This past Tuesday is a day that I will never forget. I was in our back yard hanging up clothes to dry, and for some reason I walked around to the front of the house. To my surprise I saw a police van pull up outside our wall. I couldn’t imagine why the police would be coming to see us. “They must be seeking shade from our thorn tree,” I thought, and I went on into our house. Then the gate bell rang. When I answered it, I heard the familiar voice of Moses, one of our Zimbabwean friends who was baptized the week before last. “Hello, Mmago Kg!” he said. “This is Moses.” “Hi, Moses,” I said, “come on in.” I pushed the button to open the gate and then walked outside to meet him halfway.
I still feel the same shock now that I felt at that moment when I saw Moses standing in our driveway with his feet chained together. Two policemen stood behind him. “What is your relationship to him?” one of the officers asked me. “I’m his friend,” I said, “and we go to the same church.” “What church do you go to?” they asked, and I answered. Then they told me to help Moses get his things. (He had been storing some things here — cooking oil, salt, etc. — until he could arrange to send them home to Zimbabwe.) Still in shock, I led Moses into our house. I was surprised that the policemen waited outside. As we passed Kg on the porch, Moses scooped her up in his arms and gave her a big hug.
I couldn’t think clearly, so I led Moses around our house, trying to remember where I had put his things. Meanwhile he told me what happened. He was arrested a week before and had been in jail ever since. He was going to be deported that day. I didn’t have the sense to ask for his address in Zimbabwe, but I did think to give him the photo album that I had put together of his baptism. I also gave him all the money I had. I almost cried when I saw how little it was, but Mark told me later that any money I gave him was surely taken away.
Kg and I walked with Moses back out to the police van where the officers were waiting. When I looked in the back, I saw several others who shared Moses’s fate. I greeted them, and they gave me weak smiles. Turning back to the officers I asked, “Please, may I pray for Moses before he goes?” “Nyaa, mma,” one of them said. “Nako e chaile.” (No, the time is up.) After Moses climbed into the van, I leaned in and told him that we would be praying for him. Then the officers got into the front and drove the van away.
What was Moses’s crime? Trying to survive. With the inflation rate in Zimbabwe now over 100,000%, with unemployment over 80%, with basic necessities (maize, cooking oil, salt, bath soap, laundry detergent) being either not affordable or unobtainable (the store shelves are empty), thousands and thousands of Zimbabweans have been forced to go into neighboring countries, where, if they’re lucky, they find menial jobs that pay next-to-nothing. But next-to-nothing in Botswana is way more than nothing in Zimbabwe, and by living sacrificially here, they are able to send money and basic necessities back home. The only problem is that they cannot legally work in these countries. Many of them are caught and arrested.
You cannot imagine the impact of seeing someone you love in chains, especially someone as sweet and precious as Moses. It broke my heart. I went back into our house and cried and cried. I also sent a text message to Mark and our pastor, telling them what happened. Then I went to a friend and asked her to pray with me. I had just arrived back home when Mark called. “Guess who I just saw!” he said. “Moses!” Mark just happened to go to the airport police station to get some paperwork stamped for a new pilot. To his surprise, he saw Moses looking at him through the window of the holding cell. Mark was able to talk with him and pray with him. He said that Moses was upbeat about his “free ride home.” Mark doubted, though, that he would be allowed to take any of his things with him.
Our pastor went to the police station later that day to take Moses a plate of food. He was told that Moses had been released. “I can’t imagine why,” he said, “out of a room full of people being processed for deportation, that Moses would be singled out and released.” Did God part the waters for Moses? I hope so. But we haven’t heard from him since.
Today another Zimbabwean friend came to visit. She arrived back in Botswana just yesterday. She sat at our table and choked up with tears over and over again as she told stories of the atrocities in Zimbabwe and how the people are suffering. I told her about Moses, but she was not optimistic. “When they deport us,” she said, “they take us across the border and dump us. But then we have no money to get home, and no food, nothing. If we get caught trying to cross back over, they beat us.” Moses lives hundreds of miles from the border. I can’t imagine what happened if he was dumped there without the wherewithal to get home. So we continue praying for him and longing to hear that he is all right. I also pray for his 80-year-old father and his mother and other relatives who were counting on Moses to provide for them.
After we finished eating lunch today, my friend insisted on washing the dishes. She put water in the sink and then started washing. I could tell that it never even entered her mind to use soap. Why would it? Dish soap is a luxury that she probably hasn’t enjoyed for ages. This particular friend has a university education. Now she is reduced to walking from sunup to sundown, begging for menial labor. There have been times when she has walked for two weeks straight without earning anything at all. Other times she has worked the whole day and then been paid less than $4 for her labor. “That’s better than what happens to others,” she said. “Some work the whole day and then are paid nothing, because the person who hired them knows that there’s nothing they can do.”
Our friend “Lanny” is blessed with a good skill and fairly regular work, but he, too, lives sacrificially so that he can send money and food home to his mother. When he last returned from Zimbabwe, he was full of tales of suffering. “Everyone I know is eating only one meal a day,” he said. “They eat it at night so that they’ll be able to sleep.”
I am reminded of another Moses and another people who endured terrible suffering and hardship. The Zimbabweans, who are struggling to survive without the means to do it, remind me of the Israelites who were ordered to make bricks without straw. The Lord saw the oppression of the Israelites. “I have heard their cries of distress,” he said, “and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them.” The Lord also sees the oppression of the Zimbabweans. Surely He is concerned about their suffering, too. Please join with us in praying that He will come down to rescue them. The same God who parted the Red Sea can make a way for Moses and the people of Zimbabwe to cross through the waters of suffering that are flooding over them.
Note: Elections will be held in Zimbabwe on the 29th of March.
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