Grasshoppers for lunch

Well, it's back to classes on Monday the 30th. This past week was mid-term break (we stayed in Ndu for the most part; Charlie and I joined our friend Ally from the Peace Corps for a trip to the larger village of Kumbo to pick up some food supplies, etc., on Wednesday, but other than that little excursion, we were around the seminary campus), and the week before that we gave mid-term exams. So, starting Monday, we'll begin again with the typical routine of lectures, meeting with students, going to chapel, and grading papers. It will be good to have things back to "normal"!

One of the responsibilities we've been given most recently is supervising theses that the graduating Bachelor of Theology students will write this year. Tommy, Charlie, and I are each supervising at least one thesis, and it will take a substantial investment of time to do a good job. Each thesis will be 60 double-spaced pages (around 15,000 words), and as readers, we are expected to give input on the content, structure, grammar and syntax, formatting of citations, style, and readability, as well help the students find good resources and read them well. Once we start back full-force with the fall semester this week, this new task will consume a lot of our time and effort. Pray for us in this regard, that we'll guide and direct our students well, that our input and feedback will be helpful. (Some of the topics students are writing on are, for example: "Christianity and the Problem of Pain"; "The Gospel as the Power of God for Salvation: An Exegesis of Romans 1:16-17"; "The Church-Plating Methods of the Apostle Paul.")

On a lighter note, yesterday for lunch the three of us ate fried grasshoppers. Here's how I described the experience in an email to my dad, mom, brother, and sister:

"I tried my first grasshopper. In fact, I tried three. For the next two weeks or so, big, fat, bright green grasshoppers will be everywhere outside, like one of the plagues in Exodus, and adults and kids here love catching them and stuffing them into large plastic bottles. If you give a bottle full of grasshoppers to an elder Cameroonian, it's a great honor. … So a kid named Samuel helped us catch a few last night (they congregate around fluorescent lights on campus), and today Pa, our cook, fried them up for us in a pan (no need to add oil---when they fry, they kind of secrete their own oil), and then showed us how to pull off their legs and wings. I'll be honest, when I held the first one and looked at its small, black, beady eyes, I gulped, not wanting to stick that thing into my mouth. But when I tried it, I was really surprised by how much I liked it. Grasshoppers are kind of chewy and kind of crunchy, I discovered. And the aftertaste reminds me of shrimp (Linda Yong disagrees---she says bacon). I had three in all, Charlie videoed it and snapped a few pictures, and it was a lot of fun. Hopefully we'll post some of the shots on the blog soon."

-Wes

True fans ignore location

Serendipitously, the Seakhawks and the Colts’ playing the late-afternoon slot last Sunday coincided with fall break being this week. Here Charlie is at midnight yesterday, hoping against hope that the Seahawks would pull out a victory against the Vikings (which unfortunately remained just that, hope). The power was out (contrary to the picture’s look from the flash), a storm was raging outside, and Charlie and I huddled around a computer. ESPN.com’s NFL scoreboard promised to automatically reload, but no true fan could resist hitting refresh over and over. (If you don’t think this is fitting for missionaries, don’t worry—we prayed together during half-time. That’s a joke, but we really did.) I think the reality of defeat had begun to set in at the time of the picture: Charlie began to drift off sometime in the 4th quarter.

I, on the other hand, was able to retire with the euphoria of victory. The Colts became the ninth team in NFL history to be 6-0 for two consecutive seasons. (The Chicago Bears? Who? ) Now if I can only find a venue to watch the play-offs…

[Editorial insert: As the publisher of this post, I must interject and say that the Colts will crumble in the playoffs as Belichick and the Patriots' defense once more gets into Peyton's head. Sorry Tommy, but winless starts in the regular season don't translate into playoff success. Just ask the Colts about last year.]

--tg

Another friend...

Here is a picture of Wesley and me with a good friend of ours, Randolph. This picture is coming on the heels of a long and strenuous game of scrabble between Wes and Randolph, so if the former looks a little tuckered out, that’s why. Randolph is amazing. His reputation certainly preceded him at our first game, but none of us thought that a Cameroonian would beat an American. We were wrong. In his last game against Wesley, he did use the word “Equire” (verb: to sort things into sets of 24). Final score: 424 to 259. Wow. We have thoroughly enjoyed having him in class (I have him for Hebrew, Wes has him for Missions and NT Intro.). He is a very thoughtful, very sharp student with a big heart, which makes him similar to many of the acquaintances we have made here.


We miss you all, and do pray for you often,

-Charlie (making a rare appearance for the team)

A typical evening view

We are very fortunate in that our house faces west, thus framing the sunset by our front window. Here is a taste of what we see nearly every evening (sometimes even brighter!).

Home Sweet Home!

Here are a couple of shots of our humble abode. We really are quite blessed to be living in this house. Somehow, by God’s grace I’m sure, we have learned to call these cement walls and mossy walkways “home” (at least for this year). With every experience within and without these walls (both good and bad), this house is becoming a place filled with memories. Come this June I suspect that it will be a very hard place to leave.

Iron Kung Fu, a.k.a. MacPhil

Wesley mentioned this little man a few posts back. This is a good picture, isn’t it? MacPhil drops by the house occasionally, usually with a devious look in his eyes. He has been affectionately named “Iron Kung Fu,” since his favorite movie (or is it a TV show?) bears that very name. Today I walked past him, stopped, made blades out of my hands, and slowly turned the blades into ‘iron’ fists. He responded with a giggle, which I took as an open mockery of my ability to do Kung Fu. I let it slide. Be the bigger man, Charlie, be the bigger man. I am planning on seeing him in the next couple of days, at which time we will pick up where we left off, promptly.

Mmm...

Last Saturday, Pa helped us cook "country chop" over the fire in our living room: that's roasted plaintains, "soya" (=meat on a stick, which was the best we've had so far here--tender and juicy!), and of course (not in the picture) fufu and njamanjama! Fufu is a staple of everyone's diet here; most Cameroonians we know eat it every day. It's a thick, pasty substance made from corn or rice. You roll it with your hands and use it to pick up the "njamanjama," which is huckleberry leaves that have been cooked with oil and (often) the juice from a pepper known as "pepe."

John Stott on missions and Southern-hemisphere Christianity

John Stott was recently interviewed in Christianity Today. Here’s an excerpt that struck me:


[Stott:] [The] enormous growth [of the church worldwide] is a fulfillment of God's promise to Abraham in Genesis 12:1-4. God promised Abraham not only to bless him, not only to bless his family or his posterity, but through his posterity to bless all the families of the earth. Whenever we look at a multiethnic congregation, we are seeing a fulfillment of that amazing promise of God. A promise made by God to Abraham 4,000 years ago is being fulfilled right before our very eyes today.

[Interviewer:] You know this growing church probably as well as any Westerner does. I wonder how you evaluate it.
[Stott:] The answer is "growth without depth." None of us wants to dispute the extraordinary growth of the church. But it has been largely numerical and statistical growth. And there has not been sufficient growth in discipleship that is comparable to the growth in numbers.

[Interviewer:] How can the Western church, which surely has problems of its own, fruitfully interact with the non-Western? Right now many churches are sending mission teams all over the world.
[Stott:] I certainly want to be positive about short-term mission trips, and I think on the whole they are a good thing. They do give Westerners an awfully good opportunity to taste Southern Christianity and to be challenged by it, especially by its exuberant vitality. But I think the leaders of such mission trips would be wise to warn their members that this is only a very limited experience of cross-cultural mission.
True mission that is based on the example of Jesus involves entering another world, the world of another culture. Incarnational cross-cultural mission is and can be very costly. I want to say, please realize that if God calls you to be a cross-cultural missionary, it will take you 10 years to learn the language and to learn the culture in such a way that you are accepted more or less as a national.

[Interviewer:] So there's really no replacing the long-term missionary.
[Stott:] I think not, except of course for indigenous Christians.


Reading this was a good reminder of why Tommy, Charlie, and I are here at CBTS---as well as of the limitations we face in being here.

We’re here for discipleship, for training and equipping indigenous Christian leaders who will be involved in deepening, not just widening, the Church. Pray that we’ll remember this in the crunch of preparing lectures, grading papers, and meeting with students.

--Wes, for the team

A Couple Pictures

Here are some pictures to go with Wesley’s post. It’s from our visit to see the newly delivered baby. You’ll notice that we all look quite festive, wearing shirts made here. And though there’s no proof of it in the picture, you can trust us that there’s a couple-week-old baby girl wrapped up in the blanket.

--tg, for team

Thank you

For those of you praying for our chapel messages, thank you. I spoke yesterday and Charlie spoke today, and for both of us, it was comforting and relieving to rest on your prayers. Charlie did a great job today, preaching on the need for and practice of continual transformation in the Christian life. Today in class, I had a student tell me that she very much liked my sermon, but that one thing I did was improper. "During your sermon, you said, 'I'm sorry; I must find my place,' as you flipped through your notes. Sir, I do not think that is proper." As is usual, this was met with a chorus of different responses--some outbursts of disagreement, some laughter. A student in front of me jumped to my defense: "It is because he knows he is not God speaking! He knows he is only human!" I found it all humorous.

We couldn't do this without you--thank you for praying!

--tg

Learning the culture, bit by bit

Life here is full of ups and downs, hilarious and heartbreaking things, as anyone's life is, no matter where you are. But sometimes here, the ups feel higher and the downs feel lower to us simply because we're Americans trying hard to enjoy and fit into this strangely, wonderfully different entity called Cameroonian culture.

Here's some of what the journey has looked like so far for us…

On Sunday, our friend Emmanuel ("Emma") the tailor came over to the house. He wanted to take us to greet his sister, Marie, who just had a baby. "She's been delivered," Emma said happily, leaving us to wonder at first if he was talking about a power encounter!

As we left the house to go into the village to Marie and her husband's house, Emma and I stopped on our front porch. A couple of nights before, Tommy had put a bucket just outside the waist-high concrete barrier of the porch to collect rainwater. Now the sun was reflecting off the pool of water and onto the corrugated tin roof of the porch. Emma and I both noticed the bright, dancing reflection. With a glint in his eye, Emma pointed and asked, "Wesley, what is that?" I hesitated for a second, wondering what exactly he was asking. "Emma, that's the sun reflecting off the water in Tommy's bucket," I said. Emma immediately started laughing---loudly and for a long time. "Oh, Wesley, I was hoping to trick you. I thought you wouldn't know what it was! But now I can see you know it's the reflection." Now it was my turn to laugh. Do Cameroonians really think we Americans are that incompetent? :) Ahh, the journey of learning and laughing goes on…!

As Emma led the three of us, plus our student friend Edith who "dry cleans" (=washes our floors with soap and water) for us, into Ndu and towards Marie's house, we passed a house with a huge crowd---maybe 40 people---outside. All of them were wailing loudly, and there was a mound of fresh dirt just beyond the door. The pastor of Ndu's First Baptist Church saw us and came over to explain: "This family has just been bereaved, and family and friends have come to mourn." I immediately thought of the scene in Mark's Gospel of Jairus' daughter and the mourners whom Jesus sent out of the house. Death in this culture seems to hold a place very similar to the one it held in Jesus' time---and the one it holds in all Third World cultures of today.

On Monday our friend MacPhil came over to the house. Charlie was napping, and Tommy was meeting with a student, so I got to hang out with MacPhil by myself for a bit. MacPhil---sometimes we call him "Mac"---is the six-year-old son of the VP of the seminary. He's really cute and really funny. Tommy's given him the nickname "Iron Kung Fu" because that's one of Mac's favorite movies, and Mac has returned the favor by giving each of us nicknames: I'm "Wessy," Charlie is "Chilly," and Tommy is "Tubby." When he got to our house on Monday and I opened the door, he threw his arms around my neck as I picked him up off the ground. I gave him a sugar cube as a treat, and we sat in the living room and talked about school (how he likes to skip whenever he can make up a good excuse) and what he's been playing with his older brother Jim lately. As he walked back up the trail from our house, I watched him karate-chopping some of the flowers on our front walkway. Yep, the nickname fits. Iron Kung Fu is one of our favorite kids on campus.

Yesterday I had my first meeting with my new prayer partner---I'll call him "Isaac." He's 24 years old and is in my Systematic Theology class. Since 2000, Isaac has wrestled with a serious, debilitating health condition that could eventually lead to liver failure. (I'm being intentionally a bit vague here for the sake of Isaac's privacy.) But with the help of doctors at Banso Baptist Hospital, he's doing better now and is back in class. As we met yesterday in my office, Isaac told me his story. He is from a nearby village in the Northwest province, one of seven children. His father is a farmer. Isaac's older sister shared the "Four Spiritual Laws" with him when he was about 14, and he consciously trusted Christ for the first time then. He is here at CBTS because he wants to be a teacher and a pastor.

Interestingly---here's another instance of the vast cultural difference between us and our students---Isaac's main prayer request yesterday was for his relationship to his father. Isaac's dad really wants him to consult a sorcerer and use traditional African religious methods to deal with his illness. Isaac feels that as a Christian, to consult a sorcerer would be to compromise his faith. Wow, I thought as we prayed together, what a dramatic illustration of how the gospel confronts drastically different things in different cultures! Where following Christ might lead to a conflict with materialism in the U.S., here it is more likely to lead to a conflict with traditional magic and sorcery.

Well, I'm going to end this post and head up to the playing fields to watch a game of "Handball"---it's kind of a cross between soccer and basketball, and all three of us are considering joining one of the seminary teams.

Thanks for reading this. And thanks for leaving comments, too. It's always encouraging to hear from you, our family, friends, and supporters.

Much love,

Wes

Child Friends

During college at Taylor, it was a future lineman named Jaxson. In Minneapolis, an architect and swinger named Anders, and a firecracker, Taylor Beth. The past four to five years, I've enjoyed friendships with infants and toddlers. Here are some friends I've made here in Cameroon:

(1) One of my Greek students, Mbotto, and his wife, Vivian (a French teacher) have an adorable one-year-old named Jonetta. She's full of life, often squirming around in her mom's lap, and apparently shy around, maybe frightened of, young white men. We often sit by Vivian and Jonetta in chapel. Sometimes, Jonetta will tear up a napkin, giving me each little bit or stashing the pieces in her ear and neck. Other mornings, she'll clap with the beat or sing the worship song in a private tongue.

(2) Behind the seminary, there's a path I run a couple times a week, through villages and by people carrying produce on their heads. In the past week or two, I've become acquainted with a five or six-year-old girl named Promise. She saw me running one day and squealed with laughter. It was really high-pitched. She ran from the field onto the path, and started running a distance behind me. I asked if she wanted to "do sport" with me, and as I jogged in place, she mimicced me. It sounds cute, but she was definitely making fun of me, finding the white man a hilarious spectacle. Now, whenever I'm on a run, she inevitable spots me, shreiks, and runs behind me (always at a safe distance) with a constant, shrill laugh.

(3) A staff-member here has a nephew named Zeal (pronounced "Zee-elle," with strong emphasis on "Zee"). He's a a year and a half old, I'd guess. I see him a couple times a week, often while he's waiting outside of his school in the morning. The toddlers and young children wait outside of their school by themselves every morning until it opens. They'll often walk to school on their own, too. I don't think I was allowed to be anywhere by myself until I was ten. Zeal's mother died a couple months ago from sickness. Because autopsies are uncommon, the cause of death is often unknown. Occasionally, Zeal is bubbling with vigor, laughing heartily and playfully. But usually, he greets the world with a blank stare. He recognizes me, and will wave at me sometimes. I caught his attention one day by making a loud whistle out of a blade of grass. And we have a shared connection of patting our bellies whenever we see each other. But for the most part, he's fairly stoic, rarely smiling, expressing only sadness in his eyes. Mercy, his aunt, said that he often asks for his mother; he expects her to return. In my experience thus far, I've often found Cameroonians to be less self-conscious than Americans. For example, at the start of some classes, I'll ask someone to lead us in song, and most students are willing to lead the group. In the states, I bet only those with a musical background and a bold spirit would be so courageous. I've wondered if this relative freedom from the opinion of one's peers is due to the reality of sickness and death here. A deceased mother or father, sister or brother is not uncommon, and trivial matters never ascend beyond triviality. Just a thought. Pray for Zeal if you think of it.

It's pouring down rain now as we eat hamburgers and macaroni and cheese for dinner. If you will, please pray for our chapel messages next week. I speak next Thursday, Charlie Friday, and Wesley Monday. I think we'll be working with the theme "Transformation," preaching on regeneration, sanctification, and glorification respectively. We hope God uses it to edify students. Thank you for reading! It's humbling and a bit unbelievable that you read about our experiences, reflections, and needs. Eat some candy for me (preferably Good and Plenty). Power just went out.

--tg