Buses, boats, Bible, beauty

I would like to say my sleep was rudely interrupted when my alarm went off at 5am, but unfortunately I was already awake. Knowing you have an early start and a bus to catch rarely leads to a good night’s sleep. I dozed, or at least shut my eyes, as our bus sped from Mbeya to Njombe. It literally sped – we got stopped by police for going too fast! After about 2.5 hours at the big Njombe bus stand, we were off to the small town of Ludewa, arriving 4.5 hours later. Our luggage, stored under the bus, was coated in red dust from the roads. My colleague, Cleofaye, was getting her first taste of the delights of bus travel around here! Together with her family, Cleofaye has been in Mbeya for a year, and has begun working with the Kisi Bible translators as an advisor. This role primarily involves checking their translations for biblical accuracy, and being an office job she hadn’t yet had a chance to visit the Kisi language area (aka Ukisi). Her husband accompanied me on a trip to Ukisi last year, so this time it was his turn to take care of the kids so that Cleofaye could visit. Claudia, one of the Kisi translators, travelled with us, and Stanlaus, the other translator, had gone ahead for family reasons.

Cleofaye & Claudia warm themselves with mugs of chai at Njombe bus stand

As always after a long bus trip, I longed to stretch my legs, and the others were happy to join me. Claudia led the way, taking us to visit her sister-in-law. While there, dusk swiftly turned to darkness. Thankful for the torches on our phones, we headed back towards the guest house. I said good night and retreated to my room to eat, listen to a sermon and get an early night.

I woke to a cold, misty, but beautiful morning and went for a brisk walk. At 8.30am we headed up to the immigration office to report our presence, then down to the market. We needed to pick up some ingredients (cabbages, tomatoes and onions) for the meals that would be served at the workshop because the village we were going to doesn’t have much available in the way of vegetables as the environment is not conducive to growing them. It was also a chance for me and Cleofaye to buy some bananas and bottled water to take with us.

Morning walk in Ludewa

Finally the car arrived to take us down the mountain and off we went, stopping first to buy fuel for the boat journey ahead of us, and then heading down the steep, bendy road until we arrived at the shores of Lake Nyasa, where our boat was waiting for us. It’s a new boat, built for the Kisi community, funded by a partner organisation of our ministry, with the goal of making our ministry travel easier and also serving as an income generation project for the Kisi language committee. It was bigger than I expected, totally unlike the boat I’ve used on previous trips, and with a canopy providing some shade. A group of people had taken advantage of the fact that we were using the boat, and were getting a ride with us partway to attend a funeral. As we went, music played from a speaker tied onto the canopy’s scaffolding, powered by a solar panel resting on top of the canopy.

Preparing to board the new boat

As we approached Makonde, where we were heading, the wind got up and the waves got bigger, so getting off the boat was a little challenging, but we made it without getting too wet or dropping any of our luggage in the lake. At the guest house we had lunch (rice, greens and pork in a tomato stew) and then I set to sticking together the biblical timelines I had prepared for the workshop participants. I enjoyed a short swim in the slightly choppy lake before tea and then spent the evening hanging out in the living room of the house with Cleofaye. Unusually for a guest house, our bedrooms were in the family home, so it feels less like a guest house and more like staying in an Airbnb or staying with friends. The hosts were friendly, and one evening we chatted with the husband for a while as he ate his dinner in the lounge, and another I enjoyed being outside chatting with Claudia, some of the workshops participants and our hostess, as the cicadas chirruped away.

Our first day of the workshop didn’t exactly go as planned. The workshop was set to take place in the Anglican church, but someone had died and the funeral service was going to take place in the church that morning. This not only meant we needed to use a different church for the first day (the Seventh Day Adventist pastor immediately welcomed us to use their building) but also we weren’t able to get started until noon as everyone went to the funeral. I stayed behind in the SDA church with a couple of people, watching the Kisi translation of the JESUS film, and several little faces peered through the windows to watch as well. After a while these children plucked up the courage to enter the church and sit down, watching right through to the end of the film. Apparently the reason they weren’t at school was because a child had gone missing so everyone was out looking for them. After the film finished, I taught them a song and partway through they heard the school bell calling them back, so off they went. About noon Claudia and Stanlaus and the workshop participants arrived back at the church and we were able to get started. Numbers were lower than we expected, due in part to yet another funeral in a neighbouring village. I was teaching the same material I taught in the Manda area a few weeks ago, about the big story of the Bible. Once again we used the local language Scriptures alongside the Swahili Scriptures as we explored key events in the Old Testament and how they point to Jesus.

Children watch the JESUS film

After the workshop was over, we walked around until we found a spot where you could get phone network so that Cleofaye could make a quick call home to make sure all was well, then we headed down to the lake for a swim. However, plans to jump in the water were foiled by about a dozen or so children coming to sit down with me on the beach wanting to talk, telling me the Kisi words for various things while I told them the English words. Eventually I asked them how to say “to swim” in Kisi and whether they liked to swim, to which they said yes. So then I suggested we all go swimming! This proved to be a good solution to the awkward situation. They told the boys to leave, undressed down to the shorts that they were wearing under their skirts, and then we all scrambled into the lake (you can’t do much more than scramble as the beach is made up of big pebbles and stones that are hard to walk on) and swam around in the choppy waters as the sun set.

The next day, Wednesday, we headed up to the Anglican church, only to find a service underway for students from the local secondary school. It turned out to be a thanksgiving service for the life of a young teacher who had recently passed away unexpectedly. His poor wife was distraught. We waited outside until the service was over and then set up and got started. As the day’s teaching drew to a close, the children we had invited to come for some evening activities had already started to arrive. We had fun playing ‘Simon says…’ and then Claudia engaged them in a little Kisi literacy lesson and read them a short story. Work over for the day, I watched the red ball of the sun sink below the horizon as I splashed around in the lake with some children – it was a beautiful moment of joy and fun.

Children have a go at reading a story in their Kisi language

The final day of the workshop began without further unexpected delays, giving the translators a good chance to invite input from the participants on the quality of the translation of a book we were using. The ‘Big story of the Bible’ book had been translated into Kisi and checked (for the accuracy of the content) by me, but needed to be checked with the community to make sure it was understood and that the right Kisi words had been used to express different concepts. So we’d been using the book throughout the workshop and as we went we had asked participants to note anything they felt needed discussion. The translators also had words that they wanted help with, where they had struggled to find a good translation. For example, we talked about the word ‘garden’ to work out whether garden (which most likely conjures up the image of a small plot with a few plants in) or farmland better matches the picture the Bible gives of the garden of Eden. We also talked about salvation and redemption, as the translators could only identify one word for the two concepts, and we needed to find a way to express the different nuances of these words.

Discussing the Scriptures together

Our lunch on days one and two of the workshop was fish, but on day three it was chicken. My teeth wrestled with the meat to pull it off the bone and chew it, but the tough meat won on several occasions! I also had a taste of ugali made from fermented cassava flour. The most common form of ugali is made from maize flour (mixed with water to from a solid lump), but in Ukisi the only crop to really thrive in the sandy soil on the steep mountain slopes is cassava. They ferment it and lay it out to dry on racks, where it gives off a very distinctive smell, which I find rather unpleasant. The cassava ugali was more claggy than maize ugali, like home made glue that has dried into a no-longer-spreadable lump, and it tasted like it smelt. Most of my ugali ended up being devoured by the chickens and ducks waiting around for titbits! However, only three of us chose rice over ugali, showing just how much the Kisi love their local ugali. Definitely an acquired taste!

As the workshop drew to a close, I felt I had less of a sense of what people thought of the training than usual, but there was still some positive feedback. A moment in the workshop that particularly encouraged me was when a young lady picked up on a throw-away comment of mine about my daily Bible reading habit. Sometime after making the comment, having obviously been thinking about it, she asked me, “How do you go about reading the Bible every day?” I was thrilled to see her wanting to know how she could engage more deeply and regularly with God’s Word, and I explained how I work passage by passage through a book of the Bible, asking myself what it teaches me about God and how it applies to my life. She had attended our workshop in a different village last year and had told the translators that if we held another workshop, even if it was in a different village, then to let her know as she wanted to attend, so she was walking some distance to be there each day!

Views on an evening stroll

On Friday morning we got up while it was still dark, headed down to the beach with our luggage, and waited for the boat in the grey light of dawn. We bid farewell to the translators, who were staying on to visit a couple of other villages that they hadn’t been to yet, and boarded the boat. The sun rose above the mountains as we made our way over the calm waters; meanwhile the translators were on the backs of motorbikes heading up a very steep mountain track to visit the village of Kimata. It would be their turn to take the boat on Saturday, followed by a walk up another mountain to get to the village of Nkwimbili.

The car was waiting for us on the beach at Lupingu, and we arrived in Ludewa in time to catch the 10am bus to Njombe. On the plus side, there was no loud music, on the down side it was a small bus that rattled along as dust entered through the poorly sealed door and windows, such that after a while I started to hold a tissue over my nose to try and reduce the amount of dust I was breathing in. It was about 4pm by the time we arrived in Njombe, and I couldn’t face another long bus journey and a night arrival in Mbeya, so we booked a 6am bus for the next day and headed to a nearby guesthouse that I’ve used before. Leaving Cleofaye to rest, I enjoyed a brisk walk in the chilly evening air as the sun set – just what I needed after all that sitting. The next day’s bus journey was no better – although it was free from dust, as we were on tarmac roads, it took much longer than normal due to waiting at one point to take on board passengers from a bus that had broken down. They packed their luggage and the people strategically into the bus until there was no space for anyone to move, with aisle seats all folded down and occupied as well as people standing. After some of them had got off, an evangelist got on and started to preach – he said a lot of good, true stuff, but he somehow missed communicating the essence of the gospel of grace, and I was glad when he stopped as he was standing right next to me, shouting over the sound of the bus’s engine, with his spittle occasionally landing on my face.

Evening walk in Njombe

We decided to be kind to ourselves, after we had alighted at Mbeya’s out-of-town bus stand and made ourselves comfortable (we’d not had a toilet stop since we left over 6 hours earlier), by getting a bajaj (motorised rickshaw) to take us directly to our different homes, rather than getting on yet another small bus. It was with relief that I finally crossed the threshold – home at last. Despite the rigours of travel, I had enjoyed the trip: fun conversations with colleagues, the beauty of the lake and hills, the lush vegetation (in contrast to Mbeya’s increasingly brown and dusty landscape as dry season progresses), and the privilege of helping others discover more of the wonderful truths of God’s Word. Thank you, God; please continue to work in these communities to transform hearts and lives through your Word.