Boxes of books…

We have boxes of books. English books. Swedish books. Portuguese books. Nyungwe books. Each trip home brings us back with a load of books, some new clothes and shoes. We buy more clothes and shoes at the market here, but can't get many books. The library isn't well-stocked and you can't actually take the books out of the building. The two bookstores in town sell school books or volumes of civil legal codes. I can't afford the books they sell here. A novel might be sold for $20 to $50. Most of the novels don't pass that "whatsoever" test anyway. Some reference books are offered. A big Portuguese dictionary costs 2,000mt… that is about $70.

Back to my boxes. Stacked in a corner of our guestroom/office/store room we have about 10 boxes. Most are books we've collected and don't have shelf space for right now. The boxes are labeled: Christian, reference, novels-English, novels-Swedish, misc. children's, cookbooks… More telling are the books that have made it to the shelf: Where there is no Doctor, World Book Encyclopedia, Concordances, Dictionaries in 4 languages. There are several versions of the Bible in English plus Portuguese, Swedish and Children's versions. We have a stack of John Grishams and a stack of old National Geographics and a row of young fiction books that are hand-me-downs.

Just now, it is the "hand-me-downs" that bring me to write. Five boxes of books left for our family by friends leaving the country. First came a Swedish box from a family up North that had "outgrown" many of their books. They thought of us. Thank you. We consider several of those books to be new treasures. Then there were two boxes left by a Brazilian missionary: Portuguese books donated to our office library project that doesn't have a room of its own yet. Next came a box of books from our British friends. They homeschooled here for about 5 years and have accumulated a bundle of reading material worth passing on. That's four boxes of books from leaving missionaries accumulated in the past 6 months.

Now I'm looking at box number five standing beside the bookcase with the hand-me-downs. I'm getting teary. The books in this box were passed to us by dear friends. They have been our second family while we are in Mozambique. They know where we come from and why we are here. They understand our struggles in this place better than you do. We started as a "double team" in 1999 and became a "tag-team" over the years. Often we shared work without sharing Tete, but a tradition of house-sitting in months of transition grew between our families. We are at home in each other's kitchens. We have passed furniture back and forth, borrowed linens, and of course, read most of the books on each other's shelves.

The time has come for them to move on to another African country. They are packing and giving away accumulated treasures. Selling what they can and facing up to the limit of luggage allowances. Already packed are 16 boxes of books they can't part with. 600 pounds of faithful friends will find their way through the dusty border posts down to the Cape. We are praying that those boxes will be shipped with helpful souls passing through with room to share. The family will adjust to their new home in a town with a library, public schools in English and used bookshops for browsing and buying. They will still be connected to Tete and Nyungwe in new ways with new technology to spread God's Word and make more books available here in Mozambique.

So, now I look at that box below the encyclopedias. A reminder that we will box up our books some day and leave them with someone we love. I hope by then there is a library in Tete that will be the guardian of our books… with shelves open for browsing… with people reading about everything I've been able to read about and much more. They will be practicing English and seeking God in Portuguese at a library started by Mozambicans for Mozambicans with a will to read. I hope most of all that that library will have a whole section devoted to the Nyungwe language with dictionaries, folktales and local history written by people who have lived it. I hope that box number six will live there among them.

You see, David was in town overnight to attend to last-minute business. He brought a stack of planks… precious deep red wood… long, straight and planed for some project years ago. They are destined for the office. We are going to use them to build bookshelves! I also noticed that he dropped off ANOTHER box of books: I peeked inside to find photocopied bundles of the first dictionaries and Bible translation portions in Nyungwe done by the Catholics about a hundred years ago. They were dug out of a library somewhere else in the world and copied for use here. Someone has to be the guardian of these out-of-print treasures… for now, it is me. I only keep them for awhile and then I too will pass them on.