This child missed school on Wednesday because his uniform shirt was dirty. That makes me so mad.

“Mission Partners”

I love language. I can’t get enough of words. I love the challenge of figuring out how best to express myself and articulate my thoughts and ideas with the precision that language offers us. I like how language use shapes reality and words have meanings that can be contested. I like how meanings of words change over time. I just read a quotation from the 16th-century where “ecumenical” was a term of opprobrium.

It is this love for language that explains one of the big hurdles I had to cross before I decided to become a missionary. Some of you might recall that the word itself - missionary - was an obstacle for me. There were too many negative connotations I associated with the word for me to want to describe myself with it. Nor could I let myself brush off the word lightly and pretend it didn’t really apply to me.

Needless to say, I overcame that hurdle by wrestling with the word and learning more about the theology of mission that underlay it. That process was healthy and helpful and led to a deepening of my faith and the opportunity to think about some issues I had never seriously considered before.

Well, my feet are about to be swept out from underneath me and that process is about to be rendered moot. I learned last month the Standing Commission on World Mission wants to change all references in the canons from “missionary” to “mission partner.” It will be voted on at the Episcopal Church’s General Convention in July.

I think this is a misguided proposal. My understanding of the rationale is that the new phrase better reflects what missionaries actually do and are. Of course partnership is a part of mission. But so too are eight gazillion other things, some of which I’ve written about on this blog, like reifying, teaching, relating, learning, playing, sharing, dancing, driving, advocating, and on and on and on. I just saw a draft document of some new mission promotion materials and the words used there to describe missionaries included partner but also ally, friend, companion, pilgrim, supplicant, builder, listener, witness, co-traveler, advocate, and many more.

Sure, sharing is part of partnering but isn’t partnering part of teaching? Isn’t partnering part of companionship? Friendship part of effective listening? Witnessing part of standing with? Calling us “partners” privileges one part of mission at the expense of all the others. Why not call us “mission learners” or “mission sharers” or “mission relaters” or “mission pilgrims” or “mission supplicants”? The advantage of the term missionary is that it encompasses all the attributes of mission doing and mission being.

Now I admit that missionary is a contested word. The idea of mission I just sketched out is probably not shared by everyone in the Episcopal Church and definitely not by all Christians. But the response to a contested word is not run away from it but grab hold of it and wrestle with it. That is what I sought to do when I realized I would be a missionary if I came to South Africa. The word missionary truly and honestly describes what I am. I don’t want to run away from that.

I don’t know why I remember this but when Bill Clinton spoke at the dedication of his library in December 2004, he kept using the words “progressives” and “progressivism” when he was obviously talking about liberals and liberalism. Apparently to his mind the “l-word” had been so debased by conservatives he couldn’t use it anymore. It was a contested word. But rather than using the word proudly and reclaiming it, he ran the other direction to a new word that described the same ideas he has always promoted.

I can’t help but think that is what the Church wants to do with the move to “mission partners,” ceding “missionary” to, among others, our more evangelical brothers and sisters in Christ. The Episcopal Church - as I learned when I wrestled with “missionary” - has some very good theology of mission and ideas about being a missionary that I would like to see spread far and wide. But we won’t spread our ideas anywhere if our first step is to give up the necessary vocabulary.

Language and word choice matters tremendously. “Missionary” - underlain by strong missiology - is a good and accurate word that deserves to be retained.

UPDATE: Just as I was posting this, I received an e-mail from the Church Center with a further defense of the term. It reads in part, "It is probably easier to change a name rather than a cultural mindset at this point." It is no doubt easier but I still do not believe it is the correct decision. "Mission" and "easy" have never gone together in my mind.

A couple recent ones from the camera

How to save a life

It is amazing what anti-retroviral drugs can do for sick patients. Pakama, the woman who was so seriously sick with HIV last May and June and with whom I spent so much time navigating the health-care system, now betrays hardly any trace of her past illness. She is taking the right combination of drugs and is so healthy I barely see her because she rarely has to come to the clinic. (Nobathembu, another very sick woman I once wrote about, is also now shockingly healthy. She was practically dancing in the clinic this morning.)

During those long weeks of nearly one-on-one attention with Pakama, I often daydreamed about a day when she would be able to walk on her own and speak without running out of breath. But I’m not sure I ever really believed it would happen. It has and it’s shocking.

I mention her because about a week ago she came to the end of her tuberculosis treatment. It was eight months worth of pills, which she was starting just as I was getting to know her. As I did the paperwork to discharge her from our records, I noted to Jenny that she had finished. We both marveled at how strong she was and how much she had improved and then Jenny said to me, “You know, she only made it to the end of her treatment because of you. You saved her life.”

This made me very uncomfortable. I don’t like how it imputes so much agency to me - let’s be serious, who I am to be saving lives? - and it minimizes the numerous other factors that contributed to Pakama’s improved health. When I go to write the resume line for my time in Itipini, am I really going to write as one of my accomplishments “saved lives”? I don’t think so.

One time when I was in the volunteer ambulance department, I arrived on a scene first and soon after the patient had had a heart attack, started CPR, and did it all the way to the hospital. It worked, kind of. He survived another week, in a vegetative state, before dying. Someone noted to me then that I had saved his life and I was uncomfortable with the idea. I preferred to say to myself that I had “prolonged” his life, given the quality of life he enjoyed after my intervention. But in Pakama’s case, she has a pretty good quality of life and, while anything can happen, there’s no expectation she’ll die anytime soon.

This line of thought reminds me of Esther’s response to Mordecai’s plea that she help save the Jews. Basically, she says, “who I am to do anything?” Mordecai says, “Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.” (4:14) Basically he’s saying, “you’re the one in the right place at the right time.” To the extent I did anything to save Pakama’s life, I did what I did because I happened to be the person who was in the right place to offer assistance at a time when she desperately needed it. Isn’t that partly what mission is about? Putting ourselves in a new place to be of assistance when needed?

As a coda to this story, it turns out that one of the new high school students we are supporting this year is Pakama’s daughter, Babalwa. I had thought Babalwa was Pakama’s sister but Babalwa told me on Friday that she was Pakama’s daughter. I was a bit surprised and, as I had been thinking that week about Jenny’s comment, I didn’t know how to respond so I just sort of said, “oh” and looked away. But as I did, I could detect a look of gratitude on Babalwa’s face that told me she knew what I had done for her mother. And that was significant for me.

Buying lots of stuff

I have successfully navigated the treacherous terrain of back-to-school shopping with the group of high school students we support in Itipini. On Friday, I took the students in grade 10 and on Saturday I went with the students in grades 11 and 12.

Before we left, I had them all make shopping lists of what they needed. Last year, when we arrived in the store, they would keep seeing things and claiming they needed them. This year, I could check the items against their lists. That modest change along with a few others helped me feel much more in control of the process than I did last year.

The uniform shopping was fairly straightforward. Unlike last year, the first few stores we visited had the right-sized trousers and shoes so we didn’t have to go all over town late into the afternoon. We went to the giant wholesale place where we have an account and spent hundreds of dollars on back-to-school supplies. I know the manager there and she was helpful in getting us boxes of stuff taken down with the forklift. I was constantly worried we were spending too much money but overall the experience was mostly pleasant. There are some fun and interesting new students I enjoyed getting to know better.

Here are some of the pictures.
Technically, the idea is that we support students who live in Itipini. “Support” means we help them with school fees, uniforms, and supplies. I ended up taking 15 students shopping over the two days but not all of them live in Itipini. I was a victim of my own generosity (generosity with other people’s money, I should note).

Of those 15, 11 live in Itipini - seven new and four continuing on from last year. (The fact that there are seven new students, three of them boys, I find so incredibly delightful and surprising.) Last year during my English class, some of the students who live in Itipini brought along their friends. Naturally, I came to know those friends and now this year they have come asking for help. I was a bit torn as to what I should do in response.

On the one hand, I actually do know these students so they meet a requirement of mine for support, namely that I have a relationship with the person. Just because they don’t live in Itipini doesn’t mean they aren’t living a pretty deprived life. And the reasons they have for needing help are often quite legitimate; I’ve already written about Ziyanda whose father died last December and other students have similar hard-luck stories. Because they are continuing students, it is important that they take the grades in consecutive years (rather than, say, taking a year off to earn money to pay for fees). If they don’t the school will make them start again. In Ziyanda’s case, this is particularly important because she is in grade 12, the final and most important year.

But I’m reluctant to spend our resources on people not directly connected to Itipini because I worry about not having enough money, about diluting our influence, and about setting a precedent that opens the door in the future to more and more non-Itipini people. Plus, I think that some of these students, no matter how how hard-up they may sound, could scrounge together some money from their families. There is always more money floating around than I realize. And I’m reluctant to spend the money because I don’t want to confirm the stereotype that white people have lots of money they can toss around however they want. I am very budget-conscious and want people to know they can’t just treat me like a giant ATM machine.

Ultimately, it didn’t seem very graceful to exclude some needy students on the grounds of their address. That “technically” four paragraphs ago should tip you off to the law inherent in the statement. If we can help these students, why shouldn’t we? (But there are plenty of other students who need help and because they don’t know me, won’t get my help. How is that right?)

My decision, then, was to take them along with me on the shopping trip and concentrate on making sure they had school supplies. All of them are returning students so they have last year’s uniform to wear again, perhaps a little small or a little worn but it’ll do. I explained to them we would make the first payment of school fees - about R300 - due this week and they would be responsible for paying off the balance - about R400 - over the course of the year. They quickly assented to that offer, which confirms for me there is at least some money in the family. Yes, the family might have to sacrifice to pay for it but isn’t education worth a little sacrifice? And by having the family invest money in the education perhaps they will take more interest in how hard their children work.

After I wrote that story about Ziyanda and her father, several of you have written to ask how you can support her. I intentionally do not make pleas for money on this blog but to forestall any more e-mails, if you are interested in supporting Ziyanda and the many other students like her - not to mention the 110 in primary school - the best thing to do is donate money to African Medical Mission, the organization that pays all our bills. They are about to receive some whopping big bills from this past weekend’s shopping trip.

It’s all connected

Here’s a story about how issues and problems here cannot be addressed in isolation from one another. It’s somewhat complicated and involved but I bet you can follow along with all the names.

On Tuesday, a young man named Mbuyiselo came to see me. “Please,” he asked me. “I want to go to school this year. Any school but I want to be in school.” It’s hard to turn down a request like that, especially one said as fervently as he did.

Before Tuesday, I was only vaguely aware of Mbuyiselo and only then because he belongs to one of the more dysfunctional families in Itipini. (And that is really saying something.) One of his older sisters has a serious mental disability and simply cannot take care of herself. Usually, she is happy and a pleasant nuisance - often she just sits on the bench outside the clinic for hours on end - but about two weeks ago she took a broom and started beating some people with it. Not for the first time, her mother had forgotten/didn’t want to/been too busy to take her to the psychiatric clinic to have her prescription refilled.

The mother, Ntombi, has her own set of issues. Another of her daughters had a child a few years back, decided she didn’t want him, dumped the boy on her mother, and went off to Johannesburg where she hasn’t been heard from since. That child is named Anele and last December he graduated from pre-school and just began first grade this week. Ntombi is overwhelmed by life and shows no interest in looking after Anele. Here’s a picture from when I first became aware of him, soon after arriving here.
As you can see, he looks pretty neglected. He wasn’t going to pre-school and just hung around all day. We spoke with Ntombi and the pre-school teachers and kept an eye out for him and he became a model student (in terms of attendance). I was especially glad because it meant he got to eat every day. More than any other child I’ve ever known, his actions demonstrate just how needy he is for loving attention. He is always clambering all over for me and hitting me for attention. That sort of clinginess I usually find repelling but he and I have, over the last year or so, come to an understanding about my boundaries and his needs and I really like him now.

Back to Mbuyiselo. I was only aware of him last year when he came in to the clinic one day and we realized he was part of the family. It turns out he was going to a high-school in town and doing pretty well. Jenny and I took to referring to him as the “success” in the family and pinned all our hopes for the future of the family. Unfair, perhaps, but we’ll base our hope on whatever shred of evidence we can find.

That one visit to the clinic was all I knew of Mbuyiselo until his visit on Tuesday. So his request came as something of a shock. Didn’t he have a school already? Why did he seem so desperate? What had happened to our “success”?

It turns out he didn’t finish school last year. His father got pretty sick and he had to stay at home and take care of him a lot of days and so he never wrote his exams. Plus, he didn’t really like that school - it wasn’t as good as we thought, I guess - and his eagerness to go any place else was proof enough of that.

The trouble was when he showed up I had literally just returned from registering six new students at high school and was resting on the laurels I felt I had earned from making the process so easy and stress-free for all of us. I had used up all my goodwill there cutting in line and getting students into the right classes that I wasn’t eager for a return trip.

More importantly, the first day of school was on Wednesday and there was a very real possibility that all the slots for grade 10 were full. Plus, he didn’t have a report card from his previous school, which he needed, and he didn’t have an application for the new school. It was a lot to get done by the next day. I told him all this but he seemed willing to try and I didn’t want him to sit around for a year with nothing to do without at least trying to get him registered in school.

Shockingly, everything went smoothly and by noon the next day he was registered. He went to his old school and got a copy of his last report card. (Amazingly, they had it.) I had an extra copy of the application form. I did some serious sucking up (in Xhosa!) with the proper authority figures at the high school and got him squeezed into one last spot in grade 10. The hardest nut to crack was the “uniform teacher” whom I had to convince to allow Mbuyiselo attend school for three days in his street clothes until we could buy him a uniform. (He had given his old one away to a younger brother now at his old elementary school.) But even this teacher melted under the full-court press of my charm. (Ha!)

Mbuyiselo was effusively grateful and I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. But there was still at least one more outstanding problem. I wanted to see Mbuyiselo’s father, Wilson. It didn’t make sense to send Mbuyiselo to school if his father was still sick and needing help. I’m no great diagnostician but the symptoms Mbuyiselo described made me think of HIV. I had checked Wilson’s card when we returned to the clinic and saw we had suggested he have an HIV test several times last year but he never came in for one. The last time he had been in the clinic was August even though he had been sick enough to keep his son out of school much more recently. (Stubborn men not wanting to go to the clinic!)

Mbuyiselo took me to Wilson (sitting in a bar, not looking particularly HIV-stricken) on Wednesday afternoon. My Xhosa deserted me and I struggled to explain how we had just got Mbuyiselo registered in school and how I really wanted Wilson to have an HIV test soon. I tried not to make it seem like a quid pro quo but that’s how I was thinking about it - I get your son into school and you get an HIV test. The conversation was really frustrating because I just couldn’t find the right vocabulary and I left thinking it had been a failure.

So I was pleasantly surprised to see Wilson show up at the clinic this morning, wait patiently, and have an HIV test. Not at all surprisingly, it was positive. He’ll come back on Monday for a CD4 count and I wouldn’t be surprised if he qualifies for ARVs right away.

If there’s success in this story, it is very limited and hard to see right now. But what is important is that I think we’ve managed to go some distance to untangling a knot - the way Wilson’s illness affected his son’s education - and changed the trajectory of some lives - Mbuyiselo in school, Wilson on the path to health. There are still untold obstacles to achieving those goals, there is still an incredible amount of work ahead, and even then they may never come to pass. But things are moving in a better direction now than they were on Tuesday morning and that is reason for a little satisfaction and joy.

A slice of my life

This post, like the vast majority of posts before it, was posted at an Internet cafe in Mthatha. (They don’t actually serve coffee.) I take for granted my trips to this place but some of you might be interested in one or two aspects of this slice of my life.

First, the cafe is at Mthatha’s largest and newest mall, the Plaza. The Plaza has a terribly-designed parking lot so I always go in the back way to avoid the choke of traffic. That means I frequently end up parking in an area watched over by the same parking attendant. Here she is.
I don’t actually know her name (yet) nor she mine. The car I drive has African Medical Mission stickers on the doors so she calls me, variously, “African Medical Mission,” “African Medical,” or, best of all, just “African,” which I definitely am not.

(When I first wrote about parking attendants on this blog, some of my second-grade correspondents in South Carolina wrote to ask what kind of guns they used to guard my car. As you can see, she is armed with nothing fiercer than an umbrella - for the sun - and it is hard to get her off her crate most days.)

Then I get to the Internet cafe and plonk myself down. This cafe has opened since I’ve been here and I was so eager for them to open I was actually their first customer before they even opened. It is a family business, run by a young man, his wife and their assorted siblings and I am well known to all of them, so well known, in fact, they let me go online even when I don’t have the money with me because they know I’ll be back soon enough to repay them.
Because I am on the clock when I go online, I quickly get sucked into the online world of e-mail, blogs, and news and whatever other tasks I need to accomplish. I get so absorbed in that world that I shut out the (considerable) noise around me and forget where I am. Reading my e-mail or the news, I could be anywhere in the world, wherever events are happening or people are writing to me. So it comes as a bit of shock when my time ends and I gradually re-enter the world of Mthatha. After reading so much English, what is most shocking is that the babble of voices around me is in Xhosa. I take a moment to readjust to the reality of where I am and head back to the car.

How good are schools here?

The federal government just took over the provincial department of education:

OFFICIALS from Pretoria are preparing to take control of the Eastern Cape Education Department following years of poor academic results. The move shocked provincial administrators, who admitted yesterday they had no idea of the impending takeover by Pretoria.

In other news, our little school up the hill just received a letter saying it has been designated a "fee-free" school. Great news, right? Except the principal reports there is no corresponding effort to make up the lost revenue so he still wants people to pay fees this year.

The missionary who now knows what he’s doing

One of the great things about staying in a place for an extended time is that you get to do things more than once. You might recall a story from last January when I spent most of a day dashing around town with a group of new high school students to ensure they were registered and ready for the first day of school. You might recall I didn’t really understand what had to be done and I didn’t even know where the school was.

Well, it is the beginning of the school year again and there are more new high school students. But now - informed by the experience last January and everything in between - I have a much, much better idea of what needs to happen, when, and why.

Yesterday I drove our six new students around town, copying the necessary records to accompany the application, getting the ID photos taken, and getting them officially signed up at school. I even used a personal connection I’ve developed over the past year to ensure they didn’t have to spend hours (literally) waiting in line to register at school. In all, it was a much smoother and enjoyable process for me than it was last year.

Remember, the reason I get involved in the education of these students is that it costs money to go to high school, about $75/year just for school fees. In addition, there are fees to get the ID photo taken and to actually submit the application. That doesn’t count the cost of the uniform or the necessary pens, paper, and so on. I have been bleeding money all week, all for legitimate reasons.

And it’s exciting. There are six new students in grade 10 (the first year of high school) with the possibility of a seventh. Here they are.
What’s great about this picture is that there are two young men in the group. This is fantastic! Last year, I despaired of my gender every time I realized there were no males from Itipini in high school. To have two is wonderful. Of the young women, I don’t think any of them have children.

Meanwhile, there is still last year’s group of students to be concerned about. A couple who failed are dragging their feet about going back to school but the ones who passed are ready and willing to go.

My English class last year ended up attracting about five students who don’t live in Itipini but heard about the group from their friends and came along. Ziyanda was one of them.
She’s going into twelfth grade and is really smart - she did well in school and she speaks great English. She came to me yesterday and it was the first time I had seen her since last November because she had spent most of the break in her family’s rural village. The reason she wanted to talk to me is that she needed help paying school fees. While I am happy to help anyone learn English, we have to draw the line somewhere on paying school fees and that generally means we don’t pay fees for anyone not living in Itipini. Of course, in extenuating circumstances we could be a little more pliable so I asked Ziyanda why, when her family could pay the fees last year, she needed help this year.

Her circumstances definitely qualify as extenuating. Her father worked in the mines near Johannesburg and sent money home. But he was killed in a mining accident late last year and the funeral was in December. (When someone matter-of-factly tells you this story, how do you respond?) It sounds like her mother is working but there are other children in the family to support as well. I said we’d work something out. It seems fair and she is a very talented student.

Coming up next is the excursion into town to purchase new uniforms. Last year, when the students confirmed every stereotype about women and shopping, it nearly killed me. We’ll see on Friday if a year’s worth of knowledge and experience helps me endure it any more easily. Stay tuned...

“Hand me my chalice, it’s the one that says…”

I nearly had a car accident with Samuel L. Jackson the other day.

There I was doing a three-point turn in the middle of the road and he came barreling around a corner in the telephone company truck and nearly hit me. But when I recognized who it was I got out and had to speak with him.

Alright, so I didn’t almost hit the well-known actor. Actually, the guy driving the truck was the priest at church. There’s a priest at church who I swear looks like Ving Rhames and this one who bears a passing resemblance to Samuel L. Jackson. Naturally, I find myself thinking of the movie “Pulp Fiction” frequently in church and snatches of its (incredibly profane) dialogue float through my head at the most inopportune of times. (As in the title of this post, which I’ll let you “Pulp Fiction” devotees finish yourself.)

After our near accident, we exchanged a few pleasantries and that was that. Still, it’s yet one more sign of how different the African church is from the American that clergy have jobs on the weekdays that may have nothing to do with their priestly status.

By day, telephone repair man - but on Sundays, man of God!

I also almost got in an accident with the bishop a few weeks back. A while before that I cut off the same nun in traffic within two minutes at two different intersections. She sure knew how to lean on her horn!

Words worth remembering

I just finished Heart of Redness by Zakes Mda. If you’re interested in a slice of Xhosa culture, I highly recommend it. The story is good, too.

The point made in this passage below is an obvious one but one I realize it is very easy to forget. Dalton is a white man who has lived his entire life in a Xhosa village; Camagu is a Xhosa man who has spent most of his life in the U.S.

John Dalton is preoccupied with water affairs. It is weeks now since his water committee closed all the communal taps. The villagers are refusing to pay. When the chief calls a public meeting to discuss the matter, the few who come say, “You, son of Dalton, you got money from your business friends and from the government to start this water project. Why don’t you ask those people who gave you the money to maintain those taps? How do they think they will be maintained if they do not come to maintain them?”...

[Camagu says] “You went about this whole thing the wrong way, John. The water project is failing because it was imposed on the people. No one bothered to find out their needs.”

“That is nonsense,” says Dalton. “Everyone needs clean water.”

“So we think… in our infinite wisdom. Perhaps the first step would have been to discuss the matter with the villagers, to find out what their priorities are. They should be part of the whole process. They should be active participants in the conception of the project, in raising funds for it, in constructing it. Then it becomes their project. Then they will look after it.”

Camagu is of the view that, as things stand now, the villagers see this as Dalton’s project. He thought he was doing them a favour when he single-handedly raised funds for it and invited government experts to help in its construction. It was only later that the community was involved. Dalton hand-picked a committee of people he thought were enlightened enough to look after the project. The villagers were given a ready-made water scheme. It is falling apart because they don’t feel they are part of it.

“That is the danger of doing things for the people instead of doing things with the people,” adds Camagu. “It is happening throughout the country. The government talks of delivery and of upliftment. Now people expect things to be delivered to them without any effort on their part. They expect somebody to come from Pretoria and uplift them. The notions of delivery and upliftment have turned our people into passive recipients of programmes conceived by so-called experts who know nothing about the lives of rural communities. People are denied the right to shape their own destiny. Things are done for them. The world owes them a living. A dependency mentality is reinforced in their minds…. That is the main problem with you, John. You know that you are ‘right’ and you want to impose those ‘correct’ ideas on the populace from above. I am suggesting that you try involving the people in decision-making rather than making decisions for them.”

It is very, very easy to assume one’s own good intentions and ideas are broadly shared.

Below Zero?

Apparently, it’s been pretty cold in North America lately. My parents sent me the weather report (35 below) and I saw this picture from Fairbanks, Alaska on a friend’s blog.
Meanwhile, we are sweltering through the summer here. The first week back after Christmas brought the kind of heat that just makes you sweat while sitting still. This past week was cooler in that I only sweated through my shirt when I started moving around. Combine this with a bunch of people in Itipini who don’t have regular access to baths and it makes for a pretty ripe-smelling clinic.

For fun, I told my co-workers how cold it was in the U.S. and Canada. Have you ever tried to explain how temperatures can be below zero? To a group of people who have never experienced it? I’m not sure if they took me seriously that it could actually happen. People here know what it is like to be cold but when people here were wearing winter hat and scarves, I was wearing shorts and t-shirt. Even saying “really cold” doesn’t encompass temperatures below zero.

Then I tried to explain that when I lived in Alaska, I had a winter coat that cost $400 (courtesy of the Nome Ambulance Department). They really couldn’t conceive spending that much money on a coat or even what would make a coat cost that much.