Teen Week and Cultural Clues

 Our youth camp ended last weekend.  We weren’t the only ones with jet lag!  All of our staff was exhausted after a week with 40 teenagers.  Never having done this before, it was a tremendous success after much work and preparation by the staff.  These 40 youth are Mavuno children who have been placed in off-campus Christian homes, and their siblings from that home.  It was a unique chance to teach and disciple these children, and the speakers and all those involved did a tremendous job.

Game time in the morning

Their days started off early with “Body Exercises,” then chai and the first meeting of the day.  Our speakers shared on salvation, creation, AIDS, abortion, sexual purity, and peer pressure.  

conference hall

One of the counselors spoke on different youth in the Bible.  The teens seemed very receptive, reinforced by their testimonies at the end of the week.  Many of them feel alone in their faith back in their respective homes. 

Elliot, Seth and Shaina color with the Mbugua kids

Jen and Charlie 

Our team from Cardwell, along with the Manns and Elliot Heumier brought supplies for crafts, and prepared all the games for the week.  John and Malucha prepared the schedule and kept everyone on time.  Things ran so smoothly!  One of the teams won because three of their members memorized at least 40 verses that week. 

Not your typical dentist office backdrop.  Dr. Ian checks people out on our back porch. :)

I took a big group (18) in the Land Cruiser out to the main road (my only contribution to camp, mind you!) and they sang the WHOLE way.  I was ready to keep driving to Cairo just so I could enjoy it!  Please pray that the things they learned last week would stay with them and they would be encouraged in the Lord!

On a different note, two days ago two of the mamas from the village that I have gotten to know came to visit and brought two fresh tilapia for me.  I was SO blessed.  They had their buckets, on the way to the lake to get water, and they acted like it was no big deal.  It was a big deal to me!  They are very poor, they work extremely hard, and fish is more expensive than ever.  How humbling to receive their gift.  I was also thinking (quite honestly), how am I going to gut and de-scale these before dinner (which was an hour away).  I am not amazing with fish.  But, oh happy day, they had already prepared them for me.  No doubt they knew I was a clueless white girl I had other things to do at the moment.  As I finished what I was doing, I had plenty of time to consider how often in my life (if ever), I have given out of my poverty and not from my wealth.  I have so much to learn.

Fish, Tanzanian style, eyeballs intact.  Don't worry, you get used to them looking at you.

Hannah makes dessert to go with the fish.  "I don't like pictures of me cooking," says the domestic goddess.  Making a sword, skinning a snake, climbing huge rocks, holding lizards, yes, but cooking is not in the amazing category. :)

Yesterday, Dave and I went to visit an elderly couple that we know who live close by.  It turned out to be a very cultural experience, and you might want to preview this before reading to your children, if you are more of a private kind of family. J  We walked across the parched land, thirsty for rain after a very pathetic rainy season.  Mr. Misungui and his grandchildren were out digging sweet potatoes in their field.  I wondered aloud to Dave if he was thinking, “Great, here come visitors and I have all this work to do before the sun sets,” which made us both laugh because these people are so hospitable and kind, I’m sure it was the last thing on his mind.  “KARIBU!” he yelled, as he threw out hasty instructions to the two little children to finish digging.  He led us past the “shower,” a little squared-off area surrounded by tall grasses all fixed together.  We greeted the mama (his wife), and they pulled up two small “chairs” for us to sit on.  They were so excited that we had come to visit.  That was humbling.  Mama Misungui has had some kind of problem with her legs for a long time, and now her arm is very painful as well.  She was happy to see us, though, and we sat down outside with the two of them, their little radio talking away right next to her chair. 

We found out that they had twin grandchildren now (one was on the sister’s back).  Come to find out, Mr. M had delivered them himself, as a health officer.  Right there in the mud hut.  The first one was breech, and they didn’t know there were two until the second came.  They laughed when we asked if there had been problems.  “No problem!” 

We chatted for a while, and then Mr. M told us that he has been teaching in the village about health issues.  He went into his hut and pulled out his bag with flip-chart books that he taught from.  Put out by UNICEF, USAID, and several others, they were very comprehensive about a number of family health matters.   Then he proceeded to walk through these booklets with us: how to properly nurse a baby (which he also demonstrated on himself—“This is the way you hold the breast up, not just letting it hang down.”) and “Can you guess which picture is the right way for a baby to latch on?”  And he was pleased when we could.  “Now see, this is the woman nursing and here is the family around her, watching, smiling.”  Then the pictures of how to scoop up a child’s diarrhea from the floor with a shovel and take it to the outhouse, not just leave it there.  After that it was how to care for a pregnant woman.  “Don’t just let her go to the clinic on her own, her husband should take her, or put her on a

Bicycle.

Which, even in the picture, didn’t look very comfortable.  But was culturally appropriate.

"Don’t go to the bathroom right next to the outhouse, go IN the outhouse." This has always perplexed me, so I asked why, indeed, the man would go outside instead of just going in.  He said, “Oh, it’s work to go in!”  And then a picture of a woman squatting in the bushes with the moon above her.  “Don’t go in the bush, go in the outhouse!”  He obviously could attest to the helpfulness of these hints.  He himself had a brick outhouse that had “Choo Bora” painted on the outside:  "Good outhouse."

Here comes another one of those humbling parts.  He said, after talking, that it is their custom to at least have chai or some food for their guests, that it was bad to have us come and not have food ready.  I said that it wasn’t bad in America, and that we would come another time for chai.  Then we prayed for mama’s hand, and as we got up to leave, the two bitty ones who had been digging for their dinner, brought the sweet potatoes to Grandma and she put more than half of them in a bag

For us

Who have enough food every day

And have never been hungry in our lives

And haven’t ever dug for anything to eat

And hadn’t done anything for them, except visit

And that was humbling.

“Let us pray Him, therefore, to shed abroad in us the mind that was in Christ; that we may offer up ourselves to be disposed of as He sees best, whether for joy or sorrow; to be slighted, or esteemed; to have many friends, or to dwell in a lonely home; to be passed by, or called to serve Him and His kingdom in our own land, or among people of a strange tongue; to be, to go, to do, to suffer even as He wills, even as He ordains, even as Christ endured, ‘who, through the Eternal Spirit, offered Himself without spot to God.’”   --Henry Edward Manning