Mozambique Blog 5

What was Africa like before plastic chairs? I’m writing this up in a room where about a dozen of them are piled up in the corner – and there must be many more scattered over the whole Khovo (Church HQ) site. Plastic chairs featured prominently among gifts made to a retiring Youth Worker at Synod last week, and to a Pastor’s farewell service I attended at Tlhavna parish the previous Sunday.

Once answer I’ve received to my question is that they have made an immense and invaluable difference. They are to be found even in the most remote places, helping people to gather and communicate with one another. Schools, clinics, consultations, and all sorts of services function so much better simply because people can easily sit down together. I guess some of the church elders could offer a contrary case based on the comfort they also provide patrons of dubious drinking dens and the like, but generally they add to the richness of the shared life of Africa’s peoples.

And churches, of course, are full of the things. Not that everyone wants to use them: at Tlhavana I watched an elderly woman walk through the door on two crutches – the kind of person we would certainly offer a lift to, while half expecting that they make the decision that they were now too bad to come to church anymore. However, this feisty woman made her way to the front and on to the platform, where she unrolled a mat and slowly sat herself down on the floor,  disengaging the crutches and leaning back against the wall for the next three hours.

Most people, however, were happy to be sitting in a more western fashion. There were a few benches at the back, certainly well occupied, but not nearly enough to fill the church or provide for the needs of the growing congregation. I imagine benches cost a fair bit of money – and they must get in the way of serious singing and dancing. So a good half of the congregation were on plastic chairs. Sometimes the block of chairs stretched up to and even onto the platform. But then when the women’s group or the youth group or some other group came out to sing; or when the leaving pastor and her family were up on the platform and people were bringing gifts like a double bed and corrugated iron sheets to build a shelter, as well as those chairs….  well, then you moved the rows of chairs out the way, and cleared the space you needed for the next few minutes.

The plastic chair and the mobile phone must have changed the face of a continent between them. Pastors and others who can now keep in touch with the world and with one another will certainly give the prize to the mobile phone – but I reckon the plastic chair is a close runner up!