Pictures

This one is mostly for Jen’s dad. This is her, pigging out at 748 in Loki. Your daughter is hardcore. (Steve thought this picture was necessary.)

broken down
This was a common sight, all the fellas gathered under the hood of the rebuilt Cruiser.

broken down, broken down… again, long travels
Our journey was long and hard. This first picture is of Heinrich having to get the first LandCruiser up and going again after something went awry with the brakes. Whoops. This was on the way out of Sudan .

long travels
This is Annikia, the school helper, and I in the back of the kaput LandCruiser. We shared the back with lots and lots of vegetables, which is good, because we got pretty hungry on our 20 hour, trouble-laden trip from Tinderet to Loki. I hope you’re digging my hair. That’s what lots of hours with hard wind in your face will do to you. I’m not ashamed. We were so dirty and gross after that trip. I woke up after a little nap, covered in a thick layer of dirt. So disgusting.

the river, Kenyan crossing
We hit this sweet river just before the border of Sudan . There’s not much you can do in these situations—either you wait or you try to do through. Since we’re hardcore, we just went through. J That’s the view from the top of the cabin after Dan and I had already crossed in the big 911 truck. Then there are a bunch of Kenyans piled in the back of a (very brave) truck. It was seriously so weird to see the trucks swimming through the water. I now know what that funny snorkel thing coming from the engine is for. I love hardcore cars.

a little stuck
Sometimes even the best of us fall to rivers. Steve and Co. didn’t quite make it. J

Settling In

Greetings from under the protection of my mosquito net in my mud house in the middle of no where Sudan . (Strangely, saying stuff like that doesn’t get any less weird as time goes on.) I also bring greetings from the bugs, as they’ve come out en masse at the inviting light of my laptop screen. J

So, we’re back here in Lopit. I can tell because there was a frog in my bathroom this morning and the toilet doesn’t have a flush. The children were calling my name from the fence. I went out to greet them this morning and they emptied their pockets of peanuts—a welcome-home gift for us, I’m sure. My shirt was full of them by the time they were done. What a wonderful way to begin my day here in Lopit—what a wonderful way to begin the next three months.

Unfortunately, the whole day didn’t go so well. We came home in the cover of night again (see long entry about long travels, haha), so people came to greet us in the morning and brought news that our neighbor’s child had died while we were away. Jacob was five. He died of malaria. We knew it was going to happen eventually—that this kind of tragedy, so commonplace our villages and in the bush, would hit really close to home.

Mary and William, Jacob’s parents, are some of our closest friends; their compound is just above ours. William has three wives—two of which live on the compound and have been with us since the beginning. The news came as a shock; somehow, we hadn’t prepared ourselves for it. Kimmie took it really hard. Jacob wasn’t the only one to died while we were gone; two other children also fell to malaria. Or Jok, the bad god, if you ask the locals. I’m not sure yet how to answer them when they go on about how Jok took the child. I have not the words or the understanding of their beliefs. And that’s frustrating.

That night I sat on Anuk’s (William’s other wife) compound and played with some of my favorite children—Asunta (the one laying on the rocks in a picture awhile back), Paula, Francis and Franco. We always have fun with my batteria (torch/flashlight). They just love it. Somehow, though, they’re always surprised when they turn it on and it shines in their eyes and it hurts. They’ve gotten the idea that it hurts my eyes; Asunta always takes her little hands and shields my eyes for me. I think the greatest part is when they accidentally click the torch off and then try to get it back on by blowing on it, like you would when you’re kindling a fire. They do it to the indigo light on my watch, too. Priceless. Just priceless.

I ended up on my back on a grass mat, looking up at the moon and the stars, with Asunta spread out across my stomach and Paula playing with my hair. And I looked at them in the moonlight (it’s always such a pretty thing here, seeing the light of the moon on their dark beautiful faces) and I thought what it would be like if one of them got sick and died. I know you can get callous when you’re working in Africa , especially in areas where war and disease are common. I never want to get to that place where I no longer feel at a child’s funeral. But I can feel it already some, already it’s not so shocking, not so painful, when I hear of what’s happening.

(OK, maybe read this next bit before you read it to the kids. A warning.)

Steve has seen a lot, through being a soldier and then a missionary in Sudan during the war. He’s seen dead bodies, starving children, the whole lot. And even he will say he’s callous in some ways. But right before we left, Heinrich told us about his neighbors—the mama punished her young son by thrusting his arms, up to his elbows, into boiling water. (Or at least that’s how the story goes.) Heinrich said the mama ran away with the three-week-old newborn; the boy was just sitting on the compound, quivering in pain. That hit us all hard. Even Steve, who has seen so much, had to stop things and walk away.

There are some things, I guess, we’ll never understand, except to say man is fallen. How anyone can think there is anything good in us outside of God is a wonder to me.

Finally Back Home

Oh wow. It’s been a long five days.
Please, please, please forgive me for not updating for a long time.
We started off from Tinderet to Elderet on Wednesday morning at 6 and got as far as the mountains before our LandCruiser (that one I mentioned was being towed back) broke down. We knew it was going to happen, I guess. We’d been cheering every time it started by itself. It seems our TIMO cars have a bit of a problem starting; we always have to push start them. Ha.
Anyway, the thing broke down a few times, then went completely kaput in the desert. So Steve pulled us with his LandRover for ten hours. Through the mountains, through rivers, through terrible roads. TEN HOURS. We were on the road for 20 hours before we finally got into Loki at 2 a.m. and crashed for the night. The nice thing was there were just four of us in the car, plus about 200 kilos of vegetables and fruit, so it bordered on comfort. I could actually lay down in the back, one leg up on a huge back of oranges, the other on an even bigger bag of potatoes. Luxury. Pure luxury.
It’s funny: I used to think the three hours to my grandparents’ house was a killer of a drive. But now that seems like a drop in the bucket.
The last leg of our journey didn’t get much easier. We were stuck in Loki for a day while Steve fixed the LandCruiser and we did the rest of the shopping. To make matters even worse, the western place to eat there was out of every bit of good food. We’d so looked forward to pizza night and ice cream, and it just didn’t happen.
The next day we started out the last leg and hit some killer rivers on the way back. Daniel had to pull the trucks through. It’s so awesome, driving through water that’s up over the bonnet. (That’s English for hood.) Twelve hours later, we’re here in Lopit.
Ugh, I don’t have time to tell you all about it now. The rain is coming and I have to use the satellite. I took some pictures and I’ll get them up later. Just know I’m sorry for not updating; there’s so much to say here and I’ll get to it as soon as I can!

Where do I begin?

So much has happened in the last month, I’m not sure where to begin. Our trip to Nairobi has left my head spinning. We left home at 6 a.m. on a Wednesday and spent most of the day bouncing on the road to Loki, the Kenya/Sudan border town. There were 11 of us in the LandCruiser. I didn’t even think it was possible to fit that many people in an automobile. After a milkshake and a shower, a couple of the teammates and I took off in Steve’s LandRover to drive through the night. Not going to lie—driving with Steve is pretty sweet. This man knows what’s up. Anyway, it turned into a dense theology lesson for me, which was superb. Steve and I feasted on some Greg Bahsen; Kim and Martin took the opportunity for some shuteye. Not everyone shares our love for theology.

It was a little crazy, to start out in Lopit one day, where it’s in the high 90s and humid, then pull into Loki, where it’s more like a desert, complete with the obnoxious, terrible desert wind and sand, then cruise through the night through more of a desert, then suddenly open the window at a police stop in the mountains and realize it’s frigid outside. And suddenly, it’s late Thursday night and we’re in Nairobi , an entirely different world than what I’m used to.

We went to a grocery store that first night while we were waiting for Steve’s family’s plane to land. (Samaritan’s Purse had room on a Loki-Nairobi flight that day and took the wives and children. Thank you, SP. Thank you, Franklin Graham.) I was so overwhelmed when I walked through isle after isle of food and stuff. This isn’t even an American supermarket, but, wow, when you come from a place where there is nothing but… well, nothing… it’s quite intense. My head was spinning. And that’s how it went the entire time we were there. I felt like my cultures were colliding again. A prime example: At one point, I found myself with a huge Turkana basket full of laundry on my head, talking to my team leader on my cell phone. WEIRD. We definitely don’t have cell phones in the bush. And, in a way, I’m really glad. J

Anyway, Nairobi was a nice break. It was nice to realize, first, how great modern conveniences can be. But, also, moreover, it was nice to realize how much I don’t need that stuff. The folks at Diguna wanted to know all about the bush and how things were going, and they’d often say how hard it must be, to live out there, to minister out there. But I’ve realized that I’m comfortable in most ways—the electricity thing, the plumbing thing, the lack-of-supplies thing, it doesn’t really seem like much of a factor anymore. And I realized the people are becoming our friends, our community. And I dig that.

Heading Back Home

Oh, wow, so it’s been a long time since I’ve posted up here. And I’ve got a lot of grief from the home front about being in a city—where there is presumably more access to email and electricity—and updating less than I have from the bush. So, yeah, I apologize for that. We’ve been in Nairobi for the last bit, but our program here as been really intense—we had some medical issues on top of the already thick schedule of meetings and buying supplies. But here I am now, writing from the beautiful mountains in Tinderet , Kenya . We’re headed back to Sudan —a three-day trip on some pretty terrible roads. The first leg of our trip brought us here to a Diguna station—about a six hour drive from Nairobi in Steve’s LandRover, a ten hour trip in the 10-ton truck. Guess which one I was stuck in. ;)

We’re supposed to start another leg of our journey tonight, but I’m suddenly not so confident that’s going to happen, as the LandCruiser we came here to pick up and drive home in was just towed by behind another vehicle. I guess the test run didn’t go so well. Hmm. I guess we’ll see!

Anyway, since I’m here now with my laptop and a bit of time, I’ll do my best to let you know how things are going…

Call me!

Hey gang.

We're in Nairobi for a quick supply trip.

I bought a cell phone today (!!!!!) so you can call, if you'd like. I won't lie, it's not really cheap (maybe 30 cents a minute or so), but you can buy cheap international phone cards off the internet. Just Google it. It's a Kenyan cell phone you'll be calling. And it's free for me to get calls, so don't worry about that. Even SMS is free for me.

Anyway, some people were asking.

Here's the number: 011 254 726 082 961 (NUMBER CORRECTED 10-14)

Thanks for all your prayers. Hopefully I'll have some time while we're here to update you on what is going down in Lopit land. Know God is doing cool things!

-Andrea

Runaway Rainmaker

So, get this: The Rainmaker ran away.
Crazy, eh?
It’s funny, the things that have happened here since we moved in, but I think this one takes the cake.
I’m not even sure why he left—or, as some would argue, was run off—but I know he’s gone, which makes the animistic culture here a little thinner (and our nights a little quieter). I guess he slept with some guy’s wife or something. And this isn’t the first village he’s been shooed out of.
God is just opening all sorts of doors for us, though we often feel limited because we’re still basic in the language and are three months away from beginning any formal ministry. (Our battle cry: Language learning is ministry.) But the Lord is at work, doing incredible things.
The AIC church, planted in the 50s, I think, is seeing a bit of a revival. People are coming, for one thing. Old people who are coming back to the church, new people who are following us there. This guy Moses gave his life to Christ years ago, but fell defeated to the culture in the villages and had fallen away. Steve put the Aussie with him for home stay when we first got here—when we stayed with families for a week—and, pole pole, Moses has come back to the church and is now just on fire for the Lord. He stood up Sunday in church and spurred on the people to walk in Christ and to share His good news. That’s nuts.
Deborah, this woman who became a Christian when she was 11 and was discipled by the Barbara and Martha—some of the original missionaries here, back in the 50s—has been a huge help to our girls in Sohot, just as he’s found encouragement and comfort in them. Christians just don’t live in the villages without backsliding it seems, but she has. Praise God.
To see how the Lopit pastors at AIC have caught the vision is also cool. No longer are they just focusing on Amerikan—the tiny village where the church and mission station are, where all the Christians flock when they’re persecuted in the hills—but they’ve got on their minds and hearts the village in the hills. They see what our living up there has done and how great a witness it is. Pastor G organized a list of past members of the church or those who had been baptized and divided it up by villages. He’s charged us (and even the congregation) to find these people, meet these people and be something to these people. Everyone is realizing it’s not impossible to live as a Christian in the villages—we are, and we’re there to stand with those who will take a stand.
We don’t go unnoticed here—not just because of our white skin, but because of how we live our lives.
God is building up opportunities for us as we build up our Lopit vocabulary. This field is ripe for the harvest. Even just last night, a group of teens we know well invited us to play—to go from house to house and eat a big of sorghum and giagi (YUCK) at each place. At the last house, under this bright, remarkable moon, they crowded around us and asked us to tell them the “story of the history of America .” (Their concept—or lack thereof—of the USA is hilarious. They know nothing of its size or culture. They figure it to be much like what they know, just a cluster of huts on a mountainside. My favorite was when they asked us if we knew Rachel—a short-termer here in June who I’ve talked about before—or someone named Ellen. They seemed so confused that we would not know them, even though we both lived in the States.) I cannot wait until we can tell them the creation story, the story of Jesus Christ.
The audience is here, at rapt attention.
Now we just need the words.

Hi Jen’s Dad
Dear Roger (Jen said I could call you Roger), I’m just saying hello on behalf of Jen. I’ll try to get more pictures of Jen up here. God bless you!

Good friends

This morning I woke up sick and was kind of bummed about the idea of spending the entire day in the house, so I took my grass mat out to our yard and curled up on the rocks with my blanket. Within seconds, I had a bunch of village kids surrounding me, asking me if I was sick and what was hurting. They’re so good to me.
One of the girls tucked my blanket around me.
Another two were petting my head and my arm.
As more kids came to play (we love to play), the kids who were already there would quietly explain, “Ongwe Ibedja” (“Ibedja’s sick”) and tell them not to be too loud. Then they’d tell the stories of the things we’d done in the last few days and laugh.
I love, love, love these quiet moments with the kids.
A week ago, I sat on the rocks and showed them pictures of my friends from home. They loved to look at them and find where I was. It became a bit of a game. “Ibedja! Ibedja!” And they even worked on getting to know the people’s names and would find them in other pictures. I was really impressed. They think my mom is really pretty. “Elehamen hotonye hoi bino!”
Sometimes the little ones sleep beside me as I read. Sometimes we all just sprawl out for a nap. A lot of times, I’ll be reading and they’ll be picking through my journal (praise God they don’t read English) or my books. Or they’ll play with my hair or study the hair on my arms or my finger- and toenails. They like to compare our skin. They’re not at all shy about the fact that I’m about as strange as an alien from outer space… and might as well be one.
Kibaki, this really adorable little one who is a bit of a princess in the village, just laid on my stomach the other day, trying to figure me out.
Everywhere I go, they want to race. And it’s not just the kids, it’s all the men. But the kids and I have made a bit of a track around the outside of my house and we run and run and run.
There’s a certain compound I pass most every day that the kids always come streaming out to greet me. I made the mistake of swinging one of the kids one day, so now they come out, arms open wide, ready for the great swing. They love it when Daniel and I come by together, because they know we’re both suckers for kids. It’s funny because my roommate Kim and I look a lot alike, so sometimes they’ll ask her for a lift. Today we were both there together and they came at her, arms open wide. She simply took their shoulders and rotated them toward me, haha. She’s not as fond of the kid attention as I am.

Mail from Heaven

My roommates and I always rejoice when we reach a landmark or standard that finally makes us, as we joke, ‘real missionaries.’ The standard seems to be somehow elusive, though, as we’ve declared ourselves to truly be ‘real missionaries’ a few times now.
I think I was the first real missionary because I killed the snake with my bare hands (and, umm, a Nalgene water bottle).
But in a way, I suppose we were all already ‘real missionaries’ because we’d slugged across no man’s land in LandCruisers and a giant truck carrying all of our worldly possessions. And we’d used a longdrop toilet. We read by kerosene lamp and sleep under mosquito nets. We do cup baths and buy supplies three months at a time.
Then there was the time we never-minded the bugs in our oatmeal. ‘Real missionaries.’
But then biffing down a mountain and getting med-evaced out on a tiny airplane off of our grass airstrips—that was about as ‘real missionary’ as it gets.
And Pattie was crazy with malaria for three days, an unfortunate reality of being a ‘real missionary.’
And two days ago was the best because I really feel like this was the time, the real time—I became a ‘real missionary.’ Jon, our favorite AIM AIR pilot from Loki, ratioed Steve to say he was going to swing by and drop off a package. As in literally drop it off, out of the plane window. Steve and I ran out to the old football (aka: soccer) field to wait for him. It was so awesome because we live in a U-shaped mountain range—Amerikan sits in the bottom of the “U,” sort of—so Jon flew in with the plane, banked up against the mountains and swung back over the soccer field really low.
I’m not sure who dropped the package out of the window, but whoever it was has incredible aim, because they dropped the thing in one of the few bare spots on the field. And with the whole mountain range watching, no less. Talk about pressure.
Anyway, it was awesome to bound across the field, through the thorns and ridiculously high weeds to the shouts of the villagers, who were pointing and shouting excitedly about where it landed. It’s been the talk of the hills, that Ibedja’s mom loves her so much she sent her greetings in a package from the sky. And I thought getting mail in the States was cool.
So, yeah, getting mail dropped from planes seems a little surreal still. But I’m going to hang on to the remnants of the “romance” stage for as long as possible.

Mosquitoes bite

Ugh, I hate malaria.
Please pray for my team, as we’re really taking a beating from the mosquitoes. Pattie was crazy with the stuff for three days and Steve’s poor family just keeps getting it over and over again. It seems just as one gets over it, another gets it. They don’t even wait to take the tests anymore; they throw medicine at fevers right away. Poor little Christian—Steve and Iris’s youngest, a little over 1—was so bad for a few days, with a fever up to 104, we were starting to worry we were going to have to fly him and Iris out to Nairobi .
Steve got his golden mosquito last week—his tenth go of malaria. You can tell he’s about at his limit, as he saw some water standing on top of a container the other day and tipped it over in haste. (Such haste that he tipped it over on me.) He’s said that if the team weren’t here, if he wasn’t committed to serving us and leading us, he’d have yanked his family out of here two weeks ago and pulled out to Nairobi to recover.
I refuse to live in fear of mosquitoes, but I really don’t want this malaria stuff. It gets to your head. (I just wrote to my friend Lara and told her, it’s funny because if we’re even a bit emotional, Steve immediately begins to question if we have malaria. Hehe.) And it makes you miserable, miserable, miserable. Praise God for good medicine, though—this is the kind of stuff that kept the average life expectancy for a missionary in Africa once they hit the field at two years way back when.
But, yeah, keep us in your prayers. We’re headed for Nairobi in a week to get supplies, so hopefully we’ll have a chance for our bodies to recover and for the coming dry season to take care of all the mosquitoes.

Translation Issues

We got a copy of the Gospel of John that two of the hardcore missionaries from the ‘50s—Martha and Barbara—put together while they were here. It’s in another dialect, but it’s awesome because it’s close to Lopit, so we can try it out on people. We’re actually working on memorizing John 3:16 right now. One of the pastors here saw it typed out on our practice sheet for the first time and was just amazed that he was reading the Word of God in Lopit. What a powerful thing.
It’s awesome to think that someday we’ll be able to start translating not just John, but the rest of the Bible into Lopit. Wow. But just as we’ve been working on John 3:16, I’ve realized a lot of things about translation that I never considered before.
Take, for example, the idea of Jesus because God’s son and the idea of us being children of God. We have in our Western culture a built-in picture of this relationship as it is with God—our earthly fathers often serve as examples because our cultures were rooted in biblical principles. I mean, even if our country has strayed far from those principles in some way, the effects are still there. (Thank you, Puritans.) But the Lopit don’t have that. There’s no parallel. No hooks on which to hang this idea. So even when we get the words translated, we have to first translate the idea to these people. They know next to nothing about loving fathers or this imagery of Christ as the bridgegroom for the church.
Try explaining prayer to someone who knows only animism. Heck, try explaining it to just about anyone, it’s already hard enough.
Now try everlasting life. But somehow distinguish it from ancestors and the living dead that they know from their culture.
Now give “love” a try. They don’t even have a word for it in their language. We ask our language helpers and they’re just mystified by the idea, searching the whole of their vocabularies and senses that would convey this idea. Again, no hooks. Not even words. No “forgiveness.” Or “family.”
There’s just so much, so much I never realized you have to deal with when you take the Gospel to an unreached people.
Wow.

Language Blunders

Part of my job here in Africa is to greet people.
Yeah, that’s right, I get paid to greet people.
Alright, well, maybe not just like that. But our ministry right now is language and culture learning with relationship building, so that involves a lot of being out in the community with people. And it’s just the way of life in Lopit that you greet people.
And it was in this that one of my all-time favorite language blunders was birthed.
I’ve said before that everyone wants to know where you’re going and where you’ve been. And when we first got here, this was about the extent of our language learning, so we jumped right into this tradition of inquisition, even if we didn’t know exactly what they were saying in response.
My roommate Pattie met a woman on the path one morning and, being the culturally appropriate missionary she is, asked where this woman was headed. “Awu nang aler,” she said.
“I’m going…” mystery word.
This wasn’t the first time Pattie had heard this word, but she had no idea where “aler” was. We’d come to recognize the village names, the word for the sorghum fields and the word for the peanut fields, and this wasn’t any of them, so she pressed for an explanation.
After a few awkward minutes of the woman miming, Pattie suddenly had a pretty good idea where “aler” was.
It just so happened there was this old Lopit guy who speaks a little English coming down the path, so she stopped him. “What does ‘aler’ mean?”
(I’d like to note that there was absolutely no pause, no awkwardness in this man’s response.)
“To defecate.”
Yeah, she was going to the bathroom down the mountain a bit. I have no idea how many times we asked people this and just nodded our approval or gave an enthusiastic “olibo bino!” (really good!” another one of our early phrases) as they went along.
Oh, language learning.
And our question now is… how do you respond to that?
The traditional thing to say as you leave one another is “eno no libo!” which means…
“Go well!”

More Pictures

Beautiful Baby
KimmiePie and I visited our friend and her new little baby boy. In this picture, he’s two days old… and really cute. He was so tiny, I could hardly believe it. The weirdest thing about babies here is that, though their parents skin is this beautiful dark coal black, the babies are nearly white. This little guy doesn’t have a name yet, but he’ll get one this afternoon in an elaborate naming ceremony.

Happy Birthday, Danimal
Our teammate Daniel had his birthday yesterday, so we celebrated in style up in Longija. Longija is pretty much at the top of the mountain, so I think his gift was just getting us all to come up there. He made us cake and surprised us all with sodas he’d brought from Loki a month ago and hauled up the mountain one by one. Drinking pop in Sudan is a special, special thing. You can tell, maybe, how excited Craiger is in this picture. And that’s Kimmie and Pattie with him. No pictures of the birthday boy, sadly.

Heno, Heno, Heno
Kim’s a champ because in this picture, she’s helping Anuk spread heno over her yard. Heno, for all ya’ll not so fluent in Lopit, is dung. Of the cow variety. We have to redo our house soon. I can’t wait for THAT day, to be covered in a mud/dung mixture.

Morika!
This is our little friend Morika. The kids love to help me with my laundry, and she helped me two days ago. We had a good time decking ourselves out in clothes pins. Totally African fashion.