An Abundant Learning Experience, for me.

Dear Friends,
Greetings! So much has been going on in the past week or so that I have needed time to absorb and process much of it. Now I am ready to share with you some of the things I have been learning.

Nile Theological College has a yearly retreat. The retreat always begins on the Wednesday of our Christian Holy Week and ends on Saturday. We share Maundy Thursday and Good Friday together, returning home on Saturday and then disperse to our own churches on Sunday to celebrate the Resurrection on Easter!

I volunteered to help with this retreat. I have finally realized (I know this took me a while) that there is no kind of a Social Committee at the college. I volunteered to head the "secretaries" committee which apparently means I am supposed to be in charge of making sure the whole retreat runs smoothly. This was a big mistake on my part to volunteer for this. But I knew I couldn't do the food, transportation, budget or retreat location...THAT is why I made this naive choice.

We began planning six days before the retreat. In Sudan this works. In the US it would not. The meetings have been very interesting. I of course have very limited Arabic. I have noticed that many of the other Retreat Committee members actually have decent English but apparently they don't think that they do. The meetings are being held in Arabic with different people trying to translate for me. Sometimes it is a comedy of errors. So far I have realized that I have no idea what I am doing and it is a very good thing that I have several hard working students on the Secretary (and Social) Committee helping me. Since I introduced the film Whale Rider and the idea of having time to sit and get to know one another I personally have added the word Social to the Committee title:)

Whale Rider of course was chosen by me because ultimately it is a film about an indigenous group of people in New Zealand who, with great difficulty, let go of traditions which have kept them blind to new possibilities for generations. I also chose this movie because it is a girl who moves into a position of leadership that has always been held by a boy. And it is a film which upon my second of many viewings I realized is about discernment. Discernment to, say, the ordained ministry, can be a slow process that takes place over time. The young woman's call to ride the whales is a call that she discerns slowly over a period of time. You may see the connection between the culture in which I am now living which does not ordain women to the ministry, and the Whale Rider whose tribe came to accept that she was the next called leader.

In Oral English class we have had many very good discussions. Last week the class told me that they appreciated talking about the poverty of Africa and Sudan in particular because it gives them the opportunity to think and plan ahead. I brought the book Dead Aid: why aid is not working and how there is a better way for Africa by Dambisa Moyo with me here to Sudan and introduced it to my students. We talked about the cycles of aid and how it can keep countries in a dependent state. The students told me that the main reason for the poverty and hunger in Sudan has to do with the extremely long civil war here. This war began as soon as Sudan achieved independence from colonialization.

Sudan is rich in natural resources but there is not technical development to extract and use them. There is a lack of modernization as well and I think that this goes hand in hand with the civil war.

In the coming months I will be doing more reading about neo-colonialization and the global economy in order to write a paper that hopefully can be used as a resource by the students in understanding underlying issues of poverty and perpetuation. Neo colonialization is an economic colonization. When a country is no longer physically colonizing and exporting resources from another country, in today's global economy country's are often colonized from afar by paying huge interest rate payments for loans to build infrastructure, etc. Often the money that comes from the International Monetary Fund, etc., comes with strings attached. Or for instance the US will present an aid package that includes a requirement to hire a contracting firm from the United States. In this way the cycle of poverty continues. A bridge may be built in Sudan, but if local people are not hired to do the labor, then it is not reaching deeply into the problems and issues of development and unemployment. The market must be developed inside of a country and not be constantly imported/exported.

In Southern Sudan girl children are valued in the sense that they can make a man wealthy. If a man has two girls, and no sons, then he will receive a handsome payment of cows and he will be wealthy. Illiteracy is encouraged because the propaganda argument is that if a girl is educated she will become a prostitute. Clearly this makes no sense. But one can see where a poor family would be believe that their chances of leaving poverty in the past will be gone if they send their daughters to school. A book I read earlier in my stay here in Sudan is African Women: Three Generations by Mark Mathabane. If you have a chance to read this book it is very informative and talks about lobala which is a bride price paid in South Africa by a man for a woman to the woman's family. This unfortunate practice usually leads to the man feeling that he owns the woman and having no respect for her as a human being.

There are many issues, many traditions, here that hold people in captivity to illiteracy and ignorance. Please pray for the softening of hearts and the knowledge that we are made in the Image of God. It is for freedom that Christ set us free and my prayer is that particulary in the Christian community this freedom will break the bondage of captivity. I also pray that this freedom will be available to all of the people of Sudan, the rest of Africa and to the entire world.
Blessings,
Debbie