OK folks you asked for it, well at least one person asked
for it. We recently received an email
from a friend and eager recipient of details about what we were REALLY doing
here, and I quote “You have talked about the food,
the traffic, your apartment, learning the local dialect, but so far not a single
word about your missionary work, which is why you are there. Are you building
houses, digging wells, teaching classes, helping at a clinic, passing out
condoms or toothbrushes,.... or what? Also, no mention of the other
missionaries or what they are doing, or of the local Mormon branch members. How
are you
spending your time?”
spending your time?”
So first I will explain a few things. It has been told to us by other missionaries from our church that when a senior couple arrive in a developing country they are generally given the first month just to acclimate, to get used to the time zone, food, water, culture and people. Not the case with us, we arrived on Saturday, January 11th at about 9 p.m. We were met by two other couples brought to our apartment arriving at about 11 p.m. (2 p.m. Pacific Time) we were up and going to church the following morning whereupon arrival at church we were asked to speak. SPEAK???? These people only understand French. But fortunately Ro translated for me. After church the couple that we were replacing and due to depart on the upcoming Thursday, began our “training” Now, those of you who know me well know my biggest challenge in all my years of travel was jet lag. I was on another planet.
So from Sunday afternoon until Thursday morning we were
inundated with information, meeting people, and exhausted. After the previous couple left we tried to
make heads or tails of what we had been told and decided we would reorganize
our office to better suit our management styles. The following Wednesday the supervising
humanitarian services couple over all of SE African countries arrived and
pretty much said, “all systems are changing, so don’t really worry about what
you have previously been told”.
HA! Then they proceed to pour
information into our brains. All the
while all associates in the building where our office is, affectionately called
the TA building or Service Center (don’t ask where the TA came from) paid social
calls, it was great to meet them, but all of these beautiful African people
(most of them male) came wearing huge smiles, dressed in white shirts, ties,
black pants, and extremely closely cropped hair if any. Missionaries wear name badges, associates in
this building in Finance, IT, distribution, administration and numerous offices
do not wear badges and they ALL have very long names containing mostly
consonants.
By the way, if you are expecting this blog to resemble my
travel columns, think again. I will be
pounding out information as fast as my fingers can type no edits and I haven’t
yet found spell check on this computer.
All the while we were being warmly welcomed by the other
missionary couples who reside in our building.
They are as follows:
Mark and Elaine Smith from Utah-Perpetual Education
Fund. Our church offers financing to
young people in developing countries who have served as missionaries, return
home to impoverished conditions with no hope for education. In a nutshell the young person can get an
education, return to their village or community and help their community to
grow and yes, pay back the financing at a low interest rate after they are
employed or start a business.
Howard and Sue Bybee from Utah- Public Affairs. They pave the way for good relationships
within the country, work with the media and spread goodwill. I really need to know more about what they
do. They had been away for 3 months in another part of the country helping out
and we are just getting to know them.
Roy and Kathleen Sneddon also from Utah. Office couple. They maintain the Mission President’s office
and some of the finances. Again, I really
don’t know what all their duties are but I do know they are 79 and 80 years
old, they are pistols, run every morning and have raised 11 children. Amazing people.
Ed and Kriss Gates from California. They teach construction. Well Ed does and I think Kriss does the
books. Ed goes to work on the job every
day working with local men teaching them how to work in construction.
They are all great fun people, we have all gotten together
on several occasions socially, but they are
as busy as we are, so when we get together for fun we don’t spend a lot
of time talking about what we did all day, we are all ready for diversion.
So now, what are WE going to work on? No we are not passing out toothbrushes nor
condoms. Our philosophy is that we help
people to help themselves with supplies so they can develop a sustainable
situation in their personal lives or community. Example, we, (the church and previous couple)
were instrumental in a huge massive, over 100 acre garden plot where people who
were serious about learning how to grow and willing to maintain gardens for
food to feed their families. We
provided seeds, tools and water systems for them. It is gorgeous. These people work very hard and take pride in
their little plot of land.
Just this last Saturday we visited a village and meet with a
water committee from in the village.
They have 6 hand water pumps that we have provided for them. They are to maintain the pumps and protect
them from vandals and keep the area around pumps safe and clean. What a lovely group of people who are taking
very good care of their pumps.
These are just two examples of projects that we have visited
to see how they are functioning, some are functioning better than others, we
determine what we can do to help those that are not doing as well and what new
projects can we initiate.
How do we decide which projects to initiate? Some are already in place for later in this
year. We have several shipments of wheel
chairs coming from China. We don’t just
go out and start allocating wheel chairs.
It needs to be determined if a person could afford to buy one
themselves, if so they would not qualify for one of ours. Then we bring in doctors and physical
therapists from the USA to determine the type and size of wheel chair needed by
a person requesting one. One might
think that any wheel chair is better than no wheel chair but that is not the
case. If a wheel chair does not fit a
person correctly they can develop pressure sores that can result in worse
problems even death. Many details have
to be considered before a technical person assembles the chair and the physical
therapists work with the recipient.
We have a neo-natal resuscitation program coming up in the
spring we need to prepare for. Again we
bring in doctors from the USA who work with local doctors, mid-wives, and
nurses to teach them how to resuscitate babies who are born not breathing.
We also have an immunization program coming up in the
spring. We are currently meeting with
other organizations that we have partnered with in the past, UNICEF, World
Vision, Catholic Charities, World Bank, plus meeting with dozens of other
organizations who might want to partner with us financially on these
projects. But again, we have to ascertain,
especially on well and latrine projects just how sustainable the project could
be. We don’t just run around handing out
money, we want the recipients to be self sustaining. At this moment we have some sewing machines
that we plan to distribute to groups of women who have projects that will
generate a living for them. Every
potential project has to be evaluated carefully as we are responsible for
millions of church dollars which means many reports to be filed each
month.
So, if you have survived reading all this please know I have
just given you a brief outline of what we are working on. In a country of nearly 80 million people,
most of them in dire circumstances, there are hundreds of orphanages,
hospitals, schools, villages who are vying for help with clean water, eye
glasses, food, hygiene issues, breathing babies, immunizations, cottage
industries etc.
We do not just tend to our church members, we are here to
help any and all. But life in Africa and
especially the Congo is very different than it is in the USA. EVERYTHING
is difficult. We live about a 15 minute
drive from our office, on a good day, we make it in 20-30 minutes and sometimes
it takes 45 minutes or more. Traffic is
insane, that is the only way I can describe it.
Ro is a champ; there is no way I would even consider driving. The Congolese people function on a very
different schedule. If you have an
appointment with someone at 10 a.m. it might happen then but probably not until
10:30, or 1 or 2 p.m. This is who they
are, this is how they live, and it isn’t up to us to change their culture. Meanwhile we never know if/when the power
will go off in our apartment or office or the internet will go down, nor do we
know when it will come back up again. In
Africa there is a saying, “TIA” (This is Africa). Rarely does plan A work and we have to always
be prepared to go to plan B, C, or quite possibly Z.
Ro made his first trip to the bank on Friday. A simple task to be done that would take
exactly 5 minutes in a USA bank. He had
to see six different people, to do the transaction and was gone for 2.5
hours. All the while with a “body
guard”. Mundele (white face) shouldn’t
be leaving the bank with cash in hand without a local person right by their
side.
We have some tremendous helpers. We have two translators Felix and Fils. They are both local men in their 30’s. They are excellent with English as they
served missions in Uganda which is an English speaking country. Ro is of course fluent in French but I am
not and so while he is negotiating with locals one of our translators is
keeping me up to speed. Plus often
locals will lapse into Lingala or some other tribal language and they
translate. I am partial to Felix as we
have worked with him the most.
We have four site monitors we work with. Their job is to be
on site of water projects all during the construction stage to be sure
everything is going as it should be and to report to us all details. After a project is finished they monitor it
once a week for a year to be sure it is being sustained and maintained by the
local people as agreed upon. Again,
reporting to us. We in turn report to
our area offices in Johannesburg and they report to our church humanitarian
offices in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Our site monitors are Eric, Jordao, Walter and Eddy. Now all of these 6 men have names that are
not this westernized, that is what they want us to call them, thankfully. We LOVE Eddy, he is a really hard worker and
fine fine man. His picture is somewhere
on our blog as is Felix’s. Each one of
these young men have endured hardships that none of us can even imagine. They are all LDS and return missionaries from
various countries. Most speak only French and tribal languages. They
have not personally told us their trials, they are very confidential and keep
personal things to themselves, but we have been made aware of such things as,
having witnessed their family members being shot during wars, sisters raped,
babies taken from their arms never to be seen again, homes burned, imprisoned
on false accusations. (Our US prisons
are a vacation compared to the ones here)
The list goes on and on. I love
these young men, they are absolutely precious.
The site monitors and translators are independent contractors who work
for us and are paid by the program. I
think they are starting to get used to my quirkiness. I feel like I have 6 adopted sons, they love
teaching me Lingala and we share some great laughs. Speaking of which, laughing is very important
here because life is so difficult and subject to change in a minute so we laugh
a lot instead of cry.
We are both grateful for this experience. We feel totally
safe, and while we work hard every day and fall into bed exhausted every night,
we get up and exercise and eat healthy food, I have bread baking in the oven
and made a huge batch of granola and my phone just rang it was the Gates couple
calling to see if we wanted to come to their apartment for brownies baptized in
vanilla ice cream. The woman is an
amazing cook, her carrot cake beats any I have had anywhere hands down.
We have and will continue to give you updates on cultural
experiences as well as projects that we are able to get approved to work
on. Feel free to ask questions, we will
try to answer them. We are best located
at gloriousideas@hotmail.com.
We are grateful for each of you who write to us, we love
getting mail from home, and I try to answer as much as I can. Our adorable daughters and their families
are so good to us; they are taking care of finances for us back home, send
pictures of our babies on a regular bases, maintain this blog and send notes of
encouragement and support. All the while they are busy mothers and professional
women. We are blessed in all ways. Whew!!!!
Are you sorry you asked Richard? And
this was the Reader’s Digest version. J
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