happy with myself?

Today was a very stressful church service for me.

When I am home in town, I go to the Church of the Nazarene which is a 10 minute walk from my house. I like this church a lot. I go to it for the following reasons:

1. The whole service is in Portuguese, rather than in Portuguese and three other local languages seamlessly mixed together.
2. They use a Portuguese hymnal, so I can sing along.
3. Sometimes the husband of one of the kind older women, Mama Veronica, preaches, and when he does, he speaks in the slowest, most enunciated Portuguese I've ever heard.
4. It is a stable, sincere, healthy church.
5. It is neither enormous nor tiny.
6. Only once has somebody asked if they can be my maid. I don't mind when people do that - life is really hard here - but it is easier to feel like you are making genuine relationships if people don't view you simply as a potential employer.
7. The service lasts 1.5 hours, not 3 or 4.

Things I don't like about this church:

1. They don't dance very much. I wish they would more.

But that's it. 7 to 1 in favor of a church is pretty wonderful, especially if I can get a dancing fix when Sara is trying to do her finances and I keep shuffling my booty in front of her screen. It's better than nothing.

Today, however, was a very stressful church service for me. It started when our night guard ended his shift and left very early this morning. Then Sara and Joseph left to visit his sister in Machipanda. Vumba doesn't work on Sundays. That left just me - or rather, just me and our dog, Sampson. That was the problem.

If Sampson was transmogrified into a human, he'd probably come out as someone in need of decades of counseling. He is the most love-needy creature I've ever met. He cannot stand to be alone for a minute. Even if you hit him around quite a lot (and Mozambicans have no qualms about doing so, believe me), he  doesn't care. Negative attention is still attention in his codependent brain.

I have a love-hate relationship with Sampson. On one hand, its hard to bear ill will toward something so guilelessly hungry for your love. On the other, he never knows when to stop. You give him a speck of attention and he immediately leaps up on you, aiming for your shoulders. He's a decent-sized mutt.

If we lived in Japan, where they appear to disinfect everything - fine. But we don't, we live in Africa, where the dirt is red, muddy and often laden with garbage. We don't have a gate, so after the night guard has left, Sampson (desperate not to be alone) goes out roaming, vigorously spreading his manhood (even until he bleeds in his woo-hoo) and getting into fights with other dogs. So his ears are always bloody and ripped in half, his legs are full of gashes, and his eyes are swollen shut. If we tie him up, he breaks the rope. He's dirty, smelly, and no matter how many times we dip him, he's still full of fleas.

Which I kind of like, truth be told. I like to let a dog be a dog and part of me is glad he can live the vida natural while he's still got the energy. I love that when I go running, he always comes with me, trotting happily beside me for the 3 or 4 mile loop I make a few times each week. It makes me feel safer when I go out in the evening, because most Mozambicans have a strong and genuine fear of dogs. But just when I'm starting to feel we have a special hound-human connection, something worthy of a made-for-TV movie, he always ruins it.

Maybe my shoelace has come untied while I'm running so I stop to bend over to tie it; then he'll shove his big panting face into mine and literally prevent me from being able to get my stupid shoe tied, no matter how many times I shove him away and shout, "FICA! FICA! FICA!!", which means STAY! This usually ends with stronger language.

Or maybe we've taken a nice long walk together, and we're at the very edge of town, meandering through the deserted clay pits where men excavate, form, and dry bricks which are used for building houses here, just me and my trusty companion Sampson, looking out across the verdant fields together, the dark, lovely mountains off in the distance. "Look at the sunset, Sampson!" I'll exclaim with joy. Then I'll glance down at him, my fatal mistake, and he'll howl in pleasure, tackling me until I fall into a thorny acacia bush.

"I HATE YOU, SAMPSON!!!" is how I respond, but he'll just beam at me, wagging his tail, my poor brainwashed rescue dog.

Sampsy, depressed, alone

Or, maybe... I'm walking to church on Sunday morning, let's say, and there's nobody else at home, so there's no way on God's green earth that he's going to stick around there alone. Maybe I'm running late, so I don't think to lock him in our veranda, because once I get to church, he'll just turn around and go home. I think. That seems to be what happens, until we're about 20 minutes into the service, I'm belting out "How Great Thou Art", and suddenly, an elderly woman taps me on the shoulder and points out that Sampson is sitting right there, inside the church, beneath my pew in fact, flapping his tail and freaking out every little kid within eyesight. Then a toddler begins to loudly cry.

So I leap up, embarrassed, and grab him by the neck. We shuffle our way out, down the center aisle, followed by a wave of twitters from my brothers and sisters in Christ. I stand outside, repeatedly pushing Sampson off of me, thinking about how I'm totally screwed because this dog is not going to go anywhere except where I am. I beg a teenage boy to hold him for me for a second, I go back inside, and pull Tony out (my coworker who happens to be visiting this Sunday). We tie him up with a bit of wire to the church gate. He breaks it in exactly 0.1 seconds. Tony heroically volunteers to leave the service and take him home. I consent, immensely grateful for this gesture, and return to my seat.

Within two minutes, I notice the pastor up front, center stage, waving at me. I look down, and there is Sampson, stretched out, yawning underneath my pew. Tony enters the church a few seconds later, looking ashamed, red in the face.

So, I call it quits. I'm just packing up my things when the buxomy mothers beside me push me back into my seat using, ironically, the same language I use on Sampson: "Fica, fica!" Since the service has paused so that everyone can get a good glimpse of the drama with the white girl, I immediately obey. Parents shuffle their kids away from the dangerous beast sitting in the House of the Lord, the service resumes, and everyone pretends like there's not a dog beneath my seat. I try to forget but fail, because he smells like a garbage heap.

That was the first stressful thing about today's service.

The second was when the pastor sprung a request on me to bless the offering and close the service. I have a genuine brain-blockage when it comes to praying in Portuguese and people there know that, but they just keep asking me to do it anyways. The problem today was that I wasn't paying attention to what anyone up front was saying; what I was doing is planning my escape route with Sampson. Suddenly everyone turned around and started chanting my name. Flustered, I bolted upright. They all yelled, "Pray! Pray!" So I stood up and without a moment of forethought, articulated:

(This is an approximate translation of my Portuguese, as it would sound to Mozambicans.)

We are grateful God for blessings the you our lives. [Made-up word similar to 'We ask'] to be You here with us. Okay? Thank you. Amen.

Then everyone laughed at me for the second time in this morning's service.

The third and final humiliation came immediately after the service ended, when seven people crowded around me at once and tried to explain that tomorrow there would be a time of prayer and fasting for the church starting at 6am, no at 4pm, no on Wednesday, yes for 30 minutes, wait, starting at 6 until 7am on Tuesday? TOMORROW. MORNING. 6am, Wednesday. Prayer. Yes. No eating. First week of every month, 7pm, tomorrow morning, one hour of prayer, just 30 minutes, come on Wednesday, DO I UNDERSTAND??

No. I didn't understand. But I faked really well like I did.

Then I grabbed Sampson by the neck, elbowed my way through the post-service crowd, and ran around the block until I was out of sight of everyone. I looked down at Sampson, caught his eye, and then I shouted: "AAAAUUUUUUGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!"

Just to prove I'm not totally inexperienced with dogs, here is me in 1987 holding our dog Tubby.