Going Deeper in Conversation

It's not yet very late on Monday -- about 3 p.m. -- but it's been a very productive day already. Joe and Emily spent some excellent time with the young people, about which you can probably read on luinotes, and Dan and Robert spend equally valuable time with the ordinands whose ordination we'll attend on the 26th. Dan said that the ordinands asked challenging and insightful questions, and he seemed pumped from the exchange. Deb G went to the hospital for an official meeting with Peter, the hospital administrator.

Meanwhile, back in our compound, Nancy, Tammy, and I spent the morning in some fairly deep conversations. I'll report on these with subheads so you can pick what you want to read of what's going to be a rather long post (compared to what, right?).

Madiba Church of Lui Parish
Francis Wajo Bayuwa, the pastor of Madiba Church, one of the five congregations of Lui Parish, sat with us and spoke about his work in the church and what the place is like. It only opened in May of 2008,when Francis came down from his church in Khartoum. When it opened, Madiba Church had 250 people; it runs 150 or so every Sunday now and had 210 this past Sunday (Advent 4 to us). Francis shares his work with five ordained lay leaders (3 women and 2 men) who distribute the cup at communion, join him in visiting shut-ins with communion, and teach catechism and confirmation classes. There are also two Mothers' Union leaders who are denoted by special badges. The church does practice infant baptism with parents making the baptismal promises, but the norm seems to be baptism at age 12 plus, after catechesis. Baptism is at the church entrance because you can't enter the church until you are a Christian. Then there is further teaching in the parish before confirmation by the bishop. Besides these official classes, the church offers continuing Bible study classes and preparation for lay ministry. Francis is modeling his work at Madiba on the church he left in Khartoum (one of 80 Moru parishes in Khartoum!), where he had a school with primary, secondary, and adult education. The school at Madiba up to now goes through grade 5, but he hopes to add up to grade 8 and adult education soon. When Francis visits parishioners, he takes with him a lay leader and an additional woman. I asked him what percentage of his people can read and write, and he said he doesn't know yet, but he will be visiting everyone and doing something of a census to get to know the needs and capacity of the congregation.

The Mothers' Union
Mama Jenifa, the diocesan Mothers' Union leader, and Mama Margaret,the diocesan Mothers' Union worker, sat with Tammy, Nancy, and me for an hour or more talking of the Mothers' Union in general and what we will do tomorrow when we join their regular Tuesday morning fellowship. Mama Jenifa began by mentioning that she can't forget a previous visit from Missouri when the women who came spoke about a bird dropping one seed in an empty spot on the ground and how the seed took root and grew into a productive plant. The women of Lui were like that, she says, after the war, when they had nothing and couldn't think what to do. But now they have grown and produced a lot. Mama Margaret brought us up to date on 5 years of the Lui grinding mill (now broken and perhaps not reparable), the chicken house they've just built, and the craft and sewing shop. For the most part they seem to be plowing their profits back into their shared resources,planting teak and buying a cow and two sewing machines. (Deb G brought them two machines as well, and the Lund, Sweden, church partners gave them three.) They also make the school uniforms for the girls' secondary school and Luinjini school, selling at a much lower cost to the poor and orphaned than the market price. The challenges they face are illiteracy, fuel, and lack of transport. Mama Margaret and Diocesan Secretary Vasco opened an adult class for literacy. They started with 15 students, but numbers have dwindled as time has passed. I had to smile at that since dwindling student commitment is one of the biggest challenges I face as GED coordinator for an adult ed agency.

The Mothers' Union meets every Tuesday for fellowship, with a sermon, Bible study, prayers, and sharing of their concerns and difficulties. They workers visit families who are bereaved or who havea new baby. Tomorrow the five women of our mission team will go to this meeting. Emily is to preach; the mamas are excited about her because she is newly ordained and such a young women, and they think she will be a good visual message to their women. Then the rest of us will share our stories as women in the church, and the women of Lui will tell us about themselves, and we will all have time to share with each other and ask questions. We are very excited about this opportunity!

While we had Margaret and Jenifa, we asked about buying a grinding mill and getting it set up in Kediba. They know a priest who knows all about where to buy a mill and what kind, so we hope to get more info soon. And the women of Lui will help the MU in Kediba with setup and accounting practices. Since Emily and I were supposed to do that, we were relieved to pass on the task to some people with actual expertise in this area. The mill house has its poles up and its iron sheets bought, but there is still a lot of work to do (and pay for) before it's ready for the mill.

The SSRRC
After the MU, a woman named Helen from the South Sudan Resource and Rehabilitation Commission visited us and talked about NGOs here and also about her life in the bush during the war, food drops from the UN's World Food Programme, and the reliance on God by the people of Lui. These are really Nancy and Emily's stories, though, so I'll leave the telling to them.

Lunch
Every day we have rice and beans plus for lunch and dinner. Sometimes the plus is bean leaves,sometimes a meat stew -- last night it was ground beef and potato hash, yum! -- sometimes papaya or bananas or mango. Today it was eggplant. We were asking Christina, who is in charge of taking care of us (yes, Christina the priest), what it was before we tried it. We had to use Arabic to figure it out. It was absolutely fabulous, the best eggplant I've ever had in my life, and I really do like eggplant. We fell into a conversation in a combination of Arabic, Moru, and English, about various foods and whether we have them in America. Christina also was trying to find out what we'd be willing to eat; she was surprised to learn that we're OK with okra. Then the team's conversation degenerated into longing recitals of chocolate, ice cream, hot wings, and other food wishes. We finished lunch today with bananas and crunchy mangoes, a different variety from the ones we get in the U.S., texture somewhere between a peach and an apple, but yummy.

Arabic
If you are wondering how my Arabic is working out here, I have to say we talk about Arabic more than we talk it. Everywhere I'm told that some don't like the language and refuse to use it, but those are usually people who speak it and think it's great to have the additional shared second language. In Mundri the Archbishop was speaking Arabic some of the time because he doesn't speak Moru and some of the people don't speak English. Today I asked Mama Jenifa if she would speak Arabic so I could listen and Mama Margaret could translate from that rather than Moru, and she said she could, but she could say what she wanted better in Moru. So that's what she did. Mostly Arabic so far has been a bridge when Morus don't have the English for something specific they want to say.

The Cell Phone
I don't remember if I wrote that my Zain sim card works if we take my phone up the hill just past the secondary school in Lui, even though the tower is in Mundri. MTN is supposed to be coming in with towers in Mundri and Lainye in a couple of months, so we may easily have cell service for our trip in May. Note to future travelers: if you buy a new cell phone, make sure it can be unlocked! It's much cheaper to call the U.S. on an African cell -- 4 Sudanese pounds have bought at least 10 or 15 minutes of talk. (That's 2 USD.) By the way, our satellite phone is working again now, so some of us will be calling home tonight. (Our tonight, your this afternoon.)

Laundry
And, saving the most mundane for last, today and yesterday most of us have done our laundry. We are kind of in trouble with our caregivers for doing it ourselves, but they are very busy with Christmas and so we followed Deb G's lead and did it ourselves. I have to say I am very bad at this; I kept dropping things in the dirt on my way to the fence to hang them up. Doing laundry means taking one of our "bath" tubs off a table in the "shower," filling it with soap and water, swishing things a bit, doing the same process with rinse water, then wringing as hard as we can. Now I know why I should have been more diligent at the Y over the past few months.