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