Potatoes. When I think of the Malila people and where they live, I think of potatoes! However, on this trip, I didn’t eat a single potato as it turns out that harvesting begins in mid-June*. Instead, many of the patchwork fields were the lush green of potato plants nearly ready for harvest, contrasting sharply with the brown, dry stalks of maize left after harvesting the maize cobs. I learned that these will be dug back into the soil, serving to enrich it ready for the next crop. While I may not have eaten potatoes, I did eat plenty of cabbage! This seemed to be their staple vegetable, and is usually cooked (fried, I think) with a little tomato; I rather like the sweet edge cabbage takes on cooked like this. I also ate plenty of rice – while people normally eat ugali at home (made from maize flour), guests are usually served rice, so at each place we went to teach we were served a mountain (of epic proportions) of rice. I inevitably had to return at least half the amount of rice they had put on my plate, and that still left me with a good sized helping! My favourite meal of the week was Friday evening, where I was served ugali, greens, fried egg (very yellow), avocado and bananas.
It was a delight to travel around the Malila area, as the
rolling hills are beautiful. We visited four villages over four days, and at
each place received the same warm welcome. At least, the people gave us a warm
welcome, the weather did not. On my first day I was worried I would drive
straight past the place I was supposed to be meeting up with my colleague,
because I was driving through fog! Thankfully I spotted him, waiting by his
motorbike, and after he’d gulped down a mug of tea and some mandazi (deep-fried
things, faintly resembling donuts) at a tiny roadside shop, I followed him in
the office Land Cruiser to the first village we would be teaching in. I was
very glad of the coat I had managed to find at a second-hand clothes market a
couple of weeks earlier!
Here, and at every place thereafter, we started late. I
expected to start late; people had been told we would start at 9am and I
expected to start around 10am, but that proved optimistic! I don’t think we
ever started before 11am, and we always started with just a handful of people
with the numbers gradually growing in the first couple of hours, often ending
up with around twenty. At our final location we also had ten or so children
joining us as it was a Saturday – although the teaching was not aimed at
children they sat quietly and attentively throughout. We had hoped for larger
numbers, as letters had gone out to several churches in each village, but most
of the people who came were from the host-church, with a few exceptions. Each
group felt quite different – the first one was the hardest. They were obviously
not used to participatory learning, so asking questions was about as successful
as trying to get blood from a stone, and some participants kept their eyes down
so it was very hard to read their faces and get a sense of whether they were
engaged or not. My goal was to help them discover the joy of digging into God’s
Word, as we spent time in Ephesians (in the first two villages) and Philippians
(in the second two villages). Although I taught in Swahili, my colleague,
Mwangwale, translated certain key points and all Scripture readings were done
using the Malila Scriptures, wherever possible getting the participants to do
the readings as we wanted to help them learn to read their language. The Malila
people use their language a lot, of all the language groups that we work with
it’s perhaps the one where I see the greatest need for them to have Scriptures
in their language, and praise God they now have the New Testament and Genesis.
It was great to see their language thriving, though it was very frustrating for
me as at mealtimes they would slip into using Malila and I would be left
stranded with no idea of what they were talking about.
At the second village, Iyunga-Mapinduzi, they were much more
ready to interact and a number of the group were already quite good readers as
Mwangwale has had quite a lot of input there already. It was a privilege to
study the Scriptures with them, and I was glad that in a couple of the villages
we were joined by one or two pastors from other churches. I really hope and
pray that they will take on board some of the studying-and-teaching-the-Bible
tips I tried to throw out and will have seen the blessing that comes through
digging deeper into God’s Word. My prayer throughout was that God would use me
to help make them more passionate about meditating on God’s Word, that they
might become like trees planted by streams of water (Psalm 1). While I wasn’t
able to get much feedback, the snippets I did get were encouraging, showing
that they thought the teaching was good and that more teaching of this nature
is needed in the church. Over lunch one day, the pastors were saying how churches
tend to teach denominational doctrine rather than rooting themselves in the
study of Scripture. How I long to see churches here being rooted in God’s Word.
In the evenings we showed the Jesus Film. The first time we
were able to show it inside the church, but in the second village the
electricity wires hadn’t reached as far as the church yet, so we showed it
outside at a different spot, against the whitish wall of a building. It was
cold and as time went by a light mist descended, but I was lucky enough to be
able to sit inside the house we were using for our power supply, and they even
brought me a small coal stove to keep me warm and some ugali and cabbage!
Thankfully at the third village we were back inside, while the fourth village
had no electricity so we didn’t even try to show it (though as the church had a
generator, with which they played painfully loud and distorted gospel music
before the seminar began to let people know that something was happening, we
could probably have shown it there too). At each place we had an avid audience,
of both children and adults. As reading isn’t really a part of the culture
here, film can be particularly powerful. We also made sure that one or two
people in each seminar received a MegaVoice player – a solar-powered audio
device loaded with the audio New Testament in Malila, so that they could enable
groups to listen to God’s Word.
I was overwhelmed by everyone’s generosity – in one place we
were given a sack of maize and in another a bag of cabbages and greens fresh
from their garden and a chicken. Mwangwale’s wife gave me a bag of beans, and
someone else from their church furnished me with an even bigger sack of maize.
In case you were wondering what I did with the chicken, I left it with
Mwangwale! This month is not an easy one for people there, as they haven’t
started to harvest the potatoes and beans, which are their main source of
income, so we were only able to sell a few Scripture portions in each place
that we went to, but they are so generous with what they do have that it puts me to shame. (Although they have already harvested
their maize, this crop is mostly for their own family needs, as almost everyone
grows maize so there isn’t much of a market for selling it.)
 |
| With Mwangwale and his family |
On Saturday night, Mwangwale told me that I would be
teaching at his church on Sunday morning! I shouldn’t have been surprised, as it’s
not uncommon for guests to be asked to share, but I thought I’d said that I
would ‘just’ attend – obviously I hadn’t or I hadn’t communicated it clearly
enough! So Sunday morning saw me asking God to help me identify what I could
take from the Philippians seminar to become a short time of teaching in the
morning service. I was also asking for my voice to hold out, as after four days
of being miraculously strong (after a two-week long issue of a sore throat and
weak voice), I had spent Saturday night waking up coughing. Praise God, He
helped on both counts, and I enjoyed encouraging the congregation to imitate
Christ and talking about what that looks like. There were lots of things about
my time at Mwangwale’s church to make me smile – the church had been decorated
with beautiful deep pink bougainvillea, some of the choirs (including the
children) sang songs in Malila and after the service they sold off three eggs
that had been put in the offering (to turn the gift into cash for the church),
and the eggs were given to me!
After lunch (yes, more rice and chicken) and waiting for
someone to bring the gift of maize, I finally headed home, back along the dirt
road with the car jumping around on the small stones such that I was mostly
going only 20-30 miles per hour, but slow was fine with me as I enjoyed the
beautiful landscape that I was driving through. It was with relief, however,
that I finally joined the tarmac road back into Mbeya. The whole journey took
just one and a half hours (it’s one of the closest language areas to get to).
I know that these teaching opportunities are just a drop in
the bucket when it comes to helping people grow in a knowledge of God and His
Word, and it feels like a very small drop at that. However, God’s Word is
powerful, and I pray that though the drop may be small it may yet make a
ripple, and help people to understand God’s amazing grace and what it looks
like to live a cross-shaped life, imitating Christ. Teaching these things also
challenges me – am I also able to say, with Paul, that to live is Christ and to
die is gain? Will I also persevere, even when it feels hard and unfruitful,
because I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of
knowing Christ Jesus my Lord?
*To make conversation, I plagued my colleague with questions about potato farming, and learned a lot. I now know that you start harvesting potatoes about 3 months after planting and that about a month after harvesting you may have potatoes that are ready for re-planting. A single potato may produce quite a lot of new potatoes, it all depends on the number of eyes it has – E.g. if it has a dozen eyes you will get a dozen potatoes out of it. A potato should be planted about a finger’s depth below the soil (about 3 inches) and I think he said about a foot between each potato, and 2 feet between rows. If you want big potatoes, you will need to use fertiliser (and I confess I like big ones). So now I’m all set to plant my own! Maybe I’ll try a couple and see if I get results!
