Thank you for the support, prayers and encouragement you have shown to us on our journey to become missionaries with the General Board of Global Ministries. We are writing to share some news regarding our service in Malawi. This week we have been in New York meeting with the staff at Global Ministries. We have decided, along with the Global Ministries leadership, that our assignment in Malawi was not a good fit for us or for the church in Malawi.
We are, of course, saddened by this turn of events, but have no doubt in our call to serve in God’s mission. We are currently in a time of waiting and praying and will continue to work with Global Ministries leadership on our options for the future.
We wanted you to know of this development. We are grateful for your support and interest in sharing the story of God’s mission together. We realize you may have many questions, and we ask for your patience and grace as we work through this transition and change.
Please continue to pray for us and for the people of Malawi.
Growing up in the suburbs outside of Washington, D.C., my nation’s capital city, I remember taking friends and relatives into the city to see the Smithsonian, the Zoo, the monuments, and just to look around the Mall. My mom was usually driving, as most of these visits happened during the summer months when she was out of school, and often talking about how much she hated driving in DC. When she would recount her most recent tale of frustration navigating DC’s streets, my dad would, more often than not, point out that the city’s architect, Dupont, had intended the layout to be intimidating to visitors. I recall one particular journey that had us circling Georgetown for what seemed like weeks, trying to figure out how to get across the Potomac! It wasn’t quite as bad as Chevy Chase getting stuck in the fictional roundabout at London’s Parliament building, saying, “Look kids, Big Ben… Parliament. Look kids, Big Ben… Parliament!” But it did make for a long ride home.
Before we moved to Malawi’s capital city, Lilongwe, we heard from a number of people that, “it really doesn’t feel all that much like a city.” They’d say things like, “You never know if you’re in Lilongwe!” and, “Did you know that they have two city centres?!?” I don’t know if there was an architect involved in designing the layout of Lilongwe, but from what I have read, the city has just sort of grown from a small town into what it is today, a sprawling town/city of somewhere between 800,000 and 1.2 million people. The city is “organized” into areas with numerical names. Areas received their numbers based on the time they were developed. Areas 1 through 4 are considered “Old Town” which is one of the city centres. We live in Area 2, but I prefer to use our neighborhood’s name, Bwalolanjobvu “Place of the elephants”, to describe where we live. It is a coincidence that Area 23 and Area 24 are neighbors, as they just happened to be developed back to back. Area 25 is on the opposite side of the city, no less than 15 miles away.
The other city centre, “Capital City” is where the parliament building, recently constructed with significant contributions from the Chinese government, along with all the embassies and a new enormous hotel, also being constructed with money from China, are all located. Capital City is designed to look like a modern capital, but feels a bit like something out of Orwell when you look around and see very few Malawians around at all. Luckily for us, author Calvin Trillin’s perspective on Chinese expats having some of the best food in the world, has held true in Lilongwe. The food at the Noble China Restaurant is as good as any Chinese food I’ve had in New York City, or Singapore. I might be exaggerating a little bit here, but it is very good!
We’ve been received so warmly by the leaders of the Malawi UMC who live in Lilongwe! I am grateful for the friendship and help of the conference Lay Leader, Diverson Wakhutamoyo, along with that of his wife Salina, their church, and their family! Diverson’s humility, kindness, and servant’s spirit are fun to be around, and I look forward to working with him and others to support their wonderful work!
Lily is settling in nicely, too! Our night guard, Leonard Namauzongo, his wife, and their five children moved to Lilongwe with us. The children and Lily are getting along wonderfully. On our second day in Lilongwe, Lily was walking around the house, pointing to the back yard, where the Namauzongo’s house is, and saying, “Tin-tina! Zjay-zjay!” It took us a little while to work out that she was saying the names, at least her names for them, of two of the children, Christina and Eliza. I don’t know how Zjay-zjay comes from Eliza, but there is no doubt who Lily is talking about when she says her name.
There are some people, who after having their stuff packed away in boxes for several months, end up saying, “You know, I really didn’t need that stuff after all.” We realized, after 10 months of having our things in boxes, that we are not those people. We are so pleased that we brought the kitchen things so that we can cook together (a favorite form of family entertainment for the past 9 years). And what a treat it was to pull out family photographs, books, and artwork. I overheard Sylvia say more than once, “I’m so glad I thought to bring this!”
Sylvia’s grandfather always said that it was the drapes that her grandmother brought that made a new house feel like home. For me, it’s the big Dutch oven, filled with something tasty to eat together with family and friends.
For me, it’s no wonder the disciples finally recognized Jesus while they were at the table breaking bread together. I keep bumping into him at our table in the capital city!
This week we’ve been getting boxes stuffed full in order to head out again. We are moving from Blantyre to Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital city, which is centrally located in the country. We’re excited about the move, and hope to find a sense of community as we settle in.
Most of our boxes were packed in April 2011, and since they arrived in Malawi in October 2011, just after we were asked to move to Lilongwe, we made the decision to keep everything packed up.
We’ve heard people joke about having to wait this long for things, and asking, “Since we’ve lived this long without it, do we really need it?” I’m sure there are some things in our boxes that we don’t “need,” but at the same time, there are things in there that we really want.
I walked past an open box a couple of days ago and saw some pictures, still wrapped, I remembered wrapping up neatly in April. I couldn’t see the pictures, but I know that one of them, my favorite, was done by my best friend, Xavier Vinas, and I asked Sylvia to mark down the box number so that I could open it immediately after our arrival in Lilongwe, and find a place for it on the wall.
I can honestly say that Malawi has us more culture shocked than I have felt before, with possible exception of Washington, DC after living in Palestine for 18 months! At the same time, since we’ve felt like we’ve been perching for the past several months, it really isn’t so surprising.
On Friday, we get to start settling in, and making Malawi feel like home. Pictures of family will go up on the walls, Xavier’s picture will join them, and Lily should be able to add a few more words to her vocabulary, “Welcome home!”
As we were preparing to leave the United States we had an important round of immunization shots Lily needed to receive. At the time, we were staying a few hours drive from Lily’s previous pediatrician, and we were hoping not to have to make the drive just to get the shots! Sylvia spent several days calling numerous doctors’ offices before we eventually remembered that a former Church member had a daughter-in-law who is a pediatrician. We called the friend and she lined up a visit through her daughter-in-law. The doctor was wonderful, and we were very appreciative for her willingness to see us. As Sylvia continued expressing her appreciation, the doctor cut her off and said, “Well, my dad is a minister, and in his book, missionaries are as close to God as anyone. He always said that we should do anything we can to help missionaries.”
Sylvia and I both laughed, maybe nervously, hoping that we could live up to the high expectations.
Earlier tonight, a friend of mine stopped by to pick up some information related to a Volunteer in Mission team that is arriving tomorrow. We chatted for a while and he mentioned that the local gas station had a tanker that was delivering petrol. This friend is the main transportation provider that we use for hosting VIM teams, and he always has good information. We’ve both been looking for petrol all week so that we can work with the team that is coming from the U.S.
I kissed Sylvia and Lily and hopped in the car and headed up the road to see if I could buy some petrol, being careful to bring a book along for the wait. Sitting in the queue for petrol, I thought of the doctor’s words, and wondered, “So, how close to God is this?”
In the end, I waited two and a half hours, and the petrol ran out just as I got to the driveway of the station. Amazingly, I didn’t feel frustrated! It’s already been a long week with plenty of other frustrations. I remembered that my friend told me that he had waited for seven hours earlier this week in order to buy 15 litres of petrol (around 3.5 gallons).
One of the jobs we do as missionaries, but nowhere near as much as local Malawians, is that we try to work out how to save short-term volunteers from these sorts of frustrations. I wonder sometimes about the wisdom in this, and know that when we make things here seem easier than they actually are that we might be doing a disservice to both the short-termers and the Malawians they’ve come here to work with. Nobody wants to come all the way to Africa to spend their time waiting in queues to buy gasoline, but a little waiting is probably good to get a taste of the challenges people face.
Waiting helps change our perspective, and I’m more and more convinced that all of us, everywhere, could do with a little extra perspective.
Living in a new place always requires a few changes. For us, as we attempt to continue to grow in our knowledge of the local language, we’re also trying to grow in our knowledge of what is going on around us. When do people mean “no” when they haven’t actually said it? Should we feel like we have been invited to that gathering even though we didn’t receive an invitation? Was that a question, or a statement?
Sometimes we have questions about little things, and sometimes the questions affect ongoing relationships in bigger ways.
Malawians tend to communicate in more passive ways. They leave many things unsaid, and within their own culture, these unsaid things tend to be understood by other Malawians. This doesn’t always work out, however!
A friend of ours who is a teacher told us a story of an incident at his school. Apparently a number of teachers had been leaving early at the end of the school day. Rather than addressing the issue directly, the school principal called an assembly of all of the teachers and talked about how, “some people have been doing some things that they shouldn’t be doing.” The message was so vague that the people who needed to hear that their actions were inappropriate didn’t actually get the message.
One area of learning for us of late relates to our garden. We have an avocado tree at the back of the house. For those of you unfamiliar with avocado trees, the fruit hangs down from the tree on strands, and eventually falls to the ground. Our tree is at the edge of our yard at the bottom of a couple of sloping terraces (it is actually a neighbors’ tree, but most of the tree hangs over into our yard), and I had been watching for a few weeks as the avocados grew larger and larger. Not knowing this tree, I didn’t walk to check it out very closely. Instead, I thought I would wait to go and collect some until some of the fruit looked ripe. Last week, while Lily and I were playing in the back yard, we walked down the terraces and saw that avocados had been falling off of the tree for several days, if not weeks. There was a pile of avocados, at least 150 of them, that had collected as they fell off of the tree and rolled down the hill. On the first day, Lily and I selected a few of these that looked good, and have gone back each successive day to collect newly fallen avocados. Each day we collect between 6 and 12 avocados!
A couple of days worth of avocados
In the US, we have never had to answer the question, “What do you do with a dozen or half-a-dozen avocados every day?” In Malawi, we’re looking for people to give avocados to (not always easy since many other people also have these trees), and we’ve been eating guacamole or plain avocados most days. Sylvia has scoured our cookbooks and looked on-line and found tasty recipes for avocado ice cream and avocado smoothies.
I’m hoping that our skin doesn’t start to turn a slight green-tint!
Having learned the lesson of cleaning my plate from my dad, I have a hard time not collecting all these avocados and I am doing my best to eat them.
I’ve noticed that most Malawians don’t put so much pressure on themselves to eat these and other fruits and vegetables out of their gardens. But as I look at the mangoes continuing to ripen on our mango trees, I’m starting to wonder just how many things I need to learn from my Malawian neighbors!
How do Africans teach their children to sqat and pee outside or over a pit-latrine? Probably in the same way that Americans teach children how to use a toilet! By demonstrating. But what to do when our daughter needs to know how to do both but we only use a toilet at home?
I’ve been thinking a lot about this problem for the last couple of months as Lily has moved out of diapers and into training pants. After a trip to the Lower Shire at the end of November, we decided to try Lily in training pants. It had been so, so hot in Nsanje and, over the weekend away, Lily’s heat rash returned. We thought maybe part of the problem was the disposable diapers we had her in for the long car ride and hot weekend. Sure, at home we use these lovely, soft, and modern cloth diapers. But I was not going to carry a bag of stinky, used diapers in the car with us for four days, especially with the intense heat of the South of Malawi. So, disposables it was. But with their plastic, they really hold in the heat. I’m sure she was uncomfortable and Lily with a heat rash is just pitiful.
So when we got home, we switched to training pants. We had two days of seven or eight pee-ed in pants. But after that she did really, really super. For a week or two we had almost no soiled clothes. But then, we needed to make a trip to Lilongwe. Lilongwe is a long trip, about five hours, if we don’t get stuck behind slow moving trucks. And there are not fancy rest-stops along the way. We’ve found one or two filling stations whose bathrooms are decent, when they are open. But sometimes their water is off and they, too, send us out to a pit-latrine. So, I always prepare myself for the good chance that I will be squatting to pee. This is already tricky, as we have found that there are very few stretches of road where people are not present. But hey, this is not my first time in Africa, and I can easily pee outside with the best of them.
Lily, though, has had more trouble. Until now, she has resolutely refused to squat down and pee outside. So for this trip, I put her back into diapers. But this wasn’t just a journey up to Lilongwe. We were stopping along the way to visit three churches. And the Sunday we were in Lilongwe we traveled outside of town to visit a church in the Jerusalem Circuit. I knew that this would mean very long days, with toilets, and even pit-latrines, tricky to find.
But here’s an added problem. Now that Lily is so good at using her training pants, she doesn’t want to pee in a diaper. But she also doesn’t want to go outside, and pit-latrines are too scary and often not so clean. Over the weekend, we had several instances when she knew and I knew that she needed to go but wouldn’t. And I felt like a terrible mother for giving my clever little girl such mixed signals.
So back to the question of how to teach Lily how to pee outside. At home, in Blantyre, we have a toilet (two, in fact. We do not live in the “bush”). And I’m pretty sure our housekeeper would think I was crazy if she caught Lily and I squatting out in the grass. But, to go to a United Methodist Church in Malawi (even the Blantyre “city” church has a pit-latrine), Lily is going to have to learn how to squat.
And then, the problem solved itself. Yesterday, we went to Bible Study. Lily and I attend a group of moms and kids and it is just super because a bunch of kids around Lily’s age always come and they play together while the moms meet. At one point, Lily was in a sand box and I saw one of the moms jump up with a concerned look on her face. Her daughter had just torn off her pants and panties and was about to pee in the sand box. The mom rushed her over to a tree and helped her to pee outside of the play area. Later, I noticed the girl again without her pants on and I almost mentioned to the mom that her daughter had, again, removed her pants. But then I realized that she just hadn’t put them back on. And before it was time to go, she pee-ed outside once more.
Today, while we were outside in our back yard, Lily wanted to take her clothes off. After she did this, she indicated that she wanted help squatting. After practicing for thirty minutes or so, she pee-ed! It may seem crazy, or even silly, to you to be so excited about this. But for now, I think it’s a survival skill that Lily needs!
We celebrated after Lily pee-ed outside for the first time, and Teddy and I both thought, “one less thing to worry about!”
On 8 January I traveled to Phala UMC, a local church in the Mpenya Circuit, but south of Blantyre, near the Shire River. This circuit includes the flagship UMC of the Malawi Missionary Conference, Galilea, where much of the Conference leadership attend most Sundays. Galilea is also the only congregation within Blantyre.
The pastor of Mpenya Circuit, Collings Kaunda, asked me, after preaching last Sunday at Galilea, to accompany him to Phala the following Sunday to preach and celebrate Holy Communion. We gathered at Galilea local church at 7:30am and were loaded up and ready to travel to Phala twenty minutes later. In order to get to Phala we descended the M1 road south from Blantyre, which included numerous hairpin turns. On a previous trip in this direction a friend had pointed to the turn-off for Phala and said, we have a church down this road that is on the Mpenya Circuit. When the pastor asked me to travel with him, I remembered where this turn-off was and thought to myself, “Oh okay, that will be an easy trip.” I was not told that after the turn off we would travel an additional 34 kilometres on a dirt road, fording no less that 8 streams along the way! It took about an hour and fifteen minutes riding on this bumpy main road to make it to Phala.
The pastor explained along the way that due to the increased cost of travel in the country, and the distance to this local church, he had not been able to visit Phala for three months. We found a congregation who was happy to see us.
When we make these sorts of drives, and hear that pastors are only able to visit some of their congregations four to six times per year I often think, “How did we get this church out here?” And, “Does this really make sense?”
In reality, it doesn’t make sense from a modern Western perspective to have these churches spread out and seemingly disconnected from their leadership. But in the history of Methodism, this is exactly how churches were started; and they grew. Local leadership was cultivated and allowed to provide the needed support and guidance on a week by week basis. And, the clergy person arrived occasionally to celebrate the sacraments and provide supervision for the continued work of the Church.
After we arrived at Phala at around 10:00am, members of the congregation started turning up for worship. Sunday is a market day in the neighboring village, and since this is a season when most Malawians purchase food rather than getting it out of their own gardens, many of the Church members were returning from the market.
Phala UMC building, just after our arrival, and not many people around
By 10:30 worship was in full swing, with multiple choirs singing and celebrating. The first video is of congregational singing (poor video quality on this one, as I was attempting to dance along!). I love how the excitement builds as they sing this one. It makes sense, as they are singing, “Anasankha ine Ambuye!” which is literally translated as, “He did choose me, Lord.” But the real meaning is something more like, “The Lord chose me, and all of us… so let’s celebrate!”
This next video is of a youth choir at Phala. They sang a few songs, and had a lot of joy!
I preached a brief sermon, we celebrated Holy Communion, and finished the service a little after noon.
Then it was time for the checking-in. We heard updates about the community and the ministries of the Church. I heard the common refrain about lack of access to clean water, and the desire to have a borehole well placed near the village. The Church building, which is a significant structure, has been having trouble with its foundation during the rainy season, and the leadership is concerned. The nursery school that was started is no longer functioning (the word has gotten around in many of the congregations of the Malawi UMC that if the congregation will start a nursery school, funding will be provided by the Conference to pay for a teacher). Another ministry that is now no longer functioning is an adult literacy program.
Pastor Kaunda encouraged the congregation to work on these ministries, and organize them in ways that could be supported locally. The challenge in having no money can become an opportunity for local people to do what they can in order to provide the needed leadership and guidance for their community.
After a question and answer session with the whole congregation that lasted around an hour, the congregation split up into three groups: men, women, and youth. There is rarely a group dedicated to children during these times, and so I hung out with them a little bit while the other groups met. The children often initially run away from me, but there is always a brave child or two who come up and boldly say, “Muli bwanji?” the Chichewa equivalent to, “How are you?” When this child comes forward, I will shake his or her hand, and exchange a few greetings in Chichewa, asking the child’s name, and asking if I can take a picture. After I take the picture, I show it to the child.
"The Brave One" at Phala
This is when the other children usually sprint forward to view the picture and start yelling, “Jambula! Jambula!” This word is a good one, meaning basically anything that is artistic from photos, to paintings, drawings, songs, etc. The children quickly become a crowd, and I end up taking many pictures to show to the children. Their response is always the same: squealing laughter, patting one another on the back excitedly, and running forward to have their picture taken. Soon, all the village children gather round.
Everyone wants a jambula!
This interaction can be fun for a little while, but falls short of our mandate to care for the children, offered both throughout Old Testament scripture, particularly in the prophets, and unequivocally by Jesus when he offers both the positive command, “Let the children come to me!” and the powerful warning for those who do not welcome the children, “they should have a millstone tied around their neck and be thrown into the deepest ocean.” Sylvia and I have committed personally to develop a plan for our upcoming circuit visits so that we will include an element of education with children.
While I was interacting with the children, the other groups met for the next hour and a half. The pastor led the meeting with the men, his wife the meeting with the women, and the circuit Youth President and Vice President led the meeting with the youth.
Once the women were finished with their meeting, one of the elders of the group, agogo, came and asked/told me that now I needed to take their picture too. Their reaction was pretty similar to the children!
Phala UMC women
At a little after two-thirty, it looked like we were ready to go, and then I looked inside the church and saw that the congregation had brought a meal for the five of us to eat. The meal included a chicken stew and rice, both extravagant gifts and extensions of hospitality during any season, but this part of the year in particular. We sat down and enjoyed our meal before saying the usual goodbyes and leave taking to the host community.
The drive home was equally long, and I was exhausted when we arrived back in Blantyre at around 5pm. Another good, if still unexpected/unprepared for on my part at least, day! Malawi often makes me feel like the slowest learner in the world!
