It's just another day

Somehow I always want to get my titles from the lyrics of old songs.

Yesterday we walked to Lunjini school. It has changed dramatically since January; the two-classroom building that Margaret's family donated is already in use, along with another new building. Yet another is underway. The carpenter shop is still across from the school, but two more have sprung up since we were last here. The market has also expanded quite a bit since January. And -- not entirely on the positive side -- there are electric lights in the payat and the office here -- nice when you want to get something done after about 7:30, but the ones in and outside the payat interfere with stargazing.

Jim and I have weaseled out of preaching tomorrow, thanks to the graciousness of Stephen Dokolo and Vasco. Despite my phrasing, I think this is the right thing -- I for one am no preacher, and it feels wrong to come here and try to do what I am not called to do in my own faith community. We'll see what happens on Pentecost when Jim and I go to Lui Parish, though; we aren't completely off the homiletic hook yet. However, I have to say thanks to Emily for the kind words and very helpful straight-to-the-heart-of-it advice on preaching!

Today we had one of our weekly Moru lessons with Morris. We spent about 2.5 hours before lunch and another .5 or .75 after. We made it through the entire alphabet, collected lots of useful vocabulary, and learned how to ask some key questions. Morris is a wonderful teacher. We also sat for a while with Helen, the secretary of Mundri East's office of the SRRC, Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Commission. She filled us in on some things about the hospital and nodding disease. Which reminds me to mention that we finally met David and Heather, the CMS missionaries stationed in Lui, yesterday. We are getting the sense that the story of what has happened at the hospital is more complicated than we heard before, and Jim says that everything has changed since Deb and Dan did their evaluation in December/January.

Yesterday I wrote my blog entry in my notebook but didn't get to post it, so I guess today you get two for the price of one. Here are yesterday's musing:

We blog so much about Lui that we tend not to say much about our teammates from the diocese of Missouri. Maybe that's a mistake, because the time with our fellow Missouri Episcopalians is a real benefit to joining a Lui mission. Part of the mission-prep process is team building; it is -- rightly -- a primary goal of the initial team meting and the all-day retreat we have before going, right up there with discussing immunizations and suitable apparel for Lui.

But what we can do in Missouri pales in comparison with the way a team coalesces once we are on African soil. Without recourse to radio, TV, Internet, or other friends and family most of the time, we're all we have of home and the familiar, so when we're left to our own devices in the Lui guest compound, we talk. (Even if you wanted to, you can't bring enough paperback novels to be antisocial within the 15 kg weight limit!)

And our talk isn't just idle chat. What usually happens is that an experience in Lui becomes the springboard for processing, or at least sharing, previous important moments, or discussing life issues. So Jim and Mary and I, all in our 50s and 60s, have decades' worth of similar and diverse experiences to talk about. At home we'd never get close to these topics. And on the December trip, I really got a better ideas of Deb Goldfeder's six-month sojourn in Lui, and I had a chance to imagine more deeply what it is to be 25 or 30 in the church today by listening to Emily and Joe.

Maybe we could do this at home over a long time, or maybe it could happen in a well-designed house-church or other small-group program, but for most of us, it doesn't. So thse connections we make with one another in Lui are truly a gift, and I'm grateful to our diocese and the Diocese of Lui for it. It reminds me of an old proverb, Russian or Yiddish perhaps, that ended a book our kids loved as children, The Treasure:

Sometimes you have to travel far to find what is near.