How I Became a Mozambican Goat-Smuggler

Beira 1148 km. The sign blew past us in the warm, humid air. No map, no GPS, no tour guide. Just me, my school buddy Eric, and Jose Novela, a young Mozambican pastor who had never been to Beira either. The Isuzu double-cab turbo diesel was just getting up to a nice cruising speed as Jose shouted "Stop, stop!"

The rumble strips underneath our tires suggested that there must be a reason. A policeman was running out from that little kiosk we just passed. Oh great. Eric had brought the truck to a stop ten yards from the checkpoint. Policeman says something in Portuguese. Jose explains "He want your papers." I rummage madly through the glove compartment and find something that looks like vehicle registration papers, while Eric digs out his California driver's license.

The policeman takes one look at Eric's driver's license, then back at his face, and says "Realmente é você?" (Is that really you?) Jose translates, and Eric nods, yes. The policeman cracks a huge grin, returns our papers and waves us on. I'm sure Eric never imagined his longhaired, 16-year-old-looking-like-a-heroin-addict driver's license photo would ever be so useful.

No Dollars

The day before, the director of the religious charity where Eric and I were volunteering had invited us to take Pastor Jose and visit several new churches in the central part of the country. We had both been itching to go to "the bush," and soon got handed keys to the Isuzu and wads of money to cover travel expenses. At that time in 2000, the exchange rate was 16,000 Mozambican meticais to every US dollar. Central Mozambique had no ATMs. No one took credit cards or traveler's checks, and it was illegal to use foreign currency. So our only way to finance the trip was by carrying big wads of cash, like some kind of mafia drug lords. My normally sunken 145-pound stick-boy gut now protruded with the contents of my money belt. Here's hoping we don't get carjacked.

Our Mozambican colleague, Jose Novela, spoke about as much English as I spoke Portuguese, which meant pretty little. But he understood a good deal more than he spoke. His former career had been as a thief in Swaziland, before having a life-transforming experience with Jesus. On the first day of our road trip, I asked Jose how we would find Beira and our contacts there. His answer: "God show us."

A washed-out bridge three hours up the road forced us to spend the first night far south of where we'd hoped to be. The detour schedule made us late again the next day, and we finally arrived in Beira after a harrowing night drive replete with suicidal dogs, large trucks without taillights, and sudden gaps where a third of the pavement had been washed away in last year's floods.

No Skippy

We found the church in Beira, and Pastors Amori and William joined us to direct our trip to the bush churches. Amori, the head pastor over Sofala Province, was a quiet and serious man. William, on the other hand, was outspoken, gregarious, charming and fluent in English. He would be our interpreter. At the last minute, Pastor Amori insisted that his friend, Pastor Chapo, come along with us. The double-cab only seated five, and due to the arbitrary nature of police fines, we were concerned about squeezing a sixth person up front. But Chapo was more than happy to ride in back.

Our road now was entirely sand, with potholes big enough to drown a cow. No more 100 kilometers per hour driving – we crawled along between 35 and 45. Before long, Eric and I realized that we had the scenario all wrong in our heads: our colleagues were not directing our trip, we were chauffeuring theirs. My dreams of being a missionary hero began to wilt. My great work in Mozambique was to be a driver. We drove past burned out buildings, rusting tanks and railroad lines that had been blown up in the country's fifteen-year civil war. And we soon found that participating in a community-oriented culture meant no privacy.

Actually, our Mozambican colleagues were understanding enough to let us sleep in our own tent; but the first night, Pastor William decided it would be a good idea to pray loudly for an hour, starting at three A.M. Our budding friendship with Jose came in handy the next day, as he suggested to the group that it would be good to "Let the brothers sleep, and do our praying quietly" from now on.

Our lifeline on the road was Skippy. Yes, the peanut butter – in a glorious five-pound tub from America. Skippy was our little piece of home in a bewildering, chaotic place. Skippy was our indulgence, our reward, our security blanket. But it seemed wrong to greedily hoard it to ourselves. So a couple days into the drive, when we stopped at a village to buy bread, out came the Skippy. And we discovered that our four new friends liked Skippy as much as we did. Invariably, when we stopped for a snack, one of them would ask, "Could you bring us some of that very good butter?" We watched in despair as our precious hoard of creamy goodness was consumed in large knife-fulls by people who hadn't grown up with it, who had no memory of PBJs for lunch. It was wrong. It was unfair. We would have used it little by little and made it last for a month, but no; our Mozambican friends just dug in like it might not be there tomorrow, and soon, we did too.

No First Aid

In Marromeu, we drove past a huge sugar processing plant that had been unused for over a decade, thanks to the mined and unrepaired railroad lines we had passed earlier. That night, after the fireflies turned themselves off and the enthusiastically noisy youth choir practice ended, Eric and I were settling in for sleep when we were startled by screaming. One of the pastors came and asked us for help. Eric got up to see what was going on. He was led into the house of our hosts, where a young child was in agony. Flashlight revealed what kerosene candle merely hinted at: a large flap of the child's scalp had been peeled back. In the dark, someone had chopped with a hoe (presumably to plant it in the soil), but had not seen the child asleep on the ground. Eric recounted later how he could feel the whole room sigh in relief when he brought the first aid kit in from the truck. It was as if to say, "Everything's going to be alright now. The American has bandages." He did his best to clean the wound and bandage it, but we didn't have suture kits nor the expertise to use them. The next day, when the child was taken to the local clinic, all they did was check the dressing and say it looked good.

No Gas Pumps

       
There was never a way to know how far it would be until the next gas station. They managed to space them just far enough apart that we never quite ran out. The most interesting one was at Caia, where the "gas station" consisted of several drums of diesel and a man who sucked on a length of hose to siphon it into our truck. It was also the most expensive.

       
In Caia, a crowd of children would appear magically, out of nowhere, every time I raised a camera to my eye. I resorted to devious methods such as encouraging them all to line up in a group for the camera, then turning and snapping the scenery picture I really wanted. (I took their picture, too.)

"No assistance needed, thank you."

       
While there, Eric and I went down to the village well for our daily ritual of filtering water. Besides driving, it was the one aspect of life that we had control over. This activity normally elicited puzzled looks and questions from our hosts, but in Caia, it drew a huge crowd. Being guest 'dignitaries', we got pushed to the head of the line of village women, and they insisted on pumping the well for us. So far so good, but we weren't about to let anyone use the filter, for fear that in their enthusiasm, the clean water tube would get in polluted water. We couldn't afford a giardia attack in the middle of our road trip. So once they got used to the idea that rich white people can actually perform some labor despite being guests, they asked, "What does it do?" I explained in my halting Portuguese that "This cleans the water." I wasn't surprised when they didn't seem to get it. When Eric and I started pumping the little backpacking filter, all the women and children crowded around to watch. There must have been at least a hundred people. Soon the children were pushing and shoving to get up to the front and see the strange white people with their water cleaner.

No Ant Spray

       
After skirting it for days, our travels finally took us across the great Zambezi River, on a long converted railway bridge, to Mutarara. We went west on a yet bumpier dirt road until we pulled off at a place that Pastor William called Seza. I guess it was a village, but it looked more like a hilltop with a mud house and mud church. The children looked askance at us white people. They didn't line up for the camera, or for that matter do anything out of the usual when I was taking pictures. I think they had no clue what it was. This place was truly remote, and truly poor.

       
That night, people from the surrounding area gathered in the church to hear from the visitors. The little mud structure was lit by a single candle. During the singing, I glanced at the pulpit. It pulsed with life and movement. It took a moment to figure out that the cloth on the pulpit was actually a massive trail of ants, several inches wide. About that time, Eric leaned his hand on the pulpit, then suddenly jumped back and began doing a wild dance. He stepped out and kept dancing, slapping and shaking out his limbs for the next fifteen minutes. I think his "ecstatic experience" ended by changing clothes in the tent. Fortunately the ants were not the biting kind.

       
After church, our hosts treated us to a feast of fresh goat kidneys, livers and intestines. For the first time, we ate outdoors, because the local pastor's house was too small for all of us to sit inside. Ants were in our food and on the reed mat where we sat. Some of the goat innards were unrecognizable, but I dug in anyway. Eric teased me for a long time thereafter about eating the goat's rectum.

       
The next morning, as we prepared to leave, Jose cut a deal with the pastor to buy two goats (a male and a female) for 230,000 meticais. He was very excited about getting such a great deal, as they would have cost 800,000 or more in Maputo. He had been telling us for a while that he wanted to buy goats in Tete province, because they are so much cheaper, but we had been hoping that there wouldn't be enough time.

       
Jose wanted to put the goats in the covered bed of the truck with Pastor Chapo. But we insisted that the owner of the truck would not like the goats pooping and otherwise making a mess inside the Isuzu. We had several hours of driving left to get back to Beira that day. So we did it the Mozambican way – by tying the goats on top of the truck. The local pastor had, well not exactly rope, but something long and fibrous that we used to tie both of the goats to the luggage rack. As we set off down the bumpy dirt road, we could hear them baa every once in awhile. I imagined what their little goat brains might be thinking, going from wandering free to being tied on top of a vehicle and getting headwinds.

"No beefsteak, senhor."

       
Over a hundred kilometers later, we finally hit pavement for the first time since leaving Beira two weeks before. However, we were far to the northwest of Beira and stopped for lunch in Tete, a provincial capital. Tete was a city, but it was dry, dusty and ugly. I found out later that it was once the largest slave-market in this region. I wasn't surprised.

       
Pastor William led us to a hotel downtown that had a great restaurant, he claimed. We parked the truck in front, goats and all. There were already streaks of urine and feces down the sides. I think we were all ready for a taste of civilization as we perused the menu, with its continental-sounding options. A television in the corner broadcast the latest hit from a Mozambican hip-hop group, dancing and rapping in some kind of jungle.

       
When the waiter came, Pastor William ordered beefsteak. "I'm sorry," the waiter said. "We don't have any beefsteak, senhor."
        "Well, how about chouriço?"
        "No chouriço either, senhor." I was getting ready to volunteer Jose's goats.
        After a couple more attempts, William gave up. "Well, what do you have?"
        "Chicken."
        "Alright, we'll all have chicken, then." It took so long for the chicken to come that the waiter must have run down the street to buy it.

No Goat Permit

       
During lunch we heard (for the first time) that it was illegal to transport livestock from one province to another without a permit from the Ministry of Agriculture. So after getting lost in the bairros of Tete, we eventually found the local Ministry of Agriculture. But unfortunately, the minister was gone to lunch. After waiting an hour for him, we decided to take our chances with the police.

       
The road south from Tete was paved, but we soon came to another pothole-dodging course and smashed the left rear-view mirror on a roadside bush. A little while later, when I was driving about 90 kph, we were surprised to hear a pounding noise from the back of the truck, and Pastor Chapo's voice yelling "Cabrito caiu!" ("A goat fell off!") I suddenly discovered a rich treasury of English words that had formerly been absent from my church-boy vocabulary.

       
I stopped the truck. Eric, Jose and William jumped out and started running toward the goat, which was now limping in the middle of the highway. As I reversed back to where the lacerated goat was, the guys formed a triangle around it and chased it down. One of its horns was split open like a tulip, presumably from being the first point of impact. Aside from that, the poor thing had a bit of nasty road-burn, but was otherwise alright. As they were tying it back on the roof, William informed us that we were lucky the goat survived, because there are lots of hyenas in that area.

       
As darkness fell on our drive, we settled into a pattern of swerve, miss pothole. Swerve. Hit pothole. BAA! We passed the police checkpoint into Sofala Province late at night, and no one stopped us to ask about the goats. Fifteen hours after leaving Seza, we arrived back in Beira and wearily set up our tent next to the main road, where someone's radio blared all night. The next day, I bought a map.

       
The bush trip was done, but we needed to get the goats back to Maputo, crossing five provincial boundaries. The young man that Pastor Amori sent into town to get Jose's goat permit came back empty-handed. There were appointments calling us back to the south, so we gave up and decided to smuggle the goats instead of getting fined at every police checkpoint. Eric and I used a large tarp to form a sort of tub in the rear of the truck bed. Then we tied the goats' front legs and put them in with some grass to nibble on. They ended up spending twenty-nine hours in the truck bed with only a couple breaks to stretch their legs.

No Gratitude

       
We arrived back at the children's center in Maputo with the joy of having survived the most challenging ordeal of our lives. I naively expected people to be happy to see us. Instead we were greeted with "So you're the people who took the Isuzu for two weeks and didn't tell anyone!" We had assumed that the director would have told them. I had a small inkling of what it must have been like for soldiers returning from Vietnam in the '70s.

       
Jose, on the other hand, spoke glowingly at the staff prayer meeting about how we endured ants, bad roads, and danger to spread the gospel. I was so humbled. That day the director asked us if we would consider making another drive up north. The next week, I burned my plane ticket home. I went for 40 days without spending more than two nights in the same bed. I lived out of a backpack and gained a new appreciation for wrinkle-resistant fabrics. Over the next two years, I spent sixteen months in southern Africa, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.