Happy Christmas

Christmas Blog,

Greetings all,

It is currently around 37 degrees and it feels odd to think that it’s almost Christmas, as I would normally be well wrapped up at this time of year, not putting on Sun tan cream. The village is becoming more populated as people are returning home and a small Christmas tree has been erected at the front of Church, although it looks somewhat out of place.

One good thing about the increase in temperature is the decrease in mosquitos, at one point I was getting ready to take down my mosquito net. However one night whilst asleep I felt something on my foot, which was sticking out of the mosquito net and looked up to see a rat, the result was a flailing of legs, yet I am proud to say that I didn’t scream. Needless to say the mosquito net has remained in place as a rodent net.

Since school broke up I’ve been working for Steve (the missionary who owns the compound I live on). The work has involved helping build a new house to accommodate medical teams and transporting a 40ft container with a 20ft truck. The School exams all went well with some signs of improvement, but nothing amazing. Now that more people are returning to the village for holidays, football practices have become frequent, yet I am struggling to really get to know any of the guys who aren’t in the school very well and don’t know how to go about talking about the gospel with them, so any prayers (or ideas) regarding that would be much appreciated. The team was getting ready to play another local village however the other team backed out for some reason, I said it was because they heard I was playing but Jamus and the other guys didn’t seem too convinced. The language lessons with Jamus have been going well and we recently translated the Apostles creed together into Lopit (the name of the language) as I felt that the church might benefit from it, as the beliefs of those who attend can at times be dubious. Having spoken with one of he pastors he has agreed that we can introduce it the Sunday after Christmas, I pray that it will be helpful.

I was recently troubled by the question of whether I should move into the Village or not. Right now the compound I live on is on the edge of the Village and I don’t really get to live among the people 24/7. However I was uncertain whether I would be able to hack it. There are often weddings and funerals in the village, which last 3 days and involve a lot of drums through the night, those of you who know me well know that I don’t function too well without sleep, so I decided to stay put. I am going to try and focus on working with a group of young guys who live on the Africa Inland Church Compound and hope that if I can strengthen their faith, that they could be the ones to help the other villagers. From what I have seen the Majority of people here see white missionaries as a way to get money or advance technology, not as bringers of good news. So my hope is that they will listen to their converted brothers. Prayers that I could get alongside the guys and see what God wants me to do out here would be helpful.

I am sad to say that since my last blog my roommate Adam has returned to Germany, I am grateful for having the time to get to know him. Meanwhile my other roommate Elijah has been having an eventful time. It was about 3 weeks ago that Ellen Fox an American Missionary living up in the village came down for dinner, once dinner was finished, because it was Dark Elijah and I took Ellen back up to her house. On the way we bumped into a Local girl who was about 20 I would say. After introducing herself she followed us for a short while, she then took Elijah by the arm and began to Serenade him with a Song that I didn’t fully understand as my Language isn’t good enough, however the gist of it was obvious enough. After walking like this for two minutes with Ellen and I in hysterics and Elijah looking very scared the girl stopped singing and halted, then turning to Elijah she asked him for soap, as another missionary later said it was quite a cheap date.

I hope you all have a happy Christmas,

Yours in Christ,

Chris

Greetings from South Sudan,

I’m sorry that these blogs don’t come at a consistent rate, I am writing them when I have enough to talk about and when the time is available. I should probably start of where I left the last one, with the medical mission. The trip to the village went smoothly (not physically) as there were no checkpoints along the way; the Government has made checkpoints illegal, yet the news doesn’t seem to have reached the guys out here. The team consisted of Dr. Hopper, Steve, my 2 housemates and myself. We stayed on the Church compound in the Village almost the whole time. Whilst Dr. Hopper would see the locals we would do the pharmacy for the medication he prescribed. The most common things we gave out were Medication for Malaria, Worms and painkillers for back and Neck problems in women.  You normally see pictures in the Oxfam pamphlets and other things of women carrying stuff on their heads but I never realized how heavy it was, the stuff weighs about 35kg and they have to walk with it for miles every day. I offered to help a woman the other day on my way to school by taking her load on my head, about 200m later there was sweat pouring down my face and I couldn’t go any further, the women thought it was very funny. You’ll probably all remember that Cheryl Cole recently got Malaria and the tabloids made a big deal out of it, but sensible people said it wasn’t that serious, in light of that guess how many children died of Malaria in this village in the last year. The truth of the matter is I don’t know, but in the week I was at this village 5 children died of Malaria, a little higher than normal, but that’s still pretty crazy. The problem is that even though there are medical stations, the Malaria will develop so quickly in infants that there is no time to save them. Life for Women and children isn’t that much fun. Dr. Hopper’s work out here undoubtedly makes a big difference and he was an inspiring guy to work with. He returned to America last week, however due to new laws about flights he had to be rushed to Kenya to catch his flight. The government has imposed that all flights to and from South Sudan must go through Juba, which will make work out here a lot more difficult for all missionaries, so any prayers that the government will become more lenient would be appreciated.

Moving onto more cheerful news, I have found a new language helper, his name is Jamus. Jamus is one of the students in my third class; he is 22 and has one wife and two children. He is the smiliest guy you have ever met and holds your hand when you walk with him (it’s a sign of friendship out here). I thank you for all your prayers and hope that I will begin to improve in the language again.

It is now the last week of school and the students have exams all week before breaking up (The school year starts in January so this will be like their summer holiday). I am hopeful that there will be some improvement in their grades, but I am trying not to get my hopes up too much. We are trying to get a goat for school Christmas lunch; as long as I don’t get the brains (a delicacy) I am happy. After school finishes I have 7 weeks “off” during which I will be working for Steve doing construction work on the compound and around the place. There are now a couple of roosters on the compound and Steve reckons one of them will be fat enough for Christmas Lunch. There is some concern about how well the school will run next year, we will have another class coming in from the primary school, however we have no more classrooms and are already in need of more teachers. So any prayers that things will be sorted out would be very helpful.

As Christmas approaches the dry season is starting and the heat is now reaching the high 30’s. All of the green mountains will soon be parched, not because of the heat, but because the villagers burn the greenery for animistic reasons (they have been advised many times by missionaries not to do it). So I am making the most of the beautiful scenery whilst it lasts. 

I wish you all the best wherever you are and thank you for reading,

Yours in Christ,

Chris.

Treats from Torit (Torits) 

S3

Dr Hopper

The Medical Trip

Dr Hopper and Steve

The women I tried to help

Settled

Hi there,

Thanks for taking the time to visit my blog. Time is flying by pretty quickly and I am now well settled out here in Sudan. Tomorrow I am setting out to a distant village to help a medical team that has been staying here for a week. They have been doing daily visits to neighboring villages but the one we are going to tomorrow is a distance away and will involve camping for three days. The tribe there is supposedly steeped in animistic beliefs about spirits. I’m quite excited to go and will tell you all about it next time. This trip does mean I will be missing two days of teaching but the headmaster, Joshua, is keen for me to go. The teaching is now going very well and I thank you for any prayers, the first class are becoming more talkative and now that I am covering topics that I have taught them from the beginning things are getting easier. Both the second and third class have also are becoming easier to teach which perhaps means I am getting better at teaching. Either way things at the school are going well, during the lunchtime devotionals I have begun to teach about some of the great men in the bible and the distinctive characteristics that are born of their faith as most of the school is made up of men. Last week I spoke on Abrahams willingness to sacrifice Isaac for God and today I spoke on Noahs obedience to God in building the ark, both talks seemed to catch the attention of some students whilst others seem to use the time for a nap.

One thing that has now been started in the school is debating, Ellen (a fellow missionary teacher) and Joshua had started it a week ago and I volunteered to help out, so last Friday we had the first proper debate on whether or not girls should be given an education. The responses of students were interesting with the school be split 50/50 with arguments ranging from it’s a waste of money because the women will be making babies by about 16 to it being a human right to get an education. I think that debating will help these students to think things through instead of just sticking to their old traditions for the sake of it.

I am now beginning to help Steve out with the Sunday evening bible study for the young men, we are studying the basics of faith; it is going well although sometimes I am uncertain whether they understand everything. To those of you reading this who are not Christians, I appreciate that a lot of this will sound either odd or alien. If this is the case, I would encourage you to look into the basics of the Christian faith, for to not explore the possibility of God is stupid. I would not call the R.E lessons we are given in school a proper exploration of faith either (the R.E teacher reading this will have to forgive me), rather I would advise reading something like C. S. Lewis’s book, “mere Christianity,” which as he says himself is not written to convert anyone to his own position, but was written to explain and defend the Christian faith to an unbelieving person. 

Moving onto things unrelated to faith, this past weekend I was in Torit, a village roughly 50km away which takes about 3.5 hours to get to due to the condition of the roads, for a break from work. I went with my fellow housemate Elijah, as he needed to get a Visa. He has been in Lohutok for 6 months but has never had a visa, partly because he is a minor and didn't think he would need one and also because there are no airports, just airstrips, also what with this being a new country he was uncertain about the whole visa situation. Anyway, we arrived in Torit and went to the makeshift immigration office and ten minutes later were about to leave with a visa when the man noticed Elijah had flown out of America 6 months ago. From there on we were charged a high fee, chosen by the men in the office. Whilst Elijah was sitting there, I had to go and get the money for these men. About two hours later Elijah was free to go and his fee paid. The day wasn’t a complete waste though as I managed to get chicken for lunch at Hotel Torit, which is like the Hotel Rwanda of Sudan and buy a crate of blackcurrant and pineapple Fanta (soda)!  

I would ask for any prayers regarding the Medical trip over the next 4 days, the Sunday evening bible study and also that I could find a new language helper/teacher as my last one has gone to university in Juba and hence my local dialect isn’t progressing.

Thank you for reading,

Yours in Christ,

Chris.

p.s. I think that if you enter your e-mail into the little bar (it might say e-mail address) under the header, you will be automatically e-mailed when I upload a post.

Adjusting to life in Sudan

Greetings all,

First of all I would like to apologize for the delay between my last post and this one, the internet was down for over a week and this is the first chance I have had to get down to writing everything that has happened since the last post.

A good place to start would probably be to tell you how the teaching in the secondary school has been going. I should first of all mention that I got the age range of my students wrong in a previous post. It was sometime last week I was talking with another teacher about the older students and she revealed that my oldest student was in fact 58; I suppose his walking stick propped against the wall should have been a clue.  She also revealed to me that out of the 40 or so students in the second and third classes only a handful weren’t married and quite a few had children. The next lesson I taught after learning all this was a little more intimidating than when I had taken my first class. The one thing that is noticeable however is how keen some of the older students are to learn even if an education may not benefit them too much at their current ages. It makes me realize how much we in the west take our educations for granted, these guys didn’t have the opportunity to learn at a young age but had to endure the wars that have burdened Sudan for the past 50 years. The lands to the sides of the roads from Torit (the closest town) to Lohutok still have numerous mines on them which people keep clear of and guns are a common sight, when I walk to school in the morning I will greet local farmers and shepherds walking out to work with AK-47’s slung over their shoulders which they carry in case of cattle-raiders or for hunting. The fact that the older students received very little education in their youth makes teaching the second and third class slow and difficult at times, not to mention their first language isn’t English so certain words such as simultaneous (as in simultaneous equations) have to be explained which proves tricky. However, they are all eager and very bubbly so even though the lessons prove testing I enjoy them. In comparison, the first class are the polar opposite, they are nearly all beneath 18 and quick to learn, but are not so keen and are silent for the majority of the lesson. A few of them model themselves on western rappers and will come in a lot like our teenagers with their trousers falling off their bums and big studs in their ears. Their attitudes make teaching the first class quite difficult at times. However, they all play football on the field in the evening and when I play with them we get along really well so I pray that I could enthuse them to learn and get to know them better. Any prayers for the second and third classes and patience in teaching them would be appreciated as well as prayers that the first class teaching will improve.

Every day before lunch at the school there is a devotional period where we have some singing and a talk from one of the teachers. Since 4 of the 6 teachers are seasoned missionaries the talks are all pretty good. The singing involves a lot of clapping, but the Sudanese peoples voices aren’t quite as good as those of other African nations, but their enthusiasm is normally just as good. The principal of the school deemed that I should have the Wednesday devotional to give talks. Last Wednesday was my first; I chose to speak on pride because although I am by no means the perfect person to be speaking on the topic I thought that the talk might be beneficial to some of the first years.  At the end of the talk a fellow teacher called Ellen Fox said she thought the talk was very good, however, she is the only other person whose first language is English in the school, so whether the students of the School fully understood my talk I am uncertain. I am however grateful for the opportunity to speak to these guys about Gods word.

Since last speaking to you, I have attended the local church twice; both times roughly 25 people have attended, about 4 of those being students from the school. Pastor Tito who had accompanied me to Lohutok from Torit delivered the first week’s sermon. He is about 6ft 3, well built and his enthusiasm for the gospel is a real encouragement. His talk was good, however, last Sunday a visiting Pastor from Juba (the capital of South Sudan) gave a talk on tithes. Throughout the whole sermon I was pulling my hair out as the pastor was preaching prosperity gospel claiming that when we give tithes to God he will multiply our earthly wealth over and over. Later that afternoon I went to the Anglican Inland Church compound to speak to the pastors about the issue. The only pastor present was Tito and after telling him my concerns he informed me that he and the permanent pastor here in Lohutok after the sermon had talked to the visiting pastor about the sermon telling him it was prosperity gospel. Tito informed me that prosperity gospel is currently a big problem in Africa and that he rebukes it whenever he sees it, however sound doctrinal preaching will not be present everywhere due to education levels and the fact pastor training isn’t as thorough as it is in the west, I suppose only time will change that.

Last weekend the governor for the Eastern Equatoria of South Sudan came to visit Lohutok. The whole village turned out to greet him at the meeting place on the road up to Lohutok under a big tree. There was a lot of singing and dancing and some of the guys were dressed up. I didn’t stay for a lot of it as the main duty of the day was talking about what the village needed from the new government and the people here seem to have a way of saying what should be said in a minute in an hour. The senior school requested funding so they could pay teachers and set themselves up more securely instead of depending upon missionaries, however there plea seems unlikely to receive anything substantial. It was interesting to see the seeds of a new government being sown, however, how much this new government will be able to do I am dubious about and pray that no corruption will spring up.  

I have seen a fair bit of wildlife out here in Lohutok already, things like; geckos, lizards, scorpions, bats, snakes, ant mounds and cows (these two are on the football pitch), termites in the house (they make pretty patterned tunnels up the wall out of mud), there are also a lot of interesting insects and butterflies out here, apparently no zoologist (I think that’s the right term) has ever been to look at the wildlife in this region, so it is likely that there are uncategorized insects and small creatures here. I have been told that baboons and monkeys are very common higher up in the mountains, so some time I will have to venture there to have a look.

The two guys I’m living with are proving to be good fun and enjoyable company. Adam took me for a motorbike lesson on the airstrip here last week and I’m hoping to go again soon, but the pair of them are normally quite busy working here on the compound. Elijah and I cut our hair this week, Elijah made a mess of mine so I insisted with the help of Adam on making patterns in the side of his, which he is now rather fond of.  The food is beginning to become slightly monotonous here at the house, but compared to the school meals of just beans or boiled leaves it is gourmet.

I would really appreciate any prayers regarding teaching, but also that I may become more integrated with the villagers as so far I haven’t ventured too far into the village or made too many non-school connections.

Yours in Christ,

Chris

The School

The road up to the School

The Governors visit

Elijah's  Hair

driving on the airstrip

Welcome to Lohutok

I am writing to you from my new home at the base of Lohutok village. The last week has been pretty hectic so this week’s blog will probably be a little longer than last weeks. The day after writing last weeks blog I departed for Torit, South Sudan with a missionary couple to visit the South Sudan AIM Headquarters where all of the missionaries in South Sudan were meeting for a couple of days. The plane to Torit was tiny, it was six seated and the back seat where I was sitting was pretty cramped. It was great fun for the first hour or so until I got a little uncomfortable. The noise of it all was so loud that you needed to put on ear covers and couldn’t really have too much of a conversation with anyone. The airstrip at Torit was pretty good in comparison to some of the others I’ve seen; it was a dirt strip where the locals have their football games. On arrival, I had been expecting to have to go through some kind of security check to get visas and stuff, but there was no airport or any officials. The AIM compound was right next to the strip and as soon as I got off some of the missionaries were waiting to take my bags into the house. Later that day I went into the town to sort out paperwork and was taken to a decorated cargo container where the immigration office was. I now have a South Sudan pass for 3 months because South Sudan doesn’t yet do visas. It was at Torit that I met Cath Bezold (I think you can find her testimony on youtube but I’m not sure) a South African Missionary that will be working with me in Lohutok from time to time. All of the guys there were really nice and whilst for them it was a retreat from all the work they’ve been doing, I was keen to get going and do something, but hearing them talking about different problems out here will probably help me out over the next couple of months. Whilst staying there I was sleeping outside in a tent alongside some other guys. It was during the second night that the biggest storm I’ve ever seen hit at about 1 in the morning. According to the locals it was the biggest they’d seen in a decade. Two trees on the compound were ripped out of the ground and the tents we were staying in were battered. I abandoned the tent about 15 minutes into the storm as the sides had decided to no longer be waterproof and my mattress was turning into a sponge for the rain. I ended up sleeping on the living room floor sharing a mattress with another missionary. The next morning I must have had about 15 new bites, but was grateful to be dry. We spent the morning repairing the compound and drying stuff out (I don’t seem to be doing too well with the weather so far). On Monday myself, Cath, 3 guys working for Cath and a local pastor called Tito set off for Lohutok. Cath was somewhat worried about the road checks, as she has had bad experiences with them as they can sometimes be drunk and/or demand money. However, everything went very smoothly, except for the roads, which are extremely bumpy, people weave across the road choosing whichever path looks best. I arrived in Lohutok just in time for Lunch. I am staying with a South African/German family called the Matusiks; there are 5 young children (4 girls and a boy). They work for a German missionary organization called Diguna who have close links with AIM. Diguna set up their own large compounds and try to be self sufficient opposed to AIM who normally try to live among the locals, therefore the compound here grows a lot of food and has a big workshop full of vehicles including a number of motorbikes belonging to Stephan Matusik. Stephan is a pretty impressive guy; he has served as a South African Paratrooper, speaks four languages and seems full of stories. However, after two days of being here he left with his family as they are attending a Diguna conference for two weeks. I am living in a small house on their compound with two other guys, a 16 year old American called Elijah and a 22 year German bike mechanic called Adam, who are helping Stephan out here. The setups quite nice, but I’m beginning to get bored with the same staple foods, although we did make pizza last night as a treat. I started teaching in the school yesterday; the secondary school has 3 classes each of which has roughly 15 or so students. I am teaching all 3 physics and maths, they are a long way behind. The students who have been there for about two and a half years have only completed roughly a terms worth of work and from my lessons yesterday I’m uncertain whether they’ve understood what they have been taught. On the whole, I think my first day of teaching went fairly well and there are signs of real promise from the first class who are all of a younger age (the older classes range from 17 to about 60). I am just happy that I didn’t break down at all. The one thing which did strike me as extremely impressive was the speed of the arithmetic’s, they have no calculators and therefore have had lots of practice with calculating sums in their head, so I would say something like, “ therefore the answer is 2600 times 0.48” and in a matter of seconds one of them would shout out, “1248.” It’ll be interesting to see how they handle logarithms and other mathematical problems without calculators if we get to them. At the moment the school is pretty stretched for teachers, there are about 6 of us and pretty much everyone is taking two subjects regardless of whether they are their strong suits. I haven’t yet been up into the village itself (the school is also at the base) as I haven’t yet had reason to do so although I hope to venture there at some point. The villagers are very friendly and wherever you go there are greetings of “hello teacher,” or “mung,” which is the local word for hello and seems to be repeated over and over when you meet someone. One big plus is that beside our compound there is a rough football field and every night all of the guys from the village come and play and people come and watch, so far I’ve played the once and did alright, but my lack of Lohutok vocabulary was a hindrance. I hope that it’ll be a useful way to get to know all the guys here.

I am now off to meet my language helper, Joshua, for an hour so.  So, as they say here: homo bino (thank you very much) for reading.

Chris

-Saturday 1^st October

the plane to Torit

The runway

The guys cutting up one of the fallen trees

the wet and broken tents

view of the mountain on which Lohutok is situated from the compound.

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First Week In Africa

Hi there, this is my first ever blog so you'll have to forgive me if it isn't up to scratch. For the last week I have been in Uganda (which is just below Sudan) at the Africa Inland Mission guesthouse doing orientation and language lessons. There has been a range of guests here during my stay ranging from an American Church group who were staying for just a week through to old missionaries who were getting ready to head back to Canada for retirement after over 30 years of work out here. Needless to say the dinner time conversations haven't been too boring.

The AIM Guesthouse

My first day here wasn't that eventful as I was a little tired after travelling for about 15 hours and decided to spend most the day sleeping and stayed indoors. The next day, myself and one other arrival, a guy called Connor from Northern Ireland had to go into Kampala (Uganda's capital) and exchange some money into the local currency and get new sim cards for our phones. We were escorted by one of the AIM secretary's, an African lady called Rhona who could show us around. Travelling into Kampala involved taking a small motorbike called a boda boda down to the main road and then taking a taxi. The reason the motorbikes are called boda bodas is because they were initially used as taxi's from the border of Kenya to Uganda which used to be over half a mile apart. 

Driving on the main road into Kampala was quite scary as there doesn't seem to be too much road safety out here and the bumpers on the front of cars aren't there just for show. When we got into Kampala we got everything sorted out and then went for lunch in a shopping centre, as soon as we sat down about 8 waiters from different restaurants piled in all around us and started showing us there menus persistently trying to make us purchase their food. Having finished lunch we proceeded back to the taxi-rank when it started to rain a little bit. Rhona said that we should probably head towards some cover, but I thought that she was being a little silly and said that it wouldn't take that long to get to the taxi-rank. About a minute later it began to really rain, these drops weighed about five times as much as English ones and fell twice as fast stinging your face. The whole city seemed to come to a stand still as all pedestrians stopped under the shelter at the sides of shops and the cars came to a standstill as streams of water gathered on the road. We took cover. The rain only lasted about 15 minutes but so much water had fallen in that time that the streets were covered in puddles. Whilst making our way to the taxi rank Connors flip flop was ripped off his foot by a stream on the side of the road and travelled about 100 yards before I could retrieve it for him under the wheel of a car stuck in traffic, the lady inside looked rather surprised to see a mzungu (white person) outside her car waving a flip flop. 

That was probably the most action packed couple of hours I've had here so far. Other than that the only time I've been out was to go to church on Sunday, which wasn't too bad, the singing was great fun lasting about an hour although i didn't feel a little awkward with my hands as all the Ugandans had theirs in the air or swinging around. The sermon then lasted another hour or so and was relatively sound, although it is very different to our English sermons which have a much clearer structure and point to them. 

The other days have been spent learning language skills that I'm going to need over the next couple of months. I had expected to fly into South Sudan on Tuesday but due to problem with flights I am now going to be leaving early tomorrow morning. Prayers regarding safe travel and being able to integrate well into the village would be appreciated.


-Wednesday 21st Sept








Pictures of taxi rank and mosquito net.

What A.I.M is doing in the central regions of Africa

Move Against the Fear from AIM On-Field Media