Barroso Maquivale was born in 1959 in Munhiba, in the Zambezia Provence, Mozambique.
He was married in 1982 and has four children and seven grandchildren. Today, Barroso is a very different man to when I first met him in August 2016. My first encounter with Barroso was when I was running an evangelism series in the Nhamatanda prison.
Barroso was in prison for drug dealing and was a tough character. When he was 15 years old he left school and immediately started getting into trouble. First it was alcohol and then came the drugs. He was known as the town drunk and was always in fights with his neighbours.
Even though he was a drunk he was able to build a very nice house and always seemed to have money. His neighbours wondered how this could be, until one day in 2014 it was discovered by police that he was selling drugs and he was promptly arrested. Barroso was sentenced to 4 years in prison and this is where our paths crossed.
Barroso attended our evangelism program and proclaimed to me that he hated all kinds of religion, especially Christianity! But he continued to attend our program. Why? When we conduct our prison evangelism programs we offer the men extra food every day and this draws many of them to listen to our meetings, as they are usually hungry. Barroso didn’t want Jesus, but he did want fresh bread and bananas. So he came every day and strangely his heart began too warm to the love of God. At the end of the evangelism series I made an appeal for baptism and Barroso was one of the first to stand!
After he was baptised his behaviour changed and he became a new man. The prison was surprised at Barroso’s good behaviour and after one year he was recommended to be released early from his prison sentence. After serving only two of his four year sentence he was released and went back to his family in the town of Mepinha. Here he joined the Mepinha Seventh-day Adventist Church and became an evangelist in his own family. His family were not religious at all, but within six months he converted his wife, children and their spouses.
Barrosos is now the head elder of the Mepinha church and is responsible for converting over 25 people to the faith since his release from prison over three years ago!
