Impressions from a trip to the Ndali language area

Banana trees, mountains, red soil, rice and beans, ‘Mwagona’, rough roads, sacrifice and hardship. These were the impressions left on my mind by a trip to Isoko last week, a village in the Ndali language area (a five hour drive from Mbeya). Although it is just a village, it is a hive of activity as the district hospital is located there, powered by hydro electricity. The purpose of my visit was to train Sunday School teachers (assisted by two colleagues from Mbeya). Twenty attended the workshop, some having travelled some distance from neighbouring villages, who then stayed overnight in Isoko for the duration of the workshop. Our Literacy / Scripture Use Coordinator for the Ndali language area, has a bike ride of 11km over rough roads to get to Isoko, which he does every day that he needs to be in the language office. This is just one example of the hardships to be faced living in a such a remote area. As I talked to him further I learned more of his life and how he came to be a pastor – it was amazing to see how God has led him since his childhood, and I found it personally very challenging to hear of the sacrifices he made in the process. His parents couldn’t afford to put him through secondary school so, encouraged by the church where he was already taking leadership responsibilities while still in his early teens, he headed to Bible college. Although he got some help with the funds he needed for this, he also wove baskets well into the night in order to sell them to help pay his fees. This makes me think, how much do we value the education that we have received? How much would I be willing to sacrifice to gain further education to help me in my job?

The workshop itself went well, with the participants actively engaging in what we taught, but as usual they really struggled to find the main teaching point of a Bible passage and to think how to teach that to children. Once again, I found myself asking God, “What can we do? How can we help people to grow in a knowledge of God’s Word? How can these teachers teach children the Bible effectively, if they themselves do not know your Word and don’t receive good teaching in the church?” Some of the teachers didn’t even have a Bible, yet alone any other resources! (We took books to sell, including Bibles, as they have no other way of accessing these resources other than to take the bus-converted-from-a-lorry public transport to nearby towns over four hours away). Despite this, I hope and pray that they will all have learned a few new skills that will help them in their role as Sunday school teachers, and if nothing more, they will have been encouraged that what they are doing is important and will have gained a new vision for their work.

Isoko itself is a beautiful place, and our Coordinator there took us for walks to show us more of the area – hence my impressions of mountains, red soil and banana trees! I loved the community village feel – the Coordinator seemed to know everyone and had a word to say to just about everyone we met! (‘Mwagona’ is the first greeting you make in the Ndali language).

And finally you might be wondering what the ‘rice and beans’ is about. For six out of the seven meals that we ate on the trip, we had rice and beans! I confess to taking my own little supply of food for breakfast – snack bars, bananas and Ribena! While I would choose beans over greasy meat stew any day, by the sixth time I had definitely lost my appetite for them!

Worldview

Have you ever borrowed somebody else’s sunglasses and been surprised at how yellow (or pink, or red, or blue…) the world looks, when you had always thought that the world had a definite brownish hint? We all look at the world around us through different coloured glasses. The different colours are our different worldviews. Have you ever thought about how your upbringing in a particular culture that is underlined by a particular worldview affects how you see everything? It affects how you view society, how you view relationships, how you view time, the cosmos, the mind, morality etc.

I work in an office where Tanzanians, Europeans and Americans work closely side by side. This week and next we are holding a workshop at our office to help our Tanzanian colleagues understand the way we (Europeans and Americans) think, as well as various other things (such as helping them understand Wycliffe better, team building etc). As part of that, we have been thinking about the differing worldviews that we come from, and today I had the dubious privilege of being the teacher and talking about secularism and God’s Word. As I prepared for this, I was struck again by just how much our understanding of our faith is actually affected by the worldview of the society in which we grew up. When I read the Bible, I read it through my secularism spectacles, whether I mean to or not, as they are impossible to take off completely. Equally, my African colleagues read the Bible and act out their faith through the worldview of their environment, which is primarily animistic. It is impossible to acquire a purely Christian/Bible based worldview, because we don’t ‘acquire’ a worldview, we grow up in a worldview and imbibe it subconsciously. Most of my colleagues have grown up in Christian families, but despite that, we can all see how our secularist worldview has affected our faith, from making us sceptical of supernatural healing to being afraid to speak the truth of the Bible into a Christian friend’s life when they need to hear it because we mustn’t be ‘intolerant’. While for my African friends, their worldview may lead them to believe without measuring the truth of what they hear to blaming everything on the spirit world rather than acknowledging personal sin or nature’s input.

Of course, the question then is, how do we determine truth? Well we certainly have to come back to the Bible and test our thoughts and actions against it, but even as we do that, we are always going to be reading it through our worldview specs. I think those of us who work in a cross-cultural setting are in a privileged position to start seeing God’s Word from different perspectives, and hopefully to find our understanding of God deepened as a result. I am looking forward to more conversations with my colleagues so that we can come to understand each other and our differences better and so I can see ways of interpreting and applying the Bible that I just haven’t noticed before. May the Spirit of truth guide us into us all truth (John 16:13)!

People

In my last blog I talked about how unsettled life can feel here, particularly due to the comings and goings of people. While it is hard to go through these constant changes, I also think it’s a great privilege to meet so many different kinds of people and get to know them to a greater or lesser degree. I just wish I could remember everyone’s names – I have an incredibly bad memory for names, which is very embarrassing in this relational culture. I find comfort in the fact that Tanzanians also mix up non-Africans, even those they have know for a long time, confusing our names and faces.

One thing I love about Tanzanian culture is how easy it is to talk to people (at least, on the surface it is, but getting to know people deeper isn’t so easy). Here’s some recent random encounters:

- Down at the market I popped into one little shop to buy some eggs and ended up in conversation with the shop owner, discussing deep questions like, “How do you see Tanzania versus England? What advice do you have for us? Why don’t we make progress?” These questions aren’t uncommon. I always start my reply with what I value about Tanzanian culture – people’s hospitality and focus on relationships.

- On the way home from church I stopped to buy some samosas from two ladies on the street corner. We got chatting about religion, and I shared the reason for my faith – that through Jesus Christ alone can we have a certain hope for the future.

- As I left church a couple of weeks ago, a voice called out, “Subiri” (“wait”) – it was a lady from church heading the same way. She knew my name (as most people do at church) but I didn’t know hers (as is usually the case!) and I learned about her family and I visited her market stall (where she sells tomatoes and lemons) and her home.

Of course, there are also the less pleasant encounters, such as people calling out ‘mzungu’ as I pass by and staring at me, and there are the encounters that you just have to laugh at, such as children saying, “Tell me my name” – they obviously haven’t quite grasped how English possessive pronouns work!

God certainly made each person unique, and He also made us to be relational beings. I find myself more and more seeing the value and importance of relationships and friendships and spending time with people. And if we are made in God’s image, doesn’t this need for relationship also reflect something of how God wants to be in relationship with us? Does it also teach us something about how God is more interested in us spending time with Him than He is in all the things that we might seek to do for Him (just like with Mary & Martha)?

I am looking forward to all the chances I will get to spend with people over the next few weeks – chances to see old friends and deepen new friendships, and most excitingly, the chance to welcome my parents to Mbeya! Karibuni sana!

Photo: Some of the people I have recently had the privilege to encounter - Sunday school teachers at a workshop in one of the language areas where we work.