crisis in Zimbabwe, none of the Zimbabwean interns will be able to raise the support they need and J-Life will have to find the funds for them. Finally, we drove to another city called Bulawayo for another weekend seminar with youth leaders.

I’m sure many of you have heard at least a bit about the political and economic turmoil in Zimbabwe. In the midst of such hardships the people are so calm and hopeful. In a way they seem almost passive and have resigned to riding out this wave of tyranny. Optimists would say this is because they are just great people. But another reason is that they have no choice. There is no freedom of speech in Zimbabwe. You could be detained for treason just for talking politics on the street and being heard by a supporter of the ruling party. Spies are sent to churches to make sure pastors also ignore the pressing issues facing Zimbabweans. There is an eerie calm in Zimbabwe which is hard to describe.

Everything is difficult in Zimbabwe. There is a cash crisis so that you are only able to draw about $3 a day from your bank account. To get this money you could wait as long as 6 hours at the bank. Despite it being illegal, trade is done primarily in foreign currency and you would not want to hold on to local currency because you could wake up the next morning with the price of groceries having doubled overnight. There are constant power cuts and water cuts, not due to a lack of water, but because they cannot buy the water treatments to make sure it is safe for drinking.

The grocery and department stores are nearly empty. And the stock they do have most people cannot afford (in one store they were selling cans of 7up for $15 each!). We met with a pastor at a restaurant but of course we had no intention of ordering a piece of chicken for $22. It was very depressing when the manager walked around greeting the people sitting at the tables, handing them the photocopied menu with the prices for the day, and not one person in the restaurant ordering anything the entire time we were there.

I could tell many more stories about the struggles in Zimbabwe but in reality it was a really great trip for us because of the great people we were able to meet and just how appreciative and excited they were about the training we did there. It was encouraging to see this movement really starting to take root in other countries. We are continuing to beg God to intervene on behalf of the Zimbabwean people and we ask you also to pray earnestly for the Church and the crisis in Zimbabwe.