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May 10, 2008
Dear Friends,
Please join us in our joy!
We are now assured that funding is in place so that we will go to Ethiopia in August! Thanks to lots of people, our fund-raising has been so successful that Presbyterian World Mission has assured us that they will “top up” the amount still needed. If other gifts and pledges come in, that “top-up” money will flow back to the general mission budget and help other missionaries. Please be assured, though, that your gifts will stay with us. If we are ever over-funded for a given year, the excess will simply flow into our next budget year. A gift designated to our support can never be used for any other purpose.
We recognize that we could never have realized this call without the help of many Presbyterians all across the denomination. Please lift up our funding in a prayer of thanks for the power of this connectional church, including the three presbyteries and 70 individual churches—in 20 states—that have pledged to support this call. Wow! We are reminded of loaves and fishes, where a perception of scarcity turned into a miracle of abundance.
Lora and I spent the last two weeks of April traveling in West Virginia, Maryland, and Virginia. We walked on the old canal towpath along the Potomac River, enjoyed drives in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and even hiked along a little stream with redbud reflections by a beaver lodge. We spoke at many churches, sometimes more than one per day, and were hosted with inevitable graciousness. One of our profound memories is praying with our hosts. In a sunny breakfast nook in a modern apartment, in a softly lit sitting room in a family home, or in a dining room in a log bed-and-breakfast from 1757, we gained a sense of the breadth of this community that supports us, this far-flung congregation that is our church. What fun! You know how in a big church, with more than one Sunday service, sometimes the “nine-thirty-ers” don’t recognize the “eleven-o’clock-ers”? Lora and I have the feeling that we have just attended a whole series of services in a very big congregation!
We attended the Ethiopia Network meeting in Washington, D.C., where we met a lot of Presbyterians who are passionate and experienced with mission in Ethiopia. We got to meet one of our bosses from the partner church, and he approved our request for several months of language school when we first arrive in Addis Ababa. That’s a relief, since Amharic will be hard enough to learn working full-time at it. We managed to check some of our first attempts at pronunciation, and we seem to be on the right track. Amharic has a “K” sound like we have in English, but also a gutteral “K” that sounds like you need a Heimlich maneuver. There's a typical “T” as well as an exploding “T,” which sometimes involves accidental spit. Some words have both the gutteral “K” and the exploding “T,” so it sounds like there is a serious respiratory problem going on.
We spent one day playing tourist in D.C. We visited the sites up and down the mall, each just for a tiny bit. We both really loved the Smithsonian. Lora liked the exhibit on gems and gemstones, including the Hope diamond, while I was fascinated by the fossils. There have been so many new discoveries that I have to admit that my knowledge about fossils is fossilized! We also walked through a greenhouse set up for a tropical butterfly display, complete with jillions of blooming flowers and automatic “mist-ers,” as well as airlocks and full-length mirrors so that we could check ourselves for “hitchhikers” as we left. It was very fun to have all sorts of butterflies fluttering around us, including the huge, blue, irridescent Morphos. The “weather” inside the greenhouse felt like Vanuatu!
We admired the last few cherry blossoms and were in awe of the Lincoln Memorial. My most memorable view of it was at night from the terrace on the top of the Kennedy Center. Among the glaring yellow lights of windows and traffic, and above the darkened monuments to war, the memorial floated white and serene, a reminder of “malice toward none, with charity for all.” That ideal was reinforced by a later visit to Arlington Cemetery, which mostly struck us with the extreme waste of all those lives, including John F. Kennedy's. It’s a thought-provoking place; just how much progress have we made since the Civil War?
We’re back in the office in Louisville until the end of May. We’ll then take a vacation to study for comps and start packing. It’s amazing how much you can accumulate in three years! It will be good to cull our possessions, to “diet” back down to a weight that’s fit.
We find ourselves thinking these days of the way sixth grade exam results are announced in Vanuatu. Only about one-third of the students can find a place in grade seven; for the other two-thirds of each class, the push-outs, their education is over. On a particular evening, about a month after the end of the school year, the entire country huddles around the village radios to hear who passed. There’s no other way to get the word out to the waiting students, so their names are just broadcast over the national radio! When a village hears the name of one of their students, they all cheer and congratulate the successful student’s parents. But success comes at a price: leaving. The villagers pool their resources to help pay for school uniforms and books, as well as the cost of a sleeping place on the deck of the next passing freighter. Then they hold a big farewell feast, complete with a roasted pig and lots of yams. They cry, and pray, and send the student, maybe only 12 years old, away to boarding school. If the village is on an outer island, the family may not see their son or daughter for four years.
We are strengthened, as our inevitable time of parting nears, by the example of sacrifice that so many families in the global South make for education. Our sacrifice, much smaller, is eased by knowing that you are our village. You have pooled your resources to support us and are now helping us celebrate the opportunity for learning beyond what we can accomplish here. In a couple of months there will be time for tears, and prayers for safe-keeping, and emptiness in all our hearts. But right now, let’s feast!
Thank you for being part of our village.
Love and peace,
Lora and Bruce Whearty
The 2008 Mission Yearbook for Prayer &
Study, p. 223 |
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