Back in the Game

Hello, hello, hello.

Greetings from Heathrow Airport in London; I'm halfway back from my holiday/medical trip in the States. Wow, what a whirlwind.

I was blessed with a relatively low-key time at home -- I spent time with my family, saw a handful of close friends (including my favorite kids!), caught an Illini game (!!!) and was able to visit both Oglesby Union and Stratford Park, my home churches. I say "relatively" low-key because anyone who knows me knows low-key doesn't come easy, and anyone who knows coming back in the country after 7 months abroad knows everyone wants to spend time with you. So, yes, it actually was really stressful, but I'm hoping it was a good kind of stressful that will still leave me somehow refreshed and ready to head back into the bush.

Coming back to America was interesting. I'd tell people I was on holiday (vacation) and they'd always ask me what particular holiday it was in Kenya that would bring me home. That wasn't the only language blunder -- my poor parents had to endure bits and pieces of Lopit and German.

I had to ease back into things. The first day I gave a go at Target but ended up having to leave, completely overwhelmed. And I found myself constantly walking around the house turning off TVs and lights, concerned that we'd run out of solar power since it was overcast. (My parents run on regular electricity, just like everyone else.) But I finally did adjust to being able to drive 110kpm without fear of destroying my automobile on some dirtroad pothole. Oh, and I adjusted to being able to drive, period, and thinking in mph again, as well. And I was Walmart's biggest customer, I do believe.

Good showers, good food, good friends and all that was nice, but I'm ready to get back to Africa. (And I dare say my parents were very ready to get rid of me.) I found myself missing my team terribly and called Kim three or four pathetic times. I even sat in front of my television one night, watching the Lopit footage I sent back to my friends while I was away. Now that is sad. I miss my little village, my little house and even my little longdrop toilet.

The computer disaster came and went. I got my new one in just a couple days before I left and Tom tried to load it up with good books and programs for me. (Thanks, Thomas!) All the financial stress was calmed, as the folks at OUC and a couple of my friends covered all but $500 of the thing. What a HUGE relief. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Frustratingly, other things kept going wrong. But, conveniently, I was in the States and in a position to fix them. Praise God for his nice timing on that.

Anyway, so here I go, back into Nairobi, then a three-days' journey into Sudan. God worked in my heart while I was gone, and I'm happy -- nay, joyful -- to say I can't wait to get back and work harder, with more focus than before.

I'll do my best to get the blogs a'flowin' again -- I was amazed to know how many people read it at home, so I'll do my best to keep it up. Pray for the satellite situation -- that it would work and we'd have email connection!

Thanks again for everything... God bless!

Good news and bad news...

Well, folks, I've got good news.

I got my eyes checked out yesterday -- everything is a-OK, which makes me a happy woman. My vision has come back to nearly where it used to be, and the pain is gone. So praise God for that.

On the other end of the spectrum, I have bad news.

I also heard the news on my computer yesterday. Its death certificate has been signed. I now officially have some other huge thing to stress about. (Whimper.) I guess this will be another lesson in trusting God for finances and to bring me through. I have to order a new computer today to get it in time to take it back into the Sudan, so please pray as I look for the money and wade through process of choosing and buying a new computer.

Well, there you have it. I'm going to try to resurrect my harddrive and get all my photos and documents off there. I'm hopeful I'll be able to recover everything and share it with all of you!

God bless you!

from the dark...

Goodness, it's been forever. Pardon me. The satellite we work from in Sudan stopped working with my computer, and my computer has since decided to stop working, as well.

Talk about technological mutiny.

We're on holiday now and will be for a couple of weeks. During that time, I hope to catch ya'll up on things and post some photos. Of course, that all depends on the resurrection of my computer. So please be praying for that, as replacing a dead computer will make my wallet... equally dead.

Things in our village are going OK. I know I left a lot of things hanging. Francis is better and just as cute as ever--a few people have asked. I'll try to get on here and update more in the future, but for now, I'm going to go enjoy a soda and a hot shower.

(Thank you, civilization.)

Wedding Bells and Fist Fights

If I had any question about where the children go while the parents dance, it was answered for me when I set out to leave my house about six this morning, curious to see what the people looked like then, after a whole night of wedding dancing without sleep.
I opened my door to see three little shadows sitting in a line on our front rocks. They turned their faces up to me and whispered happy hellos. I wondered how long they’d been sitting there waiting for me—perhaps summoned by my reading light at 4:30—and how many other mornings they’d sat there anxiously, to no avail.
It was probably a letdown that I told them I was going up to the ringing bell (the central sound ringing from every wedding celebration… quite nonstop… for at least two days) to see the people dancing.
It wasn’t so exciting—to us it normally isn’t—just a bunch of drunk people, scarcely dressed yet elaborately adorned with beads and any other bit of nonsense from outside, covered in white ash and gyrating awkwardly around or inside a circle.
But I’ve always wondered how they would be in the morning. We’ve been there at night, at the beginning of the all-night bashes. But never have I ventured out in the morning, though I wake up often to hear the bells and drums still going full-bore.
Well, my wondering has ceased. They’d just a bit more drunk, a bit more off-beat and a lot more likely to spontaneously break out in quarreling or fighting. But I tell you, these people would be all-stars at pulling all-nighters at college.
My curiosity quenched and my patience running thin with all the fighting, I headed back home. I felt a bit like a pied piper, collecting more and more children as I walked home, all asking if they could come to my house and play. I haven’t been doing that as much lately, and I miss it—a sentiment, it seems, shared by the kids.

The Kissy Face

You can tell a house of missionaries is in need of vacation when they kick a child out of their compound for a week… for “making the kissy face.”
(Try to get a Lopit translation for that.)
The children are so often disobedient and indifferent to our rules, it can get trying, especially in this heat. Since we won’t wield the stick, our rebukes often fall on deaf ears and the children have taken to testing us.
But we’ll prevail… in love and discipline, I suppose… even when they mock us with “the kissy face.” Haha.
But, do pray for us as this hard, hard unit on prayer and spiritual warfare is coming to an end, the heat puts us in a constant sweat and vacation is in view, for better or for worse. It’d be so easy to go into survival mode—burying ourselves only in our studies, lying as still as possible in the shade against the heat and dropping our role as learners in the community, resolving to jump right back in the instant we get back from holiday.
I’ve been close lately to that hapless state of survival—seduced there by recent trials with my health and stress in the community, among other things—so please pray especially for me.

Moon Walking

Kim and I went on a night walk last night. It was beautiful.
The moon is sometimes so bright you can walk by it, and nightfall brings the only relief—albeit small—from the heat.
On a really good night, you’ll even get a sweet breeze by which to walk and wonder at God’s creation.
And wonder you would, were you here. Wow. Just wow.
Annika and I went on a bike ride the other day and both nearly fell of our bikes when we were so distracted by the view across the valley—a purple-gray horizon etched with the shadow of soft blue mountain range.
These days you’ll often fall into the humanist view that cultures untouched by modernization and our understanding of civilization set the standard to which all humanity should aspire. That is, that the people unfettered by that which we know are perfect and reflect “the way things should be.”
In light of the Bible you see it’s actually the opposite—that these people, too, are fallen, and have received none of the blessing connected to the knowledge and foundation of Christianity
Far from perfect, their lives often reflect more starkly the curse put on Adam in the garden—to suffer the effects of sin and disease, to toil hard in the land for food, etc.
But creation, it stands a mighty proclamation of its Creator, maybe even better when it is untouched, unpopulated. A person with ears can’t help but hear what these hills are saying, what the roar of the ocean screams, what the rocks cry out…

Heading Home

Hey all… Just a quick note to let you know I’m headed back into the Sudan. My eyes are feeling better, though my vision is still a little blurry—but with a healthy dose of these drops the doc gave me and maybe eventually a new prescription, I could be good as new again. Or at least I’m praying!
Thanks for all your prayers... about this and about the ministry.
I can’t wait to get back in there and see my teammates and my friends!

my Eyes

The eyes thing is... OK. Kind of weird. I went to the Lions Club hospital here. (You ever seen the donation bins for hand-me-down glasses at restaurants? That's Lions Club.) The lady there was like, you need to come home right now and have surgery. Talk about drama. So I started the wheels on that while I looked for a guy to get a second opinion. During that time, I got over the panic of needing to go home and started instead to see all the positives. (Restocking on things like shoes, which I'm in dire need of; packing everything I should've packed the first time; seeing my parents and friends; going to an Illini basketball game.)But then I ended up at some German doc at Nairobi Hospital. He told me I didn't need to go home and to get the surgery she wanted me to get would be OK, but not altogether necessary and could end up negating itself later. Again, drama, drama. And then I was all positive about going home for no reason.And so now here I sit. I'm in Nairobi at a friend's house. I've bounced between here and the DIGUNA mission station, have relaxed very little and spent VERY MUCH between flights and bus fare and food and all that. Anyway, so I'm one big ball of stress. I've been hassling AIM AIR for a flight back into Lopitland, to no avail. They say the bush plane is out of commission for inspection all next week, which would put the next flight on the 29th. So I'm pushing for a (expensive, grr) diversion sometime early next week, but even that might be a dream.And all this to get back into Lopitland and to my team, which will be leaving for supplies and our first holiday the first week of February! Nothing like traveling thousands of Ks and paying hundreds of dollars to simply turn around two weeks later and come back. *sigh*

Little Francis

A few days ago, I went visiting and found my favorite little friend lying on a rice bag in his compound, burning up with fever. His name is Francis; he’s four (or so his mom says—you can’t really be sure); and he truly is the light of my roommates’ and my Lopit life.
He’s on our compound almost all day every day, always with this amazing smile and cute little giggle. He used to wear a raggedy read turtleneck with shorts that had the butt ripped out. But sometime ago I gave him one of my t-shirts, which actually disappeared until Christmas—at which time it became his everyday attire. I guess that’s how it works here—the kids change clothes on Christmas. And that’s pretty much the only time. Hehe. Anyway, now he parades around in my tshirt (it’s HUGE on him) and an old (but new-to-him) pair of jeans—complete with a butt. We always joke that’s going to take a while to get used to, having a seat in his pants.
He’s my friend and helper. He hands me my clothes pins one at a time when I do laundry and empties our compost bucket proudly and without complaint. So when I saw him there, lying limp, some kind of motherly fear/panic came over me. (This is a predisposition I’m not always convinced the Lopit mothers have. They often resign to, “If Jok—the bad god—wants him, he’ll take him anyway.)
Pattie and I took his temp and it was 40.3 C and climbing. (We didn’t keep it in the full time, for fear he’d bite it.) I checked my bush medicine book for the Celsius to Fahrenheit conversion and about freaked out when I realized he was near 105 F.
The clinic is closed because the workers haven’t been paid in ages and would rather drink with the holiday visitors from Juba and Khartoum than take care of the cholera and other woes. (See previous blog about needing reliable Christian nurses… ugh.) So it’s just Pattie and I, armed only with OTC headache medicine and this stupid bush book.
And, oh yes, prayer.
But I forgot about that part somehow. I ended up picking up his hot little body and carrying him back to our house. And as he half clung to me, half sunk onto my shoulder, I told God, “I refuse to let this child die. I refuse to let you let this child die.”
Quite the ridiculous thing to say to the Creator of the universe and my only source of hope and strength, eh? What am I? What is man, that God is mindful of him, that He cares for him? And where was I when He laid the foundation of the earth, that I dare pit my will against His?
The thing is, God will be glorified. And He will be glorified how He wants to be glorified. And having that mindset is far different from the fatalist, animist mindset because there is hope in the true God and I can raise my petitions to Him. And that’s what I should have been doing as I carried Francis back to my house, stripped him, put him in a basin of water and battled his fever.

Reality

There’s danger in writing a blog update sometime after midnight when you can’t sleep.
That’s why I didn’t. Pattie and I played cards instead.
But there’s still danger in writing blogs at all, I’ve decided. The danger in writing about all the fun stories and strange adventures from my life in Africa is that people at home think my life is all frolicking through fields of African wildflowers and giving Pillsbury Doughboys to naked little village children.
I’ve come to realize that the instant I write something about how life really is hard, people at home go into deep worry about me. And I’m not one to like people fretting over my situation, so let this be a sort of disclaimer…
Life in Lopitland is hard. Sometimes I can’t sleep. Sometimes I don’t think I can stand one more mooching village woman who I don’t know demanding chai or soap or clothes or water. Sometimes I’m sick in bed. Sometimes I want more to eat than noodles or rice or beans. Sometimes I can’t think over the yelling women or crying babies. Sometimes I shoo those cute kids off my compound because they just won’t listen or stop asking for stuff. Sometimes I want to give up on learning this language, give up on bringing the Gospel here. Sometimes even my Western teammates get on my nerves!
Missionaries truly are real people.
But we’ve got the same God here as we did back in the comfort and familiarity of our homes and churches in America. And we’re spurred on because we love that God, and that God loves these people, even when we can’t or don’t want to. And He’ll keep us and sustain us.
So, please, don’t worry! But definitely pray.

Site for Sore Eyes

Sudan can be a rough on your eyes.
I mentioned before that something is up with mine. Steve and Iris decided eyes aren’t something you mess around with, so I’m going to be heading into Kenya on the next plane.
Please pray for the logistics of that—hopping a flight first from the bush to Loki, then from Loki to Nairobi—and for the expenses. Unless I can jump in with a Samaritans Purse flight from Loki to Nairobi, it’ll be $170 each way, plus whatever it is to get picked from Lopitland.
I’ve never had to travel over 1000k to see an eye doctor before.
Pray also against discouragement and frustration. My biggest battle is on this front sometimes.

Say Cheese!

My roommates and I have been near a breaking point this last week.
We’re out of good food. Our supply of ‘fresh’ veggies left from the Loki trip are gone. We’ve been blessed so far to have a few cans of fruits, vegetables and even processed meat (!!!) to call our own. When a bunch of missionaries pulled out of Sudan, they sent a lot of supplies and tins Steve’s way. And some people sent stuff just for our team, because everyone was pretty excited about us. But we hit that container hard and there isn’t much left now, so Steve and Iris closed the ‘Gates of Food Heaven.’ Hehe. There’s a huge 40-foot container in Yei, but we can’t get to it because security isn’t that great—there have been lots of attacks on the road. And tins in Loki are 200+ KSH each—that’s around THREE DOLLARS each. Now, don’t think we’re starving. We have food! But with nothing much more than beans, rice and noodles, we’re realizing how great those gift cans were. And we will from now on appreciate them more (especially if we’re shelling out hundreds of dollars for fruit cocktail and Spam).
We hadn’t gotten mail in nearly a month. Christmas came and went, but no one got their Christmas cards or packages. That’s rough, especially when you know there’s stuff coming.
But then came Kurt and Hannah.
They’re veteran DIGUNA missionaries in the Congo, and they’re amazing. We met them and were blessed by their fellowship when we were in Nairobi in October. But when they came Sunday for a short visit… wow.
First, we got mail.
My roommates got handfuls of letters and cards. I got an AIM statement. Talk about devastating. But, nevertheless, it was great.
Then they came up to our house for lunch. I’m not sure there is another field of work in which you have so much contact with people who are so experienced in what they do nor a field in which it’s so important to have that kind of contact. And, what’s more, they want to share what they know with you. They brought a leveling perspective to three girls aching from the second round of culture shock and wondering at times if they’re getting anywhere in ministry. And they brought encouragement, stories, new conversations…
And cheese.
Oh wow.
Cheese.
It’s been four months since we had cheese.
And they brought a huge chunk of cheese.
CHEESE.
Pattie, Kimpie and I were nearly moved to tears.
Oh, praise God! Cheese!
After we showed them along the path to their next stop, we ran back into the house and just stared at it, thinking about all the wonderful things we could cook with it. And they said we had to eat it all that night because it would be bad by morning. (No fridges in the bush.)
Suddenly, the food world broke open. We had CHEESE. They also brought us eggs, onions and potatoes. We deliberated about what to cook—cheese quesadillas, omelets, cheesy potatoes, cheesy rice, cheesy lentils, cheesy beans, flour and cheese… just cheese, cheese, cheese. During that time, Kim ate half her cheese. But no matter, we still had plenty. Too much, in fact.
We stuffed ourselves with cheese omelets and cheese potatoes.
And it was so amazing.
Of course, this morning we were all terribly sick. But that answered our question of whether eating too much cheese would cause constipation or diarrhea.
And we all agreed that every moment over the longdrop was worth it.

Cultural Strongholds

One of the wisest things anyone as ever said to me was from my friend Sprouts way back in the day. He said, "Andi, you can't expect people who don't know Jesus to act like they do."

This morning as Kim and I sat down to do our Bible study, I was forced to remember that bit of wisdom. We sat there as we heard our neighbor and friend Susannah yelling and beating on a small kid. The child was just screaming, wailing in pain and trying to run away. Susannah was chasing her. This stuff always causes a moment of crisis. You want to run out of the house, demanding them stop and railing them for it. An even better case is when they're so drunk with balu (the local beer) they're doing absolutely ridiculous and terrible things. You want to somehow persuade them that balu is bad and it makes them do stupid things and why don't they just stop?! But you can't expect people who don't know Jesus to act like they do.

Eventually I couldn't stand it and went outside, heart beating and wanting to take a stick to this woman like she was to the child. The other women were standing there, watching, as Susannah chased the kid up the path. And when they caught view of me, you could see the news ripple up the houses -- "Ibeja is watching."

They tried to greet me casually. I could do nothing but stand there and coldly stare up the path to where Susannah was. By this time, the kid had either gotten away or she was done with her. I can't stand the idea of someone beating a child. It tears at my very being. I hate it in the States, but I hate it even more here. Beating is just what you do. Husbands beat their wives; wives beat the children. And they know it's bad. The women will sit at our table -- even Susannah -- and tell us it's bad, just like they'll tell us balu is bad. We make a point of not crusading around telling them everything they're doing is bad. It doesn't work. They have to know why it's bad. And, in many cases, they have to know Christ to know that.

I know that seems impossible because all of you have grown up in cultures where, sure, fathers may beat their children, but they hide it. Here, it's just part of the culture. Not long ago, our friend William was beating his wife Anuk terribly. Anuk ran to our house, yelling for Kim to open the gate and protect her. The whole thing escalated to the point where eventually Anuk yanked Kim in front of her and pulled her to the ground, using Kim as a kind of shield. William just beat her still, avoiding hitting Kim. And there are four adorable children -- Paula, Francis, Frano and Ellen -- who are our favorites. They're sweet and wonderful and great to us. And we always hear their mom tearing into them or beating them. The sound of her voice calling their names makes me cringe. But she's our friend. And I'm somehow thankful that at least we can give them love.

What would you do? How do you react? It's a tricky thing, and it's not as easy as you might think. This morning I wanted to yell at Susannah. I wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her and tell her this was a CHILD, a LIFE. And I wanted to sweep that child away, comfort her and hide her away somewhere where none of the stupid people here could hurt her. But instead all I could do was watch as she came down the hill, still holding that stick, suddenly noticing I was watching. And when she got to me, I muttered in response to her greeting, turned around and went home. And I cried. because you can't expect people who don't know Jesus to act like they do.

And these people don't know Jesus. Yet.

Tyranny of Time

We had a team day yesterday and one of our articles to discuss was about the unrealistic expectations of new missionaries -- ones that often cause them to leave the field early. There's the inability to relate to the host culture or pick up the language, family problems, living conditions, the expectations of missions boards back home, being jarred by suddenly being a nobody on the field, etc.

The one that really struck me, as we're coming up on the six month mark and I often am frustrated I don't know more language or have better relationships, is the area of time. The author said this, "In my home church, when I was young, warm feelings crept over me when I heard missionaries tell how nice it was of the natives to call them 'mother.' Many years later I learned you had to earn the title, not because you had white skin, but because you had persevered long enough to have gray hair. . Time is the price we pay."

It's true, time is the price. And it sometimes seems like a high one. Patience and perseverance. I know I committed to two years here and I know my plan is to go long-term, but sometimes it's easy to think about those years as just that, years, and not the months, weeks, days and MOMENTS that make up those years.

One other thing I liked from the article, an area I can really identify with, as I'm often saying I came to Africa and became completely stupid. "The new missionary, picked for leadership skills and all-around talent at home, suddenly is thrown into the role of learner, a student begging for a chance to serve. No one knows his or her worth, or even cares. . Simple, everyday tasks become complicated, or even traumatic."

How true those words are! The mission field is about the most humbling place in the world!

Fuel for Prayer

A pastor Daniel and Steve worked with a few years ago died in a car accident the other day. He'd jumped on to an army truck, which ended up tipping over on a turn. The pastor jumped from it, but was crushed. Someone came by and picked him up. Ironically, it was someone who actually knew him, but he couldn't tell who he was because his face was all swollen. He took him to the hospital in Torit to be treated, but it was Christmas, so the pastor just laid there unconscious and unattended in a bed for two days, where he died.

The hospital didn't know who he was, but he had facial markings for his tribe, so they called someone from his tribe. The woman didn't know who he was, but she kept his body in her house for two days until she could get money and people to help her bury him. The church finally realized their pastor had died and looked all over for him. They came upon people digging the hole and asked whose body it was. It was his, and they requested they would be able to bury him behind the church.

Steve talked really highly of this guy-one of two, he said, really strong national Christians who had taken real ownership of the church. He says it will be hard for him to be replaced -- there just aren't the Christian bodies, let alone the drive and talent this guy had. He also used it as a spur on to prayer for us, in the area of the medical care here.

The clinic was started by the African Inland Church (or AIM missionaries) and still bears the AIC name, but the nurses aren't Christian. And there is a difference between Christian caretakers and those who aren't. A man lay in a bed for two days and died because the workers at the hospital in Torit were just that-workers. Nothing more. So he asked that we pray for our own clinic workers (they are so few) and that someday we can give good Christian care.

Cholera for Christmas

And you thought coal was bad.

A handful of folks came from two village-clusters over with cholera. I talked with Michael at the clinic; he said there were five. One died, but the other four went home fine. But now we just know it's out there, so please pray that it doesn't spread over here. (This cluster of villages is far enough away I've never ridden to it.)
It's really a nasty thing, this cholera. It passes really easily among those who are hygienically inclined (read: every single person in Lopitland) and can take its fatal toll fast if not treated. BUT -- nobody freak out -- for those of us who wash our hands and who are more selective about where we "go" and what we eat, it's not that big of a deal.

If anyone remembers, they had a terrible outbreak before I came. I wrote blogs about it. You can look back. (I want to say mid-March.) But, my team leaders waded through sick people for hours on end for three weeks and didn't get sick. Neither did their children. And all you have to do is keep hydrated and it'll pass.
So don't worry about me. But pray for these people. Since dry season is upon us, there isn't as much water readily available. And James, the area's chief, came by Wednesday to let us know we shouldn't use the water from the rivers anymore-it's bad. And people can carry it without showing signs, so that makes it even more tricky.

Oh, and while you're at it... The village I rode my bike to a while back hit a rough spot this week as well. Some lady got mad at her husband. or her husband's other wife. or something. and burned their hut down. Along with 34 or so others. So there are a bunch of unfortunate people whose homes (and the food stored inside) are now ashes. I haven't been other there yet, but they need your prayers as well!

The great thing about South Sudan is it never leaves you short on prayer requests..

Home Sweet Home

This is Mark, Kim’s language helper. He’s awesome. He called me over today and proudly showed me his shirt sleeve. That’s right, folks, Illinois Department of Natural Resources. Woot, woot. I know a couple of my supporters who will be especially thrilled with this. You can tell I’m equally excited. As is Mark. Anything from home is super exciting.

Christmas Play

My teammates Toriana (which means “flower” in Lopit—her real name is Catherine, from South Africa ) and Martin took on putting on a play for the communities between Christmas and New Years. They did a really wonderful job, organizing local church folks and kids. And they wove together the culture and Biblical history really well. They put it on in the fuera of the village Sohot today and will do it in another village tomorrow. The fuera is the village center where they host all their dances. It’s also the place of the mangott (shown in the picture) where the men sit and do nothing all day. I guess they also discuss things and make important decisions there. But all I see is the sitting. :)

Anyway, in the center of every fuera is a clump of thick sticks (more like small tree trunks) stuck in the ground. Each stick signifies a generation of the people of the village. That is, they add them as each generation comes and goes. It’s a very special thing for them, and the fellas have told me the men can point out their stick and tell you the stories of the generations of all the other sticks.

For the play, they built upon that idea. They surrounded the sticks with more sticks and, as the play began, pulled one out and told its story—creation. We changed the generational sticks of the village to the generational sticks of the whole world. So, the first stick was creation. As they pulled out sticks, they told the story of its generation—stories of Noah, Abraham, Moses, etc. Finally, they talked about how in Jesus all generations are redeemed, all people are welcome at the cross.

They did a really great job. People came and went. I’m not sure they had the concept of a “play;” people would walk right through the middle of it! But it certainly started some talking. In fact, these fellas came out afterward and started dancing. My heart fell. But, someone explained to me that they were dancing as a thank you, in appreciation of the story and what we’d done. If nothing else, it was awesome to see the local church folk active in the play. They were so excited about it.

Anyway, here’s some pictures from it. I somehow didn’t take any of the actual play. Sorry gang. The first is just a view of some of the crowd. That’s the fellas up on the mangott. Women and children can’t sit on it. You’ll notice those two guys with funny looking skin. Those are my teammates Heinrich and Daniel. I look at scenes like this and wonder how I can actually live here.


And here’s a guy, dancing away. I really dig his huge… head… thing… And those are ace bandages wrapped around his arms and legs. And some kind of pom-poms on his upperarms. And a skirt. And sweet boots. I love dancers.

Christmas in Lopit

We had a lovely Christmas here in Lopit. Unfortunately, I didn’t get many pictures from the church service—I was doing video instead. I think the most beautiful part was when they sang “Silent Night” in one of the languages close to their own. (There are some songs translated into a trade language, which is in some ways close to the dialect from here.) The service was supposed to start at 10—in fact, the day before the pastors urged everyone to be there at 9 so we could start on time—but it didn’t begin until after noon sometime. The pastors weren’t there until really late, either. Hilarious. Toward the end of the service, people from the village came down. They really just came for the free food—the church slaughters a cow every year. Sad. Really sad.


This is Steve, cooking some goat leg at our team Christmas party. I told him he looked really American, sitting in his lawn chair with the spatula (before he struck this lovely pose). I think I might give him a “Kiss the Cook” apron for Christmas next year.

The boys had a lovely set up for our Christmas dinner with them. They even painted a Christmas tree on their wall with mud and had candles for decorations. It was actually really pretty once it got dark.

Prayer Request

Hey gang… a prayer request for you.

I’m still feeling rather weak from being sick two weeks ago. Please pray that I’d get my strength back and would be able to get back on track with language learning, relationships and my studies. I’m beginning to feel rather defeated, since I have no energy! Also, pray for my eyes. I’ve had a lot of trouble with them lately and sometimes can hardly open them.

Thanks so much for your prayers!

Cow-tipping: Moo-sic to our ears

Our village put up a new compound next to ours.
Our new neighbors are rowdy and loud.
And they even smell a little.
It’s a cow pin they’ve built next door, and those cows are downright annoying.
So please pray for our sanity as the cows moo day and night, and when they’re not mooing, they’re filling the air with noise from their cowbells. And I fear the smell as the weather grows hotter!
But there is one thing we’ve found—the one advantage of this cow pin within such a close proximity.
The joy of cow-tipping is so close at hand.
(Kidding.)

Merry Christmas Eve’s Eve!

We had our single girls’ Christmas party last night. It was so much fun. Kimpie’s mom sent napkins, napkin holders and a nice tablecloth for us to use. And we even broke out our (red!) emergency candles in empty tuna cans. It looked so beautiful, I nearly forgot I was in the bush of Africa .
We dressed up cute and laughed and danced and played Christmas music over the radio to the fellas in longija. We took requests. :) Steve called in from a “traffic jam” in his village. Somehow, that was hilarious to us. I’m so glad we have a good time together.

Then there was this obnoxiously loud knock at the door and a “HO HO HO!” Daniel came dressed up as the Weihnachtsmann (Christmas man) with a red blanket and cotton ball beard and gave us all cards and (melted—whoops!) chocolate bars. What a special surprise!

So, don’t worry, Mom, I’m going to have a fine Christmas here in the bush, even if I will be missing home. We have dinner tonight with the fellas, church and a cow slaughter tomorrow with the community and a team lunch on the 26th. There will be no shortage of Christmas joy. :)

This is KimmiePie, Jen, Annika, Cath and me. (Pattie is behind the camera!) Check out that beautiful table!

Sometimes living in the bush affects your manners.

We had a bit of a dance party. That was good times. Maybe even better was cranking up the Christmas music on the speakers and putting it on the walkie-talkies for the fellas.

Here’s the Weihnachtsmann, in all his glory. Anyone who brings chocolate is tops with us.

Cooking up a Storm

The women always laugh when we get in on their cooking and cleaning. We’re so inadequate.
But at least we try, right?

Sound the Alarm

Don’t worry, this has a funny ending.
Two days ago I was walking back from my teammates’, Heinrich and Doris , house when all of a sudden, a trickle of Munu Miji (the warrior ruling class) started to tear by. They were running full-force out into the Guum (“valley”), carrying their AK-47s and knifes and spears, looking all serious and hardcore. They wouldn’t even stop to greet me, even when I demanded it.
I asked the women what was going on, and they just said the Munu Miji were having a meeting. And they were going to shoot people with guns. Super! As I pried more about it and the men kept flying by, the women began to shut me out. I’d ask the men, “What are you doing?” And they’d say to the men, “Say, ‘Nothing.’ “
Tricky, tricky.
Last December, our group of villages go into a little spat with a neighboring village. The Governor ended up sending in some soldiers, taking away all the guns and threatening prison to anyone who was stirring up fighting. They also were made aware of the threat—if you fight, the missionary people leave. And they somehow don’t want that. So, yeah, we haven’t had any problems since then, but I this was on the back of my mind as I saw all these guys running like mad.
But, don’t worry, like I said, this has a funny ending.
They had sounded an alarm for a meeting, and none of the men knew what it was about, so they just went nuts and ran to the meeting place with their guns, sometimes shooting them off.
The actual purpose for the meeting, however, was because of a decree they’d received from the Governor—there was to be no shooting of guns.
The irony of that makes me laugh, certainly when I think of the stern faces tearing by, looking excited about getting into a fight.
Seriously, sometimes I think the Munu Miji are at their best lounging around the villages demanding their women to serve them and beating them if they don’t.
That looks a little like this.

Little KimmiePie…

For weeks, we’d been reminding our neighbor, Ebiong, to call us when she had her baby. And she didn’t. We had to find out 12 hours later when they stopped us on the way to church.
So, when it came time for the little one’s naming ceremony yesterday, she made sure we’d been called.
They named her Kim, after my roommate, which is always special. I found out yesterday about another kid named after me in the neighboring village. Hilarious how that works.
Anyway, this is little Kim and her mom Ebiong. In the naming ceremony, they smear mom with oil, then the baby with oil, then do all sorts of weird animism things to shoo away evil spirits and ask for the ancestors blessings.

Like any local custom, it also involves the local brew of “white beer.” This is little Monica, the new Kim’s older sister, tipping back with the help of her grandmother. Nothing quite like seeing a two-year-old totter around after drinking beer. I can’t wait until the power of the Gospel pushes the beer out of here.

Prayer Request

A little prayer request for you.
We’re starting to think now about what our formal ministry will be in February. Please pray that God will show me what I should be doing, as I’ve got some ideas but nothing definite. I’ve talked with Steve about putting together some kind of Lopit newspaper—he says they’re wonderful ministry tools. Imagine, a Christian newspaper! The problem is, I’d have to be paired with someone else’s ministry. Kimmie might be working on translation stuff and nailing down how to spell things in Lopit and use a Lopit alphabet. And then not many people know how to read the Lopit that there already is. So someone will have to be teaching—maybe Pattie! We’ve also thought about putting a transmitter up on the mountain and doing a radio ministry. Someone came in at some point and gave out hand-crank radios, so the people listen to them in the villages. Unfortunately, they’re getting bad Islamic influence on them from the North. So a Christian replacement would be nice!
Anyway, please be praying! I would love to work with the children as well. I feel like I’m going in a million different directions!

You haven’t got mail.

We haven’t gotten post in a while, which is depressing. It being Christmas and all, it’s nearly unbearable. The pilot who was stationed in Loki and who took a special interest in getting our mail tucked into underloaded planes first from Nairobi to Loki, then from Loki to here has gone home on furlough. And with him, it seems, have gone the days of mail dropped by parachute when he was flying by or a special delivery of fresh vegetables from his wife. Oh, Jon and Ginny, we miss you.

Whatever the case, my mom has become a champ at sending packages. She’s amazing. The last one I got was quite impressive—a decorated shoebox that even had a typed-out inventory list inside. Eat that, corrupt Kenyan customs officers! Mwauhaha. Mom’s still working on the whole sending some kind of note or letter inside thing, but I know she’ll come around. I’ve got enough cute pictures and notes from the Canales to decorate my walls. (Lara is also mastering the postal system.) Mark has me stocked with blank camcorder tapes. And Joy blessed the Husa house with two very precious DVDs—my only two—which will be watched time and again on our trips out of the bush.

Oh, I love mail. It’s so painful, knowing my love-filled packages from the states are either stuck with customs or in the AIM AIR hangar in Nairobi , with no one to get excited about them. There are three planes flying somewhere in the area now (or so the kids tell me), which is torture for my heart! The kids run and tell us when they hear a plane—this is always well before we do. Then they just point emphatically at some tiny spec in the sky and yell, “The plane, the plane!” which always threatens to throw me into fits of laughter because of a certain, small television character. It’s too bad they don’t get that one—they’d realize how hilarious they are.

Nope, the planes aren’t coming here. *sigh* Another day!

Meet Little Big Pattie

This is the newest addition to our little circle of friends—baby Pattie, named after my teammate and housemate in Husa. Her Lopit name is “Big” (except, um, in Lopit), so we’ve taken to calling her Little Big Pattie, so we’re not constantly confused about who’s talking about whom. I’m slightly worried that the longer we live here and the more children that are named after us, communication is going to get that much harder! :)

This is Momma Davitica and Little Big Pattie. Then that’s me and the wee ‘un. She was only about 12 hours old here. Amazing.. We couldn’t believe how she was looking at me like this!

Mean case of malaria (or something)

Well, after four days of headache, body ache and stomachache—including a 11-hour drive in a hot truck with a 103 or 104 fever—I’m finally feeling a bit better and starting to eat again. Wow. I don’t like getting sick in the bush.
Something is going around our team, something a little like malaria but a lot like misery. So please pray for us, as the weather gets hotter, the water runs out and our bodies run down!
I’m glad to be feeling better. Since I was gone in Loki for a few days (we got stuck there on a supply trip because no trucks could get into town to stock the shack stores) and then half-dead in bed for a couple days after that, the kids went nuts yesterday when I dragged myself to the door to greet them. Talk about funny. Little Francis’ eyes got all wide and his grin got wider, then they all stampeded toward me, greeting me and asking me how I was. I guess some of them thought I’d stayed in Loki because I was sick. The village rumor mill is out of control sometimes. ;)

PICTURES

Steve found a turtle on the road. It quickly became the newest family pet. (I assure you, the dik-dik was furious.) Christian and the turtle have a love-hate relationship. As you can see, he was definitely at a “hate” point here. Hilarious. I love this kid.

This is little Ellen, our neighbor Abooba’s kid. I think she actually made it in my last prayer letter, as well. She’s too adorable. But she has a terrible habit of peeing on Kim. (I think that’s funny. Kim probably doesn’t.)

Here’s the kids, washing away at the river. We have so much fun there.

Here’s our sweet new coal stove. Have I talked about this before? We get excited about things like this year. I can now make perfect bread. YUM. The kids love it, too.

The kids kept pulling apart the sticks of our fence and coming in early in the morning to stare in our windows. In a moment of brilliance, Kim had this ingenious idea to tie the sticks together. The kids didn’t know what to do with themselves. This is Franco, Francis and Paula (Ellen’s older siblings), looking through the fence in dismay. Hehehe.

Babiano (01 dec 06)

… is out of the hospital and doing well. He’s the one who came to us basically bleeding to death a while back. He actually came to our place first when he got home, which was nice. Then we walked up to his place and sat looking over everything for a while in silence. It was a nice moment. J It’s good to know he’s better and we’ve made a good friend.

Language!

My language learning is going well, though I still make dumb mistakes. I keep wanting to tell kids, “banga oyo!” (don’t cry!) but I mess up and say “banga oye!” (don’t die). While the latter is definitely something I desire (that is, that they wouldn’t die), it’s not exactly all that better.
We’re learning Bible verses in Lopit. “Nyo amuno Hollum hiyo dang ta fau bino,…” (For God so loved the world…)

Once my language teacher was drunk (not unusual) during our lesson and demanded that I say the “dang” part with a lot of umph. (That’s “dang,” like “DONG!” almost, but sort of swallow the “n.”) He says we English speakers have ways we annunciate certain words and he is doing that in Lopit now. (Everyone is out to revolutionize the language, it seems.) So we were going through the verse (I know John 3:16 and 1:12), yelling DANG! Whenever we got to it. My roommates in side the house couldn’t help but laugh, which made me laugh, which made Willie walk up to the window and reprimand them, shaking his finger.

Really, it might have been the best language lesson ever—bi DANG (in ALL)!

Let there be light! (04 dec 06)

We ate dinner in the light last night.
It was so amazing.
Steve finally got up here and installed the solar panel we bought in Nairobi six weeks ago. (This man is busy.) Steve is like a celebrity in the villages, so his mere presence created quite the stir, let alone this weird thing he was fastening to our roof. Then the homemade Kenyan ladder he was using to climb up on the room collapsed and he took a hard fall, so I’m sure that was even more fodder for the village rumor mill. (I won’t lie—my heart stopped when I saw him go. But he was fine. He’s tough. Iris told me today that the way he told her he’d ran over a landmine in Western Equatoria a while back began with, “Guess what I did today?” just as casually as if it was as much of a nonevent as stepping on bubble gum. Weird.) Somehow, though, no one mentioned it yet. I don’t know how it would be possible though for them not to have seen—the men on the mangott (the manly meeting place where they do nothing all day) are constantly surveying our every move.
Anyway, after much such to-do, he got a light hooked up in our kitchen. We all sort of stared at it for a while, amazed. You wouldn’t believe how incredible the idea of flipping a switch and having light has become to us. I mean, WOW. It’s just THERE. We didn’t know what to think of being able to see our food well of the shadows dancing on the wall. The village was similarly impressed. We could hear them stand outside our window and talk about it. The kids would just say, “light” in this really strange, E.T.-phone-home way. That caught us off guard, too, because it was the straight English word. I think the school kids taught them. I can’t imagine there being a word for “light” (of the electric variety) in Lopit.
We had a stream of people come to visit just to see this single lightbulb. I can’t believe it—we might be even more popular than before!


Kim really wanted her parents to see this picture. She’s so hardcore—a bush electrician.

Likewise, Steve is also hardcore. This is him, up in our bamboo rafters. Good times.

Hello, hello! (02 dec 06)

Well, it’s been a while, hasn’t it?
My deepest apologies—I’ve been really busy. I know what you’re thinking. “Andi? Busy? In the bush? What could you possibly be doing that keeps you so terribly busy?”
Well, I’ll tell you, though I find myself just as amazed as you are. I’ll give you a rundown of a day last week.
4:07 a.m.: I struggle out of bed before even the rosters (my ingenious plan to avoid being waken up by them), make my bed, start the tea pot so my roomies will have hot water when they wake up later and then light my lamp and settle into my desk for Bible study and prayer.

5:47 a.m.: Our neighbors wake up and the men start their morning ritual of blowing their noses. It’s really sick and… involved. I hear laughter from the other side of my wall—it’s Kim, no longer able to focus on prayer with all the racket outside. We being to field the ‘Good mornings!” and “Give me tea!” requests from the trail, another morning formality. At some point, I take a break to sweep the yard. Yes, the DIRT YARD. Yet another morning formality. So weird. I do it so everyone in the village can see—I assure you they’re all watching—and we don’t get complaints that day about it.

7:30 ish: My roommates are up and around and our first visitors are yelling at the gate. I hold out as long as I can, clinging to my guarded time in the Word, but finally let myself out and begin serving and entertaining our guests. Pattie, Kimmie and I are chai-making machines.
8:30ish: I’m out the door and down the mountain to my team leader’s house, where I snatch the bike he so graciously lets me use. I spend an hour tearing down the dirt road, peppering the field-goers with hellos and answering the shotgun Lopit questions—“Ibeja, how are you? Where have you come from? Where are you going? Pick me up.” (I guess that last one isn’t so much a question, but that’s just how the language is. Give me this. Bring this. Take that.) I normally give them a fright when I come up behind them. Yesterday I nearly was clothes-lined three times by men carrying long tree trunks on one shoulder. They’d realize I was coming, freak out and wheel around, leaving that deadly trunk swinging across the path like a gate. Hilarious. Anymore, I’m ready for stuff like that—I’m used to dodging cows, goats and people. Though, I did manage to hit a cow the other day. But that’s a whole other story.

10ish: Up the mountain and showered, I start the long process of making bread. The children who invited themselves inside to help me stare in awe as I dust the sugar over my version of my mom’s amazing cinnamon rolls. They lick everything they can get their hands on. Sugar is gold around here. All the while, curious neighbors and friends stop by. You can’t do much without attracting a crowd around here.

11ish: Off to the river with a big bag of the clothes I’ve put of washing. Children see me leaving and run to their houses to grab their water jugs. Soon, I have a line of them in front and behind me. Everyday is a party. And I guess there is always a party-pooper—often, some loud angry woman at the river who demands my clothes and my soap. It’s never fun going ‘round with them (they can be holding a bar of their own soap, yet demand you give them yours), but I suppose it sharpens my patience. Sometimes humor wins the wars; sometimes our friends come and stand up for us; sometimes you go home frustrated. The kids are always great helps for me—for some reason, helping the silly white Ibeja with her clothes gives them great joy. And they teach me language while we’re washing.

1ish: We quell the flow of visitors long enough to eat lunch. I begin with the battle with the coal stove and, having eventually lowered myself to defeat by use of kerosene, put in the aforementioned bread. Between loaves, I read my books for the TIMO curriculum and talk with the kids on the rocks outside.

2:30 p.m.: Back down the mountain, this time to the school, where I meet ol’ William for my language lesson. This is tedious stuff. We finally finish a Lopit language version of the creation story to the tune of the other teachers beating the stray dogs that wander in and the high-pitched singing of the children, who are working on some English song for an assembly. I can recognize maybe three words of said song—“I love education!”—yet Kim (also at the school at that time) and I can’t shake it from our heads for days. We’re singing it even now.

4 p.m.: It’s time to start dinner at home, so I enlist the help of the children to sort and clean our 10kg bag of beans. They happily accept the challenge… especially with the hope of candy for payment. We sing and pick through beans. At one point, I watch in terror as a baby—under the care of her 6-year-old sister—leaves a pile of green poop in my yard, not far from the pack of children tending to my beans. Said older sister cleans it up with a leaf and quickly goes back to sorting beans. I make a mental note to wash the beans with extra care and vigor.

5 p.m.: Sweet Pattie lights up the giko (coal cooker). She, too, resorts to kerosene. My pride is restored and the beans are left to boil for two hours. Beans take a long time. Inside, I mix up some chapatti dough. It’s my night to cook and I’m making white chicken chili, thanks to some wonderful woman back in the States who sent the seasoning packet to me. (THANK YOU!) Not having any chicken or the proper beans didn’t matter. We have this strange soy stuff you can make taste like meat with a broth cube. The wonders of modern cooking. (I wonder if there are chocolate-flavored cubes?) between the spurts of cooking, I study language and talk to the children again.

7 p.m.: Dinner is finally served. We all eat too much. That’s what seasoning will do to a person. Supper time with my roommates is always the best. We laugh. A lot. Add to that “Singles’ Hour”—the endearing name we’ve given to the time we use the radios to tell Steve we’re all Oskee Kilo—and the nights can be a blast. We call it Singles Hour because it normally turns into hilarious exchanges between the two single women’s houses and the fellas up high on the mountain. The families have far better things to do with their time. Eventually we turn off the radios and do our nightly prayer time—for our villages, for our team, our families and our language learning.

8 or 9ish: We each take to our rooms for the night. Depending on how exhausted I am, I’ll try to read more or white letters. Sometimes the teens will come by and rouse us out of our beds to go “play” with them—that is, going from house to house to get a little food and tell stories. Kim is much better at going than I am. I’m always pretty wiped by then. Sometimes women will stop by to visit. Sometimes I simply prepare my to-do list for the next day and crash, often to the sounds of drums, dancing and yelling.

So, there you have it—my life here. Every day brings something new, some kind of kink in your “plans.” It’s best not to have plans in Africa , I’ve learned! Some days aren’t as full. Sometimes all you “get done” is managing the flood of people who come—boiling water, making chai and doing dishes. Other times you’ll find yourself at a friend’s house, simply sitting and enjoying the ridiculous view over the valley. And some times, quite honestly, you have to sit in your room and recuperate!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I celebrated my first major holiday in the bush today! Happy Thanksgiving!
Since there are only four of us Americans, I was a little worried we’d forget Thanksgiving and it’d pass by without notice, sort of like July 4th did. But Jen wouldn’t let that happen. She’s been planning a HUGE Thanksgiving meal for months now. It was wonderful! Hopefully, I’ll get a picture up here of the spread she laid out. It was so amazing.
The funny part was trying to explain to the other teammates just what Thanksgiving was. Jen said it was about food. I said it was about football. But they think to Jen, everything is about food, and to me, everything is about football or some other sport. So that got them absolutely no where.
Don’t worry—we explained the whole thing. And, in the end, we were all thanking God for the blessings he’d given us—here in Lopit and back home. J
I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I’m so thankful for you!

Peanut Butter

Not too long ago, I wrote Lara about how great and wonderful peanut butter was and how I got a jar in the mail and was ecstatic and was finding all sorts of fun uses for it.
That’s been kind of ruined lately, as the people are harvesting their peanut fields and we suddenly have two HUGE bags of them on our kitchen floor. There are peanuts, peanuts everywhere. It’s worse than a major league baseball game.
But, here’s a cool thing. I now know how to make peanut butter—from the very beginning to the very end. When we first got here, they were tending their ground nut fields. We helped. Then they had to pick the stuff. We helped. I spent a couple afternoons under a shade tree in the fields, plucking the nuts off the plants. Then I helped shell them at home. Then you roast them. Then you “atusa” them. (I’m not sure of the English equivalent there.) Then you grind them. My arms were really sore! And then, WHAMO, you’ve got peanut butter. And it’s darn good.
Anyway, it’s become part of life here, these peanuts. And I’ve seen it open doors for relationships. After I spent those days in the fields, everyone in the villages was talking about it. And everyone felt the need to bring us MORE peanuts. (Good… times…)
Funny how peanuts are part of my ministry.

Babiano

A prayer request for you.
About two weeks ago, a kid came to our fence, calling for us and saying he wanted water. When we went out to see him, he was sitting on a rock, his head in his hands, gushing blood. He had been beaten with a stick by drunk men in the neighboring village and his head was a complete mess. There was so much blood. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen so much. Kim and I tried to stop the bleeding, took him the mile or so down to the clinic. Steve met us there and we put him on a drip—he’d lost a lot of blood—and tried to control things while we searched for the volunteer nurse guy. I ended up helping put stitches in this guys head—with utensils I’m not certain were sterile and in a bed we’d moved by the window for light, since there is no electricity. At first, the nurse said he didn’t have local anesthetic, so we tried to go in without it, at which the boy nearly flew off the table in pain and was screaming. Michael (the nurse) soon decided maybe he did have anesthetic after all. It took him forever to get everything ready. He seemed so unsure of what he was doing. At times, Steve was softly suggesting, “Do you really want to do that exactly?” Steve’s no doctor. I’m no nurse. But there we were. I definitely was forced to reckon with the reality of the situation here, the reality of AIDS, the reality of poor medical care, the reality of… these people’s lives and the effect balu (beer) has on their society. It’s safe to say I was furious. But I should say: They do good work with what they have; the guy is a volunteer with limited resources and limited education, but Iris is impressed by what he can do. So, yeah, don’t want to slander the guy.
A few days ago, we got word that the kid (a teen) was still having troubles and they weren’t controlling the bleeding very well. They thought he was going to die. His situation keeps changing, so please pray for him. His family is one that we’re close with in Husa and would love to see come to the Lord.

Pray for Rain

Well, the dry season seems to be upon us, as the days between rains are getting more and more and the weather is getting hotter and hotter.
Please pray for us as we try to conserve our water, yet stay healthy!

Also, a point of praise—I finally have a language helper! It’s been, what, four months? But finally, I’m sitting down with a Lopit three times a week. Praise God, I’ve been able to learn from Kimmie—our team language guru J--so I’m not too far behind.

Working with William, the schoolmaster and said language helper, has been good, but it’s brought even more things to the forefront that I never would have thought about. I’ve only had one lesson (I have another in a few minutes), but we started to translate some of the story of creation. How do you translate the idea for God creating the whole Earth, when most adults don’t have any concept of it? And when he created the oceans, what do you say? There isn’t a word for oceans; there are no oceans around here. “Big water” was the best we could do. What about Noah and his boat? What’s a boat, anyway?

And these are just word translations—what about translating ideas? I listened to a John Piper sermon the other day in which the whole message hinged on one word in the verse. Are we going to be able to be so true to the original message, even with a language as… basic… as Lopit?

You see, what we have in learning this language is a bit of a moving target. That’s what happens when a language isn’t written down. As Steve so aptly put it, you get one guy with three wives and a bunch of kids, who speaks with a lisp, and the whole language changes. That’s hardly an exaggeration. We learn words from older guys and the younger people don’t have a clue what we’re talking about. Don’t have a word? Don’t know how to spell it? Just make it up. There’s no standard, no fixed point around which things revolve.

It’s evidenced, too, in that when we pulled out the work of Martha and Barbara from the 50s and looked at their translation of John and read it with the people, they hardly understood it. The language has evolved that much, in just a couple generations. Now I know what the old guys are talking about when they grumble about the younger generation making a new language, messing up the old one.

And so I’m left impressed with the idea that maybe schooling the children here—getting them to read and write and establishing a set language—deserves more thought than I first gave it. I mean, I didn’t consider just how valuable it is. Then at least when we translate things, we’ll know they’ll be good 20 years from now. This is no novelty—Martin Luther, in translating the Bible into German, ended up basically setting the standard for the German language, giving it rules and spellings and such.

Just another great product of the reformation. J

Go Illini

I finally saw my first Illini sweatshirt here in Lopit. Check out that 80s-style boatneck. Woot, woot! (I look terrible in this picture—I just finished carrying my third load of stuff up the mountain. Gross.)

Theology Matters

Part of our TIMO curriculum is that we read a missionary biography every unit—a practice I really enjoy, since I didn’t grow up in an evangelical church and had no idea what a missionary was until I realized I wanted to be one. And, yes, I really like to read and learn, I’m finding.
In the last two days, I polished off two books about William Carey, “The Father of Modern Missions.” We were assigned a short article about him last unit and watched a video while we were in Nairobi , so my interest about this guy was really peaked. I can’t believe what he did in India , a place completely in the grip of Hinduism and Buddism. He went there in the name of the Lord, to preach the Gospel, but he didn’t just trust God to use the Gospel to save souls; he trusted God to use the Gospel to change society. And, wow, did it.
I would go on and on about all this guy did—he was a common shoemaker in England, but ignited modern missions, convincing Christians that the Great Commission was still valid today; he was a botanist who made huge inroads in the field in India; a self-made linguist, translating the Bible into 40 or so languages, while also translating the Indians own literary works; he was hugely responsible for the outlawing of infanticide and, later, widow burning… etc., etc., etc.—but I couldn’t do it justice.
Two things have really hit me in my study about Carey.
First, this guy really poured himself out for the Gospel, for the cause of Christ. He went hard. He was compelled by Scripture, compelled by Christ. The sacrifices he made were intense. The persecution he endured, amazing. God used him in huge ways. And I want to trust God to use me in huge ways, too.
The second thing ties into what I said before, about him not just doing the modern missions thing of thinking the Gospel stops at evangelism, at sharing the good news and welcoming new believers and separating ourselves from the world. He really believed in the social, political and economical effects of the Gospel. And his ministry affected that. And I can see—and the last book I read helped me to see even more clearly—that this guy’s theology had a HUGE affect on how he went about doing God’s work.
This has been a huge lesson for me while I’ve been here—that the theology we hold (consciously or unconsciously) really dictates how we live our lives, how we worship and think of our God, how we share that God with other people and how we expect that God to work. I’ve been learning about, in a word, presupposition. It’s HUGE. I can’t believe it. I don’t read books the same way; I don’t look at my days the same way; I don’t look at my God the same way. I’ve been forced to dig deeper, to examine why I do the things I do, think the things I think; why missionary organizations function the way they do; why writers write the way they write. There’s so much unsaid, so much underneath that governs how we respond to God. And it’s not always good.
Our team is going through a Francis Schaeffer series—How Shall We Then Live? It starts in the Roman Empire and explains how Christianity affected society and culture and how culture and society affected Christianity. It’s helped me to look at things and ask, “Where did this belief come from? Is it biblical or cultural? What influenced it? What does it influence?” It’s terribly interesting. If you can get your hands on it, watch it. It’ll change the way you think.
I guess this probably doesn’t make much sense to anyone—I haven’t done a very good job of explaining it and I’ve learned a lot of people run from even the mere mention of theology—but it’s what I’m learning on the academic side of this trip, so I thought I’d share. I’m growing so much in my walk.

Well Dung, Good and Faithful Servants!

Today Kimmie and I re-poohed one of the outside walls of our house.
And, yes, I do mean with a mixture of mud and cow dung.
(Sorry, Grandma.)
It was probably one of the most fun mornings I’ve had here in Husa. I actually wish Kimmie could tell you the story of how they got the cow dung, because it’s way funnier when she tells it. Let’s just say it was an experience.
(I took some video for ya’ll, so you can look forward to that next time around.)
Some of our friends in the village helped us collect the mud and the dung, and one of them taught us how to mix and smear it.
We were covered in dung up to our elbows.
And, after a little fight, up to our noses.
So gross.
But so great.
I’ll let the pictures tell the tale.
What you don’t see in them, however, is Davitica (the lady there) constantly yelling at me about how HORRIBLE I was at smearing. Ugh. Unfortunately it was really true.
The whole village got a big kick out of the two idiot Americans covered in pooh. Actually, the whole of the mountain got a big kick out of it—wherever I went today, people were asking me about Ohudo and me mudding the house. News travels fast here.

Day Tripper

I always get excited when our team talks about the vision we’ve all adopted—starting here in Lopit and slowly spreading out to the nine other unreached tribes as the years go by.
Saturday, I got a little taste of how that would be, and it got me even more excited.
I’ve taken to riding Steve’s bike in the morning—a replacement for my running, since my legs went kaput in Nairobi (there’s a prayer request for you). Saturday I decided it would be fun to ride to a neighboring group of villages, about a 30K ride roundtrip on the dirt roads. So I packed my language book and a banana and took off.
The villages around here are all of one bigger tribe, but they all speak languages that are a tiny bit different—often times, they hang on to the dissimilarities just so they can claim superiority over the other villages. That’s the case with the mountain range I live in. The teachers claim that our specific dialect is the best, that -------- is the richest language and if you learn it, you can learn all other languages (not just in the tribe, mind you—in the WORLD). Funny how such a rich language doesn’t even have a word for “fun” or “love” or “family.” Ha.
Anyway, it was awesome to get out and meet a whole other group of people. The place I went to was called Wolli-Wolli (best village name EVER). It reminded me of our first days here in Lopit—the people gawking, the children crying in fear. I actually came up to this small child on a rock and he fell backward off it, he was so startled by me. Whoops.
They were amazed that this white girl was speaking the words of ---------, especially when they’d talk about me with one another and I’d answer the questions they were asking. We laughed and laughed.
I was reminded again of my night out with the teenagers, when they all sat around Kim and my feet and said, “Tell us the story of America ,” ready to listen to our every word. Once again, I saw a ready audience for the Gospel.
Beyond Husa.
Beyond ---------.
The fields are white with the harvest!

More Pictures

I told you about the dancing before, and here are some pictures from it finally.

Here’s a Lopit warrior… in a mini skirt? Nice. J

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.