Visit Report 2001
[Source: Elizabeth Tucker and London Link]
In November 2001, Bishop Richard Chartres, Bishop of London, went to open the church of St Mary and the Esperanca Berta Health Centre in Zove. Bishop Richard laid the foundation stone of the Esperanca Berta School. It is a building with two large classrooms, and there is an office for the Head and a store room for books and exercise books.
It's not often that pilots enlist their passengers to search for a place to land.
And it’s not often that the Bishop of London finds himself in a five-seater place, flown by just such a pilot, flying into the interior of Mozambique!
One minute he’s a visiting Bishop come to strengthen ties between the twinned dioceses of London and Lebombo; the next he’s a member of an aerial landing-strip search party …
Fortunately the landing strip was found, the cattle had all been herded off the grass runway, and Bishop Dinis Sengulane of Lebombo was there to greet Bishop Richard for the most important day of his recent week-long visit to Mozambique.
A car carrying the two Bishops from the landing strip stopped in front of a tall white cross constructed by the side of an isolated stretch of road at a place called Zove. The cross had been made out of the wreckage of the car in which Bishop Dinis’s wife, Berta Sengulane, had died in 1998.
In just over three years since that terrible occasion, the combination of money raised through ALMA in London and a huge amount of local hard work has completely transformed the area.
On the day of the accident it had taken five hours to reach the nearest health centre. Now the same spot boasts a church (St Mary’s) and the Berta Sengulane Health Centre. Very soon it will also include a school and houses for both a health worker and a priest.
The remainder of the visit included the opening of two further ALMA funded projects: a new school at Zandamela and the consecration of St Benedict’s, Malhangalene.
Bishop Richard went on to inaugurate an e-mail link between Twyford school and St Cyprian’s Maputo; met with President Chissano; and visited flood resettlement and street children’s projects in the capital, Maputo.
Coming home, the runway at Heathrow proved easier to spot - and with ties between London and Mozambique duly strengthened, Bishop Dinis returned to daily life in the Diocese of Lebombo as Bishop Richard wove his way back to St Paul’s.