Lots of goodbyes

I’m writing this post from the Jo-burg airport, killing a long layover on my way out of South Africa for the last time. (For now.) It’s over.

I had to say goodbye to lots of people these last few days and weeks. That’s not an easy thing to do, especially when so many of them don’t quite understand just how far away it is I am going.

In lieu of any sustained reflection on the experience or the departure, I’m just going to post some pictures with a few captions to show you some of the people that have been in my life these past few years.

There was my Bible study group, which had a good-bye potluck for me.
Joe, Zama, and I were the only guys there that night.
There was Yoliswa, my fabulous Xhosa tutor these past two years. I’m still looking for conversation partners to keep my Xhosa up in the U.S.
There was my friend Adam, the only white medical student in Mthatha.
My missionary friend Matt came up for one last weekend in Mthatha. As luck would have it, when he left I had to push his car in my pajamas to pop the clutch.
There were professionals around Mthatha I’ve come to now in the course of my daily work. One is Sister Nellie, who is the driving force at Ngangalizwe Health Centre. After a relationship that was occasionally contentious, she was surprisingly magnanimous the last time I saw her.
There was also the deputy principal of Nozuko High School, who has been on me as long as I’ve known him to help him raise money to build a hall at the school so they can host events and generate income for the school. He works so hard with so little reward. I happened to show up during a parents’ meeting to vote on new members of the parents’ advisory board. He wanted me to run for the board and didn’t seem to understand that I was telling him I was leaving. He at least insisted I vote. I have never cast a less-informed ballot.
In Itipini, I had time to lead more round of morning prayers with the pre-school children.
Then I set out to visit all the many people in Itipini who have shaped my life, like the Nophondo clan that was busy washing their clothes when I went to see them…
...and the crowd in one of the shebeens…
...and a former TB patient…
...and the daughter of a staff member who died while I’ve been in Itipini…
...and a woman whose name I love to say, Nomadamazana Malangeni, who is happily lost in a mental fog most days...
...and a current TB patient, who tried to hide his alcohol behind his foot and his cigarette in his hand when he saw me. (You can see the smoke coming from his hand.)…
...and Johnson, one of our watchmen…
...and Zanemvula, one of the few older men in Itipini I genuinely like and respect. I was so touched when his daughter died suddenly last year. As he is one of the taller people in Itipini, I gave him all the clothes I had decided to leave behind. I was a bit embarrassed I had three boxes worth of pants, shirts, sweaters, shoes, and much more to give away and my luggage was still way over weight. He liked it though…
...and then finally the staff, who gathered for a goodbye on my last afternoon.
I’m using the time in the airport to polish off a few more posts I’ve been meaning to write for a while so keep scrolling down to read more about these last few days in Itipini.

“She turned me into a newt.”

The story I told recently about the young man who burned down the shack of one of our staff members because he thought she was a witch and had cast a spell on his girlfriend got me thinking about witches and witchcraft. We dismiss that sort of thing in the rich world but, as this incident shows, it is a very real and salient consideration in places like Itipini. I started asking around among my cultural interpreters and here’s some of what I learned.

One cultural interpreter sighed when I asked her about the situation and explained that young men are always blaming old women for their problems and doing so with the language of witchcraft. One other young man in Itipini who suffers from severe alcohol- and drug-induced dementia even blames his mother for his troubles but has said he won’t harm her because he loves her.

In my limited knowledge of witchcraft, which, as the title of this post indicates, stems mainly from one scene in a Monty Python movie, it seems that it is always the old women who get the blame so this news didn’t strike me as unusual. What was interesting is that it is the young men in Itipini making the accusations. I wonder if this has anything to do with how relatively powerless the young men are. They can’t find steady jobs, they can’t get married, and they aren’t educated so they can’t get positions of (legal) power in society. In contrast, the women, especially the older women, are doing all the work that keeps society functioning - raising the grandchildren and great-grandchildren produced by these young men, working long hours at informal jobs to keep the young men fed so they can spend their money on alcohol, and so much else that keeps everything ticking along. It struck me as one more indicator that a major need in South Africa is a re-conceptualization of masculinity and what it means to be a man. (As I’ve noted before, that’s not my job.)

One cultural interpreter explained that she believed that a person could acquire HIV in their sleep, independent of sex or bodily-fluid transmission, if someone else cast a spell on them. This woman is otherwise well-spoken, intelligent, and well-educated on HIV, which she has. She is also devoutly Christian and saw no apparent contradiction in her beliefs. When I mentioned this conversation to another friend in Mthatha, he noted that it is another reminder that HIV is not just a medical condition but also a spiritual one. I hadn’t thought about it in those terms before.

What was most stunning to me, however, was what I learned about how beliefs in witchcraft affect our work in Itipini. Two of our staff are responsible for what is loosely called “home-based care.” When people live alone and are too sick to take care of themselves, these two older women bring them food to help them back to health. This seems like a perfectly harmless and uncontroversial thing. Two jobs are created and sick people get the nutritional assistance they need. That is about the amount of intellectual energy I’ve put into thinking about this program.

So it came as something of a shock to me when, in conversation about witches, one of my cultural interpreters said, “You know, people don’t like it when Elsie and Mrs. Nani [our two staff] bring them food. They think it is doctored and they don’t want to eat it because they think it is making them sick.” She stressed that not everyone thought this way but even if some people think like that, it is a major obstacle to the success of home-based care. Sick people need the food so the medicine for say, HIV or TB, can be effective. Whatever the reason, if they won’t eat it then that’s a problem.

But how do you solve it? Is it the fault of our two staff members that they are looked upon with suspicion? Should we take a job away from two responsible and hard-working staff because of the effect they have on the success of the program? How do we convince sick people to eat the food they need, regardless of where it comes from?

I often talk about the obstacles posed by cultural differences but I realize I don’t always specify what I mean by the phrase. This is one of many examples of the obstacles that are a constant in cross-cultural work.

More obstacles

I found myself thinking a lot in these last few weeks about the many obstacles to education that students in Itipini face. It’s June so that means it is time for mid-term exams, which stretch over three weeks and give students some time off during the course of the school day. That, in turn, meant I saw them more frequently than normal during the day.

One student, Siziwe, lives with her family in a shack just above the clinic. On a few occasions, I had to head that way for other reasons and poked my head in to say hello.

One time I found her warming her hands over the dying ember's of the morning's fire.
Another time, I found her lying in her sister’s bed, bundled up in a blanket in the middle of the morning.
A third time, I found her sitting in the sun with her sister, her sister’s child, and a neighbour’s baby.
Each time I saw her, I asked when her next exam was. But I didn’t quite know how to ask the question that was most pressing: how come you’re lying in bed when you should be studying?

On one trip, I asked Siziwe to show me her bed and she pointed to this tiny thing, which she shares with her younger brother. She can’t sleep very well there. I wondered if that had something to do with the answer to my question. If she can’t sleep well at night, perhaps she needs to spend time during the day catching up on that sleep. And if she’s always cold because there’s no insulation in the shack and there’s not enough blankets, then maybe she needs to spend time during the day warming up. (No one ever believes me when I tell them this but it gets quite cold here during the winter, especially at night.)

I remember how much I studied for exams in high school and college. But I never realized that what allowed me to spend so much time on studying were things I took for granted, like a comfortable bed, thick walls, and a working furnace, among much else.

Trying to pull back

There’s these two brothers in Itipini I’ve mentioned in a previous monthly e-mail.
On the left is Zanethemba; on the right is his older brother Lizwi. They aren’t always so dour (well, Lizwi is). Here’s Zanethemba in a lighter moment.
Zanethemba came across my radar first back in March when he tested positive for tuberculosis and also had a low CD4 count. He was pretty sick. A few months later, Lizwi came in with the same set of symptoms more or less. He tested positive for TB as well, which is not surprising given that they both share this shack, which is about seven feet on a side.
That was where the story ended until a little while ago. It is nothing unusual in Itipini - people have HIV, people get TB. In this case, they just happen to be brothers and live together.

It turns out, however, that Lizwi has a few children, at least three, in fact, none older than 10. One of them is Siphisihle, the young girl who had TB when I first arrived and whom I invested a lot of energy in then. They had been living with their mother but she dumped them on Lizwi a few weeks back because she figured Lizwi was about to die and she was going to move on to a man who could earn some money. In addition, Lizwi’s wife’s oldest daughter dumped her young baby with Lizwi and took off. That daughter happens to be Tunyeswa, whom just a few weeks ago shocked me with the sharp deterioration in her condition.

Here are all four children.
At one point, the youngest of the three siblings had a very bad lip infection and couldn’t eat or even really open her mouth until the antibiotics went to work. But the children look after each other and care for one another. Here’s Siphisihle and her younger brother Siphamandla.
So now there are four children and two adult men living in a tiny little shack with only two beds just a few feet apart. Neither man apparently knows how to be a father and Zanethemba can’t always remember all the names of his nieces and nephews, mainly because I don’t think he’s taken the time to learn them. Lizwi would like nothing more than for us to figure out a way to get them into a home someplace that could look after them.

There’s all kinds of reasons to be concerned but one I think about often is the potential spread of TB in that shack, especially as Siphisihle has already had it. The TB guidelines call for us to test the people a patient lives with but children need a Mantoux test and in order to get that we have to get them all to a certain clinic on one day of the week. Given how hard it was to get the one child with the lip infection to take his pills, it is easy to get exhausted simply thinking about the logistics of organizing those tests.

We’ve repeatedly called the social worker for help and guidance. Nothing. (Remember how I said the government has an informal relationship with Itipini?) Siphisihle and her older sister go to school. The younger children hang around the shack all day. It is cold this time of year and they don’t always have a lot, or even any, clothes. Lizwi and Zanethemba get food because they have TB and it is easy to include the children in that and check on them every day. The greatest source of hope in this situation is that the children actually do a reasonably good job caring for each other and are in good spirits.

But there are no easy solutions and I want to scream at the complexity of the situation. Tunyeswa has disappeared since she last came in looking so sick. I’m concerned about her health but also about her siblings and child. If I ask her about her children when I see her, will that make her less willing to listen to my advice about her health? I want Zanethemba and Lizwi to get better (and they are, especially Zanethemba, who has improved in leaps and bounds) but I don’t want to absolve them of all responsibility because they’re sick.

And in all of this, I know I need to hold back and not get too involved because I’ll be gone before the situation begins to improve, if, in fact, it ever does.

This is what incarnational ministry gets you. You learn all about the contours of a situation, which is a blessing of sorts, to begin to realize the true complexity of life. But you don’t necessarily get any closer to a solution. You just have to hope that knowledge of the situation is good enough. It feels particularly unsatisfactory.

Hard to find time to do much writing lately but I am taking plenty of pictures

Much like the Beatles, my last concert was on a rooftop

Bossy

Some of you might remember the story of Pakama, a woman who about this time last year was very sick and on death’s door. She has since got the right combination of pills and is thriving.

When Pakama was sick, a dominant characteristic of her personality was her strong desire to live. She was always directing me and telling me what to do, how to push her wheelchair, when she had another appointment, which pills she had to take when, and on and on and on. I’m convinced that it was that will to live that helped her survive when I’ve seen many other people in her position die.

Now that she is better, I see a lot less of her and her bossiness is a lot less endearing, for instance, when she comes in the clinic and cuts everyone in line. I often thought she was only pushy with me but then I watched the other day as the HIV support group in Itipini set to work planting their part of the garden.

Pakama is at the top of the photo in the dark shirt, taking a sort of supervisory and managerial role while everyone else works.
She closely supervises this woman.
Missed a spot!
And another!
And only at one point does she deign to bend over and help out, though being careful not to get her shoes dirty.
I find this series of photos hilarious and stood on the rooftop and watched her work for sometime but that may only be because I know her so well.

No winners in this situation

Itipini is what is known as an “informal settlement.” The organs of government in the municipality have an informal relationship with the community. Most of the time, I think they’d prefer to think it doesn’t exist. That had tragic results this week.

On Wednesday, there was a young resident of Itipini wandering around with a giant bush knife, threatening to kill one of the employees of the Community Project, whom we call Mrs. Nani.
The young man claimed that Mrs. Nani was a witch and had put a spell on his girlfriend. (Snippets of Monty Python immediately flashed through my head when I heard this and I wanted to go searching for a duck. Then I realized how serious things were.)

I know this young man reasonably well and I also know his girlfriend. She is hands-down the most well put together young woman in Itipini. I can’t see how anyone could think she has been bewitched.

On Wednesday, the young man was mentally unwell and drunk. (In addition to the bush knife, he was walking around with a paint can full of home brew.) Understandably, he was making a lot of people nervous. So we called the police. No answer. (Really!) I took one of the pre-school teachers, Nthantisi, and went to drive to the station. On the way, Nthantisi was very critical of the station we were going to and said they wouldn’t help us. Instead, she called the local emergency number. They answered the phone and promised to come right down. Unfortunately, they didn’t know where Itipini is. (These are the police! They know everything!) So we waited to show them the way. After five or ten minutes, I suggested we call again to see what was going on. The folks at the local emergency number said police officers from our local station were on their way. That was the same local station Nthantisi had just been criticizing. So we returned to Itipini to wait for them. They never showed up. Itipini is less than five minutes from their station.

Mrs. Nani didn’t go back to her home on Wednesday afternoon and slept at a friend’s place. I wondered as I went to bed that night if she would be alive on Thursday.

I was wrong, thankfully. She lived. But late on Wednesday, her shack went up in flames. Absolutely nothing was saved.
The fire department had shown up long after the place was beyond saving. When I arrived this morning, it was still smoldering.

On Thursday morning, the young man was still around. Evidently, the community had performed a little vigilante justice, as he had a bandage across his head and looked like he’d been beaten up. (Why do they always wait until after the fact instead of intervening beforehand?) But he was also quite docile so Jenny took him and Mrs. Nani to the local police station. The young man was arrested and Mrs. Nani made her complaint. But later he was released and is now back in Itipini. Why? Because there's no food at the police station to feed the prisoners.

I’m only tangentially involved in this situation but I get only marginal satisfaction from the outcome. Mrs. Nani lost her home. And the young man isn’t getting what he needs either. Clearly, he needs medical care, mainly psychiatric and substance-related. Jenny commented that he looked pretty pathetic as he was led away.

What kind of police station makes you come to them to get service? Where were the police officers who might have been able to prevent this? And given how much of a problem substance abuse is in Itipini, where are the people and programs to help address those issues?

People in Itipini don’t treat each other right all the time, it’s true. But it seems like the government never treats them the way they deserve.

Skipping School

A well-known obstacle to education in the developing world is attendance. Sometimes kids just don’t go to school and there’s no truant officer to make them. And oftentimes, they have legitimate reasons for not going.

Luleka, one of the students we support in high-school, missed a day of school because she had to take her younger sibling to the clinic. Their mother was busy taking their brother, who had just had a seizure, to the hospital. Luleka got the role because she’s the oldest daughter.

I don’t know the name of this student but her mother had to work in town one day, which meant the older child had to bring her younger sibling to the clinic and miss school in the process.

Xolelwa, the oldest child in this picture, is one of eight or nine daughters (I keep losing track) in a family. She’s also already an aunt several times over. The three children in this picture with her are a few of her nieces and nephews. I haven’t seen Xolelwa miss school because of these nieces and nephews but she spends a lot of time caring for them in the afternoon. I wonder what it’ll do to her back, having to carry them around from such a young age?

I used to get frustrated when I saw children we support not in school. Now, I just give a resigned sigh. I don’t know how money alone can solve a problem like this.

It's a tough life being six weeks old

Meaty Mission and Ministry

I was recently asked what I mean when I use the phrase “incarnational ministry.” Excellent question! Before I moved to Mthatha, I had heard that phrase a lot but never quite understood what it meant. Now it is the foundation of my ideas about mission.

Incarnate means to make flesh. (The -carn part of the word is from the Latin word for meat, hence the title of this post and the word carnival, to say goodbye to meat.) The Incarnation is when God became flesh and choose to live as a human. That’s why Jesus had the name Emmanuel - God is with us.

I consider my mission and ministry in Itipini to be incarnational because I have made a decision to share a particular existence with this group of people. As Jesus came from heaven to earth so I chose to come from North America to Mthatha and live in a place that was completely different to what I knew. (That’s about as far as the Jesus/Jesse analogy goes.)

Incarnational ministry also takes time. Jesus spent 30 years on earth before launching his public ministry. Maybe he was using that time to figure out how things worked and how best to calibrate his message. I’ve spent two years here and am still in the dark about so much.

Incarnational ministry is foundational to my thinking about mission because it is the necessary first step to everything that follows. You learn best about a place when you are incarnate there. You build relationships with people when you share a common existence. Such efforts towards reconciliation as you can manage are premised on this knowledge and these relationships. Nothing I have accomplished here could have happened if I had stayed in North America. That’s obvious, of course, but points to the importance of incarnational being and doing.

There are dangers, of course, not the least of which is that you is expose yourself to potential danger and harm. Choosing to be incarnate requires a certain willingness to take on a measure of vulnerability. Jesus did wind up on a cross after all, which definitely wouldn’t have happened if he had stayed in heaven. But if he had stayed in heaven, he also wouldn’t have been able to rise from the dead and rescue the world from sin and death. Life is full of trade-offs. If I had stayed in North America, I wouldn’t have ended up with countless gastrointestinal illnesses. But I also wouldn’t have had a transcendent and life-changing experience. On balance, I’d say I got the better half of the bargain.

Mission, as I’ve noted often, doesn’t just happen overseas. It happens wherever there are people yearning for right relationship with God and with each other. As we consider our mission opportunities, whether it is down the street or across the globe, the first question is the same: “how can we choose to be incarnate among these our brothers and sisters in Christ?” That is the foundation of rich and enriching mission.

The TB Express

Our tuberculosis caseload has increased notably in the last few months. I don’t know why. A lot of the new patients have had TB before, which means that this time they have to get 56 doses of a drug called streptomycin. The only way to give it is as an intramuscular injection. Since this is something I learned to do when I was an EMT, for the last several months it seems I have spent a good portion of my day jabbing patients - mainly older, smelly - men - in the butt with needles. (They are pretty funny about making sure I alternate cheeks.) Poor guys. Fifty-six is a lot of doses. But it works, for the most part. They get dramatically stronger and healthier over the course of the treatment.

A few patients aren’t strong enough to make it to the clinic on their own so I load up my syringes and make my rounds. I call it the TB express.

Mandla is first.He lives in one of the tiniest and most tumble-down shacks I’ve ever seen - and that’s saying a lot.
Mavis was always next.
She lived in this small shack.
But I learned yesterday that she died on Friday, shortly after I took that picture of her. Is it exploitative to post it here? Is it wrong to mention I was one of the last people to speak with her?

She was close to the end of her regimen of injections and just had not been improving at all. In retrospect, I imagine she had multi-drug resistant TB but she was never tested for that and, like many others, has slipped through the cracks of the health system despite our best efforts to prevent it.

Luxuries

It’s obvious that if you spend even a little time in a place like Itipini, you learn a lot about what you’ve taken for granted - running water, insulation, a roof that doesn’t leak, electricity, etc., etc., etc. But the more time I’ve spent getting to know the people here, the more I realize how many intangible things I’ve taken for granted.

I’ve already written about what I’ve noted about the capacity for leadership. Here’s a short list of a few more:

An environmental consciousness - It is appalling how people here treat the environment. Mthatha is a city full of litter. It never ceases to amaze how people casually throw away their trash with no thought of where it ends up. They throw it out the window of cars or taxis, they drop it wherever on the ground. I can’t stand it. The rivers and drainage ditches are clogged with trash.

Privacy - People here have so little private space. Going to the bathroom, bathing, changing, even sex are not private acts here. Personal details about a person - particularly concerning their health - are a lot less private here than I am used to.

Sabbath time - When your existence demands a huge amount of daily physical labour, the idea of taking a break is almost laughable. You simply can’t. It certainly puts new light on the fourth commandment as I imagine the Israelites were a lot closer to the people of Itipini than to us.

Planning ahead - When you don’t have a savings account or a steady job, planning any farther than the end of the day is difficult. The question is, how will I make it to tomorrow? Then the next day? Then the next? I’ve realized that planning my life one year at a time, as I have for the past several years, is a luxury.

I’m sure there are lots more but that’s a few for now.

Rhini

For the last two years, every few months or so I’ve headed down to Grahamstown (or Rhini in Xhosa) to visit my fellow YASC missionary, Matt. Matt and I arrived around the same time two years ago, he stayed on a second year, and is now, remarkably, staying for a third.

Here are Matt and I after church on Sunday morning.
He goes to church at the Mariya uMama weThemba monastery where he works after-school with these four boys.
Nomamiesi is the Xhosa woman who prepares the snack for the after-school program Matt works at. She also is raising several of the children in the program at a farm outside town. On every visit, Matt and I pay her a visit, drink LOTS of tea, practice our Xhosa, sing, and generally enjoy the benefits the surrogate motherhood.
On Sunday, I drove her and a few of her large brood to church.
I’ll miss Grahamstown.

Sitting and staring

Not my finest hour

About every month since January, a young man named Samkelo, not much older than me, has come into the clinic. He is HIV-positive with a low CD4 count and has tuberculosis. Each time he visited, he assured us he was in the preparation process for anti-retroviral drugs and taking his TB treatment daily at the nearby government clinic.

On Tuesday afternoon he came in and looked worse than he ever has before.
He had a miserable and hangdog expression. Just looking at him, I could tell he has not been taking TB treatment.

It turns out that Samkelo no longer lives in Itipini but in a newer settlement somewhat close to where I live. Like many of the other newer settlements around Mthatha, it doesn’t have a clinic so he was coming to us for help. I assumed he had taken a taxi across town. But even if he had done that he still would have had to walk at least a mile from the nearest taxi rank to the clinic.

I asked what time he had left that morning. He had left home at 5am. (It is winter here and it is very cold and dark at that hour.) “And you took a taxi?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I don’t have the money.”

I clocked the distance later that afternoon. It had taken him eight hours to walk eight kilometers to the clinic, stopping for frequent breaks along the way.

His financial situation implicates his health. The clinic where he needs to go for ARV prep and TB treatment is a 20-rand (about $2.50) round-trip fare from his home. (There’s a closer clinic that is a 10-rand round-trip fare but that would require a bureaucratic hassle to change the location of treatment.) Clearly, if he doesn’t have the money for a taxi to get to Itipini one day a month, he’s not going to be able to afford to get his treatment every day of the week. If there was a clinic within walking distance of his home (a settlement that is home to tens of thousands of people), perhaps he wouldn’t have ended up in such poor health. But there’s not.

Since his home is on my way home, I offered him a lift. I drove him almost to his door because I wanted to know where he lives so I could come back and check on him. Here’s what we saw.
In the time he had been gone, his roof had collapsed! He looked at it and sighed. I was at a loss as to what to do. I didn’t want to leave an obviously sick patient to endure a cold night in a tumbled-down shack. But I had only expected my commitment to him to last until we got to his house. I was hungry and tired and wanted to get home myself. And where else could I take him?

What followed was not exactly my finest hour. I smiled, said something like, “Great!”, made a vague promise to come check on him soon, and took off. I didn’t look over my shoulder.

I was wracked with guilt the rest of the afternoon before I suddenly realized there actually was a place I could take him in town that would be able to help him with his TB treatment and ARV counseling. I resolved to visit him again on Wednesday.

When I returned, he was nowhere to be found. I asked the neighbours - all of whom live in much nicer places - if they had seen him and they said he had gone back into town, to a place down near the river where other homeless people hang out. I drove down there and searched all over for him and asked everyone I saw if they had seen him. No luck.

So now I’m in this horrible in-between zone of knowing that I can do something but not being able to do it. My only thought is that Samkelo took a taxi back to his rural village where is mother is. Sick people often do that here. They give up hope of living and return home to die where they were born. It is frustrating whenever it happens because I don’t want to give up hope like that, particularly not in this situation where it is clear - to me - what kind of help is needed. The tricky part is providing that help.

Thinking about all this, I find myself worried at the situation we might have created. Samkelo had figured out a way to get himself out of Itipini. That’s great. No one should live on a dump. But when he struggled so much to make it back to Itipini, the thought in my mind was, “It would be a lot easier for him if he just lived here.” And that’s an awful thought. But is it possible that the presence of our clinic is an inducement for people to live on a dump? Is it such an incentive that perhaps people never even consider leaving, even if they have the opportunity?

On Wednesday, as I was driving around looking for Samkelo, I heard the new minister of human settlement (i.e. housing) say in a radio interview that he wanted to take a broad look at the question of housing. He said something like, “It doesn’t make any sense to build a new settlement if there isn’t a clinic there.” It was tragically appropriate for the situation I found myself in. I just worried it was too late for Samkelo.

What are you laughing at?

Lighting a Fire

I wrote in my last monthly e-mail that if mission is a journey we choose to take with others, the greatest challenge I am finding lately is how to encourage people in Itipini and Mthatha to take that journey with each other, independent of my presence. This is especially important, of course, as I prepare to leave in just a few weeks.

I was at a prayer service on Saturday at a hospice in Mthatha for people with AIDS. One thing the people in this hospice desperately need is transport to the health clinic to get ARVs. It is something Jenny and I have recently been providing as we have become aware of the need. One of the men leading the prayer - who had driven to the event in his own vehicle - said something like, “We pray these people will get the help they need.” It has apparently never occurred to him that he might be able to provide the help they need. How do I encourage this man to journey with these patients with AIDS?

It is convenient that my own departure is coming in the season of the church year when we focus on Jesus’ departure from his followers. I don’t want to compare my ministry in Itipini to that of Jesus in the Holy Land but the Bible readings these past few weeks have given me some comfort. For one thing, Jesus talked a lot with his followers before he died and before he ascended about his departure and how they couldn’t come with him. I’ve been trying to do the same.

(In one touching moment, a student I know, upon hearing I was leaving, asked if she could come along. I explained it was a long way. “That’s OK,” she said. “We’ll take the bakkie,” meaning Jenny’s truck that people often pile into when they need a ride someplace. I didn’t know how to explain the bakkie couldn’t make it across the ocean. A long way for people in Itipini is like, say, here to East London, a three-hour trip. How do I explain what a 17-hour plane flight is like?)

And even though Jesus encouraged his followers to carry on his ministry in his absence, I’ve realized recently they didn’t initially do a great job of it. After Jesus was crucified, they huddled in an upper room for fear of arrest. After Jesus ascended, they huddled in a room “for fear of the Jews.” It was only when the Holy Spirit came upon them in their huddle that they went out to preach the Gospel in every language.

I take a lot of comfort from that story. Even Jesus - though he gave his followers the Great Commandment - couldn’t get his followers to journey together in his absence. Jesus had to send the Holy Spirit to light a fire under (actually, over) them and get them out into the world.

It’s not just up to me to get people to take this journey together. In fact, it’s probably not even primarily or mostly up to me. There’s always another Actor. As my time winds down, I find that a reassuring thought.

You can’t purchase shalom

I’ve been reading the news coverage in preparation for the Episcopal Church’s General Convention. A while back - though recently for me as it only just arrived in my mail - there was an article about Convention’s focus on the Millennium Development Goals, the so-called “Eight Commandments” that are designed to address global poverty.

I should state up front that I generally view the MDGs with suspicion. I don’t find them a useful conceptual tool and I think the Bible has a more expansive - not to mention more poetic - view of what is required of Christians to work towards a more perfect Creation. Mostly, I find the focus on MDGs aggravating because it means I have to explain myself and my work in terms of vocabulary I don’t find useful. For instance, in my limited engagement with them, they don’t speak to the needs I’ve discovered relating to the need for a new conceptualization of masculinity or the difficulties surrounding secondary and post-secondary education.

The Episcopal Life article quoted the report from the Standing Commission on Anglican and International Peace with Justice Concerns (that’s a mouthful - and how can there be peace without justice?). That sent me in search of the whole report and it was refreshing to read:

The MDGs are a new framework for global healing and reconciliation, but they are nothing new for the people of God. These tangible, achievable goals...are but a 21st century articulation of what the church has been called to and worked toward its entire existence….

Even more important than the numbers is the spiritual transformation we have seen take place in the church as we come face-to-face with Christ, working in partnership with our sisters and brothers around the world to end extreme poverty. While one measure of success is certainly in dollars raised, an even deeper measure is to be found in stories told around the church—stories of sacrifices made, lives changed and joy discovered….

The Episcopal Church is experiencing an awakening—at its best humbling and, at times, stumbling—but an awakening, nonetheless.

It came as a frustration, then, that the rest of the article was essentially devoted to budgetary matters. What I’ve learned so strongly while working in Itipini is that while more money is needed to build a more perfect world, what is desperately needed is more relationships. People need to commit to people, no matter how different they may seem.

In my experience, money often serves to corrode mission. What progress towards right relationship - with Nolizwi, Vuyelwa, Pakama, Petros, and countless others - I’ve been able to make has been the result of my decision to share an existence in Itipini these last two years. It takes money to support me here and I never forget how many people have made that support possible. But that money, invested in me (or any missionary), has been able to accomplish so much more than if it had just been written over to buy, say, malaria nets. The fruits of incarnational ministry are a lot harder to quantify than malaria nets but it is incarnate ministry that moves us in the right direction.

(It was interesting to see so much concern in the Episcopal Life article about measuring the 0.7-percent. The entire budget of the Mission Personnel Office - and many other church offices, I am sure - should go under the 0.7-percent category.)

I think I see this disconnect most clearly in my ongoing efforts at a micro-credit program. As I wrote in an early evaluation of it, I had no trouble raising money for the program. In fact, I had way too much money. What I didn’t have enough of was human resources to facilitate the program and provide the kind of real support and encouragement the borrowers needed. I’m convinced micro-credit addresses several of the MDGs. I just wish there were more people working in micro-credit programs around the world instead of writing cheques for other people to work in micro-credit programs.

When it comes to stewardship, we often talk about how we can give our time, talent, and treasure to our church. It’s easy to give your treasure to global mission. It’s a lot harder to give your time and talent. I’ve spent so much time here thinking of ways people in the rich world can contribute their time and talent to people like those in Itipini. I haven’t come up with many so far. It’s a difficult question but one we need to embrace.

Instead of seeing General Convention obsess over its budget, I’d like there to be a conversation about ways Episcopalians can contribute more of their time and talent to the pursuit of right relationship around the world.

(Let me note some obvious caveats. First, I realize budgets are important statements of principle and deserve some degree of obsessing. Second, I’m familiar with the Body of Christ metaphor. Just as it is my role currently to serve in Itipini it is the role of others to raise money and awareness in the rich world. We all play a part. But I worry that sometimes people get so comfortable in the raising money role, they never ask if God is asking them to play a different role in a different place. I also worry that raising money simply becomes a cathartic experience to make us feel like we are “doing something” and obscures on focus on the real needs of the world.)

Shalom is a popular concept these days and rightly so. It’s a handy and deeply true way of expressing our final goal - completeness in Christ. But even if we had all the money in the world, we could never buy shalom. When we spend so much time obsessing about budgets and dollar figures, I worry that we begin to believe we can.

Pictures

Volunteering in Mthatha - “Saving Africa”

I’ve been deluged with e-mails recently from people who want to volunteer in Itipini. To save time, please read this post before deciding whether or not to e-mail me.

Most importantly, please be aware I have no control, say, or input over who volunteers in Itipini. I am a missionary of the Episcopal Church who happened to land here two years ago. And I’m leaving in just a few weeks. I’d recommend checking out the web site of African Medical Mission - www.ammsa.org and on Facebook - the organization that operates the Itipini Community Project.

I can share a few thoughts on volunteering in Mthatha, however, that might help shape your thoughts.

First, the longer a commitment you can make the better. You can’t “save Africa” in two weeks (or two years, for that matter). There are SUBSTANTIAL language and culture barriers that make even the most basic tasks extraordinarily difficult. I’ve been here nearly two years and only just now feel basically competent.

Second, if you’re interested in performing a certain role - like teaching, nursing, whatever - think about how much that role relies on certain givens, like a common language. Then take away those givens and think about what your role would be like. Often people who come for a short time wanting to do a specific thing can be more of a burden than a blessing because we have to redirect our energies and attentions to accommodate and assist them in that task. That doesn’t take away from what they have to offer. It’s just the reality of overseas work.

Third, ask yourself what you want to get out of the experience. I have seen countless volunteers show up, determined to “help,” and get so frustrated usually for one of two reasons: the people they want to help aren’t aware or don’t think they need the help; or those language and culture barriers get in the way. I try to share as gently as possible the lesson I continually re-learn, that who I am matters far more than what I can do. As I’ve noted, what I do is often pretty basic - counting pills, alphabetizing cards.

Fourth, remember the advice of Dorothy Day: “Do not give to the poor expecting to get their gratitude so that you can feel good about yourself. If you do, your giving will be thin and short-lived, and that is not what the poor need; it will only impoverish them further. Give only if you have something to give; give only if you are someone for whom giving is its own reward.” This same view is also expressed in something I’ve seen attributed to an unknown (to me) Australian aboriginal group: “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

I hope that helps structure some of your thoughts. For those of you who have volunteered in Mthatha or overseas before, I welcome your thoughts and comments on this list and how to make it more complete.