December 8, 2013
I’m in Juba now. It is amazing what some rest in a cooler
(a/c) environment can do for the body.
Two of the things that I
think are worth addressing in this blog before I post it to help bring you all
into conversation with things that folks in the developing world face are: the monotony of survival food and the issue
of water.
Digging around in old emails
the other day I ran across one which dealt with a SNAP challenge. SNAP is the Food Stamp Program in the United
States, although I admit that I do not know what the acronym stands for.
This was a challenge that a
number of Presbyterians undertook; to live on the amount of money a Food Stamp
recipient receives, for a week. One of
the comments apprising the challenge was the monotony of the food required to
be eaten when living on such a small sum.
This is a daily fact of life
in Malakal. According to the United
Nations, food security means having at least one meal a day. Food insecurity means a meal every two or
three days. Breast feeding mothers who
do not receive enough calories are not going to be able to sustain their
babies. Some marriages in South Sudan
assume that the labor of the wife will provide two meals of porridge per day
for her husband. This includes grinding
the grain and cooking it into the porridge.
Morning and evening.
I did not understand until I
landed in Khartoum in 2009 that the “basic four food groups” were an invention
of the developed world. I had trouble
comprehending that some people were not eating vegetables and fruits not
because they didn’t like them, but because they had no access to them. They may have been available but they were
not within the family food budget.
I remember the first Easter
Retreat that I went on with the college.
There were very spare meals and no “snacks” available in between those
meals. When I asked where the snacks
were someone politely pointed out to me that it is only rich organizations that
can afford to make food, or bottled water, available to people between meal
times. That was a wake up call for
me. The people in Malakal, many, many of
them, eat the same thing everyday. They
purchase a bag of say sorghum (which by the way in its raw form is a grain with
many colors) and hopefully cooking oil to give it a better taste and they eat
this day after day after day. It
sustains life, barely.
Water is hauled from the Nile
River in jerry cans on the heads of women.
I am fortunate because I can afford to buy Nile River water and clean water (somehow treated and
better for the going through my Katedyn water filter system) that is brought to
me by men on bicycles. People who can
afford to buy water also sometimes receive it through metal cylinders that are
hauled by donkeys, the donkey cart.
I know that my relationship
with water has changed. I watched
something the other day, probably a movie on my computer, that showed people
watering lawns. I was appalled. I realized that I was having trouble watching
such an abundance of water being used to keep GRASS green when women have to
haul water on their heads in jerry cans from the Nile River here in South
Sudan.
For the three months that I
have been back in Malakal I have longed for running water. Now in the hotel I have it. There is water in the facuet in the bathroom
sink, there is a shower with water coming out of it. There is a toilet that flushes without my
having to pour a jerry can of water down it.
Today I emptied my travel kettle water leftover from my morning coffee
down the sink and realized I shouldn’t have done that, it was a waste of
water.
I can once again properly
rinse out my toothbrush. I have
discovered that is very difficult to rinse a toothbrush out one handedly,
holding a pitcher in one hand and the toothbrush in the other and trying to get
any excess paste out of it. It never
comes clean. I supposed part of the
lesson in this is that I have begun to use less toothpaste than I used to.
I am concerned about what is
going to happen when I return to the United States to begin a new life
there. I know that I am going to have to
start from scratch finding a new home, a new community, friends, creating new
rhythms of life and cooking in new and different ways. I also know that I will have to endure
re-entry shock and I know that it will not be easy. I know this because going from a country
where the majority of the people have not benefitted from “foreign aid”, where
there is hunger and where water is a scarce commodity and where women die from
the complications of child birth, where easily preventable diseases are
flourishing and going to a country where the majority of people are not
suffering from lack of but instead from an abundance of, is just plain going to
be a difficult spiritual journey.
Someone told me that a person
had taken a picture of the mud in Malakal a few months ago during the height of
rainy season. That person posted the
picture to the internet and was soon thereafter arrested.
Recently there was a
situation where people washed their hands with soap and water in a basin and
then that water was used to wash dishes.
People defecate and urinate in the Nile River and yet it is a primary
source of drinking water for the people here.
And it is drunk direct from the source, there are no water treatment
plants for the water that the majority of the people drink.
Malaria and typhoid are
everywhere. If people urinate and
defecate in an open field one could assume that eventually those materials make
it into the ground water so that if someone is using a well as a source of
water they are being exposed to waterborne diseases, such as typhoid.
There are many others things
of which I could speak but I will stop here.
For the people with whom I will be in conversation I would ask that you
remember to have patience with me. I
have seen things and experienced things that many people in the United States
will never see or experience. I am
changed, I am different. My adjustment
will be difficult and I need to be met with patience and love.
Blessings,
Debbie
December 1, 2013
I’ll be going to Juba in five
days and will be able to “file” this blog so I want to catch up a little….
One of things we take for
granted in the developed world is birth certificates, and with that the
knowledge of the exact date and time of our entry into the world. There are many, many people in the world who
have no idea when they were born. Some
tribal chiefs can identify people by who their parents are, the chiefs know the
entire lineage of the tribe or clan.
Sometimes they can help identify a year, or near to the year by way of a
major marker; such as, I was born in the year of the great flood, and then
finding out when the great flood took place.
Many of my students list
January 1 as their birthday because they have absolutely no idea when the real
birthday is. I was contemplating
yesterday that perhaps the Western notion of celebrating birthdays seems odd to
people here as so many of them have probably never considered doing something
like that. It is enough that the mother
survived and the baby survived. Or
perhaps just the baby survived. Because
often enough in this world neither survives.
I am having challenges beyond
the normal challenges is doing the doctoral work upon which I have
embarked. These challenges, which
include lack of cooling devices in hot weather, lack of light inside dark rooms
that makes it difficult to study, and lack of a diet of healthy food with a
good variety. There is also endless
singing and drumming due to the location of the house on the church
compound. So lack of quiet in which to
undertake the work.
This is making me contemplate
American life. I know people who
undertake graduate and postgraduate study in the states while continuing their
regular lives, versus people who are able to take a period of time away from
Monday through Friday responsibilities.
This is a difficult way to earn a degree. In the United States we do have the
week-ends, or at least most of us do, and yet they are often eaten by all of
the things left undone during the week.
We have occasional holidays
like Thanksgiving and Christmas. And
then there is paid vacation time if a person is extremely fortunate. This usually does not exceed 30 days.
Our lives in the United
States are geared towards retirement.
The 40 years or so between high school or college graduation and
retirement can be like flavorless wafers….we are working machines geared
towards elevating the GDP and eventually retiring so that we can pursue other
interests in what time we have left on this earth.
I wish that there was
something between the two extremes of South Sudanese barrenness and American
meaninglessness. I believe that this is
where prayer for fruitful change and transformation comes into the
picture.
Blessings,
Debbie
October 26, 2013
Bats, bats, bats, everywhere
bats. And their poop.
We have now discovered in our
little house one of the legacies of the civil war when South Sudan was a part
of Sudan. No one had the time to think
of the bats and thus the bats were left in peace to multiply by the thousands. I have now learned from the locals here that
they are extremely tenacious. I am
hopeful that there is a way to actually get rid of them that does not involve
tearing the house down and rebuilding it, because I doubt that that will
happen.
I believe that as with other
species of wildlife bats do not have bones as they are able to become flat and
do feats that put magicians to shame, such as entering rooms through the spaces
beneath the doors. I am quite sure that
Hudeini never accomplished something like that.
They both walk and extend
their wings and fly. Kind of like an
amphibious vehicle that can both be a boat and a car. If they weren’t so awful and didn’t leave
their poop everywhere they would be rather a marvel of nature I suppose. But no, I do not appreciate them.
Blessings,
Debbie
October 17, 2013
I have realized today how
hard up I am for good, critical news.
The man at the little store where I bought toilet paper today was
wrapping it up with a piece of newspaper.
A story on another piece caught my eye and I asked if I could take that
piece. They are very good pieces of
journalism. I didn’t realize we could
get papers from the Gulf States, for instance.
Then came the haha! Moment….distinct from an ah hah moment…..I looked at
the date on the scraps and it is Tuesday, November 20, 2012…..haha! Jokes on me!
Still good writing and very interesting….not the up-to-date commentary
that my soul was seeking out……
Bits and pieces….the other
day someone cut some of the grass here at the house with a scythe….a metal
instrument with a blade. I wonder if I
will be able to adjust to “lawn mowers”?
I realized after he had cut just a little bit that I haven’t smelled the
scent of fresh cut lawn in a very, very long time.
I also realized the other day
that I have never seen anyone here wearing blue jeans, or jeans of any hue for
that matter.
Blessings,
Debbie
October 8, 2013
Hard won lesson on bat
removal. When the holes are all plugged
up bats are still going to be in the house.
They will no longer be able to go out at night through their familiar
routes. No bats can get back into the
house but the bats that are already there are then going to begin flying around
the interior of the house. Until they
are all killed they will continue to fly around inside at night.
Blessings,
Debbie
October 5, 2013
Oddest thing. I have started to re-watch The Flame Trees of
Thika on DVD. I realized tonight while
watching it that the British folks who are shown bringing their “refined” ways
of life into turn of the 20th century Kenya are representative of
one way that colonialization took place.
The Kenyan locals, the indigenous people, found themselves working for
these foreign whites. The whites became
the rich and powerful within Kenya, as within most colonized countries that experienced
folks coming in from other countries to maintain their way of life in a new
setting.
I also realized tonight that
school for children is a way of socializing children into the expectations of
society. If a child is going to be
prepared to enter into the advanced educational system of their own native land
they must be brought up in a primary and secondary system that prepares them
for that. And, again, teaches them how
to integrate within their own culture.
Blessings,
Debbie
October 4, 2013
It is interesting to observe
myself getting very excited over a mirror.
I find it is hard to properly maintain dental hygiene without a mirror.
I also find that brushing
teeth has an intimate feeling to it and I prefer not to brush my teeth when
there are men in the same area of the house that I am – namely, by the sink.
A couple of days ago a
conversation with someone triggered an entirely new train of thought. The newest visitor to the guesthouse came
through Juba first, as most people do.
He told me that he had observed that this year more Arabic was being
spoken. Last year people were struggling
to speak English. This year here in
Malakal the mosque is sounding the call to prayers, apparently last year it was
not doing so.
I have heard that there are
second thoughts about making English the official language as, for instance, so
many current government officials went through school in Khartoum, in
Arabic. I found myself hoping that the
country would not go back to Arabic because Arabic brings a culture with it and
it would be an “easy” way for the new country to get sucked back into the
Arabic/Islamic culture of North Africa.
Better to move forward into something new.
Then I realized that I think
of English as the language of the free world.
It is the language that is spoken in places where democracy
governs. And then, even later in this
thinking process, I thought: I suppose
that English brings a culture of its own and I am just blind to that because I
am a part of it.
Just as with Arabic, English
is the language of oppression. English
is also a language of access. Mostly
only the educated in a country where it is not the native, or first, tongue,
know English. As in the Philippines, it
is the language of the educated, the language to get access to government
services and medical care, the language to move out of poverty.
I suppose also that English
is the language of colonization. Now
granted the Arabs that swept out of the Arabian Penninsula in the 7th
century, bringing Islam, the Arabic language and a new culture to North Africa,
were colonizers as well as brutal participants in the slave trade and brutal
slave masters of the black Africans.
When I think of colonization I guess that I think of America and then,
even higher on the list, the British and the British Empire. Although when I was in Great Britain in 2006
I admit that I was stunned to find out that for many people English was not the
first language….Irish, Gaelic and Welsh were (or would have been centuries ago)
the first language for many. Of course
then this would also bring us round to the issue of language….from whence did
English first originate in the first place?
How many lands that speak English now began with English? Even in the United States English was an imported
language….the European colonizers brought it with them. The people that populated North America
before they were brutally subdued and forced into small reservations did not
originally speak English, each people group had their own language.
When I think of the British
Empire and I consider places like Australia and New Zealand then I recognize
that even though English is spoken there and I have always considered them
British, the people who originally inhabited those lands were simply not white
Europeans.
Ethiopia was never
colonized. The country fought a brutal
war with the Italians for five years, and the Italians lost. I wonder if that is why Ethiopians feel that
they are not African. They have, I
suppose, been influenced and shaped by other cultures like all of us have,
through trade and exposure to missionaries and dealings with foreign
governments. But they have never been
ruled by a foreign power and had their lives formed into something that is
alien. Their native languages are the
languages spoken in the country. Because
Ethiopia has become the home country for the African Union pressure was put on
them to adapt in some ways to what has become the received African culture and
now there are some street signs, etc., that use English as well as the majority
language of Amharic that is native to Ethiopia.
I found that I preferred
Nairobi to either Khartoum or Addis Ababa when I was living in Khartoum. In the final analysis this makes sense to
me. Khartoum is Arabic and Addis Ababa
has not been colonized. Whereas Nairobi
is fairly European. I guess this says
more about me and my own comfort zone.
Blessings, Debbie
September 15, 2013
The internet situation here
in Malakal is proving challenging. When
I got back to town the modem that I had recently purchased from a departing
teacher would not get any kind of a signal.
It had worked perfectly before I had left and I had assumed I was all
set up for resuming internet connections upon my return.
Turns out that the government
in Khartoum shut those modems down.
Nada. So, after a week of trying
everything I could think of, including new SIM cards, two folks took me to a
shop in Malakal where I purchased a supposedly unlocked modem (we’ll see, says
the skeptic) and the SIM card that was used before and that had worked before
was inserted.
Surprise, surprise. There is a signal, an indication that
internet is available, but no connection.
I took the computer somewhere else after church today. Turns out that no one is able to use the
modems on their computers, the only things that work here are iphones and
ipads, neither of which I currently have.
A kind soul got me into the
local hotel and using the wireless internet there. I don’t know how often that will be available
to me, but it was sheer relief to spend a couple of hours on line going through
gmails and deleting all of the things that had piled up that there is simply no
time to look at, or that is just plain junk.
Blessings,
Debbie
September 9, 2013
Well, well, well. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse
here I showed up at the Nile Theological College and the heavens opened and
began pouring rain. My students and I
could not hear each other for the pounding and we could not see anything for
the darkness. This lasted for the first
one and a half hours of class. After our
one hour “breakfast” break the rain subsided and we could hear and see to
varying degrees.
My guard was late this
morning. The driver didn’t show up. The student that lives at the compound where
I reside helped me get to the taxi station and we took a taxi to the
college. I told my students that I need
them to be on time because we must have some order in the chaos that is
Malakal. Okay, the truth is that I must have some order in this, the
chaos of Malakal.
There are still no roads that
would improve the lives of the citizens here.
There is money and the already rich are eating it. I was told that if anyone says anything they
may be killed. The church is complicit because
the church has become the government and no longer speaks up for the people and
the needs of the people. Beware, it is
in this kind of time that God calls up prophets.
Oh Malakal, oh land of South
Sudan, beware. It is in these times like
the times of the Judges of old, when everyone is doing what they want to do,
that God calls up prophets. When human
beings are deaf, blind and dumb and do what is best for themselves and not
their neighbors, then God calls up prophets.
Beware.
Blessings,
Debbie
September 8, 2013
I am out of internet contact
for the moment and don’t know when I will be able to post my blog entries for
the time being, probably not until Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in December.
I have some random thoughts
and observations. I begin with the
number of children that I see in Africa who are fending for themselves. I saw this in South Africa and in Addis Ababa
and I see it too in Malakal. People who
say that in the continent of Africa there are no street children because of the
community ethos (everyone takes care of the children) are misinformed. If there is no food at home, for a variety of
reasons, there is no reason to stay at home.
It is heart breaking to have little boys and little girls making the
universal gesture for food outside of cars in traffic, or on the side of roads. It is one hand with all the fingers put
together (extended, not in a fist) and thrust towards the mouth.
Someone has dropped the ball
on these kids. Someone is not living up
to their responsibility for them. A
child is not supposed to have to be responsible for him or herself. In Addis Ababa last week someone told me that
the two little girls who came up to our car had come to the city from the village. They put up their bare feet to ask for shoes
and their hands to ask for food. Their
smiles were very engaging. All I could
feel was anger at the parents who had deserted them. If they are orphans then it is for the
country that has deserted them.
I have seen this in other
countries as well, in other forms. I
have a vivid memory of being outside of Petra, in Jordan. There the children were carrying handfuls,
strings of beads and such things as perhaps the traders once tried to entice
the American Indians with upon invading the land that became the United
States. Cheap trinkets that they hound
tourists to purchase. Perhaps even so
it is a form of begging and it certainly isn’t what they should be doing. They should be in school. When these hordes of children appear
everywhere that there is tourism, hounding, badgering, annoying, it is the sign
of not only a sick economy but a stricken family life and civil society.
This is not to excuse or
minimize the neglect that many, many children in the United States experience
on a daily basis. I am sharing what I
have seen in other countries, not in the United States. But I don’t want to give anyone the excuse
of, “Oh see what is like everywhere else, we aren’t so bad….” Yes we are.
Neglect of children is the neglect of children. And it is caused by sin and poor
choices. I suspect that I should
clarify that statement as well. When I
say sin this could be the sin that is visited upon someone by someone else. Say the sin of the spouse in a domestic
violence situation where a parent is rendered emotionally unable to care for
the children. Hopefully you get a
glimpse of what I am saying.
The sermon this morning was
interesting. I realize now that there
are at least three ways to do a sermon.
Topically, where a preacher picks a subject and jumps all over Scripture
to prove the point. Exegetically,
pulling the meaning out of the Scripture.
And then there is looking at the Scripture and applying today to the
Scripture. Instead of the Scripture to
today, today to the Scripture. I may
have done that once myself.
One of the sermon points was
that the women are leaving the villages.
The villages are left without the resources that the women bring to
it. What can we do? the preacher asked. I thought, give the women Theological
Education. Give them something
meaningful to live for. Praise the
resources that they are taking away from the village. Are they ever appreciated? If they aren’t, why not leave?
The second point that I
particularly noticed was the discussion about leadership qualities. This included bravery. I made a comment to the man sitting next to
me who was translating for me and he asked me in all seriousness, “are women
brave?” The point was that a leader must
be brave and bravery is measured by male standards, by the MEN who decide what
it is to be brave. I told the man of
course we are. An incomplete answer is
that women alone face childbirth, would a man have the courage to do that? Of course not! It is an incomplete answer of course because
not all women endure childbirth, but in my opinion, all women are brave.
I thought to myself during
the sermon that all of the qualities that so-called .leaders are supposed to
have are found in women as well. Why
don’t the men bother to contemplate what it means to be a mother? She feeds her children, she protects them,
hopefully she encourages them and advises them.
A family is a miniature village.
But men are looking for the biggest muscles and the most kills, be it
human or animal. They are not looking
for who stayed up all night with a sick child or spouse. They are not looking for who does without so
that the rest have enough. Or who has to
put up with the cultural humiliation of being fed last even though she is the
one that prepared the food.
My suspicion is that the reason
the man asked that question is that all of the women he knows have been
socialized into believing that they are not brave, and everyone around them has
been socialized into believing that with them.
When the normal “brave” looks one way to the people who happen to BE
brave in that way, it is going to be a process of growth and transformation to
come to the recognition and acknowledgement that BRAVE can look differently and
act differently in different people. Brave,
or any other characteristic, does not come in one-size-fits-all.
Blessings,
Debbie
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