Lighting the Stove

Once again raising the question… how many people does it take to light a geko oven? Well, in this case, five, it seems. That’s Maria (Davitica’s niece; cousin to baby Pattie), Cassia (Davitica’s second youngest), a mystery child (forgive me?) and Night, Mary’s girl and a constant help to us.
I’ve since given up on lighting the geko from scratch—it really is a pain—and taken to one of two alternatives.
Sometimes I simply take my tongs and hold a piece of coal over my gas stovetop until it’s lit, then I use it to light everything else. Yes, I just admitted that. I’m somewhat ashamed, but somehow very proud of my brilliance.
Then there’s the better option. I noticed that folks ‘round here often send their kids to other huts to grab a piece of hot firewood or coal; then they light their own fires with it. Perhaps equally brilliant to my over-the-stovetop idea. (… Perhaps…) So now I just run up to Lodina’s with my oven mitt and pan lid. They laugh at my “clothes for my hands”—they just carry the stuff on a flat rock or lid. They have the amazing ability to touch and carry ridiculously hot pans and stuff. (As in, they pick up a pot of boiling water with zero problem… and wonder why we can’t.)

Breaking In

Once, Kim and I both forgot our keys to the bicycle lock that keeps our gate closed. (Sometimes we lock it when we have laundry on the line; we’ve had bras stolen before—they like to dance in them!) We were too ashamed to tell Pattie, so simply squeezed through a hole in the fence. Pattie thought it was a bit curious that the door was still locked when she came home… and we were giggling in the front yard.

Pattie and Pattie

Pattie and her namesake. She’s actually quite cute. (I’ll let you decide if I mean Big Pattie or Baby Pattie… or both.)

The Great Coal Fridge Fiasco

This cool veteran missionary suggested to Kimmie that we make a coal… thing… so we could keep things cool. Apparently, this coal fridge thing has worked for people in the past.
Well, after a whole day of struggling and cutting wood with her LeatherMan and numerous defeats, Kim decided the coal fridge was definitely not going to work for her.
She launched the ugly, awkward thing over the fence, even though Oseta (in the backround there) begged her not to.
Launching things over the fence has become Kim’s go-to move in the face of frustration.
It’s actually quite funny. The other day she broke the broom stick and ceremoniously heaved it over the fence. One of the boys watched this with a smile, then—upon Kim’s return into the house—calmly went and retrieved it for her.
We’re starting to be known for our quirks—and know the quirks of our neighbors. :) It’s great.
Oh, and again, that’s Oseta, of chicken-killing fame. I’d say this is the day he really became one of our favorites—he’s been our loyal helper and friend ever since.

Sweet Ellen

Just a few more adorable pictures of Miss Ellen. Honestly, how cute is this little girl? I think she’ll be walking in the next week!

Cath and the Easter Play

Just a little scene from the Easter Play. If you remember, Cath (in blue) and Martin and others worked really hard to make a play that was contextualized to the culture. It was really neat. That’s Kim in the back there, also known as Mary, mother of Jesus/Craig.

Just another morning…

If you don’t know these two faces by now, you probably haven’t read my blog before. This is Franco (left) and his brother Francis. They are, still and always, some of our favorite little boys.
This particular morning, I looked outside my window when I woke up to see the two of them crouching on our rocks, naked and waiting for us to wake up. They normally come in the morning to say hello and see if they can sweep our compound for us or play.
They actually were quite naughty the other week—they came in the house while Pattie was napping/reading and took the playing cards and some peanuts without asking. Oh, the drama! We had to ban them from the compound for a week. It was one of those “This hurts me as much as it hurts you” situations.
But, that’s gone and forgotten and they’re back now, and better than even.
Kim and I started a project while Pattie was in Nairobi—a retaining wall in the back of the house to keep our kitchen and Pattie’s room from flooding, and giving us a nice place to sit and greet people. It’s right on the main path to the village, so we can sit and say hello to everyone as they go by and see what everyone in the village is up to. (We have adapted to Lopit culture in that way, haha.)
Francis has been as gungho about the project as Kimmie was—every day before I came to Loki ,he was there, bringing rocks or moving dirt or some special thing*. He’d show up in the morning at my window, asking if he could help. Hehe. The first day, he got a hold of my sandals and put them on, then stood there for an hour, trying to maneuver a shovel that was as big as he was. It really was adorable. I took a picture, but it’s still in Lopit—I’ll put it up when I can.
Oh, good ol’ Francis… I love that kid.

Fowl Play

You’re probably getting by now that meat is sort of a big deal ‘round these parts. So it wouldn’t be beyond your imagination that we, as we drive out of Sudan, often encourage Daniel to try to hit one of the guinea fowl that sometimes saunter across the road.
Well, I’m here to tell you that sometimes dreams do come true.
Dan nailed one yesterday.
I heard the murmuring from the front seat as he and Jen were clearly conspiring against the poor animal and aiming the LandCruiser.
Then the telling thud as he clocked it clean in the head with the underside of the car.
And the triumphant acclamations as the rearview mirrors confirmed that, yes, Daniel had in fact successfully killed tonight’s dinner.
Next thing I know, we’re in full reverse, heading back for the kill. Then Daniel’s sort of looking perplexed at the poor thing—turns out the hit wasn’t as clean as first thought. Then the optimistic brandishing of the knife. Then some indecision.
Then we realize we have nothing to put the thing in anyway, and to seal the deal, a truckload of Sudanese and Kenyans rolls up and starts laughing at us, asking why we killed their animal. And so a friendship was struck as we handed over the bird and headed on our way… smirk with our success and somehow comforted that we were heading out—to Kenya, where if you look hard enough, you can find meat—and not back in, to the land of protein deficiencies.
Oh, and we saw this ginormous bird later. I’m talking three dinners’ worth of food here, people. We really wanted that bird. Then Jen—in this case, the voice of reason—suggested that it would really be a terrible thing if said bird was on the endangered species list…

Chicken Tonight

Sometimes, all you want out here is some meat.
One of those times was the other day. Kimmie and I set out to the village in search of a delicious chicken. This isn’t our first meat breakdown; it happens every so often. We always spend at least a day asking anyone and everyone if we could please, please, please just buy a chicken from them. Normally everyone tells us, “Absolutely!” but then never come with the chicken.
But Sunday—a glorious, glorious day—was different.
Somehow, Mary’s father was happy to relinquish one of his flock.
I helped the boys chase the silly thing all around the village. Seriously, it was hilarious. I nearly took out my eye on a bamboo pole sticking out of a thatched roof.
That thing did not want to become dinner.
But, low and behold, Oseta finally snatched it up. (Interesting note: Oseta is one of our favorite P7 kids. His name means “vomit.” And I guess here, that’s OK.) I carried the thing home—by its legs—triumphantly and was still searching for a sharp knife when the boys called and said Oseta had already taken care of it.
It’s a good thing, too. Kim says when you slaughter a chicken, you cross some imaginary threshold which you can never come back across. You’re just… different. And we both have this irrational fear that if we become too independent, God will decide we don’t need husbands and pass us by… So, a double thank you to Oseta.
Anyway, Susanna came and helped me pluck and gut the thing. It was an all-around not terrible experience.
And we were two very happy women at dinner that night. :)

It’s been a while…

Oh, gracious, it’s been a while since I’ve written, hey? Sorry about that. I’ve had about a million things to write about, too.
Let’s see. What’s new in Lopitland?
Well, I’ve been learning a lot of culture stuff lately. No, wait. It’s more like I’ve found myself more and more confused by cultural stuff lately. But, whatever the case—I’m hopeful things will become more and more clear as time goes on and as we learn more language.
Ministry is same ol’, same ol’—still hard, still overwhelming. But God’s still keeping me through it, so that’s good.
The preschool is still just a building without a door. Dan’s still working on the door—in between the other thousand projects he has—and the curriculum is still…. Somewhere? It was supposed to come from U a week or two ago. As I see how the church is already running in a million different directions with the primary and adult classes, I wonder how the preschool is going to work out. But it’s something the community and the church has told me—and continues to tell me—they want, so I’ll keep pressing on. Pray for Lopit workers and teachers and support.
We’ve been going to the gardens a lot lately—another way to spend time with our friends. I’m not at all convinced they appreciate us being there!
There’s been a little excitement around here, with some folks coming in and raiding goats. It was actually nice, though, to see our brave Manyumiji (this, I think, is how I’m going to spell it from now on) gearing up for battle. There was no battle, but seeing how they rise to the occasion certainly makes it easier not to harbor bitterness for their apparent laziness.
My bike has been sidelined for a while. The tubes are like pincushions, and the anti-puncture slime I brought from the States is completely gone. Which pretty much means every other ride ends in a frustrating flat. Boo to that. I’m praying to somehow get supplies soon—I was really enjoying meeting the new people and even got a letter from Asia the other day.
Oh, and I was listening to my John Piper sermons the other morning and had a bit of an epiphany. I realized there was no reason I couldn’t start recording Pastor’s sermons now—just like Desiring God record’s Pipers—and clean them up on my audio editing program, so in the future when DIGUNA does get a radio station up here, we’ll have material for it, straight away. he was jazzed about it, too, so that’s cool. (A lot of the men around here have these wind-up radios that the UN or somebody distributed. They wear them around their necks as status symbols and often have them blaring a station in a language they don’t understand.)
Well, that’s a general overview, I guess. I’ll try to keep up on these from now on…

I’m No Green Thumb

Kim and I would be the first ones to tell you, we really don’t like going to the gardens.
It’s pretty miserable. So far, we’ve either been waist-deep in a slew of green—they don’t plant in rows—trying to decipher the good stuff from the weeds. Or we’ve been on our hands and knees, pulling up the clumps of sod the Manyumiji hoed up, shaking out the grass and weeds by the roots and throwing it into a big heap.
The other day, I walked—barefoot, with mud to my ankles, slipping all over the place—for an hour and a half, just to get to Adwina’s field. Then we worked for seven hours—knees planted in that same mud, pulling up stuff—before walking the hour and a half home.
We laugh, because I really don’t think the ladies appreciate our coming and working with them so much. Yes, our TIMO hearts want to work next to them. But I’m afraid we’re a bit of a pain—we’ve been known to accidently weed out good plants and have other traits that don’t exactly make us super gardeners. Hehehe. They often tell us to just sit under the tree and rest—they don’t want us to get tired or dirty.
Ever get the feeling someone is just trying to get rid of you? ;)
We actually joke that we’ll find whoever it was that was especially not nice to us the previous days, then punish them by going to their field with them. I can imagine their pity for us, as we show up with our bookbags full of water and sunscreen. :)
Farming in Lopitland is nothing like farming in America. There’s no plows—not even oxen plows. There’s no rakes, just hands. The men have these long, long poles with a flat iron piece at the end—their version of a plow. So they all get together scrape at the ground, in rhythm. Then we go behind and pick up what they left behind.
More than once (and probably upon seeing our utter incompetence), they’ve asked us if people weed in America. The specialization system is foreign to them—they don’t have it. I’ve tried to explain that, no, I don’t weed, but some people do. Some people work in the field, some people work with books, some people work in an office. They work in different ways.
Glazed over looks.
So I don’t have a field? No.
And my father doesn’t have a field? No.
Pause.
Lu-lu-lu, shaking their head.
Anyway, despite all that, it’s still been nice in some ways. Adwina & Co. asked me to pray to my God so he wouldn’t bring the storm that was coming at us from all directions—we were so far from home, with babies and the wind was getting cold. So, I did pray. Hardly a drop fell—crazy. And I did get to witness a great garden moment. There was a fury of excitement (I thought at first they were going to kill another puff-ader) and then the boys pulled up with the kill—three field rats, for our dining pleasure. Threw ‘em straight in the fire and ate ‘em right then and there. The kids got the tails and feet Adwina broke off. YUM!

Welcome home!

Heinrich and Doris are back. That’s big news. They brought new baby Philip, who’s just adorable. Salome is all grown up and lots more outgoing than when she left. It was amazing to see how easily she slipped back into life here. Kimmie said that first night they were home, little Salome had already found her way to a Lopit woman’s lap.
Philip had a Lopit name even before the LandCruiser hit Steve’s compound, so that’s great for the little guy. They all say how chubby he is and how great that is. He’s got red hair, just like his mom and sister; I’m sure that’s an added attraction.
We’re really, really happy to have them back. They’re a super great couple and add so much to our team—with their talents, their ministry and just with their marriage. They make me laugh and just add some invisible thing that makes our team stronger. (Gosh, I’m really going on about them, aren’t I?) And it’s nice to know they’re in it for the long haul—they have a vision and a heart for this place that extends well after TIMO.
Which logically leads me to say that they’re happy to be back, too. Heinrich was just giddy to see people and get back home. He was like a kid at Christmas, ha. I think he’s really going to kick things up with getting stuff translated and all that. He, Doris, Kimmie and I are meeting tonight about translation stuff.
It won’t be long until Joshua, Justina & Co. are back, too. Wow, to have our entire team back in the game! I can’t wait. And we get to meet our other new member—baby Joy. Be praying for their safe travel and for an easy adjustment back into Lopitland.

Touche.

Alright, I’ve been chewed up one side and down the other about my choice for Bill Mueller as my BoSox player.
(All these blogs I put up about ministry, without a single comment. I write about Billy and I get clobbered with emails.)
So please forgive my poor judgment.
I just wanted to be a former Cub, regardless of who the real heroes of the World Series were…

Happy Birthday, Jen!

It’s probably not so hard to imagine that birthday’s in the bush can be a bummer if you’re not careful, so we here in TIMO (at least the single female contingency) do our best to play ‘em up big. And we’ve been doing a lot of playing lately, with Kimmie and Craiger’s birthdays last month, Pattie’s earlier this month, Martin’s yesterday and Jen’s today. Wowza. We gave Kim a weeklong birthday celebration. (The gift that kept on giving and giving and giving.) Craiger got a TIMO madlib. Pattie got a special radio show, complete with honky-talking Big Tex the radio announcer.
And Jen got malaria.
Ok, no, wait. We didn’t give her the malaria. That just happened. Haha. Poor thing.
Luckily, I think Jen’s probably one of the more resilient team members (and, like me, isn’t crazy about birthdays anyway), so she’s doing OK. She was a’suffering last night, but I think she cycled out of her fever just long enough to enjoy a special birthday tea this afternoon.Cath gave her a “Red Sox Day,” complete with a cake in the shape of a sock and a ball and a viewing of Fever Pitch later tonight. Each of us also made her a special birthday baseball card of ourselves, which I think she really liked.
(You can see them there in the picture, with Jen grinning away like mad. Jen informed me today that her parents asked if we’d had a fight, since there weren’t any pictures of her up lately. So you’re going to get a spattering now. I hope you enjoy!)
Anyway, like I said, we do our best to make birthday’s special. The packages our families send never come. (My mom sent one in December for my February birthday; I still haven’t got it. Kimmie’s Mom sent one, also in December, for her late April birthday. It’s also MIA, along with Craig’s. We pray often for our mail to come…) We miss home a bit more. Sometimes we even get malaria. (Poor Jen!) But I think, all in all, we do alright. :)

She’s Topps. So, here’s Jen with her baseball cards. I spent a good half an hour at team day Wednesday, trying to explain to people just what baseball cards were and what position each one of them should be. We were each members of the BoSox World Series team. I wisely picked Bill Mueller—former Cub and AL batting champion. I consider it due reward for actually knowing what baseball is… I told Steve he had to be the Green Monster. That, for better or worse, was lost on him.

Red Sox Nation—errr—Village. Kimpie and I really cowboyed up for Jen’s birthday. That’s coal marks on our cheeks. You gotta do what you’ve gotta do, you know? On the hike to Sohot, everyone kept asking what was on our cheeks. We just told them they were dirty. (How would you explain that?) Our German and South African friends weren’t quite as satisfied with that answer and wondered why the heck we had coal marks on our cheekbones. Sigh. Hello intercultural confusion.

Burping… and Other Cultural Breakthroughs

Yesterday, Kim learned the best cultural thing ever.
She was with her language helper, Mark—a constant font of language and culture knowledge… and great entertainment—and he burped. So, naturally, she laughed at him.But then he informed her that burping was a special skill in Lopitland.
Yes, it takes a very rare person to be able to do it. In fact, he’s only one of three people in the whole of Lopit who can let out long, drawn-out burps.
Which you’d think would be just random trivia, until you learn that these three gifted people, by virtue of their burping, are believed to be healers.
That’s right, healers.
Because they can burp.
You probably think I’m making this up, but I’m dead serious. And Pastor G even confirmed it today. Crazy.
Also today, Kimmie told Mark that she, too, was able to let out long burps (I can bear witness to this fact), along with nearly every person in the United States of America.
He was impressed, I guess, but quickly lowered his voice and asked if she could take some bad news.
Apparently, also in the Lopit culture, they say those burping people won’t live for very long, unless they become witchdoctors.
I think she took the bad news in stride…

The Fellas

Though our stint at the primary school didn’t last long, with all the random vacations and confusion and lack of organization, we were there long enough to make quite a lot of friends among the teenage boys.
Our P5, P6 and P7 boys love to come by here and hang out—whether it just be to join the myriad of other children enjoying the Whiteys Show or to play cards or to help us with language or for help in math, etc.
They are so much fun.
The other day, Kim and I were playing 80’s music on my iPod speakers, and they told us to come dance with them. Long story short—they now know how to “Walk like an Egyptian.” And my stomach still hurts from laughing. Now they keep asking us to come dance with them.
They’ve taken to calling Kim, Hyena. I think that’s hilarious. They’ll walk by the fence and call to her. Hahaha. Last night, I got an animal name of my own. I’m Leopard. Kim tried to get them to call me Snake. It didn’t catch. Though once, I was bantering with Kimmie and Akang broke through, from behind the fence, “You, Snake—shh!!” We were rolling. This probably isn’t as funny to you as it was to me…
Anyway, Pattie made the mistake of asking what her animal name was.
Elephant.
That’s a high compliment ‘round these parts. In Africa, the bigger the better. I especially love the days when they tell me how fat I’m getting and how great that is and how soon I’ll be big, big, BIG! Super encouraging for an American. Luckily, I can turn around and have someone tell me I’m getting too skinny and I need to eat more…

School’s In

Things got a little juggled around, with school being so crazy.
Pattie is continuing on at the primary school. I’m waiting out all the practical problems for the preschool and guarding my time for that.
And they asked Kim to teach a new program the government is pushing across South Sudan. It’s an adult, accelerated learning course. It’s for all the adults who were kids in school when the war broke and had to stop their education.
It finally got off the ground this week, an answer to much prayer.
Kim is loving it. She gets to teach a lot of the adults we know—the two house help people at America (Angelo, the guard, and Elizabeth, the househelp), the teachers, some of our neighbors, etc.
She always has good stories to tell. She says all the guys have to leave their guns outside the school building, so you’ve got this pile of rifles outside in the schoolyard. They use the primary school, so the grown men are awkwardly sitting—long legs bent like a spider’s, knees poking up somewhere above their elbows—on the logs the kids use for seats. She says a lot of them really love it and soak up every word, loving to answer what they can in English.
It’s weird, thinking of our adult friends in that situation. We love Angelo, the guard. He’s hilarious. He’s just goofy and always drunk and never doing much guarding at America. We can joke with him a lot and he says all sorts of funny things. The first day in class, he was talking with his neighbor while Mark was teaching. And so Mark called him out on it. Kimmie said he gave the most innocent look and pointed to his neighbor, shrugging. Thinking of him doing that makes me laugh so hard.
I guess the more I get to know the people here, the more we learn the bits of their personalities. And, unfortunately, the harder it becomes to communicate to ya’ll the funny little things that make life here bright and fun, despite all the other circumstances…

Update on the Witchdoctor

Cath and Pastor Saba had an early morning meeting with the witchdoctor who wanted to give her life to Christ after seeing the Easter Play. They met with her and explained everything to her, laid out the whole Gospel.
She said that yes, that’s what she wants. She wants to have Jesus in her life.
But, when Cath explained to her that that would mean giving up a lot of this other stuff—this worship of other gods and witchdoctoring (yes, I made that word up)—she bawked a little.
She really wants to be a Christian, wants to live for Jesus. But right now the cultural strings are too tight and too many. But she wants it—that’s what’s key. And through God, all things are possible.
Cath and Pastor will continue to meet with her. She wants to come to church and everything.
So, be praying for her convictions, for her true conversion.
Pray she’d count the cost and see the glory of God as infinitely valuable.
And pray that she’d be one of many!!

“Heavily Soiled”

This morning, I daydreamed about the dial on my mom’s washer at home.
Oh, to have a setting called, “Heavily Soiled” or something.
I scrubbed clothes for two hours this morning, working out the dirt from my ride the other morning.
The UNIMOG—sent out for supplies—hadn’t arrived back from Kenya the night before, like it was supposed to. That’s not such a tragedy—oftentimes the trek takes longer than we’d expect, be it because of rain filling up the rivers or trouble at the border or whatever.
Since I normally ride in the mornings, I set out to find them on their way. There’s 28K’s (‘bout 17-18 miles) of rough, muddy track between us and the main road, so I figured I’d either find them stuck in some pit on that stretch or making their way along it, having bunked up at some village the night before.
I’ve been enjoying using the bike as a little ministry lately. I ride out on the road and meet new people and find out where they’re from and try my dialect of the Lopit language on them. Sometimes I have to coax them back on to the road, after they’ve seen my white face and fled. Haha!
It’s always so neat to meet new people. I met these three hilarious women on the way. I’d stopped to check on a soft tire and a few of them came up the track. Whenever I greet them in Lopit, it always shocks them and they just start rolling in laughter. But it’s funnier when I’ve been on a muddy ride, because they gawk at how dirty I am. Remember, they’re used to only seeing mud on coal-black skin. Mud on my pale whiteness looks quite stark to them. (It’s the same with bruises or scratches, they’re always very concerned about our scratches.) Anyway, these women “lu-lu-lu-lu”ed at how messy I was, and one of them snatched my bandana from me and started wiping me down with it. We did our best to chat and they finally let me go.
About 25K’s out, I had a flat, but I was right at a village I’d greeted people at before, so it worked out well. I got to the village—the name of which rings more of Asia than the bush of Sudan (to me, anyway)—at rush hour, as the women were coming out to go to the garden. So as I sat there tinkering with my flat, I tried to greet people. Between the bike and I, we’re quite a show. Always draw a crowd.
After about five minutes, I saw all the Munimiji, armed, flying out the village and to the road. It’s always funny to watch them run past. The schoolmaster—who I had met and was talking to—told me casually that there was an “enemy” in the field they were off to track and kill him. He also told me he was upset because the teachers were at school, but the children refused to come. Africa is so weird to this Western girl…
Anyway, all ended well. I finally got the tire patched and met the truck only a kilometer more up the road, then we headed back together. The roads are much kinder to a girl on a bike than driver in a truck—I can pace with, if not beat, most lorries on this stretch. :)

Praying on the Mountain

Yesterday, it was ultra sweet because we were ready to leave for church and Abuba and Lodina—who previously only sent their children with us to church—said they were going with us! Woohoo! Happy Mothers’ Day, indeed. The moms came with us to church.
But then we hiked all the way down the mountain to the church and they told us we had to turn around and go up another mountain, that we were having church on a mountaintop today, to pray for rain.
Figures, the only time Abuba and Lodina come to church…
But it was still cool. We took on the hot sun, put the kids on our back and climbed up to the little shade tree and a handful of people, singing and praying.
Pretty sweet, if you ask me.
And then, last night as I was walking all around Lopit for two hours, trying to find a nurse to take care of this kid who had cut her toe off (emergency medicine, Lopit style), it starts to drizzle and I look up and this HUGE rainbow is stretching all the way from the Three Sisters (the three peaks, kind of the Lopit trademark) across to Oliri, another big mountaintop. Really, really cool.
And now you know.
Alright, the kids are being so funny today. I have to go play with them.