Symbolic Comings and Goings

Veteran travelers--Oren and David leading the way out of the plane and into the arrivals lounge at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi.






I am writing this from bed in the Mennonite Guest House in Nairobi Kenya.  It is a bit difficult because David is sitting next to me refusing to sleep (as is Oren in the other bed.)  This should probably be expected. They are excited to be traveling and in a new (albeit familiar) place.  The hour time difference is not helping much either.

We arrived this afternoon to find the place virtually full of a who's who in the MCC world.  The occasion for this trip is our regional meetings of Central West Africa. (For economic reasons we are gathering in East Africa but that is another story.)  The reps from Burkina Faso/Chad (Ginny and Levy), Congo (Tim and Suzanne), Rwanda/Burundi (Paul and Rebecca), and Nigeria (Brenda and Mark) as well as our area director (Mark, and regional peace officer (Gopar).  The reps from Kenya (Ron and Martha) stopped by to pay a visit to us today as well.  Several of the reps have families so Oren and David were able to meet friends (Val, Greg, Sarita) whom they have met before in most of the 4 reunions we have attended in the past 2 years:  (Ghana, Rwanda, Nigeria, Burkina Faso)

I have come to appreciate these meetings more as the time in our assignment lengthens.  I do find there are many challenges that seem to face us uniquely as MCC reps-- increasing demands from headquarters with regard to reporting, diminished funding, trying to support volunteers who have varying physical, emotional and spiritual needs.  Not to mention sharing an assignment with one's spouse as well as managing a household and family.  Crises we deal with rarely fit into office hours.

There is much business to discuss, and maybe much of what we struggle with in our particular context is not discussed extensively, there is still a feeling of comaraderie and compassion that permeates the gatherings.

Interestingly as well, our service workers the Horsts are here as well because of a medical issue that was not able to be addressed in Burundi.  So it feels a bit like an MCC Central West African invasion of Nairobi this week.


Our arrival here though seems like a continuation of the pattern of comings and goings that has been going on since last week.  This week, in fact, our house felt like a real hotel with Jodi and Yolanda with us until Jodi left the country on Wednesday, then several partners from Rwanda joining us Wed and Thursday night as they were down here for some planning meetings with us.  On Saturday, a new arrival, Josh Miller, who is volunteering with us for a month, came in by taxi from Tanzania where he had spent 3 months working with the Maasai.  He is in his early 20s and will be working with our partner Moisson pour Christ.  We were sad to leave him the next morning with little orientation, but he will be going up country to work with them on a youth camp on Monday morning.  He seems pretty adaptable given the challenge he was willing to take on in the months prior to this assignment.

To back track a bit, we did say goodbye to Jodi on Wednesday evening as she headed home on Brussels Airways.  There was a small group of us including her cook Helene as well as Zachee, Bridget and Tim.    I received an email from her on Saturday saying she was back in Cambridge and had had a good flight home.  Before she left I was able to do a short interview with her on video about her assignment that I hope to share with some of you all this summer when we are home.

That same evening two of our Rwanda partners came down to stay the night at our house.  They work with organizations that run small savings groups among some of the poorest people in Rwanda.  We invited them to meet with us and several partners in Burundi.  Our goal was to draft a large concept paper to begin a 'conservation agriculture' project in our countries with a fairly large grant.

Conservation agriculture or "Farming God's Way" is something I have mentioned before and is an agricultural technique aimed at preventing soil erosion and limit the use of fertilizer by keeping ground cover in place.  (Basically no plowing.)  It has been successful in Mozambique in increasing yield significantly with less inputs.  The challenge for us here is that it is not well known and not a 'government approved' technique in the sense that they are pushing a very large scale, fertilizer intensive 'green revolution' style of agriculture based on the success of similar programs in Asia and other parts of the world.  The problem is that the latter tends to favor large farmers rather than small ones for many reasons.  Most of our partners work with very small, poor, marginalized people who can barely eek out a living on a small plot of land and would not necessarily benefit from the more 'globalization' focused methods coerced by the government, IMF, FAO, and US AID.

MCC, with its environmental, creation care theology, has been encouraging conservation agriculture training as an alternative that offers better yields with a more eco-friendly technique of water conservation and soil enrichment.  Whether this can be implemented successfully by our partners in their communities in Rwanda and Burundi remains to be seen and was at the heart of our discussion in our all-day Thursday meeting.

Felix joined us on Thursday evening for dinner and our conversations went well into the night on variety of topics, especially gravitating to some of the major differences between Rwanda and Burundi in terms of history politics and ethnic strife.  It was a very rich evening.

Oren has been home from school this past week as it is spring break.  Sadly David joined him at home Wednesday through Friday as he, once again came down with a virus that caused him to run fevers for most of the 3 days.

I was glad that he had recovered by Saturday in time to go a Birthday party at one of Oren's friends' houses.  I did not go as I needed to stay home, pack, clean the house, and make about 10 days of dogfood to put in the fridge for our time away.  (A fairly smelly job as it involves cooking about 3 kilograms of offal then mixing it with rice).

Yolanda was still at the house when we left Sunday morning and will stay there to meet her dad who is arriving on Wednesday.  We will be gone all week and will return next Saturday to be home on time for Easter.

David is finally asleep, albeit fitfully, and I will try to join him soon.  I don't know what time they will wake up in the morning, but probably before I want to.  I will say a bit about our first meeting as a group since I led a Palm Sunday devotional as the first parrt of our gathering. (We are going to make an effort to follow a Holy Week liturgy as a devotional series this week each morning during our meetings.)

We gathered after dinner and sung some hymns together as many of us were traveling today and missed church.  I shared a passage from Zechariah, a prophetic vision of the King of Peace riding into Jerusalem on a young donkey.  I observed that Jesus' prophetic act was done with awareness of this text and was a deliberate symbol.  A consciously 'staged' act to demonstrate his identity.  (in fact, in the book of Mark he pretty much turns back around and goes out as soon as he finishes his entrance on the first day.)  The prophets of the Old Testament were remarkable for their symbolic acts--Jeremiah buying land before an invasion, Hosea marrying a prostitute.

I observed to the group that MCC does consider itself to have a prophetic witness and what we do symbolically may be at least as, if not more important than anything else we do practically.  I gave the example for me of language learning.  I spent 2 years studying Kirundi and am still not conversational.  (I had hoped I would be by now.)  But it has not been a failure because what it has told our partners here about our ministry and our willingness to 'walk alongside' as brothers and sisters is enormous.

We shared as a group other 'symbolic' actions we do (often sharing in the symbols of the culture we are in) as ways to show our identity as a reminder to ourselves and a representation to others.  I think that if we are sincere in our desire to understand and love each other, 'symbolizing' (or ritualizing) is one of the most important things we do in our lives and very possibly will outlive any of our practical contributions.

If I could encourage anyone this Holy Week to do something meaningful, it would be to consider the symbolic acts (habitual or one time) that you do that tell yourself or others who you are and what you believe.  Actions speak louder than words.