to build a bridge

I parked the truck under a tall tree and the three of us walked down to the river.  As we neared the edge of the water, we paused as two men pushed a motorcycle across a temporary ‘bridge’ made of branches and logs.  The bridge made from a fallen tree that I’ve used to cross the river in the past had been washed away, so this was the only way to get to the other side.  Amissi, Selso and I greeted the men and then crossed over ourselves.

It’s nearing the end of the dry season, so while the log bridge we used works fine for now, in just a few weeks it will be gone.  The Montepuez River will soon be filled by runoff from northern Mozambique’s seasonal rains; so while these days the river doesn’t seem very imposing, once the rains begin it will become a dangerous, rushing monster.

Amissi (a church leader that lives here in the city), Selso (a young man that Amissi is discipling) and I talked as we walked the dirt path from the river to the village of Ncomekah.  We greeted the men, women and children who passed us on their way to cross the river themselves.  After walking for about half an hour, we arrived at Rajabu’s house. 

Rajabu is a man who my teammate Jeremy Smith has been discipling for the past few years.  He and his wife recently moved to the village of Ncomekah to be near Rajabu’s mother-in-law.  Rajabu and his wife want to start a church in that village.  We sat around after worship eating mangoes and Amissi made plans to come by bicycle and visit them again in a few weeks.  Rajabu was excited to have some promised help in beginning that church.  But he noted that while those plans will work fine for the month of December, by January or February the river will be impassable.

Rajabu accompanied us on our walk back to the truck and as we walked along I thought about the meetings that have taken place over the past few months about the lack of a bridge over the Montepuez River.  I thought back to our first meeting with the community leaders back in June – I was sitting under a thatch roof with Armindo Eusebio (a young man I am discipling) and Will Zweig (a Peace Corps worker teaching Science at the local High School).  The bridge was Will’s idea.  He had approached me a few weeks earlier, asking about places in our district that most needed a pedestrian bridge.  So, there we were sitting on bamboo chairs listening to a group of men from the villages of Bandar, Cambir and Ncomekah.  These villages would benefit the most directly from a bridge and one by one they stood up and told tales of family members being killed or maimed by crocodiles, friends who drowned trying to swim across the rushing waters, and others who lost food or their own bicycles to the river.  As I translated the stories from their Makua-Metto into English, Will’s eyes widened.   

This was the place to build a bridge.    

The Montepuez district is in the middle of the poorest Province (Cabo Delgado) in what the United Nations Development Program considers to be the third poorest country in the world.  And Mozambique’s lack of infrastructure is most costly to subsistence farmers who live in outlying villages.  During the rainy season, these villagers have only three options: risk crossing the river by swimming, pay nearly half a day’s wage to have themselves and their goods paddled across on unstable canoes, or travel miles and miles out of their way to reach the nearest bridge.

At that meeting with the village leaders back in June, we discussed the possibility of a safer, cheaper and faster option for the people: building a 35 meter-long pedestrian footbridge outside of the village of Bandar.  I’ve been glad to play a small part in assisting the US Peace Corps in partnering with the Prometto Association, the Montepuez District government, Bridges to Prosperity and a Bridge Commission made up of leaders from these three villages to build a bridge that would directly benefit at least 10,000 Mozambicans.  The estimated budget for the construction of the bridge is $20,000 and there is a 40% financial commitment that has already been promised.  So, what we need now is the remaining 60% (about $12,000) in order to completely fund the project.

 

We are in the process of writing grants and making this need known to people who may be interested in contributing to this project.  If you are interested in making a donation, send me a message through our team website here and I will give you more details about how to help.

Please keep this project in your prayers – it will be an amazing blessing to our friends here in Montepuez!

Grace and Peace,

Alan

Mangoes and the nature of God

  

One of the best parts about living in our part of Africa is this: MANGOES.

All the fresh mangoes you can eat! 

Growing up in the United States, for me, mangoes were these exotic, luxury fruits that sat on special display in the local grocery store.  They were expensive - having journeyed a great distance to make it from the field to our produce section.

For Westerners, mangoes are special treats.

For our Mozambican friends, though, oftentimes mangoes are the only thing standing between them and severe hunger.  I know that may sound dramatic, but mangoes serve as a ‘stop gap,’ helping people make it to next year’s harvest.  So, while a stomach full of mangoes is not the most nutritious thing in the world, it does provide enough energy to keep going. 

For the past few weeks, the temperature has been steadily climbing and the mango tree in our backyard has sent larger and larger cascades of fruit crashing down on our tin roof.  Each afternoon, friends drop by asking if they can collect mangoes from our yard.  Most people here in Cabo Delgado have spent the last few weeks working in their farms and getting the soil ready for planting.  The harvest won’t begin coming in until a few months from now.  Everyone around here knows that we’ve officially entered the time of hunger. 

Aaron Roland, a former colleague of ours here in Montepuez, used to talk about how God’s character is evident in the mango tree.  He would say that God knows that November and December are tough months and has provided an abundance of food freely available to help get everyone through it.   

 Our God is like a mango tree in the way that he is generously providing for his children in their needs at their hardest times.   

Earlier this week, I was with a group of church leaders who posed this question:  “Is God a man or a woman?”

I responded by saying that sometimes in scripture God is portrayed using masculine metaphors and sometimes feminine metaphors.  God, for example, is called our Father (Matthew 6:9); our King (Psalm 47:7); and pictured as a shepherd who looks for his lost sheep (Luke 15:1-7).  But on the other hand the Bible has beautiful feminine imagery portraying God as a mother who can’t forget the children she nursed (Isaiah 49:14-15); a woman in childbirth (Isaiah 42:14); a midwife (Psalm 71:6); a hen sheltering her baby chicks (Psalm 91:4); a mother eagle protecting her offspring (Deut. 32:11); a female bear protecting her cubs (Hosea 13:8); a woman working leaven into the dough (Luke 13:18-21); and a woman seeking a lost coin (Luke 15:8-10).

So, the Bible is rich with masculine and feminine imagery for God.  But, it's important to remember that God is way beyond what we can imagine. 

God has no gender – God is God.

I then took a deep breath and gave them this example.

My daughters probably couldn’t give an abstract description of who I am.  It would be impossible for them to give one that is complete.  They see me leave the house before they go to school in the morning and then welcome me back home in the afternoon from spending time in a village.  They see me teaching and preaching in languages that they don’t understand.  They know that Rachel and I had a life before they came into existence, though it is hard for them to imagine (actually, it’s hard for me to imagine as well!)

But if you asked them to describe who I am in relation to them… well, that’s a different story.  Katie would have no trouble rattling off a list of books that she likes me to read to her before bedtime.  She would talk about how I pick her up when she’s scared of the dog and there’s a good chance she’ll mention me making her favorite pancakes for breakfast last week.

When the Israelites described God they didn’t use abstract words like omnipotent and omnipresent or impassable.  Instead, they told the stories of the way God worked with them in history.  They told of how God was the One who called and cared for Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  They testified to the way I-AM-WHO-I-AM dramatically rescued them from bondage in Egypt. Then in the New Testament, Paul refers to God by way of his powerful action in sending the Son - "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ" (Rom. 15:6).

There is no way that we humans can understand the nature of God.  God is far beyond our understanding (we haven't even touched on the idea of the trinity!).  The only thing we can do is to describe the way that God has related to us.  That’s why the Bible is such a gift.  We get these beautiful and painful tales of a great God who goes to great lengths to save us. 

One of my favorite Biblical scholars, Ben Witherington, says this:

“In the New Testament, there are only three nouns used of God.  God is love.  God is life.  And God is light… the three ‘L’s.  Everything else is an adjective.  God is righteous (adjective).  God is holy (adjective).  God is sovereign (adjective)… I mean, we could keep going down that road.   But it’s got to be significant that when we are talking about God and using another noun… it’s love, life and light.”

The Bible uses a variety of titles and metaphors to describe God.  But, until the Lord is fully revealed to us, we humans will continue to fail to wrap our minds around the nature of God.  In the midst of our failings, though, those times that we come the closest to understanding our Creator are when we name the ways that God has been active in our world, loving us so fully and bringing us great and sustaining gifts such as life, light… and mangoes!  

Grace and Peace,

Alan

What's in a shrug?

There is a memory from my mission internship in Togo way back in 2001 that has stuck with me.  It had been raining and we stopped to visit with people in a small village.  I can clearly picture Frank Bunner squating down, talking to an old West African woman and her family.  What stood out to me that day, though, was the way that his posture mimicked the people around him.  It hit me that Frank’s mission team had not only learned French and Evé in order to communicate the gospel but that they were also using a different body language to connect as well. 

That snapshot of Frank crouching has stayed with me and served as a reminder that ministering cross-culturally necessitates learning languages both spoken and unspoken.

The Makua-Metto people have some interesting behavioral habits.  They'll raise their eyebrows or raise their chin in order to answer ‘yes’.  They will take in a short breath in order to encourage the other person to keep speaking.  And they will softly clap their hands to show respect.  But the part of their body language that was the most confusing for me to understand was...

the shrug. 

At the beginning of learning the Makua-Metto language, we practiced short simple conversations with many, many people.  I remember often asking: “How many children do you have?”  Every once in a while, though, a woman would respond by shrugging her shoulders.  Now, from my American body language, shrugging one’s shoulders like that means: “I don’t know.”  Confused, I thought to myself, “How could she not know how many children she has?”  Later, though, we learned that shrugging one’s shoulders in this culture is the way to say “No.”  She was telling me that she didn’t have any children.

Body language is one of the hardest things to put into practice.  I can raise my eyebrows to answer yes.  I take a short breath to encourage a friend to keep speaking.  I’ll clap my hands softly to communicate respect.  But, I still don’t shrug my shoulders to say “no” – it doesn’t feel natural, even now.

But, Rachel and I have noticed something different in our children.  Sometimes our three year-old Katie will shrug to say “no” and other times she’ll shrug to say “I don’t know.”

Most days our girls spend the afternoon playing with the Mozambican kids who live nearby.  It's been fun to see what words they pick up or ask us about.  Even though her Makua-Metto is very, very limited, it seems that Katie has picked up some of the body language.  Or... at the very least she has become a bilingual shrugger!

Grace and Peace,

Alan

Apprenticing Animals

“What kind of creatures are we?”

Over the past few months, I’ve read three authors whose books tackle this big question in different but related ways.  David Brooks refers to our species as The Social Animal.  Jonathan Gottschall calls us The Storytelling Animal.  And in James K. A. Smith’s book Desiring the Kingdom, he says we are ‘liturgical animals’ or ‘Desiring, Imaginative Animals.’  (p. 40).  Then there’s a number of additional suggestions we could consider as well such as Alasdair MacIntyre’s description of us as Dependent, Rational Animals, or even Christian Smith’s vision of us as Moral, Believing Animals.

Now while each of these proposals has merit and certainly warrants our attention, I would like to throw out one of my own.

I believe that we should understand our species as ‘Disciple-Making’ or ‘Apprenticing Animals.’ 

We humans spend a monumental amount of energy and resources, more than any other creature, in training up members of our own kind.  With only a few notable exceptions in the animal kingdom, human maturation takes the longest of any other species.  From extensive (5 minutes :)) internet research I only found three: Elephants can take up to 20 years to mature sexually, but that seems to be only in captivity. There are some species of sea turtles that don’t reach sexual maturity until their 30s or 40s but they live on their own from birth.  And finally, something called the Bowhead whale takes 20 years to reach maturity.

Looking closer to home we see that as a whole, our fellow primates spend a huge amount of time apprenticing their own.  Orangutans, for example, stay with their mothers for about five to eight years.  Gorillas take eight years to reach sexual maturity and chimpanzees take seven.  But humans, in comparison don’t reach reproductive status until they’re early teens and then don’t become full adults in most cultures until even a few years later.  So, even in comparison with high-end care giving primates we humans still spend about twice as long as the rest of them apprenticing our own for adulthood.

To summarize: While most mammals spend months or years apprenticing under the guidance and protection of their parents, human beings are unique in that they are dependent on caregivers for a period much longer than most any other animals.   

Why do humans have such a long apprenticeship?

In contrast to other animals whose behavior is for the most part instinctive, human behavior is complex and culturally determined.  Our species is born with very little software pre-loaded, so most of the important things we need to survive are transmitted by those around us.  Both language and culture acquisition are multifaceted processes that necessitate a large investment of time and resources on the part of caregivers.  So, we need a long apprenticeship in order to assimilate all the cultural rules and cues that will help us survive.

Amazingly, humans come out of the womb ready to start learning their way in the world.   The most powerful tool that they have at their disposal is the capacity to mimic.  An interesting New York Times article notes that, “Dr. Andrew Meltzoff at the University of Washington has published studies showing that infants a few minutes old will stick out their tongues at adults doing the same thing.  More than other primates, human children are hard-wired for imitation, he said, their mirror neurons involved in observing what others are do and practicing doing the same thing.”  The article goes on to talk about the ways that these neurons affect not only behavior but also our emotional responses.  We humans readily empathize with others, literally feeling what they feel, even when it is not happening directly to us.  This penchant for mimicking helps humans in their quest for acquiring all that learned behavior.

So, humans need a long apprenticeship before fully entering the world as adults and we are pre-wired to almost immediately begin apprenticing ourselves to our caregivers.

What kind of impact could seeing ourselves as ‘Apprenticing Animals’ have on our faith?

This understanding taps into a thread found throughout the Old and New Testaments.  One of the most glaring examples would probably be Deuteronomy 6 where Moses tells God’s people to talk about the Lord as we sit at home, as we walk along the road, when we lie down, and when we get up.  This apprenticing emphasis is seen clearly in the life and ministry of Jesus and made even more explicit through Jesus’ final instructions to his disciples in Matthew 28 where he told them to go and make disciples of every nation.  Jesus’ vision was that humans would use this inborn drive to disciple and apprentice others into mature citizens of the kingdom of God. 

Every culture around the globe apprentices or enculturates people into a certain way of thinking and believing and followers of Jesus are called to inhabit a certain way of living as well.   I think understanding ourselves as ‘Apprenticing Animals’ can help us see disciple making as something that all of us have the capacity to do.

Our very nature, our DNA, has been encoded with the propensity for apprenticing.  Disciple making is not something that only a certain group of people is called to do.  Christ’s followers are capable of fulfilling our calling to disciple and train others to live a life in line with the coming Kingdom.

Grace and Peace,

Alan

Put the book down

I sat on the curb in front of a government office in Pemba, Mozambique.  Years of living in Africa have taught me to carry a book to keep me distracted from the inefficiencies of bureaucracy.  After a few minutes of reading, I stretched and stood up.  A young Mozambican man walked up to me and said, “You Americans sure seem to read a lot.  How many books do you think you’ve read in your lifetime… ten?” 

“Oh,” I said with a smile. “More than that.”  That began an interesting conversation about literacy, habits and why certain cultures value reading more than others.

To read more, check out the rest of my recent post at Story Warren. Then be sure and poke around their website - they're doing some cool stuff!

Grace and Peace,

Alan

October 2013 Newsletter

Happy October everyone!

Very soon after returning from our July trip to South Africa, the old truck sold and fundraising for the new truck swiftly came to a close - THANK YOU!  In a short span of a couple weeks, Alan made multiple chapa trips (minivan taxis) to Pemba to wire the funds to Toyota and buy a plane ticket, to Chiure for a church conference, and again to Pemba in the back of a flatbed truck for his flight to Maputo where he would pick up the new truck.

He spent two weeks away from home, which included truck registration paperwork and insurance in Maputo, and then outfitting the truck in Nelspruit, South Africa for continuous off-road use in our remote location (bull bar, driving lights, canopy, roof rack, jerry cans, sturdy shocks and springs, and off-road tires).  The return drive takes three full days, and on the second day he had to drive in a military convoy through the section of Mozambique that experienced political violence earlier this year.  Thankfully that was uneventful...

Within a three-week window, Abby's teacher Kara came back from a trip to the States, Ellie's teacher Rebekah also came back, Alan returned with the new truck, and our teammates the Smiths returned from their furlough in the States as well.  It has been wonderful to have our whole team back together in one place again, and we are full of gratefulness.  Leading up to September, some of our regular activities and responsibilities had been suspended waiting on the new truck (studies out in villages) or waiting on teammates to return (team school).  So September was very busy as we resumed all our regular routines all at the same time (whew!), and we also ended the month with a Provincial Women's Conference for women from Churches of Christ in the Cabo Delgado province (like a state in the US).

The women's conference is initiated and organized by the women from the two Churches of Christ here in Montepuez, and it doesn't necessarily happen every year - I think this was my fourth conference.  Our team participates in different ways in different years, depending on what's needed or requested at the time.  This year the conference was initiated, scheduled, and organized by Mozambican women here in town, and they asked my teammates Martha, Kara, and I to help plan the theme and lessons, and lead three of the teaching sessions.  In all there were eight different sessions organized around the Armor of God passage from Paul's letter to the church in Ephesus, five lessons taught by Mozambican women, and three taught by American women.  We used props to simulate a suit of armor (Mozambican style, of course) as we repeated Paul's metaphors over and over again to talk about how to remain strong with God.  66 Women were there from 17 different towns and villages, and the worship and learning together was encouraging.  This year our team provided transport for the return trip for all the women who came in from churches outside of Montepuez (either rides home or chapa fare).

With the blessing of reliable transportation (we just can't stop saying THANK YOU!), we've started our studies again in different villages.  I have a bi-weekly rotation of studying with women in three different groups (Nkororo, Newara, and the Chipembe village cluster) in addition to the weekly women's study here in town:  the women in Nkororo are going through the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew, and the Newara and Chipembe groups are going through a booklet of different stories, miracles, and teachings of Jesus.  The groups in Nkororo and Newara don't have any women who can read, and the Chipembe cluster didn't have any women who could read either until about 2 months ago.  So when we study together in villages, we do everything orally, reading and repeating the passage out loud together multiple times before we discuss what we're learning from it.  When I study in Newara, I go with Delfina, a wonderful godly woman from here in town who can read, and she and I take turns reading and facilitating.  In the women's Bible study here in town however, there are five women who can read, so my teammates and I are in the teaching rotation with those women; the women in town just finished the booklet with the stories and teachings of Jesus and are starting a booklet with major Old Testament stories.

Alan has resumed either bi-weekly or monthly studies in the Chiure district (with teammate Jeremy Smith), Nakhuka cluster, and Chipembe cluster.  The group in Chiure and the Nakhuka cluster are studying godly leadership while the men in the Chipembe cluster requested to go back and do an overview of the Biblical narrative since God has been blessing that church with growth and they have a lot of new believers who haven't heard all the stories yet.  Alan is also about to begin a seminar for believers from the different denominations here in town that will cover a survey of the whole Bible.  The seminar will take place on four different Saturdays over the next few months.  

In the last year or two, based on counsel from our mentors, our team has been transitioning more of our hours into intentional mentoring of leaders (like Paul mentoring Timothy).  In town, Alan is intentionally focusing on two men named Domingos and Armindo with regularly scheduled time together.  Outside of Montepuez, Alan has regularly scheduled time with Napoleão in Namunu and Cruz in Mariri, as well as a few men who are also part of his studies in different villages.  Part of the wisdom behind this counsel is while God can use his people mightily anywhere he desires, we are not from here and even though we've been here ten years and learned two languages, we will in some degree always be outsiders and a little bit strange.  And so to some extent our time is better used intentionally mentoring a handful of believers who are regular people in their regular neighborhoods, learning to love God, who can authentically show what that Kingdom life looks like in Makua culture.  We appreciate your prayers as we try to discern the nuts and bolts of what that will look like.

We've written elsewhere about the five giants that oppress the Makua-Metto people.  Earlier this year, Alan completed culture interviews and put together a series of lessons on the Giant of Magic - the system of witchcraft, divination and spirit possession that makes people live in fear.  That series was well received by the churches and the team is committed to developing more lessons on the other giants over the next couple years.  This past Saturday, Jeremy and Alan went down to Chiure to continue meeting with the group there and teaching on the giant of weak and selfish leadership and what it would look like to practice godly leadership.  They're starting by looking at leadership lessons from the lives of the kings of Israel - comparing and contrasting Saul and David specifically.  Our goal is to help develop Christians who exemplify faithful servant leadership in their churches and communities.

We've also been involved with a couple development projects lately that we're excited to tell you about:  

A Peace Corps worker friend living here in Montepuez approached Alan to ask if he knew of a place that needed a bridge.  He has contacts with an organization that helps people build pedestrian bridges in the developing world and wanted to know where that kind of bridge would make a big difference.  We knew of a great spot near the village of Bandari where a bunch of our friends have trouble navigating in the rainy season.  Every year people get swept away or attacked by crocodiles.   Alan has gone to meetings with government officials and local leaders about this project, and we've been glad to use a little bit of our influence and to help.  If all goes well we may end up building the bridge sometime next year.  We came to Mozambique expecting to help build figurative bridges for people, we never expected that we would be involved in building literal ones!  To get a better idea of the kind of bridge we're talking about, please visit Bridges to Prosperity.  

Over the past few years we've been experimenting with ways to help our Mozambican friends farm in more sustainable and productive ways.  We've tried several strategies from producing written materials to hosting seminars here in Montepuez but nothing seemed to have an impact.  Alan was honestly about ready to give up on the project, but this year we've taken a different approach and are taking the seminars to villages who've shown interest.  They are forming community or church farms where groups of 15-30 people will do a plot using these methods together.  One of our friends, Gonçalves Ignacio, a faithful church leader who lives in the town of Balama, has been working his own farm with sustainable methods for a few years now.  Over the past few months we've helped him go to these villages and offer this training.  There are now 5 community groups whose members total over 100 people who've started using these methods this year in communal plots.  Alan met with Goncalves this week and they laid out a vision for doing seminars and forming community farms in 10 different villages spread out across our province with the goal of having 100 families implementing these methods in their own farms by 2015.  We're excited to see what will come of this project, and we'd appreciate your prayers about this.

The past few years, water has been especially scarce in our region during the driest months before the steady rains (September-December).  Which is why we're very thankful  that two years ago we had a bore hole drilled here on the land (thanks again to all who contributed to it).  But when we returned from South Africa at the beginning of August the well wasn't putting out any water.  At first we were concerned that our 67-meter well was dry, but we've discovered that the pump is not only broken but irreparable.  Since the rains are still a few months away we've had to pay a truck to go and get river water to fill our cistern, but thankfully a missionary friend is down in South Africa and will be heading back this direction soon, bringing us a new pump. 

Our girls are doing great at the moment - Abby is in fifth grade (surely I am not old enough for this?), Ellie is in second, and Katie is in preschool twice a week with Micah Smith.  Kara Tobey and Rebekah Keese are doing a fantastic job teaching three classes (5th, 2nd, and kindergarten) to seven of the nine team children.  This is Kara's and Rebekah's second school year with us, and we are recruiting for wonderful candidates to fill their shoes... but more on that in a future post!

Thanks for keeping us and this ministry in your prayers.  We'd love for you to pray along with us about the following things:

·         That God would raise up faithful leaders in the churches

·         For peace with the upcoming Mozambican elections

·         For good rains this year and a great harvest

·         That we would be a blessing to our Mozambican friends and neighbors through our work in the churches and in the community

Grace and Peace,

Rachel Howell