Dental Luck in Nairobi.

Whew!  What a day!  In the dentist's office for 3 hours....got a cleaning, x-rays, oral evaluation.....the female dentist (loved that it was a woman!) and I decided on three teeth for crowns.  Two of the teeth had pieces of tooth missing so instead of wasting money on fillings I am just going for the crown....the other one, well, let's just say I am very happy that I am going to have a porcelein tooth of one color to replace it.

Got back to the Mennonite Guest House and was enjoying another awesome Cadbury milk chocolate bar and one of the temporaries came out.  Had to go to reception....borrowed the cell phone and called the dental office, the front desk ordered a taxi for me and off I went to get the temp glued back in. 

While I was there I heard that I was absolutely the last person whose order was taken for crowns being done before the Christmas break in the labs.  As the dentist said, God was with me on that one.  I felt really bad though as there was a young boy who had fractured a tooth and she couldn't find a lab to do a crown for him.

She usually sends the ceramic work to South Africa because apparently the labs there do a "better" job of the crowns than the local labs in Nairobi.  We had a long discussion about this.  As it turns out it is all the better that I am just thrilled to be getting old, discolored teeth with way too many fillings replaced, I don't have a need to have a million dollar look.  She said that folks in Nairobi are very particular.  I apparently am not.  Since all of the South Africa labs were already closed for the Christmas break I rejoiced that I am not!

In between all of these trips to the shopping mall where the dental offices are the only thing on the 4th floor I was the only person who enjoyed the scrumptious lunch that the cooks cooked up here at the Guest House.  Did they read my mind that my most favorite thing in the whole world is mashed potatoes?  Now if they come up with macaroni and cheese before I leave I will know that they read minds!  Anyhow, wonderful salad, scrumptious Mexican bean dish and the chef shared the receipie when I asked for it!!!  The excellent garlic bread again.  All I can say is, wow.  It is going to be hard to go back to my South Sudan cooking. 

I have definitely lost weight again from being in Malakal for three months.  My clothes are hanging on me.  I am planning to find African fabric here in Nairobi to take back with me to Malakal.  I have been introduced to a good tailor there and I want to have more of the wonderful African clothes made for me.  I like to support the local economy (both in Nairobi and in Malakal) and these African clothes are creative and interesting to boot!
Blessings,
Debbie

Friday the 7^th of December, 2012

We have little slugs here in South Sudan.  At least they aren’t big ones! 

The finals for my two classes are done, the grades turned in and a semester finished.  I can now turn for a while to my own research proposal reading and packing for Nairobi.  I like the rhythm in teaching, the rhythm of the academic year.  There is closure to things; unlike with, for instance,  housework.

Someday the doctoral work will be done and then the end of a semester will signal time for myself….to read whatever I want, to travel for pure joy, etc. 

Today was the last “breakfast” at the college until next February when the Concentrated Course will begin.  We had lentils and wheat berries cooked together.  The food here is without imagination, of a very humble nature.  The point of the food is to be filling and provide nutrition.  This is the kind of diet that causes me to ponder:  “Eat to live, don’t live to eat, in order that others may live also.”  With food like this one has no desire to live to eat for the eating does not provide a satisfaction besides the filling of the belly.  I imagine that it is something like this in refugee camps.

For the next week I will be putting together my own meals.  I am finding that the solar oven, or cooker, is indeed very helpful.  I can do soups or grains in it easily.  One ambitious day I actually did both a lunch and a dinner.  The problem with dinner is that I have to eat it quite early as the only way to keep the food warm is to wrap the entire cooker in a blanket and I don’t have one appropriate for that. 

While in Nairobi I will be stocking up on food; interesting food that is easy to cook to get a little bit of variety into my diet here. 

I am also looking forward to eating meals at the Guest House where I will be staying, and to eating meals out in restaurants!  Pizza is at the top of my list. 

Blessings,

Debbie

December 11, 2012

I experienced graft this morning in a government office.  I was asked to pay 100 South Sudanese Pounds for a paper giving me permission to leave Malakal and the officer would not give me a receipt.  The Principal, who had accompanied me to the security office, said he wouldn’t give me a receipt because it was illegal for him to ask me for payment.

Government officials are not paid well and the pay is often late.  The supervisors of some officials tell them that they can take money from people to help make up for the lack of salary.  So that is what this man was doing!

In the past week or so I have had pieces of the truth about dowry come to my attention and today a whole has come from the pieces.  During the Civil War many men were off flighting and were not marrying.  Once the Civil War (this was a war between the northern and southern parts of the whole country of Sudan which is now Sudan and South Sudan as well as fighting between tribes in the south) had been terminated by the Peace Agreement of 2005 the men who returned from fighting wanted to get married.  There was little money in the country and dowry became extremely expensive, 150 to 200 cattle.  Without dowry a man could not marry.

Cattle rustling has become a major problem and it is now growing in violence.  Women and children are not only being kidnapped but also murdered with impunity. 

I will be teaching Apologetics this coming semester.  The basic meaning of Apologetics is the defense of the faith and explaining the hope that is within us.  One of the first questions I will be asking my class this coming term is, “What does it mean to you to be a Christian?”  What kind of faith are we defending?  If Christians are involved with murder and kidnapping in order to marry then we must really examine, what has this to do with Christianity?  If I am a Christian can I engage in these behaviors?  What would Jesus do?

Blessings,

Debbie

December 11, 2012

I wonder if feet shrink?  I am losing weight because of the lack of food here in Malakal and the lack of variety and I am noticing that my Birkenstock sandals seem to be larger on my feet….

Such a feeling of relaxation has come with the ending of the academic semester!  I still have tons to do:  packing for Juba and Nairobi, planning two classes and continuing my own reading for my doctoral thesis proposal, and yet I feel as though a great burden has been lifted.  This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it!

I have a new househelper (housekeeper) with me today.  She is cheerful with helps a great deal already!  I have three weeks of laundry and a house that hasn’t been swept in three weeks for her to deal with.  I don’t have the right touch for a floor that has dust on it all the time even when it has just been swept.  People who have lived with these conditions all of their lives have learned how to deal with them and somehow things look fresh even when the reality is that they are not!

Blessings,

Debbie

December 18, 2012

Left Juba this morning and am in another reality now.  The touchdown on the plane into Nairobi late this morning brought back memories….Nairobi was my first port of entry into Africa three years ago in 2009.  This was the first continent where I saw dirt coming in to land….

It was clear even from the airport that Nairobi is a major urban metropolis, much, much larger and more developed than Juba.  It is really quite a good thing that after Malakal I had two days in Juba before coming here.   That time in Juba gave me a bit of space to process leaving Malakal and adjusting to modernity.  Coming into Nairobi I realized:

There is an enormous difference between the smallness of a little town, or village, like Malakal and the impersonal secularization that I could sense in Nairobi.  Life feels more out of control in a large city, a city that is spread out and actually has outskirts.  Malakal is much more self contained and the sameness is one of the characteristics for small.

Of course Kenya is a different country and that may account for some of what I am seeing as different, as “other”, it may not be only the sizes of Malakal, Juba and Nairobi, respectively.

I remember when I went to China being thankful that I had had experience in the Middle East first.  The culture of the Middle East is vastly different from the United States, and yet it is much more familiar than the culture of China which was so very different that having had an in between experience was helpful.  That is what Juba was on this journey between Malakal and Nairobi.  Juba was my Middle East.

Having arrived at this compound I am filled with amazement.  It is huge.  And it is green.  I thought a friend had told me that it had a garden.  No, it IS a garden.  Somehow it makes me think of the Swiss Family Robinson.  I don’t know, it is just so odd to me to think that something this green exists when my soul is dying of thirst in the heat and brownness of Malakal.

There are huge trees here, big enough for children’s swings to hang out of them.  One of the joys this afternoon was seeing a brother swinging his sister on one of them.  There is grass everywhere, and the folks who thought through how to minister to weary missionaries have put tables and chairs all about on the lawn so that we can sit out and enjoy the green and rest. 

My room is wonderful.  Not like a Hilton.  A big bed with four pillows.  I am so thankful not to have been given a single, twin bed.  Those things are quite horrid for anyone who is used to sleeping in a large bed.  There is no mosquito net.  I am taking this to mean that mosquitos are not a problem here.  Wow!  No wonder the room looked so normal to me when I first saw it!

The desk is piled with my books now, even though I also brought my Kindle.  I have reading to do for the Research Proposal for my thesis through UNISA (The University of South Africa).  I also have lots of shopping to do, primarily for groceries to take back with me to Malakal.  Peanut butter, nutella and coffee top the list.  Tomorrow I have a dentist appointment, the next day I must go to the South Sudan Embassy to purchase a new visa for the one that will expire that day so that I have a valid one when I return to Juba on the 30^th of December. 

I have now had two Cadbury bars!  I hadn’t had chocolate in three and a half months! 

Dinner was amazing.  I was drinking the filtered water and suddenly realized that it was cold and that was why I was feeling so satisfied. 

Tomatoes and avacados!  SALAD!!!  Actual lettuce.  Green beans.  Tremendous garlic bread.  Real coffee with real milk.  Okay, this place is a treasure for a starving missionary.  How am I going to go back into the desert after this?  Literally, Malakal is a desert.  Which wouldn’t be so bad if there was power.  With power there could be refrigeration and cold water. 

The Guest House is going to bring Diet Coke in for me so I can purchase it at the front desk!  There is a frig for guests so tomorrow after my dentist appointment I am going to see if I can find yogurt to bring back and place in said frig.

And I plan to try and spend the afternoon outside in the quiet and green.

Will write more soon…

Blessings,

Debbie

Blog

December 1, 2012

I continue to learn how to teach by the teaching itself.  The students have enjoyed doing team work in their tests, group tests if you will.

This is fine and good, it is an important thing to learn how to negotiate, listen and create documents of substance with others.  As I watched how the four different teams worked on their final today I realized that it is also important to make a balance with individual work.

There is at least one individual, perhaps more, than is so very quiet in the class that team work is simply not the best vehicle for him to tested with or learn from.  He needs to draw from his own information and will not do that willingly in a group.

I remember that there are oral learners, visual learners, kinesthetic learners, musical, spatial, etc.  I try to meet at least most of those needs at times during the semester.  I must now remember to balance the needs of the ultra quiet with the abilities of those who enjoy the group work.

Blessings,

Debbie

December 4, 2012

As I awoke this morning to the sound of an animal that I could not identify outside the walls of my home, I realized again how different life here in Malakal is from life in the United States. 

I see animals everyday that I walk outside of my gates.  Not only cats and dogs which are everywhere in the Seattle area, but goats and sheep and cattle.  The babies are so cute as they trot about and make desperate calling noises to their mothers.  I have only lived on a farm once, for a very short time, when I stayed with a friend and her husband in a rural area outside of Seattle.  That time and this is similar in terms of the closeness to nature.  I was not raised being close to animals.  While I am glad of having only two cats calling my yard home here in Malakal, it is gratifying to be experiencing something so different in my life for this season that will be gone from my life when I return home to the United States.

I was invited to a memorial service, they call it a Service of Prayer, here in Malakal on Sunday of this week.  A colleague’s husband had died.  After people shared about his life, prayers were said a sermon preached, food was served.  The women were in one part of the compound and the men in another.  I found myself thinking, “ah, the women’s court.”  As my hostess walked me through the different groupings of men to reach the car that would bring me home after the food was eaten, I found myself a bit unnerved by the tradition that still exists here.  Very unlike a memorial service in the states where the genders would sit together in service and in feasting afterwards.

Blessings,

Debbie

Blog

December 1, 2012

I continue to learn how to teach by the teaching itself.  The students have enjoyed doing team work in their tests, group tests if you will.

This is fine and good, it is an important thing to learn how to negotiate, listen and create documents of substance with others.  As I watched how the four different teams worked on their final today I realized that it is also important to make a balance with individual work.

There is at least one individual, perhaps more, than is so very quiet in the class that team work is simply not the best vehicle for him to tested with or learn from.  He needs to draw from his own information and will not do that willingly in a group.

I remember that there are oral learners, visual learners, kinesthetic learners, musical, spatial, etc.  I try to meet at least most of those needs at times during the semester.  I must now remember to balance the needs of the ultra quiet with the abilities of those who enjoy the group work.

Blessings,

Debbie

Reflections on Life in South Sudan.

Friends,

This morning I looked around at my classroom of South Sudanese students.  Each one of them had Western clothing on.  This bothered me and it did so in particular because these Seniors are having a class picture taken today.

We are in Africa and the students are wearing shirts and ties and the two women have shirts and skirts on, Western style.  When I inquired about this someone said that African clothes are very expensive and that the Western clothing is much cheaper.  So typical.  The colonizer makes it cheaper to buy the imports from the colonizing power than the local goods made from locally sourced materials and created by the indigenous people. 

I found myself just about in tears.

Later I had a discussion with another teacher.  I don’t sleep well at night here in Malakal.  There are many reasons for this, one of them is that the power comes on and then goes off at unpredictable times and often I am awakened by its beginning and its cessation. 

The other teacher asked me if I was tired from cooking.  She asked if I cook on charcoal like the African women who must kneel to stir their pots on the charcoal stoves.  I said I try to avoid using charcoal.  And then I pointed out that I do not have what to me is a normal kitchen.  I don’t have a kitchen sink or a kitchen counter.  I don’t have a refrigerator.  Nothing is normal about my experience of trying to provide food for myself here in Malakal. 

It is difficult to live day in and day out in an environment that is so utterly foreign to my own.  I am essentially camping.  I never did like camping and I don’t enjoy it now. 

I wonder how it was for Jesus?  When he came to an utterly foreign environment how was it for him to live day in and day out?  Was it as hard for him as it is for me?  I’d like to think so. 

Those of us who work and live in South Sudan get to take quarterly R & R’s.  Some of the reason for these times of getting away from the country have to do with being able to experience a sense of normalacy that is closer to what is normal in the United States….at least for me.   It is HARD to live here.  The saving grace is the fact that I believe that my students are gaining knowledge from me that they would not gain in any other way.  And hopefully it is invaluable knowledge.  That is what makes my being here worth the sacrifice for living a totally abnormal life.  Otherwise this sacrifice would be untenable.

Here and there, but NOT everywhere....

July 7, 2012

Dear Friends,

Greetings from the skies over Washington State headed for California!

Early run to the airport this morning. I realized once there, and once again, how much we take for granted in this country.

There were stacks of white boxes on an attractive wagon at the security point. So different from South Sudan where the machines aren’t working any longer and all of the luggage has to be hand searched for contraband.

The ladies’ bathroom was clean. Toilet paper, soap, running water, towels. When you use a bathroom at an American airport please try to remember the countries that offer only traditional toilets and have nowhere to put ones purse or backpack or rolling bags.

When you take a drink from a water fountain at an airport in the US remember the countries where a person cannot safely take a drink of water anywhere.

July 9, 2010

Tomorrow is the first anniversary of the independence of the Republic of South Sudan from Sudan. May the country make it to a second anniversary.

I am reading Nelson Mandela’s Long Road to Freedom. One of the things that he talks about in the book is how the Afrikanner (white) government tried to bring disharmony between the tribes in South Africa in order to weaken the blacks and make it easier to maintain control of them. This rings a bell for me because I have inquired of my students before about the tribal markings that many of them have. Some tribes have “life lines”, also known as scarification, deep lines cut into their foreheads which can be seen after death on their bones. Some tribes have bumps created on their foreheads, or dots which form different patterns.

My students told me that these markings began at the suggestion of the

British colonizers as a way to sow disharmony among the tribes in Sudan. Before the markings one tribe could not differentiate other tribes and everyone lived in peace. With the markings came “the other”; dissention, resentment, jealousy and competition. This of course was the intention of the colonizers. Divide and conquer takes on new meaning when related to colonial rule.

As I am reading this book by Nelson Mandela I am reminded that it is not only South Africa that has seen oppression. The State of Israel continues to illegally occupy the Palestinian Territories. Sudan oppressed the south of Sudan to the point where the Southern Sudanese voted to become a country of their own. There are many places of contention in the world where the desire for power by one party tramples upon the rights of another party.

As I read the book I realize that some of NM’s experience, to me, mirror what Myanmar/Burma’s Suii Ki lived through. Her times of house arrest, of being cut off from the outside world were perhaps experienced somewhat differently by NM, but there was a general belief again that divide and conquer would silence.

July 11, 2012

I really love Southern California. It is so very different from the East Coast. It is somehow more earthy and raw. It is big and vast. The East is more refined, perhaps because the folks that populated the East (the ones that originally colonized the “empty” space and the native population) were from Europe. The people who populated the West Coast were made of different stuff. Not that it didn’t take courage and guts to come from Europe to the New World, it did. It took something different to come from the colonies and New England and the South to California. Go West Young Man (and Woman)!

Friday, September 7, 2012

My time in the states is over and I am now in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. In two hours I’ll be going to the airport to begin the third leg of a journey that took me from Seattle to Dubai (United Arab Emirites) to Addis Ababa. From here I will go to Juba, South Sudan and from Juba I will make my way “home” to Malakal.

I understand that water is not flowing to the homes in Malakal. How does one live without water? I am walking into an unknown situation once again and I don’t know how long it will take to find solutions. I am essentially camping in Malakal. I have never been one to enjoy camping and so I am having to try and perceive the experience in new ways.

On the airplane sometime early Wednesday morning we flew over the North Pole. I took note of it because when I looked out the window I realized that what I was seeing was a frozen landscape. That was when I realized that it was a polar landscape.

I move into and out of so many cultures as I traverse God’s claim on my life. I seem to be particularly sensitive to the cultures where I sense a male arrogance towards women. After being in the United States for four months this can be a particularly heightened experience. Most men who are third or fourth or uncountable generation American, at least of those that I encounter, understand the worth and the value of women. When I encounter the alien (to me) attitude that women are objects and our value lies in our usefulness to making life comfortable for men, it is a painful encounter for me.

September 9, 2012: Juba

I had a great if brief talk with a young woman from the UK (she is English) this morning over our hot coffee and bread that is considered breakfast here and in some parts of Europe where I have traveled before.

I could not sleep last night as I am probably still on US time and so I had lots of time to think and reflect. Some of my thoughts were about the differences between missionaries, or Mission Co-Workers as we are now known in the PC(USA), and short term mission workers or even NGO workers. NGO’s are Non-Governmental Organizations, technically the PC(USA) is one of these as are other church mission sending organizations. Usually NGO is associated with, for instance, World Vision or the United Nations.

Missionaries are usually alone in their posts, or if married, alone as a couple. Whereas short term mission trips, perhaps sent by a particular church, are normally made in teams. Missionaries are aware that we are going to be in a said situation for a lengthy period of time and pray for the grace to be able to survive that time. Short term mission trips have the luxury of knowing that shortly they will be leaving the country and any difficult circumstances, like four hours of power a night. That sounds like so much now having come from Malakal where we had power only one night a week!

It can be enlightening to reflect on different lifestyles and the minimal existence of most missionaries. The NGO’s whose facilities I have had occasion to visit in Malakal have been like islands from another world in a sea of heat, humidity and lack of water and electricity. I feel so normal upon entering NGO buildings and slowly it occurs to me that it is because there are lights during the day and air conditioning is running. While a wonderful occasional perk it can also be quite devastating to have to return to my own particular reality after visiting such a paradise, in part because I have been made aware that even in a poverty stricken third world country ravaged by 50 years of civil war, a different reality is not only possible but actually exists.

On my travels through the United States this past summer I remember that in Detroit I realized that there were parts of that city that I would term dead. Boarded up, crumbling, deserted. Even so there had been an infrastructure at some point on those dead streets. There had been utilities, water and electric and probably garbage pick up as well. Maybe that is one way to look at Malakal, or one way to look at Detroit. Even at its deadest, Detroit is more alive than much of Malakal. People have moved on from Detroit. In Malakal there are people who are not able to move on. The present lack of life, lack of services, lack of opportunity or hope for change is their reality. My reality is that I have the ability to leave Malakal every so often and thereby keep my sanity intact. For many of the locals in Malakal, their reality is that now and always.

Living on a compound with other missionaries, or Mission Co-Workers, would probably be easier. The problem with compounds is that they are insular. The people inside them are “protected” from the local people and their crumbling, less than beautiful lives. It may be possible to do a more productive job while living in a condition more like one’s native country. On the other, God’s hand touches the eyesore differently when a person lives in its midst.

There are pros and cons to both sides of the argument, or the thought. When I was in China I spent most of my time with my students. I began to lose vocabulary and my spelling skills diminished. I needed to have more time with other westerners. I am finding a similar situation in Malakal, in part because there are so few other westerners. I need more balance. I need not to leave all of the comforts of home, of the west, behind and this means that I am not going to be able to live at the level that most of the folks in Malakal live. I am possibly just not capable of that. I live more like them because I am not short term. And I can’t live like them or I won’t be able to be long term.

September 10, 2012

There are some shows on television, which shall remain unnamed, that make unreality appear perfectly normal. There are times here in South Sudan where I find myself thinking how amazing is it that situations that cannot possibly be real or true or what is actually happening are indeed real, true and what is actually happening.

The airport here in Juba is one of those things. It is chaotic and dysfunctional with several flights of people from places such as Uganda, Eygpt, Ethiopia and Kenya all hunting for luggage in the same small space. Yesterday I think we nearly saw a passenger rebellion. Luggage is lost or misplaced, throwing lives into disarray as people must rearrange schedules to compensate for the lack of organization on the part of the airlines. The only comfort in all of it is that most of the people who come from the outside see it for the zoo that it is. Perhaps because of the civil wars when the north and the south were simply Sudan, one large country, the locals are not as aware of how disrespectful the process of retrieving luggage is. My hope is that as time goes on their demands for order will grow and they will accept less and less situations which suck the life out of everyone else. Perhaps it is a sign of health when previously acceptable situations begin to suck the life out of a person and they come to recognize that it is not life giving.

Blessings,

Debbie

Languages

Dear Friends,
Greetings! I have learned that South Sudan and the United States have a similar struggle when it comes to indigenous languages versus colonialist languages.

In the United States many of the American Indian tribes have languages/tongues that are nearly extinct. This is true in many parts of the world that have been colonized. The reality of the United States is that beginning with Europe, the American Indians were colonized by outsiders coming in, taking their land, changing their culture and forcing them to use languages that were not their own. I learned this a few years ago myself when a friend from Belfast in Northern Ireland corrected me as I talked of the culture in the US as if it had never been anything other than a European culture. In the current day and age it is not so much a European culture anyhow as so many parts of the country are becoming much more Latino, for instance.

In South Sudan Arabic was the first colonizer language and then English became so. At this time in history as far as I can tell in South Sudan there are first the tribal languages, then Arabic and then the further layer of English which has been named the official language of South Sudan.

A country seems to need a common language in order to function as a country and yet the question becomes, what is being lost as people no longer function exclusively in their own native tongue?
Blessings,
Debbie