The countdown to the end begins…!
Happy Easter to everyone! (a bit late, I realize). Christos aneste! – The Lord is risen!
This week marks the "beginning of the end" for us -- the final push until the end of the semester and then our saying goodbye to Cameroon. We've already started having conversations about "reentry" into the U.S. -- how it will be great to see friends and family, how it will be oh-so-hard to say goodbye to our Cameroonian friends and CBTS and the culture we've come to know (at least a little) and love (a lot), how it might be strange in all sorts of ways to become re-accustomed to the American way of life we know so well and yet now, from our vantage point, seems strange. You can start praying for our process of leaving. In many ways, we're dreading it. It will be very difficult to leave.
We spent last week -- our mid-semester break -- in a village called Mbingo, just a few hours south of Ndu. There's a Baptist hospital there that specializes in treating patients with Hansen's Disease, and some of our good missionary friends -- Thom and Ellen Schotanus with the BGC -- are helping with construction projects at the hospital and are planting a church nearby. The hospital is situated in a lush valley bordered on all sides by steep cliffs that will soon be filled with waterfalls as the rainy season progresses here. It looks like something out of "Jurassic Park" -- green, majestic, beautiful. We got to stay for three nights in a "rest house" that's owned and operated by the hospital. It sits perched on the top of a hill directly behind the hospital. The house is more Western-styled than ours here at CBTS, with huge windows and a tile-floor kitchen. I have good memories from last week of waking up late, wandering into the kitchen, making coffee, and staring out over the valley down at the hospital and beyond into rolling green hills dotted with thatched-roof huts and zinc-topped mud-brick houses. I felt relaxed, well-rested, and peaceful.
It was a much-needed break for us. All three of us brought stacks of mid-term exams and papers to grade (I think I graded over 50 papers over the three days we were there), so it wasn't the most relaxing vacation. But it was nice to have quiet for a change and be able to get a lot of things done that had been on our “to-do” lists for too long. The doorbell at our house at CBTS seems to ring incessantly sometimes, so it was great to be able to mark exams and quizzes and papers and have some alone time without the usual interruptions.
The break wasn’t all work, though. I was able to do a bit of pleasure reading – I started Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. We hung out with some fellow missionaries: Our friends Thom and Ellen invited us over to their house for Chinese chicken wings that Thom marinated overnight and fried to perfection the next day for us – they were VERY tasty! And we watched some fun movies (The Italian Job, A Knight’s Tale, and Stand by Me). We also hung out with some third-year medical school students from the U.S. who came to the hospital in Mbingo to do very specialized rotations but ended up (as they put it) like the old-time American traveling doctors with the black bags at their side who literally had to treat any and every kind of medical condition their patients experienced. Working in Cameroon, these med school students said, is like stepping back in time. Hearing these guys talk, it made me all the more thankful for another man we got to spend a bit of time with in Mbingo – Rod Zimmerman, a North American Baptist missionary doctor who has literally given decades of his life to providing medical care to Cameroonians. Guys like Dr. Zimmerman are heroes of mine – he works the same long hours as doctors in the U.S. but under much more stressful conditions and without the same compensation.
We got back from our trip in time to attend Easter services at our home church, and it was surprising for me how Easter didn’t seem to be that big of a deal to the pastor and the people at my little village church. A seminary student of mine was the guest preacher. He preached a sermon on reconciliation from 2 Corinthians 5 with hardly any mention of the resurrection. Other than a 4 a.m. processional around Ndutown, which I opted out of, (“to reenact the women’s journey to Jesus’ tomb,” my pastor said the week before), you would never have guessed that it was Easter Sunday at Calvary Baptist Church in Njimtoh. We Baptists could use a bit of liturgical re-tooling, I think!
Let me leave you with a brief snapshot of what’s been happening here recently. This morning around 6:45 a.m., I was in the kitchen making coffee when a student of mine whom I’ll call Emmanuel showed up at our front door. He seemed agitated. His face was twitching, and he was avoiding eye contact with me. He said he wanted to ask me to pray. Two days ago, his sister died while giving birth. The baby survived, but her situation is precarious. People in Emmanuel’s sister’s village are blaming the child for the mother’s death, and Emmanuel was concerned for the safety of the baby. As I write this, he is traveling on a motorcycle on rocky dirt roads into this village in “the bush” to try to reason with these villagers. Several weeks ago, Emmanuel experienced another family tragedy. His cousin, a woman named Josephine, killed her two children. A Peace Corps volunteer friend of ours (not our friend Ally) saw a video clip on TV of this woman, Josephine, in her underwear and with some bloody bruises on her face being dragged out of the back of a pickup truck by an angry crowd. Fearing the worst, our friend flipped off the TV. “Jungle justice,” as they call it around here, can be brutal. Fortunately, Josephine is now safe. She’s in jail, and she’s pregnant again. My student Emmanuel recently talked to her, and she told him that no pastor wants to meet with her. Perhaps they are shunning her as some sort of further condemnation? Emmanuel told me this morning that he wants to go meet with her and let her know that he cares about her. So, I expect that sometime today, after he meets with his sister’s village friends, he will go to the prison near Nkambe and try to share Christ’s love with his cousin who killed her children. I prayed with Emmanuel this morning and gave him some money and told him to use it to provide for his newly-born niece and his jailed, troubled cousin. (Some people believe Josephine may have killed her children as part of some witchcraft ritual; others attribute her actions to postpartum depression.) Would you pray with me about this situation?
The risen Lord is at work here in the rural Northwest province of Cameroon. It is an honor for us to be part of his body here.
Peace,
Wesley
This week marks the "beginning of the end" for us -- the final push until the end of the semester and then our saying goodbye to Cameroon. We've already started having conversations about "reentry" into the U.S. -- how it will be great to see friends and family, how it will be oh-so-hard to say goodbye to our Cameroonian friends and CBTS and the culture we've come to know (at least a little) and love (a lot), how it might be strange in all sorts of ways to become re-accustomed to the American way of life we know so well and yet now, from our vantage point, seems strange. You can start praying for our process of leaving. In many ways, we're dreading it. It will be very difficult to leave.
We spent last week -- our mid-semester break -- in a village called Mbingo, just a few hours south of Ndu. There's a Baptist hospital there that specializes in treating patients with Hansen's Disease, and some of our good missionary friends -- Thom and Ellen Schotanus with the BGC -- are helping with construction projects at the hospital and are planting a church nearby. The hospital is situated in a lush valley bordered on all sides by steep cliffs that will soon be filled with waterfalls as the rainy season progresses here. It looks like something out of "Jurassic Park" -- green, majestic, beautiful. We got to stay for three nights in a "rest house" that's owned and operated by the hospital. It sits perched on the top of a hill directly behind the hospital. The house is more Western-styled than ours here at CBTS, with huge windows and a tile-floor kitchen. I have good memories from last week of waking up late, wandering into the kitchen, making coffee, and staring out over the valley down at the hospital and beyond into rolling green hills dotted with thatched-roof huts and zinc-topped mud-brick houses. I felt relaxed, well-rested, and peaceful.
It was a much-needed break for us. All three of us brought stacks of mid-term exams and papers to grade (I think I graded over 50 papers over the three days we were there), so it wasn't the most relaxing vacation. But it was nice to have quiet for a change and be able to get a lot of things done that had been on our “to-do” lists for too long. The doorbell at our house at CBTS seems to ring incessantly sometimes, so it was great to be able to mark exams and quizzes and papers and have some alone time without the usual interruptions.
The break wasn’t all work, though. I was able to do a bit of pleasure reading – I started Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. We hung out with some fellow missionaries: Our friends Thom and Ellen invited us over to their house for Chinese chicken wings that Thom marinated overnight and fried to perfection the next day for us – they were VERY tasty! And we watched some fun movies (The Italian Job, A Knight’s Tale, and Stand by Me). We also hung out with some third-year medical school students from the U.S. who came to the hospital in Mbingo to do very specialized rotations but ended up (as they put it) like the old-time American traveling doctors with the black bags at their side who literally had to treat any and every kind of medical condition their patients experienced. Working in Cameroon, these med school students said, is like stepping back in time. Hearing these guys talk, it made me all the more thankful for another man we got to spend a bit of time with in Mbingo – Rod Zimmerman, a North American Baptist missionary doctor who has literally given decades of his life to providing medical care to Cameroonians. Guys like Dr. Zimmerman are heroes of mine – he works the same long hours as doctors in the U.S. but under much more stressful conditions and without the same compensation.
We got back from our trip in time to attend Easter services at our home church, and it was surprising for me how Easter didn’t seem to be that big of a deal to the pastor and the people at my little village church. A seminary student of mine was the guest preacher. He preached a sermon on reconciliation from 2 Corinthians 5 with hardly any mention of the resurrection. Other than a 4 a.m. processional around Ndutown, which I opted out of, (“to reenact the women’s journey to Jesus’ tomb,” my pastor said the week before), you would never have guessed that it was Easter Sunday at Calvary Baptist Church in Njimtoh. We Baptists could use a bit of liturgical re-tooling, I think!
Let me leave you with a brief snapshot of what’s been happening here recently. This morning around 6:45 a.m., I was in the kitchen making coffee when a student of mine whom I’ll call Emmanuel showed up at our front door. He seemed agitated. His face was twitching, and he was avoiding eye contact with me. He said he wanted to ask me to pray. Two days ago, his sister died while giving birth. The baby survived, but her situation is precarious. People in Emmanuel’s sister’s village are blaming the child for the mother’s death, and Emmanuel was concerned for the safety of the baby. As I write this, he is traveling on a motorcycle on rocky dirt roads into this village in “the bush” to try to reason with these villagers. Several weeks ago, Emmanuel experienced another family tragedy. His cousin, a woman named Josephine, killed her two children. A Peace Corps volunteer friend of ours (not our friend Ally) saw a video clip on TV of this woman, Josephine, in her underwear and with some bloody bruises on her face being dragged out of the back of a pickup truck by an angry crowd. Fearing the worst, our friend flipped off the TV. “Jungle justice,” as they call it around here, can be brutal. Fortunately, Josephine is now safe. She’s in jail, and she’s pregnant again. My student Emmanuel recently talked to her, and she told him that no pastor wants to meet with her. Perhaps they are shunning her as some sort of further condemnation? Emmanuel told me this morning that he wants to go meet with her and let her know that he cares about her. So, I expect that sometime today, after he meets with his sister’s village friends, he will go to the prison near Nkambe and try to share Christ’s love with his cousin who killed her children. I prayed with Emmanuel this morning and gave him some money and told him to use it to provide for his newly-born niece and his jailed, troubled cousin. (Some people believe Josephine may have killed her children as part of some witchcraft ritual; others attribute her actions to postpartum depression.) Would you pray with me about this situation?
The risen Lord is at work here in the rural Northwest province of Cameroon. It is an honor for us to be part of his body here.
Peace,
Wesley
posted by Charlie, Tommy, and Wesley | 7:46 AM
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