The Upper School and Africa 101

Well,

I apologize for the long silence on my end of things; communication is not my strong suit to say the least. Nonetheless, I figured that here at the beginning of the second week of school would be the best time to remedy this habit.

As mentioned above, we made it through our first week of classes. I received the final word on what classes I was to teach the Thursday before it all started, so my nose has officially been to the grindstone. I am teaching 7^th grade science (basically general physical science), 9^th grade geography, 6^th-11^th grade P.E., and art for grades 7-9. They have all been great classes to take on. I was pretty wary of teaching a couple of subjects (geography and science,) that I had no idea about, dreading the idea of being like some of my previous teachers who neither knew nor cared about their subject. Yet, I have been enjoying all of my subjects immensely. I do my best to communicate to my students the same enjoyment, and get them to see the Lord's glory in all of it as I do. We will see how that works out. Nonetheless, it has become readily apparent to me that philosophy really is the study of all studies, thus preparing me with all knowledge....(insert snickering here).

Teaching art has been a great joy. The Lord has given me opportunity to revive my love for it, especially for drawing and printmaking. I haven't been able to do any art over the past few years without guaranteeing more stress and guilt for the week to come. So, having been prohibited by school work for the past few years, I have now been able to revive these skills AND bring my students along with me, teaching them and encouraging them.

It has been really cool and encouraging to see how great of an opportunity we have been given to minister to these kids. As elite of a slice of population as our student body may be, it is nonetheless such a great privilege to be the sweet aroma of Christ in these children's lives. Many of them don't come from Christian homes, and yet their parents have agreed to fully support all the teaching we do there, including teaching of the gospel. That has allowed me to feel freed up to walk along side these children and disciple them. Having heard horror stories of mission schools overseas from time to time, it is such a blessing to be at one where the excellency and sweetness of Christ are visceral.

We are hoping to get into the groove of teaching and school soon, so that we can join in the ministries that happen in the city. We have been heavily advised to take the first year slow as far as commitments go, getting our bearings before jumping in headlong. So, please pray for us in this regard; diligence, excellence, and insight in teaching as well as wisdom and faith in joining in the ministries here.

The hardest thing, though maybe the best, about the last month has been the waiting we have been doing for school to start. Tied up with that is our desire to be useful in the Lord's hands. It is much easier to see ourselves as useful when we are busied; but that is often not the case. It has been good to be slowed down by the Lord, being reminded that He is the One Who guides the work. Yet, our desire since we started has been to bless and minister to the church in Africa, and it is hard to see ourselves to being doing that when we haven't been able to jump in as we would like. I guess impatience is not necessarily the best response at this point.

That being said, I was able to visit Maula Prison within a couple of weeks from arriving. I went with Jay Stoms and the local Gideons to deliver New Testaments to the believers there. The whole operation had to be done with wisdom given abject poverty there. They figured that it would be ridiculous to hand our the bibles willy-nilly and none of the believers there receive them. So, they had the guards gather all the regular attenders of bible study. The guards for some reason insisted on gathering them in a corral which was right out in the open, between both sides; invoking great greed and jealousy on the part of the rest of the jail. So, after the Gideon's brief presentation in the native language, Chichewa, they began distributing them. It was at this point that chaos broke loose. The rest of inmates somehow managed to make it into the corral we were in, and started getting some of the New Testaments. So, the members of the group were afraid of getting nothing at all, and so started storming the boxes of New Testaments. It was at this point that the guards came in and locked everyone down, while the Gideon's got ahold of what was left of the New Testaments. They decided that they would give the New Testaments to the leaders of the bible studies, and to the women's side, so that they would be fairly distributed.

Now, at first blush, it seems like the tragedy was that there weren't enough New Testaments for these men “hungering and thirsting after righteousness”, so that non-believers were excluded. It might seem close to an anti-ministry to only distribute New Testaments to the believers there, while the rest were locked down, being prohibited from life. Yet, Jay in his wisdom politely burst that romantic bubble for me. As we were watching them in the early distribution (that is while it was still semi-organized), I said to him, 'It is wild to think that in the States these same New Testaments are thrown on the ground when they are given away, yet here they are clutching after them.' To which Jay responded, 'well, some of these guys might actually read them. But some will trade them, some will use them as rolling paper for cigarettes, and some with use them as toilet paper.' It was then that I realized that the well-intentioned and victimized Malawian I had imagined may exist, but probably not there at Maula Prison. It was then that I realized that in fact, every human heart is desperately sick and in need of a Savior (Jer. 17:9), not just us self-sufficient N. Americans. Greed, and disregard for the word of God exist everywhere. That in fact is the real tragedy. What is glorious about all of it, is that some men who have maybe never owned a Bible in their life, and yet have been made new in Christ, now have in their hands the New Testament, the very word of God. Overall, the experience was a great orientation for me, reminding me that ministry is done differently here even though hearts are the same.

By the way, this is one our lizard buddies, we often find these guys scampering around our porches and trees.