An Island Too Far
MAKING LANDFALL
We rolled up the legs on our trousers and jumped into the wild, warm surf as our little speedboat tugged against its anchor in the rising tide. Before us was a mesmerizingly beautiful beach, drawing, it seemed, all things toward itself. As our team waded through the water with baggage and provisions atop our heads, stumbling in the thick, powdery sand, we felt like explorers in a new land. There wasn’t a person in sight, or any sign of a settlement; just a perfect line of unspoiled beachfront stretching to our left and right in a gentle arc of pale yellow sand and jewel blue water. But the illusion of being pioneers was not, we knew, accurate. This island was indeed inhabited, and it had a history. It even had a name: Nosy Mitsio. And, as our survey team was soon to discover, it had a sad story to tell.
Madagascar has 3000 miles of coastline, much of it is like that wondrous beach on the peripheral island of Nosy Mitsio: exotic, beautiful, and sparsely populated – the stuff of tourist resorts. Madagascar is a fascinating place. An island 1000 miles long and 350 miles wide, it sits undisturbed off the southeast edge of the African continent. It is both so large and so diverse that some consider it to be a micro-continent in its own right – home to a truly vast array of plants and animals, many of them found nowhere else on Earth.
Historians believe the island was first settled around the same time Jesus was born. And even though Madagascar is only a couple hundred miles from the African mainland, it was, remarkably, first settled from the east, by seafaring Polynesians who crossed the expanse of the Indian Ocean in outrigger canoes, likely originating from present day Borneo. The descendants of these first settlers are the Merina people, Madagascar’s largest ethnic group, who are concentrated in the highlands and hold most of the positions of authority and influence in the society. Their dialect is the official language Madagascar’s people, broadly known as the Malagasy.
Over time, settlers from the African continent arrived along the western coast, and in the north, Arab traders. The French colonized the island in 1883 and the people of Madagascar eventually broke away and gained full independence in 1960 – becoming a nation.
But in the narrative of Madagascar’s history, which includes colorful stories of pirate ships and sunken treasure, as well as cruel tales from the slave trade, the defining element was perhaps the 103-year Merina monarchy – an epoch that ended with the arrival of the French, but had lasting consequences for Malagasy society and, most notably, the condition of the Church.
As the Merina subjugated other people groups in the early 1800′s, they brought with them their culture and ideas, and even the newly translated Bible. Mainline, denominational churches followed the spread of Merina influence. But for some of the other ethnic peoples, the whole of Merina culture was coldly received. And even though many eventually submitted, they maintained a suspicion and distaste for anything Merina that persists to this day; and unfortunately the Church was thrown in with the rest of it.
Madagascar is officially considered to be 40% Christian, but the number of Evangelical Christians is much smaller. And this remaining percent faces tremendous odds in reaching their own people. To Madagascar’s unreached, the existing Church is foreign. It speaks a foreign dialect. It is an establishment of an untrusted people group. And, perhaps most telling of all, it is seemingly powerless in the face of a dark and crushing undercurrent in Malagasy society, the true religion of the island: Animism.
MAKING VOWS
Tuesday is a taboo day, and the Sakalava people in Nosy Be – another small island off the northwest coast – are not entirely sure why. It is a custom handed down to them from generations ago, from their ancestors. This particular taboo is basically a sabbath, a restriction against doing any traditional work like planting rice or fishing. But it does not apply to the activity of receiving visitors, which was fortunate since our team arrived on a Tuesday. We sat with the elders, and many of the other men, women, and children in the village and asked them what it meant to be Sakalava.
The Sakalava are one of the largest people groups in Madagascar. They are found throughout the entire western plain of the country and on some of the smaller islands, nearly a million strong all together. Their ancestry has closer ties with Africa than Asia, and so they are both visibly and culturally distinct from the Merina.
But one common element across cultures is that Madagascar is a land of kings and queens; and the Sakalava are especially proud of their heritage. From ancient and unquestioned customs, to the misadventures and heroics of a long line of royals, we learned how the Sakalava kings of old set the stage for everything we saw today. What was surprising to learn however, was how these departed kings and queens still had influence over their people today – in very tangible, and sometimes frightening ways.
“Our ancestors were the first to live here,” one old man from the village told us. “We are still doing what they did. They left us three sacred places to go to for healing. We have grown up with this. It is good for us.”
The Malagasy are widely known for their ancestor worship. They believe that the dead are never really departed, and this is especially true of dead royalty. These “spirits” may embody inanimate objects like trees and rocks and lakes to which a person can go and converse with the ancestors. This activity is so closely wed to daily life that it has created a landscape of “sacred sites” all over the island – from prominent natural wonders to small hand-crafted shrines in the center of every village.
The spirits may also embody living people, mediums, whom when possessed will take on the character of the long-dead ancestor and literally interact with the village in real time. But the people caution that they never really know what they will get. When seeking advice from the ancestors, they may instead be ambushed by a fickle, fitful spirit – perhaps a resurrected witch doctor – with ill intent.
At the heart of this type of spirituality is a system of bargaining with intermediaries. For the Sakalava, god is a distant idea, and the idea of a gracious God who intimately cares about them is even farther from their experience. So they must go to the spirits. They bargain with them. They visit the sacred Tamarind tree on the edge of the village, bow before it and place an offering of rum or money in the tangle of its roots. There they make a plea – for something mundane like a new oar for their boat, or for something profound like a child’s life. They make a deal. Make a vow.
“If I get this thing, I will kill a cow here. I will buy fabric and clothe the tree. I will protect this sacred place.”
And it is taboo to not keep a vow. A person may get sick as a result – a kind of retribution from the spirit world. The whole village might even suffer some awful consequence.
One might be tempted to dismiss these traditions as harmless superstition, like throwing salt over one’s should after spilling it. But there is a serious reality beneath the Animism of Madagascar. It is truly spiritual, demonic even.
As our Sakalava host explained, “It is beyond something that you can see.”
But what I could see, in the few moments when our conversations with the Sakalava drew more intimate and inward, was a deep-set uncertainty about life. Amidst the backdrop of a beautiful village in a beautiful setting were a people of downcast eyes. Captive. Bound. Sad.
MAKING A STAND
From the minute we stumbled ashore at Nosy Mitsio and declared it a paradise, we knew that it wasn’t. For the same dark undercurrent we found running through the Sakalava culture was also here. And what at first looked like an uninhabited island, was in fact the cultural birthplace of the Antakarana people – a cousin group to the Sakalava.
The Antakarana have an epic story. They are known as the “people of the rocks” because of the treacherous limestone massif in northern Madagascar to which they fled during the years of the Merina advance. So determined were they to remain separate from the Merina people, they hid in caves for over a year, fought a bloody resistance, and ultimately made a daring escape. Some of the Antakarana stayed behind and accepted the Merina rule, but a group of them, led by the king, secretly maneuvered their tiny canoes through a maze of a mangrove forest and fearlessly burst out into the open sea. They sailed, and they landed here, on this very same J-shaped island where we stood half-wet and awestruck at the tail end of our survey trip.
In their hasty escape, the Antakarana made a dangerous bargain. Before they set out, they summoned the spirits of their ancestors and begged for supernatural protection. And in return, if every single Antakarana made it safely, they vowed to follow the religion of the Arab traders – they and all the Antakarana who followed after them.
The remnant intended to make their last stand on that island. They expected the Merina to continue the pursuit and finish them off. But the Merina never came. So the king chose a special place to honor his vow. In a sandy clearing close to the beach, the people laid down a jumble of large stones, sacred stones from the caves on the mainland, and made an offering of themselves. They became Muslims.
MAKING INROADS
As we traversed the island with Daniel Zagami, AIM’s Madagascar Unit Leader, we visited as many of the small villages as could be found. We sat with the sitting King of the Antakarana, in the shadow of those sacred stones which embodied the spirits of past kings, and we were warmly welcomed.
But here, just like among the Sakalava, a spiritual heaviness hung over us. The Antakarana, Muslim in name and half-hearted observances of Islam, were still wholeheartedly Animistic.
One afternoon we set out to climb the highest hill on Nosy Mitsio, and from it we could see nothing but ocean in every direction. It was a picture of utter isolation. Standing there I thought about how an island was something like a human heart separated from its Creator.
“It’s like they’ve gone too far.” Daniel said.
The Antakarana made such an effort to isolate themselves: From the Merina culture, from the mainland peoples, from the world. And it’s like they’ve gone too far, and God cannot be found anymore.
But as Daniel looked out over the island, he imagined the ministry teams that would one day come to this place: TIMO teams that would travel to Madagascar’s distant shores, brave the ocean journey, be tossed and sea-sprayed and awestruck, to make that same beachhead we made, but to stay.
There is no church here. And there can never be a Merina church here. But will there ever be an Antakarana church? Will they ever be free from the dark spiritism of their past?
As I sat and watched Daniel draw maps on scraps of paper and think aloud the possibilities and strategies, I knew the answer was yes. Because there’s no such thing as an island too far – not for TIMO, and certainly not for God.
“The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners.”
–Isaiah 61:1
Street Art
The life and ministry of Andrea Hellemann is plotted with catchy quotes, titling each season like a room in an art exhibit. When Andrea first told her parents she wanted to be a missionary they very calmly replied, “Why don’t you do something normal first.” But a few years into her nursing degree, a guest speaker singled her out of 150 of her peers and said, “You look like someone who wants to go to Africa”. Over the next few years, God gently painted a masterpiece in Andrea’s life. While each stroke undoubtedly highlighted the hues of previous seasons, it’s the way those colors look in light of her current work with Safina Street Kids Network that keeps her captivated by His sovereignty.
“I’m not good with names,” she said, her German accent punctuating each vowel. “But right now there are 150 kids at Safina and I can tell you the name of every child and where they go to school.”
That’s an impressive feat considering none of those kids actually live within the physical walls of Safina’s property. The Social Services office in Dodoma, Tanzania holds fast to the illusion that there will always be enough family members to care for displaced children. Therefore, they are repulsed by the suggestion of a government sponsored orphanage. So every day Andrea and her team open their doors to offer a hearty meal and a short devotional to any child who survived the night. “Food builds rapport”, she reasons. “Most won’t tell the truth about their life on the first visit. We need them to come back regularly in order to help them. They will always come back to eat.”
It isn’t long before each child comes to see Safina as a safe place. Unlike their life on the streets, there is no pressure here—no caveats, no refusals. In fact, Andrea recounts many times pursuing the children even when they have been arrested. Taking a personal interest in their welfare, however delinquent, makes Safina the only figure of stability these kids may know. Abandoning them to a corrupt justice system rarely promotes rehabilitation, and certainly not independence. By teaching and modeling Christ, even within discipline, Andrea and her team give these kids a whole new picture of who they can become.
The evolution of a lost child’s hope
There are times when family members can become a powerful advocate for an orphan if assisted with things like school fees and healthcare needs. Therefore, Safina always seeks to restore the family unit first. Unfortunately, the undertones of each child’s history can significantly complicate their future.
“Bahati was physically ill with fear as we approached his village” Andrea explains, reminiscing over a photo taken when he first arrived at Safina. Considering his background, she knew his anxiety was warranted. Still, she prayed for a miracle as they journeyed closer to his past.
After gathering information from various family members, however, the possibilities for Bahati faded. His parents had died, leaving him with a disgruntled elder sister and her husband. Unwilling to care for him but being left with no choice, Bahati’s sister simply refused to feed him. The dishonor bestowed on the family when he was forced to steal his daily bread required discipline. “We tied him to a tree and beat him,” the family told Andrea, “but even that didn’t help”.
Within weeks of coming to Safina, Bahati begged to go to school. Being well aware of his fate should he return to his village, Andrea’s team located a supportive family who would care for his daily needs while Safina funded his education. “You see now he’s always smiling” she boasts, watching a progression in his pictures. Ruminating his victories, Bahati’s joy reflects on Andrea’s face.
A battle for the mind
It’s not hard to understand why these children come to Safina. It’s the lure of escaping reality, even if only for a meal. In recent months, however, Andrea and her team have discovered kids turning to new escape mechanisms. One affordable lure for street kids is sniffing glue, a readily available inhalant that dulls the mind and senses. Before the issue became epidemic, the local hospitals were willing to hold those coming from jail cells for a few days of rehabilitation before turning them over to groups like Safina. However, as the habit overwhelms the streets, resources and expertise are vanishing and the hospitals are now refusing to treat addicted children.
“There’s nowhere for them to go right now,” Andrea says, her eyes exposing her heart’s distress. “We want to help but we are out of space and would need a unique staff to handle detox programs.”
The success rate for rehabilitating glue addicts depends entirely on how long they have been exposed. Andrea struggles with the obvious need and her own desires to offer a solution before it’s too late. For her, each child that enters Safina represents the potential for a regenerate life. She knows that if these kids choose Christ at a young age, their experience empowers them to minister to those who follow. These kids become a crucial part of the hope for Christ centered churches in Africa. But in Dodoma, Tanzania, it’s a race for their hearts and their minds.
Safina Street Kids Network has been reaching children of Tanzania with the Gospel for fourteen years. Every day they paint another gray canvas with the color and beauty of Jesus’ blood. But as glue sniffing and other temptations lure these children back into the streets, one could easily put quotes around the thoughts few of us can bear to verbalize:
“How many will be lost before they see the hope of Christ’s healing hand?”
by Jami Staples
Family Style
Where I come from when someone says “family-style” they are describing a quaint little restaurant where mashed potatoes come with every entree and the fifteen items on the dessert menu all end in “-obbler”. But to Dan and Bethany Tanner, the directors of Mavuno Village in Mwanza, Tanzania, “family-style” means a revolutionary new approach to orphan care.
Family-style orphan care isn’t exactly a new concept. If I briefly view myself as an orphan, I quickly realize that God’s solution for a world full of disoriented toddlers is a family unit. There’s a mother and father figure for leadership and guidance, siblings for personal growth and development, and of course extended family members, just to make Christmas dinner interesting. As early as Adam and Eve “family-style” has been proclaiming itself as the model approach to child rearing. So what, then, makes Mavuno Village appear so innovative?
As I listened to Dan and Bethany discuss the plight of orphans in Tanzania, I was somewhat shocked at my own fascination with their vision for Mavuno. Why did the concept of family-style orphan care sound so monumental? Then I realized that I was having trouble holding the elusive notion of “family” in my politically correct palms. In so many countries the idea of a family unit is convoluted at best. Likewise in Tanzania, the Tanners explained, the members of a family come and go as if they are woven together with elastic thread. Father (a term, by the way, serving only as a physiological description) finds a job and several female companions in distant cities leaving the mother (defined as the one who gave birth but may or may not actually parent) to resolve the lack of income with starvation in whatever means profitable. On holiday, when they may all be together for a brief period, Mom and Dad pretend monogamy is still the standard. But the comings and goings of both parties subjects the “family” to discord and disease. Before you know it there are five children from various, and perhaps infected, gene pools sharing the days only meal. Then the news arrives: Dad has died of “unknown causes”. The burden of hopelessness pushes Mom over the edge. Once Grandma realizes Mom is not coming back from her quest for help in a nearby village, the children are abandoned like unwanted puppies, but without primal instincts. The extended family offers their sympathies to Grandma. After all, who can expect a 65 year old widow to care for five more mouths? So each child begins a life dependent on compassion and hand-outs, oblivious to the edifying gift of a days hard-earned wage.
Now, ask one of those children the definition of “family”. Ask them to explain the role of a father or a mother. Ask them what they want to be when they grow up. Ask them to identify with God, our Heavenly Father. For the 980,000 orphans in Tanzania, their past is a mirror to their future. But for the 35 children currently under the care of Mavuno Village, these questions have new answers filled with the luxury of hope.
Mavuno Village is all about going back to the basics. “We wanted to give these orphans an environment that would enable them to be godly, self-sufficient citizens of Tanzania” Bethany tells me. “We knew that just taking care of their physical needs would not accomplish that – we had to do more”. So Dan and Bethany designed a plan that aims to redefine “family” for every member.
John and Milka Mbugua are currently serving as the ministry’s prototype. Less than 2 years ago they were invited to move into a four bedroom concrete home built on Mavuno’s 200 acres of lakeside property. Within a year they received nine children; five 4 year olds, two 5 year olds, a girl who is 10 and a boy also aged 10. In order for these children to grow up with an understanding of work ethic, leadership, and the persona of God, the Tanners believe John must be employed and empowered to model that for his kids. Therefore, the vision of Mavuno Village is to build a home for each qualifying couple and immediately give them a plot of land for them to farm. Through the process of professional and spiritual discipleship, Dan will teach the men to plant and harvest unique crops that can be sold locally and exported internationally; like sunflowers, mangos, loquat, and the increasingly lucrative, Moringa Tree. They even have their own dairy barn to provide fresh milk for each family on the premises. Mr. Mbugua is currently serving in an administrative role for the ministry. But on the weekends you will find him, his wife and their children in the garden. Together John and Milka teach their kids to plant seeds under little mounds of untreated soil, cover them with grass, and nourish each crop using water from Lake Victoria, just a stones-throw away. In a more subtle manner, though quite by design, John and Milka are also planting something deeper inside each little life. The seeds of hard work, God’s provision, moral accountability, and the concept of family, are strong sprouts already taking root in the adoring eyes and peaceful smiles of each child.
As the mother of two boys, I can only marvel at Milka’s outstanding ability to thrive in her role as Mom and teacher. Every morning her quiet spirit patiently instructs all six of the little ones around a 3×5 foot wooden table. In her concrete school room, there’s absolute silence as each child stares at Milka respectfully, waiting for their individualized assignments. As a family, they quietly celebrate each other’s every victory by singing a “good job” song and clapping in delight. For Milka, education of these little ones is not only about learning the ABC’s. Teaching them to value one another as brothers and sisters, respect her as their figure of authority, and praise God for their daily bread is a job she described to me as “awesome and tiresome”. After some much needed nap time, they all march down to their garden so the kids can be (muddy) kids and Milka can tend to the weeding. Often you will find Bethany there, tending her own veggies. It is imperative that the mothers of these orphans are supported with Biblical and practical mentoring from their sister-in-the-Lord. And what better classroom for a mother of nine to learn about the essential ingredients for growth, than in the middle of a garden toiling beside a veteran “gardener”?
The tan Land Cruiser bounced and jostled as I struggled to photograph the breathtaking landscape Mavuno calls home. Meanwhile, Dan paints for me a picture of what is to come. On every hillside there is a watermark – a soccer field here, a primary school over there, a dorm for short-term missions teams situated just next to the current office building. The framing has already begun for two more homes waiting for new families.
Each evening I sat in the Tanner’s home and listened to the hope-filled futures behind each painful story of the Mavuno kids. Ericki and his brother, Besa, for example, ages 8 and 11 respectively, were rejected by every relative after both parents died. They spent months on the street begging for their next meal before coming to Mavuno and into the Madata family. I was there – I saw them as they came home from school and sang songs about Paul and Silas with their “sisters”. I marveled as these, once self-made, boys obeyed their “mother” with respect and confidence.
Mavuno Village is still in its infancy. Every day they look for provision and direction from the Lord and every day they find it. But recently they also found an exciting measure of success. “Not long ago,” Dan tells me, staring shyly at his hands, “we asked 4 year old Michael Mbugua what he wanted to be when he grows up”. He pauses, and Bethany, making no effort to hide her emotion, continues, “Michael didn’t even bat an eye. He looked right at us and said ‘I want to be a daddy’!”
by Jami Staples
**Currently all Mavuno children are supported by sponsors. The monthly contributions go to the child’s family to care for the unique needs of each child. To learn more about supporting Mavuno Village or to sponsor a child, please visit their web site at www.mavunovillage.org
A Noble Effort
The patient work of Literacy Ministry
Written words are patient things. Once they find their form in so many sentences and are bound into books, they wait. They remain unchanged in the fleeting breadth of a human lifespan, and untouched in the devastation of a human conflict. It may be decades before a book once neglected is turned open again and its words are absorbed as they were meant to be. When that time comes they will still fulfill their purpose – but only if the words can be read and understood.
AIM missionary Martha Hughell could not have known what lay ahead when she bound up the words of the New Testament in the Otuho language in 1969. Her translation had taken 17 long years of patient labor, and when she retired she did so with the satisfaction of knowing the Lotuho people of Southern Sudan finally had the Word of God in their mother tongue, even if only few could read the language at the time. The church embraced the translation and volumes spread in the years between Sudan’s first and second civil wars. But those years were short and by 1983 the Lotuho homeland was engulfed in conflict once again.
By the time peace returned, 22 years had passed; nearly two million Sudanese had lost their lives, and an even greater number had been scattered. Some ended up in neighboring countries as refugees, others simply fled over the next mountain ridge and waited – wandered and waited for decades while the war ran its course.
Many of Sudan’s social structures suffered during this time, and the schools were no exception. Among the varied international relief efforts addressing each emerging crisis in the country, there were those who saw the importance of education as a stabilizing force in the conflict, and as a hope for any future beyond it. So there beside the drama of a protracted African war, beside the aid workers, peacekeepers, and pallets of relief food, were teachers. And some of them were missionaries.
Russ and Lyn were living in Juba, Southern Sudan’s principle city, when the war began. Both had come with AIM to teach in the schools; Russ was from urban New York, Lyn from the county of Kent in England. Juba, where they first met, was unlike either of those places. The town was oppressively hot, set on the western bank of the Nile in the southernmost part of Sudan. Juba was also a hub of war-time activity and a safe haven for relief efforts. This allowed both Russ and Lyn to continue in their ministries despite the steadily unraveling situation around them.
For two single missionaries in such a place at such a time, the assignment was a bonding experience. Russ and Lyn shared more than just a unique knowledge of which roads in Juba had land mines. They shared a genuine love for teaching. And they were both curiously persistent – stubborn perhaps – in their desire to serve the Sudanese people.
But by the late 80’s, Juba was under siege. By 1990, most Western workers had either left or been evacuated, including Russ and Lyn. They landed in Nairobi and, not surprisingly, were married there that same year.
When asked how a lady from Kent ends up married to a man from Queens, Lyn smiles and declares in her soft-spoken way, “The war threw us together.”
And together, they were doubly persistent.
“When I came,” Lyn says, “I knew this was a place I could spend the rest of my life. The calling was specific. The circumstances, not so much.” Russ’ story is much the same. So they simply followed their calling and worked around the circumstances.
When living in Sudan was no longer an option, the Nobles based themselves in Kenya and made frequent returns across the border. When AIM pulled all their missionaries from rebel-held areas, Russ and Lyn found a way back in with an Africa-based church ministry. When the mission planes quit flying due to insecurity, they found a ride on UN chartered planes instead. They continued to focus on teacher-training. They developed training modules and then carefully skirted conflict areas and held workshops over month-long trips to rural villages and towns in scattered locations in the South.
In all of these places, the Nobles were witness to the deterioration of the education system, which in rural areas was already little established. Sudan, it seemed, had a more fundamental problem than struggling schools and displaced students. The teachers were few and inexperienced, and many of them lacked basic literacy skills in their own language.
Literacy is like a living thing. Children who read are taught by adults who themselves can read. It is a skill that trickles down from generation to generation, and when the cycle is broken, a people group can become functionally illiterate in a very short time. The war in Sudan disrupted education to such a degree that an entire generation was being left behind. The official literacy rate in Sudan today stands at 27%, but in parts of South Sudan adult literacy is as low as 5-10% among women. Either way, these are some of lowest literacy rates in the world.
The discovery of this trend caused the Nobles to take a step back and refocus their efforts on a ministry of helping the Sudanese teach literacy to their own people.
In its simplest definition, literacy is the ability to read and write. But it’s also a doorway to further life skills – simple things like writing a letter, counting money, or casting a vote with some knowledge of how it will affect your future. Literacy is also the key to education. It’s been estimated that a 15 year old girl in South Sudan has a higher chance of dying in childbirth than of finishing primary school. But even more, literacy is a doorway to the Word of God, which a literate person can read for themselves and be transformed.
For the past ten years the Noble’s ministry has been all about this. Russ and Lyn have touched on as many as nine different people groups and languages since they began, promoting literacy and leaving a trail of self-sustaining literacy classes all over South Sudan. But how do you facilitate literacy in a language you don’t speak?
“We’re not linguists,” Russ explains, “They know the language, we bring the expertise.”
That expertise comes in the form of training and equipping volunteer literacy teachers who are chosen by the local church. The volunteers then go out into the communities and run literacy classes for a season – a couple hours a day, a couple days a week. It is a slow and patient effort. But what may look to be a very simple process is in reality moving through many complex steps toward something that transcends the process: a man or woman who can read their own language for the first time.
Russ and Lyn moved back into Sudan in 2007, excited to begin the process again. This time God led them to the Lotuho people who have, in recent peaceful years, been returning to their homeland.
Next door to the Noble’s house on the AIC church compound in Torit is a small literacy office in mild disarray. Shelves and foot-lockers crammed with written materials. Pamphlets and booklets. Little readers in a dozen languages. Storyboards and blackboards. On Russ’ desk is an incomplete Bible story he’s working on with a translation helper. On Lyn’s is a scattering of Otuho letters on hand-printed index cards. On top of shelves and under tables in stacks are tattered boxes filled with copies of the Otuho New Testament.
In the Nobles’s front yard is a temporary classroom of poles and tarps. As many as twenty literacy teachers come for a two-week training course that may be their first or their fifth. They learn the techniques of teaching others to read and write. They practice reading aloud and writing legibly. Russ gives a lesson on what it feels like to be pre-literate. He invents a new way of writing English with strange symbols and stumps the class. The learners will need patient teachers, he explains.
“Many new learners do not even know how to open a book, turn a page, or hold a pencil.”
Each graduate of the course leaves wearing a bright new T-shirt with the Otuho alphabet printed on the back. Each new class they start in the community will get a footlocker full of reading material designed to take the learners from tracing letters to reading God’s Word.
Leaning against a tree in the village is a make-shift blackboard. And under the tree is an eager group of learners – mostly adults and mostly women. They sit in a semi-circle on woven mats in the dust and watch the teacher inscribe the symbols of their mother tongue with a stub of chalk. The teacher makes the sounds and the learners repeat them. They laugh at themselves and light up as connections are made between symbols and speech.
In a more advanced class, one learner holds a primer in her hands while an infant slings at her side. She stands at front and reads aloud to the group, stumbles once or twice, but ultimately triumphs. On the sidelines the Nobles are watching during one of their regular visits to encourage the class, and even Russ is excited about the progress. A year ago they were learning letters. In a year or two they will be reading the Bible – the one waiting since 1969 to be read.
In helping people access the Bible for themselves, Russ describes their ministry as “one piece to the puzzle in building the church in South Sudan.” But it is likely more than that. The whole process is itself a parable of patient love. It is a translator giving a lifetime to encode the Scriptures into a new and cumbersome language. It’s missionaries like Russ and Lyn making many returns to a war-torn nation in a tireless effort to train teachers and develop materials for the learners. It’s a literacy teacher, his hand wrapped around the hand of his sister and pressed against a blackboard as they, together, trace out the letters of the alphabet in Otuho or Dinka or Nuer. And it is God, who has promised that his Word will not return to Him empty, and who is infinitely patient in waiting.
As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire.—Isaiah 55:10-11
by Mike Delorenzo
Blogs to Facebook
Did you know you can easily link you blog to your Facebook page?
The first step is to find the syndicated “feed” from your blog. For an Aimsites blog, your feed should simply be hhtp://youraimsitesname.aimsites.org/feed
Copy that link and click here to navigate to Facebook. This link will take you to a page where you can add the RSS feed. Once it’s set up, anything you post to your blog will automatically be posted to your Facebook wall.
AIM Short-Term
Short-term missionaries – Reinforcing missions
The End of the Road
Glenn and Sandy Wilton first came to Adi in 1976 to live among the Kakwa tribe of northeastern Congo. They did not arrive on a two or four-year assignment. They came, like missionaries of a different era, “for the duration.” But some twenty years after beginning their ministry, they were forced to leave in the face of violence and unrest due to civil war. At that time countless people, both Congolese and foreign missionaries, were forced to say goodbye to their homes and possessions. Many saw everything they had struggled to build and grow destroyed, burnt up by the fires of revolution and human vice.
When the Wiltons were able to return in 1999, they came back determined to build on whatever remained. Physically, they didn’t find much. Their house had been been stripped by looters; one lone doorframe was left, the windows were gone, and everything of earthly value was taken. But spiritually, Adi was very much alive. There were some who had carried off the Wiltons’ possessions saying, “No, bwana Wilton is never coming back, this is mine now.” But there were others who remained faithful to the ministry and the missionaries they loved. Glenn remembered how one old man came back with a mixing bowl and proudly told him he had saved it for Mrs. Wilton, that he knew they would return. One pastor was in the middle of a sermon when Glenn, who had just returned, walked into the church unannounced. The pastor fell silent, then said, “They say it is death to come to Congo. But nevertheless, here is Mr. Wilton, come back to live with us!” Today, Glenn and Sandy are still living with the Kakwa. Their ministry is thriving as they continue to meet a wide range of spiritual and physical needs.
From the first morning I spent in Adi, I was impressed by how much can be done with so little. When Glenn returned after the war, he found the ancient rusting hulk of the tractor he first brought from Canada completely vandalized. With very little mechanical knowledge, he managed to rebuild the tractor and today it provides an invaluable service: road repair.
Roads in Congo are built flat, and after a few rains the water cuts twisty paths along their length that make them impassable. So Glenn spends some of his days riding back and forth under the beating sun to raise the center and create channels along the sides; the result is roads that will last. People understand and appreciate this, stopping to wave or give a thumbs-up as Glenn passes. The tractor also aids in Glenn’s ongoing effort to restore the old AIM airstrip a stone’s throw from their house. Glenn and his work crew had recently broken through the dense underbrush to complete a road going around the airstrip with hopes of discouraging people from walking on the airstrip itself. The hired workers had cause for celebration that day: The men were tired but happy, and someone suggested we go kill a goat to celebrate. But much work still remains. Glenn hopes that some day Adi will serve as a regional hub for air operations, bringing planes that could serve the local hospital and reach neighboring communities like Bunia and Aba.
Glenn is also a brick-maker and a builder. To date he has built homes for seventeen Bible institute students and three teachers’ families, not to mention shoring up the foundation of the local church, a building dating – like the Wilton’s house – from the 1940s and still impressively sound.
With an eye on the spiritual foundations of the Church, the Wiltons have been working for years to complete a Bible concordance and full-fledged hymnbook in Bangala, a language spoken by over a million Africans in DRCongo, Central Africa Republic, and Sudan. Over the past ten years the Wiltons have been addressing this broad need, one that that goes beyond Adi to the surrounding regions: the development of Christian literature in the mother tongue of the people.
The problem, Glenn explains, is that “these are a people just barely coming out of an oral language tradition.” They are not yet able to benefit from Christian resources printed in English. So the Wiltons have been devoting much of their time to provide resources that fill the gap. Along with the help of a local literature-writing committee and several Kakwa men whom they are training, the Wiltons write, print, collate, wrap, and distribute Bangala Bible school books and Christian education materials for local churches. They offer resources for young couples and even publish a “youth Bible reading card” along with thought-provoking questions on the daily readings.
The publishing process is quite labor-intensive; there are no professional printer services or copier technicians here. The Wiltons rely on much older technology: Gestetner machines and mechanically-created stencil copies, which are easier to maintain and more cost-effective than buying hundreds of toner cartridges. This is a labor of love, a labor that requires patience and daily devotion. I watched in the evenings as Glenn was sitting at his dimly-lit dining room table stapling pages together and then painstakingly tapping the staples flat with a hammer, hundreds of them, so that the little books wouldn’t become unbound over time.
Such devotion – in the building of a road or in the binding of a book – is hard to find. Devotion to the spiritual growth of a people at a remote outpost in the Congo is even more rare. As the Wiltons prepare for retirement next September, I am left wondering, what’s next now that they’ve come full circle and reached the end of the road? The answer is clear: Like Glenn’s workers on the airstrip, you can’t just celebrate what’s done; you go around again.
As the church in Congo matures, it still needs spiritual partners to come alongside it and bless it. Glenn and Sandy could not have rebuilt their ministry upon returning after the war but for the neighbors and friends who came to their door to help them. “We cannot walk away deaf from what’s been built,” Glenn declares. We cannot abandon the church during its growing process after a tumultuous period because we were asked to make painful sacrifices for their sake. Taking Christ’s example, we need to be willing to persevere with those whom we love, letting faith in God’s omnipotence and not the seemingly insurmountable challenges of our circumstances determine our hope in the future.
After thirty years of ministry at Adi, Glenn Wilton has a good idea of what’s required – and what’s not – to serve God in such a place. What kind of person is God looking for? “Before they were like Abraham,” Glenn whispers and shakes his head in amazement and respect for the missionaries who came long ago. Even looking one generation back, Glenn is amazed at what unskilled missionaries could accomplish. “I look at this church,” he says pointing to the local building, “it still stands straight today. I ask myself, how did they do that six decades ago? The things they did…the things they dared to do!”
God is not looking for giants among men. Those who came yesterday were made of the same stuff as you and I, and God is still in the business of doing miracles. He is looking merely for Abrahams. People willing to make a leap of faith, believing that God will provide and equip you as we trust in Him. “It’s about where God calls you,” Glenn says, “to the exclusion of all else.” Chuckling, he gestures at the rebuilt tractor, the cabinets he fashioned, the doors he welded, and the bricks he has made. “I’m a high school chemistry teacher!” Almost no one who comes here full time, Glenn maintains, ends up doing only what they came expecting to do. But this does not mean that every missionary must be a jack-of-all-trades. In fact, Glenn insists there are only three characteristics required for a missionary to the Congo: Spiritual maturity. The ability to be flexible – to meet needs and do what needs doing, and not necessarily what you expect would need doing. And the ability to cope with frustration. The rest, Glenn promises, God will provide.
During my final day I couldn’t help but reflect on how even my own short time in Adi demonstrated what Glenn had said. I came as a photographer and writer, but I spent most of every day fixing computers for Glenn, the Bible institute, and the local hospital. The head surgeon even seated me in front of an ultrasound machine, handed me a manual, and asked, “How does this work?” And after much fumbling I gave a seminar in French to the hospital staff on how to use their new machine. As I was packing my bag, I still felt like I had not accomplished very much in my time there. But we do not always see the ways in which God uses us, nor do we always understand how much something seemingly small to us means to the person we do it for. The head pastor in the region came and shook my hand when he learned of the ways I had helped. Glenn later told me he came to greet him and express how happy he was because of “the youth that came.”
Adi, like so many other places in central Africa, is waiting, not for experts or bilingual Ph.D. holders, but for encouragers, for partners, for prayer warriors, and for Abrahams willing to follow God wherever he calls them; from today until the end of their road.
by Kenny Bendiksen
Fishing at Night
At night, globes of light wink into existence on the expanse of the water. More and more appear, like a string of glowing pearls bobbing on a swath of velvet. The fisherman place lanterns on small, hand-lashed floats and release them, one by one, onto the lake. The lights bring flies. The flies bring fish.
Shoals of minnows known as dagaa surge and seethe along the surface beneath the lantern light. The fishermen work in teams–some boats remain stationary while others circle around drawing the nets in broad arcs. After hauling up the catch, the men return to the islands in the still-dark morning, piling the dagaa on sandy, drying plots–conspicuously clean and maintained among the haphazard sprawl of the camp.
The prize in Lake Victoria has traditionally been the Nile Perch–pale white monsters often weighing over a hundred pounds. But in this Tanzanian archipelago, the perch has been largely fished out, leaving a less-appealing quarry. Dagaa fishing is not glamorous. It’s humbling and time intensive–raking and drying and protecting the fish for days before you see any return on your labor. And if the rain comes for long, the fish rot, and the the women must sweep them into reeking piles and wait for the next boatloads.
Spiritually, these camps are dark places–lawless clusters of temporary shacks and brothels, rife with AIDS and despair. But AIM missionaries like Bob and Dorothy Matthews, (insert single lady), and Chris and Dale Hamilton live here, called to be ”fishermen” of another sort. Traveling by boat and by float plane, they host mobile clinics for the sick and marginalized island dwellers of southwest Lake Victoria, demonstrating the love of Jesus Christ and shining Light.
by Mike Saum
Set Apart
The shepherds of Lesotho, marginalized in the culture but set apart for God
Hope and Healing
Impacting the kingdom of God through AIM Health Ministries
Water is Life
Living water for the nomadic peoples of Northern Kenya
Soil, Sheep, and the work of a King
GOD IS A FARMER
August Basson knelt beside a row of rich brown soil in a field of newly planted maize and plunged his hands into the earth. With an exuberance well matched to his lively South African accent, and with the experience of a man who holds a soulful connection to the land, he carefully rubbed the moist earth between his fingers. Plunging in once again he begins to laugh. “You see this, you see this!” he exclaims. His visitors crouch down for a closer look as August unearths a prize. “It is an earthworm!” he sounds out with boyish glee. The tiny creature wriggles free of the dirt and dances in August’s calloused and careful hands. He laughs again and promptly declares it a miracle.
“I have not seen an earthworm in years. This is a good sign. It means the land is beginning to heal.”
August, along with his wife Anita, originally came to the tiny, landlocked nation of Lesotho over 16 years ago to preach. But he soon found himself preaching to people with empty stomachs. Lesotho is a nation facing a dire farming crisis, which has turned a country that once fed neighboring countries into a land that today can barely feed itself.
Known as the “Mountain Kingdom,” Lesotho, on a map, is like a thumbprint in the middle of the vast nation of South Africa. Mostly highlands – arid, rocky, windswept – Lesotho is a breathtaking display of what one missionary here described as “devastating beauty.” It’s unique history created a land with a single, homogenous culture and a people ruled over by a benevolent king. Lesotho appears to defy the stereotypes of suffering Africa: There are few signs of abject poverty. The literacy rate mirrors that of many developed, Western nations. A one hour flight spanning the country east to west reveals some very impressive infrastructure. And peace, the rarest of commodities in Africa, blankets the land. But unfortunately, peace still proves elusive to the hearts of the 1.8 million Basotho people who live here.
Lesotho is burdened with one of the highest HIV infection rates in the world. Nearly 23% of the population, one in five Basotho, are suffering from the wasting effects of the disease. And the land is wasting away as well. This sober fact is evident every time it rains.
“The biggest export of Lesotho,” August says with regret in his voice, “is the land.”
“And they don’t get one cent for it!”
He steers his Land Cruiser off the road and across a field to the edge of a plot neatly cut into rows by an ox‐drawn plough. This is a family farm. It was passed down from father to son. It will be passed down again if it can only last another generation. The rains are pouring heartily from the sky, but what should be a blessing in Africa, here reveals a curse. At the edge of the farm, the land falls off into a gully, and the gully itself into a network of others as far as the eye can see. And it immediately becomes clear that this farm was once much larger. August pops an umbrella and bounds across the field. His heart sinks as he describes what is happening. In rivulets of muddy water, the rains are carrying away what is left of the topsoil – and at an alarming rate.
“Your farm is like a living inheritance you pass on to your kids,” he explains. And then with a sigh, “They are passing on death.”
As August began to identify the agricultural disaster threatening the land and livelihoods of the people he came to serve, he quickly switched his focus from preaching to developing a program to solve the seemingly intractable problem. But he soon found his efforts were failing. Then one day famine came and August was faced with scores of people at his gates. “I can’t feed a nation!” he pleaded with the Lord. And God challenged him that perhaps he could. Or rather, God could. Perhaps everything they needed, was already provided.
Over the past few decades, basic farming has been destroyed in Lesotho. It is the fault of good intentioned missionaries as well as aid agencies and governments. There have been a lot of failed projects, programs, schemes, and systems. August summed up his frustrations, and the wrong headed approach of applying western methodologies to the uniqueness of Lesotho, in a short, sober revelation: “The plough has killed more people in Africa than any war.”
The problem was not so much the plough however. The problem lay deeper than any curl of steel could cut in a field. Deeper than the gullies swallowing up the fertile soil. Deeper even than the sorrow of the Basotho who have summarily declared themselves “cursed”. The problem lay in the hearts of the people.
And if it was a problem of the heart, perhaps August had a solution after all. He discovered that farming detached from a God‐centered worldview was bound to fail here. The Basotho believe farming to be a “low” profession, and have a fatalistic approach to their land. The resultant behavior is destructive. And it has proved impossible to change this behavior without changing the beliefs behind it.
“Ideas have consequences.” He explains. “Ideas sit right at the heart of things.”
So August presented a new idea: God is a farmer. He was the first farmer. August quotes from the book of Genesis – “God planted a garden in Eden.” – and with this unexpected revelation begins to teach a new way of thinking about farming: God’s way.
Adopting a mindset called “Farming God’s Way”, August has found a means to address the ecological needs of the land, as well as the theological needs of the people. He has become a preacher once again, albeit one with muddied boots and calloused hands.
“There is a need to help people see we have a key relationship with the land – the way we view ourselves has an effect on how we deal with the land – and it all goes back to our right relationship with the Creator.”
GOD IS A SHEPHERD
One hundred miles east, high in the bouldered, treeless mountains of Lesotho, a similar transformation was slowly unfolding.
John and Shan Barry live in a small house set on a grassy knoll in a broad and beautiful valley, in the village of Molumog. The Basotho villagers here populate the valley only sparsely, and seem to easily blend with the land and bend with the wind. They are typically wrapped for warmth, in wool blankets or layered clothes, as they go about the simple and satisfying tasks of life. Except on Sundays, when nearly the whole village dutifully converges at the church adjacent to John’s house. On Sundays, they come dressed in their very best clothes. And for some the day is worship. For others it is social obligation. But for John, Sunday mornings bring a burden.
His glance wanders outside the thick stones of the sanctuary walls to the hillsides far distant. And here John is painfully reminded that there are some among the village who are not represented at church. In fact, there are some who are not even welcome. Speckled upon the hills, adrift among herds of sheep and goats and cattle, is an outcast community of shepherds doing a job which knows no sabbath, and fulfilling a societal role which places them in the single most unreached people group in Lesotho.
“The church has a heart for these boys, but in a half‐hearted way,” John explains.
Shepherds pose a unique problem. They are respected, but not socially accepted. Ranging in ages from 5 to 65, the boys and men who comprise Lesotho’s ubiquitous shepherd community work for wealthy stock‐owners who need to graze their animals in a country without provision for formal, individual land ownership. In a land without fences. So the boys live and roam with the herds. They are relegated to a life of poverty, paid in sheep and blankets, and growing up in isolation from the social fabric of their homeland.
As a result, the boys end up illiterate and unschooled. They are sometimes feared, and castigated as criminals. They lack both the manners and the clothes to show up in a church. And even if they did, they would be lost in the liturgical tradition of Lesotho’s prominent denominations.
AIM’s reach into the lives of these boys took root more than a decade ago when missionaries began to establish schools to provide a basic education and a point of evangelization for the marginalized shepherds. The schools are but shacks, scattered throughout the hills like the shepherds themselves. Today, over 700 boys are attending them. Some of the boys have become Christians. And now John has ideas for something even bigger.
In a visit to the home of a kindly Basotho woman known as Mama Tankiso, John talks about his vision. Mama Tankiso has been working with the herd boys for over twelve years. Her brightly painted home is probably one of the few places these boys feel welcome. A crew of disheveled youth loiter outside even now, and John asks her why she tries so hard to reach them.
Her response is simple and heartfelt. “I like them so much,” she says.
She tells a story about how she first began to see these boys being ignored and left out. She says it broke her heart. John, gentle in his own way and a kindred spirit with Mama Tankiso, clearly understands. He begins to share with her his idea. About how God has a special place in His heart for shepherds. And how perhaps for the shepherds of Lesotho, God has a special plan.
As John sees it, God is a shepherd. The Good Shepherd. And in this beautiful imagery is a new way of thinking about the shepherds just outside the door at Mama Tankiso’s home, and all over the country. Suddenly the shepherds were not merely an unreached people, but also messengers with the potential to reach many more. Could God use this outcast community to show what the church should be?
What if they could find 20 believers among the shepherds who could be trained in the manner of their oral traditions? What if they could create an orate Bible school to teach them stories from God’s Word. The shepherds could come to study in intervals, and in time could eventually become pastors to their own community. This could lead to a church movement. A church that affirms the shepherd’s role. A church without a building.
“I think this is what God wants them to be,” John announces. “They will be shepherds of men!”
AN UNCONVENTIONAL KING
In a land ruled by a King, it’s easy to frame a worldview based on stereotypes, and resign oneself to fate and circumstance. But God has a way of turning such things on their head. He himself is a King. Yet one that left his throne and became poor for the sake of impoverished humanity. Is it any surprise then that God has also been a farmer and a shepherd?
Is it hard to believe that God still delights in the feeling of moist, fertile soil scooped up in his earth‐creating fingers. Impossible to imagine that he still cares to cradle a frightened lamb in his world‐embracing arms? That he laughs at the display of a dancing earthworm? Or smiles in a face full of wool? Is there more than just toil in one’s work? Is there also joy, and purpose, and a lesson in reconciliation?
The message to the farmers and shepherds of Lesotho is that God, amazingly, relates to their disparaged vocations. And through them, he is working out his purposes for Lesotho – taking the humble and teaching the “wise”, and quite possibly using the “hopeless” to bring hope to the whole of the Mountain Kingdom.
by Mike Delorenzo
Orientation
Beginning the journey into missions
Captivation
A narrative of a young man and his experiences as a short-term volunteer with On Field Media Continue Reading
Tumaini Means Hope
AIM’s ministry of member care
North Africa
A short glimpse into North Africa’s soul Continue Reading
Move Against the Fear
“Sometimes when we are called to obey, the fear does not subside and we are expected to move against the fear. One must choose to do it afraid.” –Elizabeth Elliot
I have only one pair of good boots and I seldom get to use them. But they were the first thing I packed. For fifteen days I traveled through central Africa. Into the middle of the continent, and the middle of some of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world. Africa Inland Mission’s objective was to gauge the state of the church here, if there was one, and to learn how to re-engage these lands with a renewed missionary effort. What do you take on a trip like that? Good boots and a Bible. A notebook and an open mind. And, if you dare, an open heart.
Into Sudan, Congo, Chad, and the Central Africa Republic. Four countries with a combined land mass equal to two-thirds of the United States, but without the roads. So where the Land Rovers wouldn’t go, we traveled by air, motorcycle, dugout canoe, and foot – over thousands of miles of savanna, rain forest, mountain and desert. The landscapes were forbidding, and beautiful; giving way to sunlit villages of thatch and meandering footpaths, where smiling children and women carted the wares of life atop their heads.
But one has a sense, on a journey such as this, that there’s more to the story of the people and the land than you can catch at a glance. Where your boots meet the rich, red African soil, and where your itinerary makes time for a cup of tea and a conversation, you begin to see the real picture. It is largely a disheartening one. From the southern mountains of Sudan, all the way inland to Lake Chad, these four unique nations share one tragic history. Each gained independence from colonial rule somewhere around 1960. And each replaced one kind of oppression with another. What followed has been decades of human conflict and unfathomable suffering. Economies and communities were destroyed. Infrastructures crumbled. People scattered. The wicked prospered and the righteous lost their homes.
All four countries in recent years were listed among the ten least stable entities in the world. But those are only the political woes. For most of the people here, generations of spiritual darkness rooted in Animistic beliefs have led to a culture steeped in fatalism and fear. The “spirits” which they believe control their world are the most prominent and powerful forces in their lives. And the influence of Islam simply brings more fearful uncertainty.
My boots plodded through the thick elephant grass in the Datooga Mountains, tracing out a path up a hillside and back in time to an era when missionaries lived and worked here. Their house, like the Bible School they built, lay crumbling and bare, returning to the clay from which its bricks were cast. Sudan’s war in the 80’s drove them out and shut down the school. The Church scattered, but somehow, survived. Even grew.
How is that possible? It’s been said that “the local church is the hope of the world.” Jesus said as much. He told his disciples, “You are the salt of the earth, the light of the world.” And in central Africa, glimpses of that hope still remain. But they are like the courageous flickers of a lamp in danger of going out.
I sat and listened to James and John, two young Sudanese pastors aptly named, as they told the story of reclaiming a village for the Lord, and how they fought for it, literally, on their knees next to a slab of concrete that was once a whole church. I listened to a Zande choir rock their church, and my soul, with the sound of drums and voices lifted above the vaulted roof of a sanctuary built long ago, above a canopy of trees in the rainforest of C.A.R. I traveled down the Chari River with pastor Samuel, his face a mixture of uncommon humility and unpretentious humanity. We ventured onto the waters of lake Chad and prayed. Prayed, boldly it seemed, for the Gospel to one day take root this far inland. And for his little mud church upstream to simply stand. I saw Pastor Lalima praying over a thousand ravaged and displaced people in Adi. I saw the gleaming faces of the graduating class from the Bible Institute in Obo. I saw an old man, his life long ago transformed, rebuilding that old Bible school there in the Datooga Mountains.
The local church is the hope of the world. And it’s the hope for central Africa. It is God’s chosen instrument to transform lives and bring people into His Kingdom. It’s his instrument to preserve a community, a country, and the world from the debasement and destruction of sin. “But what if the salt loses it saltiness?” AIM’s Central Region coordinator simply looked north to answer the question. North Africa used to have a vibrant church. Today, it’s all but gone. He warned that this could happen here too. Are we a generation away? Less? The hard truth is that the Church in central Africa is but a remnant. Dealt a double blow from war and syncretism. It’s been scattered, persecuted, diluted. And, if you ask them, abandoned.
AIM’s initial missionary effort in these lands was not perfect. But the roots planted by those first pioneers somehow endured a forty-year absence. The danger now is that the “living stones” of the Body of Christ are looking much like the actual stones of many of the buildings. Crumbling. One wall where there should be four. Choked and overgrown with weeds. Over 124 million people live in these four nations. More than 220 unreached people groups. And a singular, impoverished church begging for help to reach them. It’s time AIM returned to central Africa.
Whatever the continued missionary effort looks like, it must be made of disciple-makers. All throughout this region, there are places where the church does not yet exist, and places where the church is barely holding on. And over countless hours in countless meetings with pastors and church leaders in the region, I heard their pleas. They ask for missionaries: people who love Jesus and are willing to share their lives and talents, to perhaps meet a practical need, while all along addressing the most important one – transformational discipleship.
It requires a coming-alongside to teach, speak courage, and ultimately go out together as One Church to the unreached. Central Africa’s transformation will begin here; in the hearts of people who are transformed into Christ’s likeness. Making more disciples who then make more. Is this vision for central Africa even possible? One thing is certain: we can no longer wait for it to become easy.
By day twelve on our fifteen-day trip I quit admiring my boots. I had grown to resent them, as well as the socks I had been wearing for three days straight. My feet were aching and slightly blistered. Gore Tex doesn’t really breathe when it’s 117 degrees. Some days prior, our pilot on the trip made a comment about feet that came to mind. I mentioned something about the “feet of those who bring good news” and he chuckled.
“Don’t know why they’re called beautiful,” he said. “The missionaries who have served here have trashed their feet. Only God could call them beautiful.”
This is a hard place. This is a hard calling. How do you live in a land of persistent instability? How do you minister to the spiritually oppressed and oppressive? How do you learn the language, understand the culture, navigate the government abuse? How do you throw up your hands in frustration and embrace a friend at the same time? What do you do when the next war touches you, and it’s your turn to flee? What if you lose all your stuff? What if you lose more than just your stuff? What if it’s worth it?
I sat in the dark; in a semi-circle of Congolese pastors at Aru. They asked us, unashamedly, why the missionaries are not returning. “Because it’s hard” we told them. “Sometimes they hear the news of this place and are afraid.” And one of them said something I cannot forget.
“In the past there were missionaries who loved us… and they accepted to suffer with us.”
And I wondered if the past was just that. Past.
I don’t know what to do with this. God is calling me to something, but is it something this hard? I have these feet, and they can go. They are able, even if they are not experienced. But the question I’m asking is this: are they willing? Willing to walk some of the earth’s most beautiful and devastated lands? Willing to stand side by side with those of my African brothers and sisters? Willing to be trashed in the process, and one day be called beautiful? Are my feet willing to move against the fear?
I don’t know what to do with this. But one thing I know I can’t do anymore is walk away.
by Mike Delorenzo
Move Against the Fear
A journey into Central Africa and the challenge of ministry there Continue Reading
Trailer-On Field Media
A short introduction to the work of AIM’s team of media missionaries in Africa
The Mwani
Reaching the Mwani people, an unreached group in Northern, coastal Mozambique
So We Do Not Lose Heart
The great need for theological education in Rwanda
Walking in Shadow
A glimpse into the Muslim mindset, and the church’s responsibility to pray, learn, and engage
Think About It
TIMO: a two year foundation for a lifetime of ministry
Four Stories, One Heart
AIM AIR – How mission aviation connects to the Great Commission
Room for a Few More
Q & A with RVA Dorm Parents Jeff and Joyellen Hazard
An hour’s drive from Nairobi, in a forest of wild olive and pencil cedar trees that looks out over the Great Rift Valley, there stands a school. Much has changed in Africa since Teddy Roosevelt laid the cornerstone for the first academic building 100 years ago. The school itself has changed: modern curriculum, expanded programs, new buildings. The diverse student body, now comprised of almost 500 students from more than 20 different nationalities, represents 80 mission organizations in over 20 African countries.
But the reason for Rift Valley Academy remains the same: to empower missionary families to serve, and to disciple, nurture, and educate students toward academic excellence and Christian maturity.
What does it take for such a distinctive school like this to thrive, a school where 80% of kids are boarding students? It takes teachers, coaches, and administrators. Cooks, drivers, and builders. And it takes people willing to broaden the circle of a traditional family to make room for a few more. Maybe even 22 more.
It takes dorm parents.
Jeff and Joyellen Hazard have served as dorm parents at Rift Valley Academy for the past nine years. In a series of questions and funny, honest answers, find out why.
Out of all the missions ministries in all of the world, how did you end up as dorm parents at Rift Valley Academy?
Jeff: We are still asking ourselves that same question (laughing). Joyellen is an MK (missionary kid) from Kenya. I was born, bred, and raised in Michigan and then conned into coming out here after marriage. In 2001, Joyellen said, “Let’s go visit Kenya,” but we packet a LOT of stuff. We got off the plane, came right here, moved into the dorm, and actually stayed. We’ve been here ever since.
You didn’t always want to be a missionary?
Jeff: Oh no. When I was growing up, missions wasn’t anything more than having weird people from Africa who would show slideshows at your church and scare you to death to go anywhere outside of your own hometown.
What prepared you to be missionary dorm parents?
Jeff: After college I was a youth pastor for three years and felt strongly called to youth ministry. During that time, I was exposed to missions. I really enjoyed it and kinda got a passion for it, but I felt the only way youth ministry and missions were going to mix is if I kept taking kids on short-term mission trips. At that point I told God, “I’ll go anywhere as long as you don’t send me to Africa.” That worked out pretty well.
Then I met Joyellen and found out she was a missionary kid from this school in Africa called Rift Valley Academy. Never heard of it.
Joyellen: I attended RVA all the way from second grade up. My parents [retired AIM missionaries, Lee and Marsha Hoving] did Bible School ministry and lived all over Kenya.
Jeff: Shortly after we got married, I looked into RVA and started asking questions about needs and opportunities. Dorm parenting came up, so I went to Joyellen and we talked about it. I fell in love with the idea pretty quickly. I was like, “Let’s go! Let’s get out there!” She was a little hesitant.
Joyellen: I wanted to make sure I wasn’t doing just what was comfortable. I had to make sure all my motivations were correct and that I was coming because that was really where God wants me. So I had to wrestle with that for a while.
Jeff:After about two years, we had done all the orientation and jumped through all the hoops and raised all our support. We packed our bags and sold everything we owned and moved in.
What exactly is a dorm parent?
Jeff: Just the name “dorm parent” is kind of funny. We are in a parent role but we are not the dorm kids’ parents. Their parents are the number one influence on their lives. For us it’s more of a facilitator role— coming alongside the parents and helping them when they’re not physically here. A lot of it’s just mentoring. We challenge our guys to think critically from a biblical perspective.
Joyellen: We try to be a constant presence, to be around 24/7. During the school day, they are off and running . They might come in and have you sign this paper or get some medicine or ask a question here and there, but the days are pretty light.
It’s the evenings and weekends that are most intense. Our busiest time of day is from 7 until 10 at night. It’s just constant: study hall, hanging out and chatting, devotions once a week, things like that.
Can you tell us about your dorm and the kids that live with you?
Jeff: This is Duma dorm. Duma is swahili for “cheetah” although it’s filled with pictures of buffalos. It’s probably one of the oldest dorms on campus, and it shows. (Joyellen laughs) So we are working on getting that fixed up.
We’ve got grades 9th and 10th grade boys. We’re at capacity with 22, which we’ve had almost every year. We get the boys in 9th grade and close to half are actually new kids. They’re new to boarding, new to RVA, some are even new to missions.
In 9th grade, they’re just coming out of junior high. They’re still goofy but trying to be cool, because they’re in high school now. They still like to have toilet paper fights in the dorm, but they don’t want the girls to know. It’s kind of a fun time.
Joyellen: Usually we will have seven or eight nationalities in a dorm of 20 students. We have some who are missionary kids, some whose parents work for the government or are business people in Nairobi. You have kids that are not Christians, that are Muslim or whatever. Just all different nationalities and backgrounds. Some that are very, very conservative. Some from different missions organizations. We have interesting debates with the boys because they all come from different places.
How does dorm parenting affect your own family life?
Joyellen: We had no kids when we came out, so our family has definitely evolved and changed over the years from no kids to three kids—
Jeff: To 25 kids. Twenty in the dorm, three of our own, and two more dorm kids next term.
Joyellen: Evenings can be the hardest time of the day because we’ve got homework and bedtime over here at our house and we’ve got homework and bedtime over there. That’s why it’s nice to be a team. Usually we will divide and conquer.
Jeff: Even the dorm guys will step in. If I have an away soccer game and don’t get back until 8:30, I’ll come in and Megan is sitting there on the couch reading a book with one of the boys and Joyellen is over helping someone else with homework. They step in and help out.
Joyellen: When we were on furlough in the States, the kids were like, “Man, our house in Kenya was bigger.” They are thinking about the dorm. They asked, “Where are all the dorm boys?” That’s what they’re used to. It’s all they’ve known.
How do your own children relate to the kids in your dorm? And vice versa?
Jeff: We usually don’t let those guys talk to our kids. We try to keep them separate. (laughs)
No. Our kids—Megan (7), Lindsey (5), and Ian (2)—were all born here in Kenya. They’ve grown up in the dorm. So our kids are dorm kids. They have 22 big brothers. The dorm guys hang out with them. They play with them. They will sit and read books and stories and watch movies and—
Joyellen: The boys really like princess movies and Veggie Tales. (laughs)
Jeff: It’s funny how many 10th grade boys you’ll find sitting down and watching Elmo. You’ll get 15 guys and they’re sucked in.
Joyellen: Sometimes our kids will leave the room—
Jeff: And we’ll turn off the TV and say, “Alright, it’s time to go outside and play,” and groans come from the 10th-graders, not from our kids. It’s kind of funny.
Jeff: When Megan and Lindsey were little, the dorm guys at the time would put them in the stroller and take them for a walk. Of course that was a chick magnet. (laughs)
What about balance and boundaries?
Joyellen: Sometimes you feel like it’s impossible, like fighting the current and going the wrong way. It would be a utopia if you could only be a dorm parent. But everyone has needs and the next thing you know, you step in and you’re swamped.
Jeff: It is really hard to set boundaries between our work in the dorm and all of the other obligations you have. You don’t have one job at RVA, you have a hundred other things. I run the IT network here and all the internet and email for the entire station—about 900 users. I coach soccer. I drive a bus—which I thought I’d never do—in Africa. (laughs) I teach Sunday School. I fix my truck. A lot. I have a Land Rover.
So those boundaries are harder to set than between the dorm and our family. They’re a lot less distinct, because I think, “How would I want my kids to be treated if they were in a dorm?” These kids are part of our family. We have a door on our house, but it it always open. We don’t have “our family” time where we say, “Sorry guys, you can’t come in, because you are not part of it.”
What does it take to be a good dorm parent?
Jeff: We have been doing this for nine years and we have learned a lot and we still have a lot to learn. We have been the good, bad, and ugly. I look back at our first two years in a dorm and we didn’t have a clue what we were doing. I still feel like, “Wow I did that again.”
Joyellen: I think because I was a dorm kid, that’s a bonus. I can say, “I really liked this about a particular dorm parent. I did not like that. Let’s make sure we’re doing this and not doing that.” I think that helps.
It takes consistency, creativity, fun, laughter. A sense of humor helps. Identify with the boys. A situation happened last night where something had happened to one of they boys and Jeff identified with him. The boy was very thankful for that. Just coming along side them and venting with them.
Jeff: When we were young and new, we had the dorm parent handbook which explained all of the little rules, and we were black and white. “Page 3, Rule B says this and you broke it. You are done.” Over the years we learned that it is not about the rules; there is a lot of heart behind it. It’s about just figuring out where the kids are.
We might have two kids who do the exact same things, but there motives are completely different. The rules say A + B = C, but then you get to the heart of the issue. One kid is looking for trouble, but you’ve got another kid, and his parent’s village just got pillaged and burned down and they were chased out of their home. He got the e-mail last night and he came home and punched a hole in his door. He is not a malicious kid, he just doesn’t know how to handle those kinds of situations. He is a thousand miles away from his parents, and he just got bad news, and he doesn’t know how to handle it. So does that kid need to be hammered? No, he needs a hug.
What would you say to someone who might suggest that boarding school is an outdated model?
Jeff: Joyellen grew up in a boarding situation and she’s got two other brothers. I think all three are success stories for boarding. It’s individual to the kid and individual to the family. But being part of it, I look at the opportunities these kids have here, for community, for sports, for extra-curricular activities, arts, fine arts, and life skills. You can do that in home-schooling situations or group-schooling situations, but there is something bigger here that RVA provides. There are opportunities here that they wouldn’t normally get.
And nothing is done without prayer. This place has been running for over a hundred years. I think that just the fact that it has been going for so long and so many kids have been coming out of here with positive experiences says a lot.
What makes it worth the sacrifice?
Joyellen: It is always nice when the boys come back. You can see that they actually do grow up and some things do sink in. It is nice to see because sometimes you are like, “Will that kid ever grow up? Will he ever hold a job in society?”
Jeff: It’s fun to get e-mails about where they are and what they are doing and what their passions are. Guys that were just struggling to get by are now telling you that they are working here or doing this ministry. Stuff that was a challenge for them here, they have overcome. That’s exciting, not to take credit, but just because you were part of that.
Are there any passages of scripture that are particularly encouraging to you as dorm parents?
Jeff: Christ is coming back soon! (laughs)
Joyellen: “Take every thought captive, make it obedient to Christ.” That is one of my favorite ones, because it’s easy to feel discouraged because dorm parenting is such a daunting task. Take those thoughts captive.
And also “With everything you do, love the Lord your God with your heart, soul, and mind.”
Jeff: Every year, I talk to the guys about Romans 12. I love the way The Message puts it: “
Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going to work, and walking around life—and place it before God as an offering.” Make your everyday life a spiritual act of worship and constantly remind yourself, “This is what God has called me to do.” Just hanging out with the boys is part of worship and part of praising God. This is the responsibility that he has given us.
by Mike Saum
11 Helpful tips
1- Turn up the quality and resolution to the highest settings native to the camera. You will get fewer pictures on a memory card, but cards are cheap to buy.
Your camera may have several different quality and resolution settings available. Resolution describes how big the picture will be (measured in pixels) and the Quality refers to how much the image data is compressed. The more it is compressed, the smaller the file size will be, but also the more detail you will lose. It’s possible to have the option for different compression settings (quality settings) for the same resolution settings. For example, your camera may offer a setting for 6-megapixel Normal, and a 6-megapixel Fine. The “Fine” setting would give you the same exact size image, but it will have less compression, and thus, a clearer picture. These days, memory cards and storage space on your computer are so cheap that there’s no good reason not to select the highest quality picture you can.
2- Turn off the digital zoom… never look back.
Digital zoom is a sham. It’s meaningless except for promotional purposes. The reach of your camera’s optics (its lens) is the only meaningful thing you need to know. A 10x lens is a good thing. The only thing the digital zoom function does is “zoom in” on the maximum optical reach of the camera – something you can easily do to any picture by simply cropping it on your computer. The use of digital zoom gives you nothing you cannot already do, but it does take away. It throws away valuable image data from the rest of the frame in order to crop in on one part. You will never get a clear image with the digital zoom selected, and you might regret it later. Turn it off.
3- Take lots of shots. Preview between shots and take more. Take several shots of the same subject while adjusting the composition of the picture and trying different settings on your camera
You should have more than one memory card for your camera. Generally, it’s better to have two smaller cards than one large one. Memory cards are volatile media. They have a limited life span. They will die one day. Best not to have 400 pictures all in one “egg basket” when that happens. This is also a good reason to clear your cards regularly. Your computer is the proper place to store your photos, not your camera. Download your pictures often. That said, having more memory lets you take more pictures. Probably the single biggest benefit of a digital camera over a film camera is the ability to take essentially endless shots. And they are free. Don’t treat your camera like it has film in it. You should never feel like you have to “conserve” your shots. If you feel that way, you probably need another memory card and a spare battery. Get in the habit of taking more than one shot of the same thing. People blink sometimes. And different angles and zooms on a single subject will improve your chances of getting a really great picture. You have the ability to preview your pictures on the fly, which should help you learn your camera’s settings better. Try several pictures with different settings and see what happens between shots. This is a great way to learn how to use your camera. What’s composition? It’s how you frame the shot. There’s another tutorial here about that. But the habit of taking multiple frames when you take a picture will encourage you to play around with the composition of the shot. Truly great pictures are made with skilled composition.
4- Master the “half push.” Holding down the shutter button half-way will lock the exposure and focus of your shot. This is the key to well composed photos.
Your camera has a feature that allows you to take some control over the shot before you release the shutter and actually take it. If you press the shutter button (the silvery-right-finger-push-to-take-the-picture button) half way down, you will “meter” and “focus” the shot. If you press the button all the way down, you will take the picture. The beauty of the half-push is this: you can push that button down half way and hold it there. Then, you can move the camera all around (re-compose the shot) and the settings for focus and metering will stick to the original composition. What does that mean? It mens you can frame my face in the middle of your screen and half-push. Hold that button half-down and recompose so I am (artistically) off center in the frame, and then take the shot. The picture will be focused on me even though I’m way off to the side in the frame. And it will be metered (my face won’t be too dark or too light, but just right) for me as well. And if that wasn’t enough, using this technique will make your camera respond quicker to the shutter release. Have you ever gotten the shot you wanted half a second too late? Pre-metering and pre-focusing the shot will dramatically speed up the shutter release and you will get your picture when you want it. Mastering the half-push is essential to good pictures. It introduces a human brain into the taking of a picture.
5- Learn how to get more control of your pictures by selecting Spot Metering and Spot Focus in the menu – YOU decide what the camera sets the exposure for… you decide what point in the picture is in sharpest focus.
To go a step further in taking some more control over your pictures, you can select the “spot” feature of your camera’s focus and metering modes. Typically, the default setting for these two important variables is some kind of compromise. You will find that your camera is set to some “grid” or “matrix” metering or focusing mode. It means that the camera averages what it sees and guesses the best focus and metering settings. Most of the time this works pretty well. But what’s the average when you have a dark face against a bright sky? Spot metering will let you pick the exact “spot” that you want properly exposed by putting it in the center of the frame and giving it the aforementioned half-push. Whether you re-compose the shot or not, at least that dark face will be properly exposed. The sky behind it will likely be washed out white, but that’s OK. If you want the dark silhouette of a person or a tree against the vibrant blue sky, use the same technique, but “spot meter” for the sky instead of the face. You are in control, and that’s the point. Get familiar with your camera’s options here, and get some practice by taking lots of shots. Try metering to subtle differences on a subject – different places on someone’s face or clothing for example. See what happens.
6- Use the Exposure Compensation setting for terribly backlit subjects. Dark faces, bright sky… not uncommon in Africa.
Another way to get the exposure where you want it is to leave the metering in an “averaging” kind of setting like “matrix metering” or whatever your camera calls it, and then just adjust the exposure brighter or darker for the entire frame. Your can do this with a feature called “exposure compensation.” It looks like a symbol with a little plus and minus in your camera menu. It allows you to tell your camera… “OK, you can average the exposure for this shot, BUT I want you to then make it two steps brighter because we are inside of a church and all those bright windows around us are going to make you average to darkly.” Hey, there’s nothing wrong with talking to your camera as long as you don’t do it aloud. With both the exposure compensation settings and the spot metering, you have to take care to remember that you have them selected. You will need to un-select them as the shooting environment changes.
7- Take control of your Flash! Disable it or Force it… don’t let the camera decide. Whenever possible, lose the flash altogether. Try taking pictures with natural light, even if you have to get creative.
Yes, I want you to take even more control over your “automatic” camera. With your camera’s flash set on “auto” it will fire or not fire, you don’t really know. But you should know that a flash does things to pictures. Generally, it makes things look less real. For people, it flattens their faces and throws shadows around behind them. For other objects, it can wash out the colors. And I won’t even go into what happens when a person makes the ultimate rookie-photographer mistake… firing a flash into glass. You don’t always need a flash for pictures that your camera thinks you do. Remember, your camera’s little brain is, by default, trying to meter for the average light in the frame. Maybe there’s already enough light on your subject. Maybe you want to emphasize the rich contrast brought about by a beam of sunlight spilling into a dark room. If there’s remotely enough light, you will almost always get better pictures without the flash. However, when you need it, for very dark subjects or to “fill” in shadows, then force it. Your camera will let you select your flash for auto (lighting bolt with an “A”), off (Lightning bolt with a slash through it), or force (just a plain lightning bolt). Look for those symbols, and try your camera with the flash turned off for awhile.
8- Low light? If the camera selects a shutter speed below 1/60… hold on! Find a way to steady the shot or bring a little more light into the scene. Beware of high ISOs and the grainy pictures they will produce.
Somewhere on your little LCD screen on the back of the camera, you will see a variety of symbols telling you of different settings that are active. On many cameras, there’s also a readout of the “shutter speed” there. It usually looks like a fraction of some sort: 1/100, 1/500, 1/30. The number is telling you what fraction of a second the shutter will be open during the picture… how long the light in front of you will be burning into the camera’s chip (its digital “film). The longer the shutter is open, the more light spills in. Shorter means less light. There’s all kinds of things related to the shutter speed at which a picture is taken, but the one thing you should be aware of is that it can easily be too slow – especially of you have the flash turned off. As a general rule, if the speed displayed is lower than 1/60 (for example 1/30 or 1/15) then it is probably too slow to hold the camera in your hands. Also, anything in motion in the frame will begin to blur. A camera will automatically slow down it’s shutter speed when there isn’t enough light available for the picture. So some ways to compensate are these: get more light into the shot (or get the shot into more light). Another option is to steady your camera on a tripod or a table or something like that. And lastly, you can increase the “sensitivity” of your “film” by raising the ISO to a higher value. Your camera will automatically try these things first… it will try to fire the flash, then if it can’t it will raise the ISO up. What you should know about ISO is that as the numbers get higher, your pictures get grainy or “noisy”. They just don’t look good anymore. So beware of high ISO, grainy pictures. You may have a readout of the ISO there with your shutter speed. Numbers like 100, 200, 400 are low and good. Numbers like 800 and higher are bad enough that you might not want the picture at all. Better to use the flash than accept too high of an ISO. But better yet to get more natural light into your shot.
9- Experiment with the Program Modes on your camera. Portrait mode is a winner!
Your camera probably has a few (or a bunch) of program modes you can choose from. Modes for pictures of flowers or landscapes. Modes for fireworks, or even skiing. One that is worth using is the “portrait mode.” It adjusts the camera’s shutter speed and aperture in order to get a shallow depth of field in the picture. What that means is the ability to capture the subject’s face in sharp focus with the background out of focus. It’s an effect that makes for a great portrait. Try it. The “ski” mode might work well for the desert. It’s worth your time to experiment with these setting in your camera. Just remember if you have one selected before going off to take other pictures of other things.
10- Take care of your pictures. Back them up. Don’t produce too many “generations” of the same picture where the Jpeg will re-compress and degrade the quality of your photo.
Did I mention that your memory card is volatile? And that if you go off to have pictures printed from it at a local studio in Africa, you will likely get a virus on the card? And that while your inside getting your virus, your laptop will be stolen from you car? As a general rule, keep your pictures in two places, and your memory card should not be not one of them. You will likely keep pictures locally on your computer. But you need to have a backup of those. Either to disk or another hard drive. When you make copies of Jpegs (which is most likely the file type that your pictures are) don’t re-name them. Every time you rename a Jpeg outside of a photo editing program, the compression algorithm will run anew. Making many generations of the same photo by using the “save-as” command is like making photocopies of photocopies… you loose information and clarity with each generation. “Copy” and “Save” are OK. But beware of “Save As” when making backups of your pictures. And be sure to make those backups.
11- Delete more than you keep! Take lots and lots of shots… keep the best.
Once you’ve got your camera and computer and hard drives and dozen other accessories… your pictures are free. It doesn’t cost much of anything to be a prolific picture-taker. You’ll get better pictures simply by increasing the odds, and it will help you learn to be a better photographer too.
(This information was originally presented as a workshop at the Kenya missionary conference in 2007)
Puting video to web
Ok, so you’ve signed up for AIMsites and now have a blog, or website, or whatever-you-want-to-call-it. If you don’t have a website, sign up here.
Putting video on your website is a great way to talk to supporters/friends/family and show them what your life and ministry look like, in a way that photos can’t. For some examples of how our family uses video, hop on over here.
Putting your video on your website is easier than you think. A couple of things you’ll need:
- a digital video camera (most cameras purchased in the past 5 years will be digital)
- a computer
- a cable to plug your video camera into your computer (most likely called a “firewire” or “1394″ cable, but USB could work as well)
- an internet connection and some patience.
- Podcast-quality video will be around 4mb/minute, so a 3 minute video will require you to be able to upload around 12mb
- On a standard dial-up connection, it should take you 3-4 minutes to upload each mb, so a 3 minute video (12mb) will take you approximately 40 minutes to upload
- In other words, on a standard dial-up connection, plan on spending 12-16 minutes uploading for every minute of video you want to post online
1. Plug camera into computer
The first step is to get your computer and your camera talking together. Power on your camera, put it in playback or VTR mode (the mode where you can watch what you’ve recorded). Power on your computer, and locate the cable that probably came with your camera that is for plugging your camera and computer into each other. It’s probably called a “Firewire” or “1394″ cable. If you are using a USB cable, you will probably need to install some drivers (look for a CD that came with your camera) before using it on your computer. Firewire is better, use that if you have one!
2. Capture and edit video
If you’re on a Windows computer, open up “Windows Movie Maker“. This is free software that comes with your computer expressly for the purpose of easily creating video!
If you’re on a Mac, you’re also in luck. Find iMovie in your applications folder and launch it.
How to use these applications is beyond the scope of this quick tutorial. Play around with it, read the help screens in your application (Movie Maker or iMovie) and learn to use it.
The gist of what you need to do is this:
- Capture footage from your camera to your computer.
- Edit footage to show the parts of the video you want, trying to keep the overall length as short as possible
- Export your movie in a web-sized format.
Furthering reading:
for iMovie (http://www.apple.com/ilife/tutorials/#imovie)
for Windows Movie Maker (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/moviemaker/getstarted/default.mspx)
4. Choose a video hosting service
Next thing you need is a place to upload your videos to. Your AIMsites website isn’t a really good place to do this for a couple of reasons: it’s not a video server and you have a limited amount of upload space.
The best thing is to sign up for a free account at one of these places:
I like blip because it gives people the option of subscribing to your videos through a podcast, like iTunes. It also organizes your videos into a “show”, so you can kind of think of each video you upload as another episode in your show. It’s also where AIM hosts its videos, which you can find here and here and here.
Once you’ve signed up for a video hosting account, and probably had to confirm your email address, proceed to the next step.
5. Uploading your video
The best way for you to get your video uploaded would be to find a client application that will do it for you. This is much better than sitting on a web-page for 40 minutes trying to send a file.
If you’re using blip, you can download their tools to upload here. I use Upperblip, but if you are using Windows Movie Maker there’s even a plugin that will let you send your videos to Blip straight from Movie Maker.
If you’re using Google Video, check out the Google Desktop Uploader.
If you’re using Vimeo, try the Desktop Uploader.
Once you’ve uploaded your video to your site, you can proceed with the next step
6. Embedding your video on your website
This is the easiest part. You can embed your own video in your pages and posts as well as video from almost anywhere else on the internet.
Just follow these easy steps:
- log in to your aimsites.org backend
- Start writing a new post (Write tab -> Posts link)
- Find your newly uploaded video on your video hosting site
- ex: I use blip.tv, and the URL of my “show” is brownfamily.blip.tv.
- Find the URL to your video. When I visit my “episode archive” and choose a show on blip, the URL changes to http://brownfamily.blip.tv/file/2801358/
- In the body of your post, paste the url. Not a link, just the url like you were putting plain text in there.
- Publish your post, et voila! You’ll see your video embedded inside of the page or post. Much better than directing your family/friends/supporters to YouTube to search for your video, or have your video shown alongside questionable content from elsewhere on the internet!
- To adjust the size of the embedded video, go to Settings -> Media
- Enter a value for the “Maximum embed size” width: somewhere between 800 and 1000 should do it. Make the height blank. Save your changes.
Questions?
We’re here to help! AIMsites is a ministry of the On-Field Media team, and we make it our mission to help missionaries with media. We built this site for you, and we are here to support it and train you in using it!
Photos and AIMsites
While AIMsites allows you to keep up to 30mb of photos stored in your blog, there are several advantages to using an external photo-hosting service like Flickr or Picasa. Let’s look at a few of those reasons:
- Large amounts of storage (1GB free on Picasa, 100Mb/month on Flickr)
- Allows your friends/family to order prints
There are some differences between these 2 popular services. We recommend Picasa for several reasons:
- More free upload space
- Unlimited # of photos that can be uploaded/accessed (Flickr limited to 200 most recent photos)
- Great free photo editing/archiving application for mac and pc
If you’re on a PC, download and install the Picasa application from http://picasa.google.com. You’ll also want to create an account on Picasa/Google if you don’t have one already. This is where your photos will be stored when you publish your “web album”.
If you’re on a Mac, you can also use the Picasa application for mac, or if you use iPhoto already, like me, download the Picasa Web Albums Uploader (http://picasa.google.com/mac_tools.html). You’ll also need to create an account on Picasa/Google if don’t have one already for the web album storage.
Explaining how to use Picasa or iPhoto is beyond the scope of this tutorial, as is uploading the photos to your Web Album. Once the photos are in your Web Album, follow these easy steps to integrate the photos here into your blog:
On the left side of your AIMsites blog admin, you’ll see a Plugins link. Expand that section by clicking the grey triangle so you see the “installed” link. Click that link.
Find “Picasa Image Express” in the plugins list, and click the Activate link underneath it.
Now, on the left side of the screen, find your “settings” link and expand that box so you see “Picasa Image Express” link. Click that link.
There are many settings on this page. The only real important one is your “Picasa User”. This is your google account that you’ve created and have uploaded your web albums to. The other settings you probably won’t need to change. Fill in your Picasa User and click “Update Settings”.
Now when writing a page or post, you’ll see a new button by the “Add media” section at the top. Clicking the Flickr icon will let you browse through all your web albums and photos and insert one or multiple photos into your page or post. Easy!
Questions? Problems? The OFM team is here to help, and built AIMsites to help, the AIM missionary, communicate with your friends, family, supporters!
The Ailing Prayer Letter
Presented in the Prayer Letter Seminar at AIM’s Orientation School
Article from Harvest Today
Author Unknown
There was a day when I filed the prayer letters I received. I considered them history in the making, a living testament of God at work through His Church, a vital link with the Body in faraway places.
No more. My files were toppling with trivia. Some random excerpts: “Suzy grew six inches last year and John is as tall as his mother.” “The roses are doing beautifully this year. George sprayed them with DDT.” “We had a great vacation in June, almost the whole banana plantation to ourselves.”
Obviously, the missionary prayer letter has fallen on bad times. Whatever the cause—perhaps preoccupation, or a malaise in the art of letter writing—the sad state of prayer letters does little to elevate the high calling of the missionary or motivate a deepening prayer life.
A good letter requires time and a lot of thought. A missionary cannot spend 20 minutes at the typewriter, concoct a clever opening, whiz through a month’s activities, pepper them with four prayer requests, then draw back and expect the home church to fall on its knees.
If Christians are to pray effectively, they must be drawn by substance. They need dimension, depth, perspective, completeness, insight.
Prayer requests are constant offenders. Some stand alone, stark, leaving the reader in puzzled ignorance. “Pray for Tomotique and Zedalita,” one letter exhorted. I bowed my head and wondered if I wasn’t interceding for a garden vegetable, a flower, or the family pet.
Other requests are the anecdotal type, grabbing one angle and leaving the essence a vague blur. “Pray for Kiko,” a letter pleaded. “His wife beat him severely last week.” Enough to arouse my curiosity to be sure but little to pray about.
Tell me, how am I to pray effectively for Tomotique and Zedalita without knowing what they are like or what they would like to be. What are they afraid of? What do they wish they could do over again? What pleases them most? What illusions were broken? What vague yearnings remain?
Give me the extraordinary and give me the ordinary. Does the rich industrialist in Zaire have everything he wants? Does he bother to look at the prices on the menu? Don’t tell me about the vultures and the boiling sun. Tell me, friend, how do they get a suit cleaned there?
Tell me the small by telling me the large. Identify with me. Come in loud and clear. Don’t give me abstractions.
And whatever, be honest. Don’t tell me the situation was dramatic, a “rousing success.” Show me how it was a success. I’ll supply the adjectives. You say your work is growing. Why, when, where and how? Give me the evidence. I’ll write the headlines.
A prayer letter is a powerful vehicle. Clearly it hasn’t had its day. Give a little more thought and substance, I may even start filing again. And do a lot more praying.
Writing Prayer Letters
Below is a condensed version of a piece written by Alvera Mickelsen
Presented at AIM Orientation School Prayer Letter Seminar
Tips for Writing Prayer Letters
Everyone likes to read good missionary prayer letters. No one likes to write them. Why? Because, like all other good writing, they require creative thinking and planning, and this is very difficult for all of us. Yet the potential results of good prayer letters are so tremendous for the future of missionary work that we dare not miss the opportunities we have. The information in [your] letter can be added to the reservoir of missionary material which will inspire and challenge both present and future generations. It can make its contribution to the total impression of missionary work.
Your letters must win and keep attention. Two basic factors are involved: appearance and content. Appearance is important for only one reason: to gain attention for the content. If your letter does not look interesting, it simply will not be read except by a few favored friends who know you very well. However, it must not only look interesting, it must be interesting.
An interesting, attractive layout will get the reader started. From then on, you must hold him with the interest and significance of what you are saying. Good design and good copy must walk hand in hand. One is never a substitute for the other.
Plan in advance. A good letter is rarely achieved by sitting in front of a typewriter and writing the first things that come to your mind.
Think first, second, and always of your reader. Choose a somewhat typical reader-maybe an auto mechanic in Keokuk, Iowa-and write every line with him in mind. Thinking of your reader will help you realize how important identification and details are. Don’t assume that your reader remembers your previous letters. Be sure that everything can be understood without reference to previous letters. Remember that it will be read by an individual in the privacy of his own home. You are not addressing a “congregation,” but you are writing a letter to a person.
Have one major thing to say in each letter. Decide first what one idea you want to share with your readers in this letter. Think it through before you begin to write. Lack of basic unity is probably the biggest fault of the average missionary letter.
Unity through subject matter. This simply means that you limit yourself to one subject and treat it with some completeness. Don’t worry about the subject being too deep or too hard for your reader to understand providing you supply him with the background and facts he needs in order to understand it. Far more letters err on the side of being shallow and superficial than on the side of being too deep for the reader.
What kind of subjects can you treat?
the religious fears of your people and what they mean to your work
the problems of raising a family in a foreign culture
the growth of nationalism in your area and its effect on the work of the church
a case history of a man or woman and his or her growth in the Lord
steps and heartaches involved in planting a local church in a pagan culture
if you are in a specialized work (education, medicine, agriculture, radio, literature, etc.), how that work contributes to the growth of the church
typical problems faced by converts in your area the history of missionary work in your area
The list could go on and on.
Unity through theme. Use of a theme gives one dominant idea through which a number of separate ideas can be brought together. Don’t depend on feeling or intuition for this. Keep your readers in touch with your family and its progress, but don’t let your family dominate your letters. Show the threats of communism, Romanism, nationalism, or Islam in your area, but don’t make all your letters historical or sociological treatises. Assume for your purposes that your letters are the only contact your reader has with missions. Is he getting a fairly comprehensive, well balanced picture of what missionary work is its plans, disappointments, victories, future possibilities?
Be generous with your use of stories about your people. We want to see them as people with the same feelings and sorrows and joys which we experience. Only then are we truly compelled to pray for them. Often missionaries fail to see the essential drama around them. In telling of a happening, give strong emphasis to sensory perceptions to how things looked, sounded, tasted, felt, and smelled. This makes it possible for the reader to enter more fully Into the actual experience.
Make use of humor when possible. Missionary work is difficult, but it is not grim. Yet many letters leave that feeling with the reader. Funny stories about the people with whom you work are fine. But even better are the stories of funny things which happen to you, which make you the butt of the joke instead of the national. Your life is full of such things language errors, misunderstanding with the culture in which you live, etc. When the reader sees that you are able to laugh at yourself, he’ll like you better. The deeper his feeling for you, the more natural it becomes for him to pray for you.
Treat nationals with respect and sympathy in your letters. One missionary said he never wrote anything in his letters that he wouldn’t be willing to have his nationals read.
Translate all terminology which may not be understood by all your readers. In many foreign countries, distance is measured in kilometers instead of miles. But the average American has no idea how far 50 kilometers is. There are many other terms which constantly appear in missionary letters-all such terms either should be explained or a substitution made.
Identify people and places. Steer clear of vague generalities such as “Pray for a very real need we face at present,” or “I’m much stronger after my long illness.” Such statements are maddening to the reader. Either tell us more or don’t tell us at all. This sort of thing makes the reader feel left out as though you must be writing to someone other than him someone who knows the answers to “what need?” and what illness?”
Use dialogue whenever possible. Few things spark up a letter (or any written material) as well as a few lines of good dialogue.
Don’t use pious phraseology in the effort to “sound like a missionary.” Use the kind of language which comes naturally to you.
Aim for simple, uncluttered sentences. The subject predicate order is still the easiest to read and understand. Any sentence which is more than 30 words should have a second look to see if it can’t be cut or divided into two sentences. Some missionaries write a whole paragraph of several lines with only one sentence. Short paragraphs are usually easier to read than long paragraphs. They also make a letter look more interesting.
Don’t send the first draft of your letter. Professional writers usually rewrite two or more times. After your first draft is finished, lay it aside for a day. Then pick it up and imagine that you are that mechanic in Keokuk and read it through his eyes. You’ll see the places which are not clear, which give a wrong impression, etc. You’ll also be able to recognize irrelevant material.
Steer clear of rambling accounts. An appalling number of letters seem composed primarily of “last week we had a meeting in village ‘A’ with 20 people there; then we drove home and got a night’s sleep and the next day we visited the schools around village ‘B’ and that night we had a meeting in village ‘C’.” And on and on and on. Don’t let your letters sound like a condensation of your diary.
Give an honest picture of your work. Don’t try to give glowing pictures of work which doesn’t really glow. Write of victories and progress whenever you can, but don’t hesitate to show the other side of the coin too: the discouragements, the hard problems, and defeats.
Don’t write sermons, not even short ones.
You don’t need a salutation (“Dear One Who Prays,” etc.) but if you feel more comfortable with one, use it.
The first sentence in your letter is the most important. It sets the tone, the mood, and the pace of what is to follow. Work hard on that opening sentence.
Don’t try to ease into your letter with such things as “It’s been a long time since I’ve written you, but. . . .” Start right in with the main idea.
Begin with an anecdote or story which sets the pace for the rest of the letter.
Begin with a startling statement which will jar the reader into attention.
Begin with a summary statement of the subject you plan to use.
There are many other ways to open a letter, but whatever opening you choose, be sure it properly reflects the subject and mood of what is to follow.
When the letter is finished, just stop. Many letters give the feeling that the writer is groping for a graceful way to close. As a result, the letter just “runs down.”
Ten Commandments of Simple Writing
Keep words, sentences and paragraphs short. Sentences should vary in structure and length.
Prefer simple to the complex. If there is a simpler way to express a thought, use it.
Use familiar words.
Avoid unnecessary words-cut and eliminate as if you were the editor.
Put action into verbs. Avoid passive verbs.
Write like you talk.
Tie in with your reader’s experience. Proceed from the known to the unknown.
Use terms your reader can picture. Avoid abstract terms.
Have variety. Develop your own personal style.
Write to express-not to impress.
What is a blog?
“Blog” is an abbreviated version of “weblog,” which is a term used to describe web sites that maintain an ongoing chronicle of information. A blog is a frequently updated, personal website featuring diary-type commentary and links to articles on other Web sites.
Generally speaking (although there are exceptions), blogs tend to have a few things in common:
- A main content area with articles listed chronologically, newest on top. Often, the articles are organized into categories.
- An archive of older articles.
- A way for people to leave comments about the articles.
- A list of links to other related sites, sometimes called a “blogroll”.
- One or more “feeds” like RSS, Atom or RDF files.
Some blogs may have additional features beyond these.
The Blog Content
On a blog, the content consists of articles (also sometimes called “posts” or “entries”) that the author(s) writes. Yes, some blogs have multiple authors, each writing his/her own articles. Typically, blog authors compose their articles in a web-based interface, built into the blogging system itself.
Comments
Want an interactive website? Wouldn’t it be nice if the readers of a website could leave comments, tips or impressions about the site or a specific article? With blogs, they can! Posting comments is one of the most exciting features of blogs.
Most blogs have a method to allow visitors to leave comments. There are also nifty ways for authors of other blogs to leave comments without even visiting the blog! Called “pingbacks” or “trackbacks“, they can inform other bloggers whenever they cite an article from another site in their own articles. All this ensures that online conversations can be maintained painlessly among various site users and websites.
Things Bloggers Need to Know
In addition to understanding how your specific blogging software works, such as WordPress, there are some terms and concepts you need to know.
Archives
A blog is also a good way to keep track of articles on a site. A lot of blogs feature an archive based on dates (like a monthly or yearly archive). The front page of a blog may feature a calendar of dates linked to daily archives. Archives can also be based on categories featuring all the articles related to a specific category.
It does not stop there; you can also archive your posts by author or alphabetically. The possibilities are endless. This ability to organize and present articles in a composed fashion is much of what makes blogging a popular personal publishing tool.
Feeds
A Feed is a function of special software that allows “Feedreaders” to access a site automatically looking for new content and then post updates about that new content to another site. This provides a way for users to keep up with the latest and hottest information posted on different blogging sites. Some Feeds include RSS (alternately defined as “Rich Site Summary” or “Really Simple Syndication”), Atom or RDF files.
Blogrolls
A blogroll is a list, sometimes categorized, of links to webpages the author of a blog finds worthwhile or interesting. The links in a blogroll are usually to other blogs with similar interests. The blogroll is often in a “sidebar” on the page or featured as a dedicated separate web page.
Comment Moderation
Comment Moderation is a feature which allows the website owner and author to monitor and control the comments on the different article posts, and can help in tackling comment spam. It lets you moderate comments, & you can delete unwanted comments, approve cool comments and make other decisions about the comments.
Comment Spam
Comment Spam refers to useless comments (or trackbacks, or pingbacks) to posts on a blog. These are often irrelevant to the context value of the post. They can contain one or more links to other websites or domains. Spammers use Comment Spam as a medium to get higher page rank for their domains in Google, so that they can sell those domains at a higher price sometime in future or to obtain a high ranking in search results for an existing website.
There are solutions, though, to avoiding Comment Spam. WordPress includes many tools for combating Comment Spam. With a little up front effort, Comment Spam can be manageable, and certainly no reason to give up weblogging.
Blog by email
Some blogging tools offer the ability to email your posts directly to your blog, all without direct interaction through the blogging tool interface. WordPress offers this cool feature. Using email, you can now send in your post content to a pre-determined email address & voila! Your post is published!
Excerpt
Excerpts are condensed summaries of your blog posts, with blogging tools being able to handle these in various ways. In WordPress, Excerpts can be specifically written to summarize the post, or generated automatically by using the first few paragraphs of a post or using the post up to a specific point, assigned by you.
Plugins
Plugins are cool bits of programming scripts that add additional functionality to your blog. These are often features which either enhance already available features or add them to your site.
WordPress offers simple and easy ways of adding Plugins to your blog. From the Administraton Panel, there is a Plugin Page.
Basics-A Few Blogging Tips
Starting a new blog is difficult and this can put many people off, there are then other people who have blogs with no comments or visits. You want to stand out from this crowd of millions of bloggers, you want to be one of the few hundred thousand blogs that are actually visited. So here are some simple tips to help you on your way to blogging mastery:
- Post regularly, but don’t post if you have nothing worth posting about.
- Stick with only a few specific genres to talk about.
- Don’t put ‘subscribe’ and ‘vote me’ links all over the front page until you have people that like your blog enough to ignore them (they’re usually just in the way).
- Use a clean and simple theme if at all possible.
- Enjoy, blog for fun, comment on other peoples’ blogs (as they normally visit back).
Retrieved from “http://codex.wordpress.org/Introduction_to_Blogging“
Why I Do Theological Education
My wife and I knew for years that we wanted to be missionaries in Kenya. After visiting Africa and meeting with representatives from various organizations, we even had an early attraction to Africa Inland Mission. The more compelling question for us: “How can we use our skills, spiritual gifts, and interests most effectively for the edification of the African church?” While greatly respecting missionary ministries of service (medicine, general education, community development, etc.), I felt inexorably drawn toward ministries of the Word: discipleship and church planting, media, and theological education.[1] After a two week teaching trip to Kitale and a brief but meaningful visit to Pwani Bible Institute in Mombasa in 2002, I felt that my calling and the guidance of the Holy Spirit had finally converged: I wanted to do theological education and leadership development. And so in 2005, my family and I came to Scott Theological College in Machakos, Kenya.
Why theological education and leadership development? The heart of the Great Commission in Matthew 28: 18-20 is disciple-making. An instructor at a Bible school has the special privilege of teaching the teachers, training the trainers, and discipling the disciple-makers. In my experience, theological education combines so many engaging facets of mission work: the intimacy of one-on-one “front porch” discipleship, the satisfaction of church work and ministry trips on the field, and the synergy of a classroom forum where students can reflectively and passionately interact. It is especially satisfying to contribute to this strategic ministry knowing that my students will be equipped and positioned to reach Africa for Christ more effectively than I could ever be as a “mzungu” (foreigner) because of their cultural and linguistic affinities.
There is a truism bandied about by national church leaders and missionaries that Christianity in Sub-Sahara Africa is “a mile wide and an inch deep.” The prolific growth of the African church in the last century has been nothing short of miraculous. With this great increase comes a profound need for pastors, teachers and missionaries who have the knowledge, skills, and character necessary for leading the church in the deep and abiding faith and service that God requires. As a theological educator, this is my work, and I sincerely believe it is time well spent.
by Mike Saum
[1] Adapted from Thomas Hale, On Being a Missionary, William Carey Library, 1995.
Man with a Message
“I was a very bad man,” Timothy recalls, as we rocket along in a rattling old mini van, a matatu, heading straight for Kibera. “I was a fighter,” he continues, “The man you see before you would be dead if not for Jesus.” He bows his head and invites me to feel a divot on top of his skull. I place my finger into his once shattered cranium, like a doubting Thomas, confirming his story. “I was the biggest sinner in Kibera,” he adds. His tale unfolds into a drama of guns and despair and an old woman with a New Testament who found him on the street. Our matatu shudders to a stop and we alight into the blazing sun of a Kenyan afternoon. And a smell.
Kibera is perhaps one of the largest shanty towns in the world. A place bustling with life. And a place where it is painfully obvious that life is cheap. Today, the streets and footpaths of Kibera bear the marks of a war zone. This is where the violence and destruction first began after Kenya’s disputed election results were announced on December 30th. Row upon row of shops and businesses are razed to the ground. Half a brick wall remains where a butchery once stood–the slogan of a new year painted across its pitiful facade: “Peace Wanted.” At some places there is nothing left to post a slogan on–just a patch of blackened soil, and shattered glass trodden down into the earth.
Pastor Timothy has brought me to this place, his mission field, for a look into his life’s calling. And to see what difference it is making in a country still smoldering with the ethnic division sparked by recent events. He is a man of exuberant energy and uncommon sense, engaging the massive complexity of Kibera’s geography and culture with innovative ways to spread the Word. In his care are four churches, a Bible school and two orphanages, a network of volunteers, and literally thousands of new Christians actively being discipled. The very streets are a ministry for Timothy.
He walks with purpose through the meandering alleyways and I can hardly keep up. At every turn, someone seems to recognize the pastor, calling out to him. One student jogs across the road to intercept, his face all a smile. “Oh, you are alive!” Timothy exclaims. “I didn’t know where you had gone.” The greeting, anywhere else, would seem odd. They embrace and speak in serious tones about the trouble that has befallen this place. Against a backdrop of looted storefronts, they talk about the week’s classes at the Bible school, hoping some of the other missing students will also return.
We stop at a small shop. An elderly woman, one of Timothy’s many “captains,” holds out a wad of completed course booklets. These strategically placed lay-people from the church help distribute and collect Bible study materials for the 7000 slum residents enrolled in his makeshift discipleship classes. Timothy tucks the papers into his shoulder bag. Back at the office, his daughter will mark them and record the new names in a book–a sort of humble version of the Lamb’s Book of Life, I think. A frayed tablet of thin pages and meticulous entries. People who accepted Christ during a Thursday evangelism outing, and who are now working through a 17 lesson course on the Christian faith. If they finish, Timothy will award them with a certificate and a new Bible.
Unfortunately, there are more pressing needs in the slum these days. The riots have had a compounding effect. Shops and stores have been destroyed or deserted, and food is in short supply. I ask Timothy how Christians in his church are responding to the needs around them. He sighs. The situation is one of hungry people pleading for food from other hungry people. What’s a Christian to do? Timothy laments his inability to meet the physical needs. But even so, his church has found creative ways to get food to the worst cases. But options are running out.
“A man does things when he is hungry,” Timothy explains, without going any further. I gather that some of the destruction I see around us is the rest of the explanation. But we both know there is more to this present chaos than a food shortage. “One place is burned. Another place is not burned.” He looks around at random, and the selectivity of the destruction comes into view. We talk about the tribes living side-by-side in Kibera. We talk about the Church, seemingly so prominent here. “Why do we say that we are Christians?” Timothy pauses and holds up the discipleship materials. “People have not been taught to grow as Christians.” In this land of 42 tribes, even the church can be divided.
“When I see the church, I see an invisible Church, of those who call Jesus Lord.” Timothy’s words are filled with meaning and passion. This is his heart, and in the present climate of Kenya’s ethnic divide, this is perhaps his most important message. “We are one tribe in Jesus.” He holds up one finger. “One.” It is a hard lesson. Timothy explains that a new Christian is like Lazarus, newly raised from the dead. He is alive, but wrapped up in all these burial clothes. Tied down. And it takes time to unravel.
Walking from his church compound we meet up with a younger pastor named Mwangi. He was once a student of Timothy’s and now serves with him in ministry. They agree that the time has come for the Church to break free from tribal divisions and lead the way. As the two pastors are standing beside one another, Timothy gives me a picture of what he means. “I am a Luhya. Mwangi, he is a Kikuyu. But we are one.” He moves one step closer to a friend who should be an enemy and puts a hand upon his shoulder. “We are working together.”
“I am the most happiest man in Kibera,” Timothy declares, which puts a smile to my face. Kibera’s “biggest sinner”, now the happiest man. Once a man bent on self-destruction. Now a man spent for the Lord. Timothy is a living, breathing display of a God whose love is relentless. The humble pastor cannot walk these streets without testifying to this. And when he walks with his enemy, shoulder to shoulder in the ministry of reconciliation, people cannot help but notice.
by Mike Delorenzo
Hanneke’s Heart
There are few things in this world as powerless as a sick child. Few things as unwanted as an infant girl or boy in Africa, poverty stricken, and dying of AIDS. To some, a child such as this is not worth a moment’s notice. But for the few who do notice, this child has the power to change their heart, and if they are not careful, to change their life.
Hanneke Cost Budde’s notice came about almost accidentally. She arrived in the bustling, dusty town of Shinyanga in 2001, expecting to teach. Already a seasoned missionary in Tanzania for 15 years, jumping into a new assignment should have been easy. But the complicated and providential circumstances that brought a toddler named Mary into her life set in motion a different path altogether.
“This is the little girl that started it all.” Hanneke holds up a plain, but obviously cherished, painting of Mary as we visit together in her backyard. Orphaned and left to die in the hospital, Mary appeared to be little more than a bundle of heartbreak. Hanneke found herself, one day, faced with the option of temporarily taking caring of the child, or simply walking away.
“When I took in the girl,” she remembers, “a friend saw me with a child with AIDS and asked, ‘Do you know what you are doing? Don’t you know you are going to get hurt?’” Hanneke wrestled with the reproof, weighing it against the burden God had placed on her heart and, very plainly, in her lap. She searched herself, testing the line between self sacrifice and self preservation.
“I thought, why shouldn’t I get hurt?”
Because of her unusual response to Mary, and to the disease which eventually took the child’s life at age four, people began to address Hanneke with questions and concerns about AIDS. She found herself inextricably drawn into the plight of widows and orphans in Tanzania, and today she heads up the Africa Inland Church’s AIDS ministry from Shinyanga town. This she does with all the toughness of a seasoned missionary, and all the tenderness of a woman who has cared for a dying child.
AIDS in Shinyanga town is pretty much a snapshot of the disease across Africa. On average, it infects about 8 percent of the population, mostly young adults. The devastation is hard to ignore.
“One school in Kahama had to close down,” Hanneke tells me, “Thirty teachers died in one year.” The local cemetery is almost all new graves. HIV is slowly becoming recognized, locally, as a preventable condition rather than a mysterious curse requiring mysterious cures. However, those who contract it are still ostracized, and it continues to unravel the fabric of the culture. Orphaned children are a new problem for Africa.
“There are no welfare programs here,” Hanneke explains, “The extended family is the place where orphans would traditionally go.” But now even the aunts and uncles are dead or dying, and a child with AIDS is almost never wanted. What Hanneke finds from week to week in a church-run counseling ministry, and through personal home visits around town, is that more and more children are being raised by very elderly grandparents, or by other children.
On the designated day for food distribution at the church, a girl of fourteen comes with three younger siblings in tow. “I can’t take care of these kids anymore,” she pleads, like a desperate mother. Patiently, Hanneke cares first for the young girl before delving into practical solutions. “You must miss your mom and dad?” she asks with the kind of understanding that has seen it before. And the girl remembers and begins to cry.
For this broken family, the challenges are huge. Hanneke listens, gives advice, and takes steps to ensure that the children are not also infected with HIV. Through a network of donors, she provides school supplies, a uniform, and shoes for each of the children so they can attend classes again. She may add them to the growing list of those who need basic food aid to survive. She may even help find a guardian to care for them, but that’s a long shot. “It’s not good for these kids to be on their own. Especially the young girls,” Hanneke remarks. They are at risk of being raped, giving HIV another chance to destroy what’s left.
The AIDS Program here has two sides. Care for widows and orphans is a ministry of “picking up the pieces,” where AIDS has already devastated a home or village. But alongside this effort, through a series of testing and counseling centers, clinics, and local hospitals, Hanneke and her team also fight HIV head on.
In a cramped corner at the church office, cluttered with boxes of files, shoes for the school kids, and an old computer tangled up in its own cords, Hanneke sees “clients” twice a week. Here she listens to new tragedies every day. Many of those who sit at her side are desperate, and may have heard the rumors that this is the place to come when all hope is gone.
“I treat them like human beings,” Hanneke says bluntly when I ask about her secret to ministering among those with AIDS. “I touch them. I hug them.” She makes it sound easy, but I marvel at her methods.
A handsome young couple enters her office. The man looks defeated and his wife, so deeply sad. Someone has just informed them they both have AIDS – that they are going to die – and so they have come here. Hanneke puts aside her paperwork, turns away from the computer and every distraction, and welcomes them in. The whole world shrinks to the distance between her eyes and theirs. She pauses, her face all peace and compassion, and speaks softly in Swahili, “Who created you?”
“Mungu.” God, is the humble reply.
“Our time is in God’s hands,” she tells them with a comforting certitude. “No man can tell you when you are going to die.“ Hanneke counsels them about the virus that has invaded their lives. She explains what lies ahead in their battle with the disease, and reveals that they can still live a healthy life for years to come. There are medicines she will get them access to, vitamins, bits of knowledge that can make a difference. And there is hope. Her eyes, her touch, her voice hint at it. And if the counseling continues and the relationship develops, they will learn more of it. Hope, in Jesus Christ.
“I have read the books. The books say you shouldn’t get close to the patients,” she explains with a touch of delight in her rebellion. “Well, I am willing to go all the way with them.” Working among those who have AIDS, ‘all the way’ means only one thing – death.
“I have seen people die without fear,” she mentions as an afterthought.
But wrapped up in that simple statement is something profound. In AIDS ministry, there is no pretense that everything is going to turn out OK. It is a work of compassion, and preparation. Hanneke’s humble gains in helping people live with AIDS – providing medicines and knowledge to fight the disease, and practical help to hold families together – are often overshadowed by the tremendous odds. That a man, woman, or child can fight and lose this battle without fear is the true miracle. The ability to convey that kind of hope is one of Hanneke’s greatest achievements in this work.
But she probably doesn’t see it that way. Hanneke is doing it because of Mary, the child who first caused her to ask just how much she was willing to give. How much she was willing to hurt.
Down a dusty avenue in Shinyanga town is a colorful little house turned counseling center. Next to it, only a few meters away, is a clinic. And next to the clinic is an AIC church – ablaze with three bright blue crosses painted on the facade. We drove by rather hurriedly with Hanneke, but the sight still caught my eye. Somehow it seemed right. Mind. Body. Soul, all in a row. Like the comprehensive way Jesus ministered to the afflicted in His time, and the way He still does today. His crowning achievement was that we all could face death without fear. And in the process, even He got hurt.
by Mike Delorenzo
A Hill in the Heart of Congo
On a solitary hill in Zande land, in the heart of the Congo, sits a historic mission station. There, a dozen odd buildings of earthen brick have stood the test of time and human conflict, and remain still today as a testimony to their builder. Maybe you’ve heard of him, or read a few pages about this pioneering missionary in a book of AIM’s history. But you would have to travel deep into the Congo to really get to know Earl Dix. His heart, and fifty-four years of his life, are still visible there. And not only in the buildings.
I recently visited Banda station with Richard and Carrell, two of the Dix children. Not children anymore, both of them nearing seventy-years-old now, they travelled here for a reunion of sorts, returning to their childhood home atop the hill and down a curious avenue of memory lane. Richard not only grew up in the Congo, but he returned with his wife to work as missionaries at Nyankunde station in the eastern part of the country. During those years, they would make occasional visits to the old homestead in Banda, but it had been a long while since his last return. Carrell, his older sister, arrived at Banda this day after a fifty-year absence. Her memories of the place resurfaced in smiles and stories and a few happy tears.
Earl Dix, ever innovative, set out to Africa somewhat unintentionally, but nonetheless wholeheartedly, in 1929. Supported by a single wealthy businessman who soon after lost his fortune in the throes of the Great Depression, it might appear that Earl’s mission would be short lived. But a minor setback such as being completely broke in the rain forests of the Congo was not going to stop him. It didn’t even slow him down. He married his wife Helena there on the field in 1930, built her a little mud hut to get started with, and then rolled up his sleeves for fifty-four years of ministry. He traded a pig for an old truck, and with it built a mission station.
Homes, workshops, schools, churches, a hospital… “I hauled a lot of bricks up this hill,” Carrell smiled, looking over the station with young eyes again. The earth usually swallows up the works of men here in Congo, ever tending back toward the wild place that it is. Yet somehow, Earl’s work has remained. I leaned against the smooth mahogany frame of an open doorway in one of the old homes, listening to Richard and Carrell tell stories on the veranda, and I began to glean bits about their father and mother through shared memories punctuated by rounds of laughter or quiet reflection.
Looking across the lawn I could imagine their ubiquitous pet lion, as it paced to and fro on the porch, waiting for Earl to emerge from the house and causing the local Azande workmen some concern. I could see Earl, in story after story, putting his clever mind and Nebraska farm-boy know-how to take on the challenges of the day. I learned how he involved his children, and adored his wife. I discovered how he once fixed the old truck with a potato. I saw him laying the foundations of buildings, trekking through the forests, and constructing bridges on the spot.
In a way, building bridges is what Earl did best. He is remembered for his talent at working alongside the Azande people, bringing them together, and leading them to the Lord. Bwana Dix, as he was known, worked tirelessly in all things, including his relationships. Perhaps this is why his legacy lives on long after he and wife have gone. At the end of the day, or at the end of lifetime, a mission station is still more than buildings or the presence of a missionary. It is a place where out of the chaos of a forest, a hospital emerges, and out of the darkness which engulfs a society, a church emerges. It is the work of men and women like Earl and Helena. And it is the work of God.
Such works can bring about a transformation. The Azande, I learned, were once a people living in deep and terrible fear. But on this day, I stood in a magnificent church with high vaulted ceilings held aloft by massive timbers, and at the same time supported by the vibrant sounds of two hundred secondary school children singing hymns in French, loud and beautiful. There was no fear there. Only light.
Richard gave a short message in a language he has not forgotten since he was a boy. With a tattered Bible matching the smooth, worn wood of a small table at the front of the sanctuary, he stood and preached both in his father’s shoes and upon his father’s shoulders. Light from the forest spilled in – hues of golden brown and green – rich, soft, substantive colors that seemed to blend in naturally with the bright uniforms of the school children. And in the mix of light and song and Scripture I remembered a short message that Jesus once gave to a crowd on a mountainside.
“A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.”
What brought Earl to choose that little hill upon which to build his life’s work, I don’t know. But seventy six years after setting foot on it, it is still a beacon of light to the Azande.
“In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.”
Likewise, Earl and Helena are still lovingly remembered by an isolated community of people no longer lost in darkness. Carrell and Richard brought many of those memories to surface again during their short visit. And in the radiant light of a weathered mission station set providentially atop a hill in the middle of the Congo, we all caught a glimpse of the unfading glory of God.
by Mike Delorenzo
Lost and Found in Sudan
Panther Bior tugged at my elbow. “How many more miles?” he asked. I looked at the GPS, turned back toward him and shouted above the roar of the airplane engine, “Fifteen.” “Fifteen,” he repeated and paused thoughtfully, “that is good.” He looked down out the passenger window, transfixed on the barren, tortured terrain of Southern Sudan, and recognized it. Driven from this place as a child some twenty years ago, he never thought he would lay eyes on it again. But Panther’s story in interlaced in the bigger picture of a sovereign God. He is somewhat like the Biblical Joseph, lost and left for dead, yet one who God did not forget. And like Joseph, he would have a day of revelation, when it would all come around full circle and there would be tears, and God’s hand would be seen and understood. As the airplane descended, and his home finally came into view, he hoped today would be that day.
Home is a concept difficult for Panther to frame. He is one of Sudan’s “Lost Boys” – children separated from their parents or orphaned in the onslaught of Sudan’s civil war. These children fled their villages in small groups and eventually converged into an exodus of thousands. They ran for more than a decade, grew up in the bush as refugees, and were witness and victim to every kind of horror imaginable. Their story is both remarkable and terrifying. It has been publicized in books and articles through the years, and recently documented in a feature film by National Geographic entitled “God Grew Tired of Us.” The title seems fitting to describe these boys who became men without a home or family, without a country, and sometimes without a prayer.
A few hundred survivors eventually ended up in a refugee camp in Kenya’s northern wasteland, and from there, all over the world. Scores of them came to America, on invitation, to begin new lives. In some of the destination cities churches stepped in to “adopt” the boys, becoming a refuge in the purest sense of the word – taking in refugees – and in the act becoming unwitting ambassadors to the Sudan. After a decade of guiding the boys through the strange landscape of America, the roles would be reversed.
Settling in New York, Panther’s life had taken a turn toward the surreal. But he kept in close contact with some of his fellow “Lost Boys” and together they fostered a vision to go back to Sudan – to bless their people as they had been blessed. In the wake of this boyish, and contagious dream were a mixed assortment of Americans whose eyes had been opened to a world beyond the one they knew, and who were driven to follow these boys home, however reluctantly, by their restless hearts.
And so, as I steered the Caravan toward the coordinates handed to me on a scrap of paper, Panther wasn’t the only one peering out through the haze. Four middle aged men, engineers and builders from North America, strained to see. The nearest usable airstrip to Panther’s home sits at an abandoned outpost on the waterless Jongeli canal – a massive, unfinished project to bypass a length of the Nile river lost in the Sudd, one of the world’s largest swamps. The town and the impressive fleet of rusting, heavy equipment scattered throughout it are a telling picture of Sudan’s stunted growth. During the war, both national development and individual lives stopped moving forward, and in fact, began to move backward. Ironically, these “Lost Boys” were returning to a Sudan that, in some ways, predated their departure. We landed on a dusty strip set between a thatch village and a thousand grazing cattle. The men stepped from the plane and Panther, dressed in a new suit, melted into the waiting crowd.
I caught glimpses of him every few moments, bobbing in and out of a sea of excited people. His expression was sometimes joyous, sometimes pensive. But the instants of recognition or disbelief over the faces of his fellow Sudanese were the moments when I saw a man like Joseph. Panther, like Jacob’s favored son, was found, and he had a story to tell of God’s goodness and divine intervention – and a captive audience to hear it.
Panther Bior fled his home village when he was seven-years-old, naked, and afraid. He returned twenty years later in a modern airplane, a man with a miraculous story. The tale is wrought with danger and amazing good fortune. It carries legends of the big city and a new world in America. But it is also a story of a God who did not abandon him in his darkest days. Of all the elements in Panthers story, it is the grace of God he talks about most. For the myriad of people caught up in his remarkable life, from the First Presbyterian Church of Skaneateles, NY to the reunited family in southern Sudan, it will likely be an enduring theme.
He will undoubtedly tell his story many times over. The American missionaries along side him will build the new medical clinic they came to raise. And they will do what they can to encourage the church in that remote village. But as I watched Panther from my place crouched down at the rear cargo door, I believed that his greatest testimony would come from simply being there again. What men and wars and the harsh and heartless land of Sudan meant for evil, God meant for good.
by Mike Delorenzo
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