26/02/12

This morning at church a bunch of the girls from the orphanage here in Namaacha sat with me. There is one little girl about two years old who doesn’t live in the orphanage, but who I recognized from church. She walked over and stood in front of me. Unsure of exactly what she wanted I patted my lap and she nodded, so I picked her up and she sat on my lap for mass. They aren’t MY girls, but it was nice and almost felt like I was back in Inharrime again.
When I went to my first mass in Mozambique back in October of 2009 I hated it. I think that I had expected mass to be the one thing that stayed constant when I left America, so I was devastated by how different it is here. I quickly grew to love it though, it wasn’t mass how I expected it, but it was a beautiful different version. That said, I was excited to go back to America to experience the mass I had been missing for two years. But when I went back to America…things were different. The priest in my hometown’s church has retired since I left, as well as the priest in the town where I went to college. And there have been some other changes. So I was left with the very depressing and possibly most frightening feeling for people who have left a place for a while—that the thing we were missing so badly all this time no longer exists.