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November 23, 2008
Dear Friends and Family,
Lora and I are home in Addis Ababa from a six-day trip to the western part of Ethiopia. We both have fevers and sore throats, and I have no voice at all, so it will take us a couple of days on anti-biotics to feel well again. We were accompanied on the trip by Michael and Rachel Weller, who are leaving Ethiopia after 14 years of mission work here, and by two young couples who are discerning a call to service. We were guests, then, at a series of farewell dinners of appreciation for the Wellers’ past service, but we were also a part of discussions about hopes for the future of Ethiopian education.
We flew first to the town of Gambella, down in the scrub grassland/forest that stretches west from the Ethiopian highlands, marking the southern boundary of the Sahara. The rainy season recently ended, so it was still “cool,” that is, about 90 degrees. Soldiers with machine guns lounged in the scanty shade of some dusty trees at the edge of the runway. Michael warned us that photos of the airport (or of any other infrastructure such as bridges or dams) were forbidden. As we crunched over the debris of spent shell casings and old bottle caps toward the barbed wire airport perimeter, he turned and said, “Welcome to Africa.” Within ten minutes of leaving the airport we saw our first troop of baboons sitting on the rusty orange dirt road. Within the first hour, as we drove east up the escarpment of the highlands, we saw our first group of monkeys swinging away through the tree leaves. The lowlands grew vague behind us, obscured by humidity and by the smoke of fires set by hunters to drive game into the open.
Back on the plateau that forms the heart of Ethiopia, we stayed at Dembi Dollo, where the first Presbyterian mission in Ethiopia was established in 1919. The future emperor, Haile Selassie, heard that there was a Christian doctor working in Sudan and invited him to come to Ethiopia to help against the influenza pandemic. Dr. Charles Lambe agreed, provided that he was allowed to start a school and a church as well. We toured the Brihane Yesus (“Light of Jesus”) Elementary School and the Bethel Evangelical Secondary School (BESS), part of the heritage of that first mission, and we were greatly impressed by serious students, well-kept grounds and facilities, and efforts toward self-reliance. A small coffee plantation, a large corn farm, a pig-raising project, and a dairy cattle herd all contribute to the schools’ budgets. We also visited a tract of 50,000 seedlings planted for future school income. Dembi Dollo, at 5,000 feet, looked like Eden to us, with flowers and jacaranda trees and bird-song everywhere. Even the starlings are iridescent blue!
Grinding corn in the Mujunger village. We also had the honor of visiting a tiny village of Mujunger, formerly a hunting-and-gathering, nomadic people, who are now converting to farming as their ancestral forests are being cleared. Michael Weller lived with them for two years and helped them through the transition to corn-farming and Christianity. We watched a woman grind corn on a stone slab, rhythmically pushing the grinding stone forward and back, and marveled at the new rhythms that now mark the lives of the Mujunger. We prayed in the small, mud-and-stick church up on the hilltop, where the afternoon sun through the open doorway lit the raised mud chancel area and the tattered cloth that draped a wooden table.
After returning to Gambella, we drove out straight across the endless lowlands. Cotton fields gave way to scrub forest, and we saw baboons and monkeys, a small antelope, even hopeful crocodiles drifting like innocent logs toward the wary villagers fishing from the shoreline. “Are there elephants here?” we asked. “Giraffes?” “Well, there used to be, up until the violence.” Hungry soldiers armed with machine guns wiped out all the big game. Now even the kites have learned to seek prey along the edges of the hunters’ fires.
Students at Gilo School. We finally arrived at Gilo, a very isolated, Presbyterian school. Gilo was closed for two years because of the violence that culminated in 2003. There were problems between two local people groups, the Nuer and the Anuak, which were complicated by 380,000 Sudanese refugees, rebel incursions from Sudan, and military reprisals. Thousands of people were killed, tens of thousands fled the area. Today the school still has no water, because its well was intentionally filled with rock and scrap metal. We visited the classes, grades one to four, with up to 117 children crammed into each stifling room. Like in the Mujunger church, the only light comes through the open door. There were painted “posters” on some of the walls, such as a diagram of the solar system, but they still show the pockmarks of gunfire. For teaching resources, the teachers each have a box of chalk. They teach art by having kids fire clay sculptures made from the local mud. We saw lumpy, gray giraffes and elephants, modeled by kids who have never seen the real animals. Music is taught by making stringed lutes out of sticks and UN cooking-oil tins from the refugee camps.
What are we grateful for this Thanksgiving? We find that our list of “thank-yous” is also a list of prayer concerns.
- We are grateful for our hosts from the Bethel Mekane Yesus Synods. They fed and housed and chauffeured us, and patiently answered our hundreds of questions. They continue to wrestle daily with the issues surrounding the church’s work. Seventy dollars can repair a child-bride’s fistula, for example, but it could also buy books for the library, or feed the hungry, or help educate a new pastor.
- We are grateful for the service of the Wellers, and missionaries like them stretching back across the years, who have created this Presbyterian tradition that is so welcoming to us. Rachel will be earning a degree in nursing and public health over the next three years, in the hopes of returning to the Gambella area and re-opening clinics destroyed in the violence.
- We are grateful for the courage of young couples who wonder if God is calling them to mission, either as a career or as one-year volunteers. (Who knows? Perhaps some of you are being called, too! If you’d like to learn more, please contact Nancy Cavalcante at PC(USA)’s Mission Service Recruitment office at or call her (888) 728-7228 x5280.
- We are grateful for the dedication of the directors of Brihane Yesus and BESS, serving the church at half the salary they could earn in business, who daily wrestle with conflicting priorities, such as balancing the need to provide an education for as many students as possible with the need to limit class sizes.
- We are grateful for the Mujunger, who can teach us about freely adapting to new rhythms in our lives, rhythms that are more in fitting with the needs of the present, rhythms that call us not to repetition but to relearning and to rebirth.
- We are grateful for the example of the young teachers of Gilo, who labor under conditions unimaginable to most of us. They reminder us never to give up hope, not even in the face of ruined wells or bullet-ridden walls or classrooms crammed with orphans.
- We are grateful for the Nuer and Anuak people, who have started a joint choir that travels to each other’s churches and sings each other’s songs, and who together hosted us for our final dinner in Gambella.
We are grateful that within a couple of days the orange dust of the west will be washed from our clothes and shoes, and we will even cough it out of our lungs, but it will never leave our hearts. Please join us in prayer for the day when we will stop wasting resources—especially human lives—in violence, either against God’s creation or against each other.
Have a Thanksgiving filled with prayer and gratitude.
Love and peace,
Lora and Bruce
The 2008 Mission Yearbook for Prayer &
Study, p. 223 |
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