Food, fog, films and Philippians - another trip to Umalila

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.

We were late home each day (I was staying at Mwangwale’s), after a bumpy ride along the dirt roads in the dark. The first night, Mwangwale’s motorbike ran out of fuel half-way! There were a few houses, all shut up as it was late at night, but he somehow managed to find someone with some fuel to buy, even though it was little more than a hamlet. We usually ate dinner after 10pm (it’s quite normal here to eat dinner late, around 9pm), arriving home to find the food on the coffee table, in hot pots (thermos pots for food), ready for us to eat. Despite the late nights (and the children were usually still up and about while we were eating dinner too), the family were up around dawn each morning. On waking, I went out for a short walk each day, enjoying the beauty of the flowers, the patchwork fields and the tops of the hills looking cosy under a light blanket of cloud and the lower slopes catching the early morning sun. On my return, a bowl of warm water would await me so I could wash, and a flask of hot sweet tea would be on the coffee table. I discovered that mixing my oats, peanut butter and raisins with the tea made a surprisingly nice porridge (helped by the fact that their tea isn’t strong, so it’s more like hot sweet water).

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?

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*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!