07673
October 19, 2007

From treating symptoms to changing systems

Cameroon missionary tells of efforts to fight hunger, injustice

by Jerry L. Van Marter
Presbyterian News Service

FRANKFORT, KY — When Christi Boyd, a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) missionary to Cameroon, agreed to speak at a potluck supper at First Presbyterian Church here on Oct. 17, she was not prepared for “old home week.”

Boyd figured it was just another opportunity in Mid-Kentucky Presbytery to tell her story of mission service and to solicit prayer, communication and financial support for Presbyterian World Mission as part of Mission Challenge ’07 — a month-long effort to reconnect Presbyterians with their denomination’s global mission work.

But when she entered the fellowship — beautifully set in festive fall colors for 75 people — she was greeted by several Cameroonian families who have settled in this state capitol city of Kentucky … and at First Church.

Boyd — who with her husband Jeff and their three children have served in Africa for nearly 20 years, the last eight in Cameroon — knew immediately which part of the country her hosts were from and fell into easy reminiscences.

These are the kinds of connections that are being made throughout the country as some 48 PC(USA) missionaries fan out over 144 of the denomination’s 144 presbyteries during the month of October.

Both her work in Cameroon and her itineration as part of Mission Challenge ’07 bear the marks of “healthy relationships,” she said: significant time together, direct personal contact, the establishment of personal connections and the willingness to respond to expressed needs.

That mission methodology — building personal relationships that will create healthy partnerships to respond to expressed needs — now has Boyd serving as a facilitator for “Joining Hands in Cameroon,” a ministry of the Presbyterian Hunger Program (PHP) that addressed hunger and justice issues for rural villagers, particularly women and children.

“To do this mission is to embark on a journey to hear the stories of those impoverished and to partner with those people to solve their problems,” she told her eager audience. “I work with partners in Cameroon and the United States to identify common interests and issues and to build networks around them. Though money is sometimes important, people are more important.”

“Joining Hands in Cameroon” is one of 13 PHP networks around the world that match PC(USA) presbyteries with international partners to address systemic issues around hunger and justice. The presbyteries of Chicago and Twin Cities Area are the Cameroon partners.

“After 35 years of compassionate relief and direct feeding projects PHP had to conclude that despite it all, the rich were getting richer and the poor poorer,” Boyd explained. “So seven years ago ‘Joining Hands’ was started to address systems rather than symptoms.”

Boyd’s initial work in Cameroon involved traveling to rural areas, establishing trusting relationships and listening to villagers’ stories. Out of those conversations grew RELUFA, a network of 20 rural organizations with common needs — agricultural training, micro-credit, educational and health opportunities for women and children and environmental protections.

“RELUFA identified four themes and set to work on them,” Boyd said:

• food “sovereignty”;
• self-development;
• economic justice; and
• political corruption and transparency.

“The major problem with hunger is speculation,” Boyd said. “The price of grain at harvest time is low because there is so much and then prices soar during the non-growing season, so growers don’t make enough from their harvest and then can’t afford grain later when they need it.”

So last year RELUFA created a network of cooperative grain banks in 18 villages, with start-up funds from the One Great Hour of Sharing offering.

Participants can “deposit” grain at harvest time and then withdraw grain later when they need it, thus ensuring food supplies year-round at fair prices. “This means that everyone has enough to eat,” Boyd said, “and they don’t have to spend all their money on food, so more children can go to school and families have more money for other necessities.”

RELUFA has also created a micro-credit program, Credit Against Poverty (CAP), that provides seed loans to other villagers for small businesses — tailor shops, restaurants, crafts, furniture-making, animal breeding. CAP also provides technical training to help small-scale entrepreneurs have a better chance at success.

Again funded with seed money from the One Great Hour of Sharing — which funds PHP, Self-Development of People and Presbyterian Disaster Assistance — “CAP took three years to develop and became operational just last January,” Boyd said. “The first loan was to a group of women who started a restaurant next to a hospital where many families came to be with their sick relatives and needed an inexpensive place to eat.”

Other loans, she said, were made to people like a young man who repaired and resold computers, a woman who started a fabric tie-dying and batiking business, and a group of women who started meat-smoking and curing business.

The first cycle of loans has all been repaid and the second cycle is now being made. “There is huge interest because people see now that their dreams have hope,” Boyd said, “where before there was no chance the commercial lenders would help them.”

But, true to the Joining Hands approach to hunger and justice, efforts are also underway to address national issues in Cameroon. When an oil pipeline running from land-locked Chad through Cameroon to the Atlantic Ocean was completed recently, oil companies began reneging on a World Bank-developed mitigation and compensation plan for villagers affected by the pipeline. Lost farmland, polluted water sources and other environmental degradation severely harmed 242 villages.

RELUFA began traversing the pipeline route, interviewing villagers and formulating more than 400 formal complaints to the Cameroon government and the World Bank. “When they saw the power our organizing was generating, the oil companies are re-engaging in the remediation and compensation plan, even at the grassroots levels,” Boyd said, noting, however, that “not nearly all of the replacement (water) wells have been done.”

Part of the problem at the national level, Boyd said, is corruption. Multinational corporations make secret payments to government officials and departments “to make the problems go away,” she said. “The oil companies and others want to prop up these corrupt governments so they can continue to operate with impunity.”

So RELUFA has enlisted such partners as the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, which has launched a Cameroon initiative called “Covenanting for Justice.” The centerpiece of the campaign is “Publish What You Pay,” a demand that multinational corporations and the government both disclose the amount and destination of all such payments.

Here again partnership comes into play: Chicago Presbytery has sent an overture to next summer’s 218th General Assembly, calling for PC(USA) endorsement of the “Publish What You Pay” initiative.

Such work is a lifelong calling for Boyd. She met her husband, Jeff, in Pakistan, where her parents were missionaries for the Dutch Reformed Church and he was a Volunteer-in-Mission for the PC(USA).

“My parents were committed to the gospel message that Jesus came primarily for the poor and they instilled that commitment in me,” she said. “When I met Jeff, I found my life partner in that mission and I give thanks that the Presbyterian Church has supported us in that mission.”

First Church, Frankfort is eager to be more supportive, Elder Gleason Wheatley told the Presbyterian News Service after Boyd’s presentation. “Our new pastor, Katherine (Redmond, who has been at the church for five months), wants us to be more missional,” he said. “And for several years we have wanted to become more missional.

“Stories like Christi’s and the ‘Mission Challenge’ will certainly get us there faster.”

In addition to Mid-Kentucky Presbytery, Christi Boyd is itinerating in the presbyteries of Cincinnati and Ohio Valley as part of “Mission Challenge ’07.”