Long Weekend=Long E-mail

You know, I was thinking that there hasn't really been anything extra curricular to post on here in a while (except for the pastor in church saying that a dear sister had been attacked by a margarine (instead of migraine) headache during the service). Either I'm doing something wrong, or the universe is holding back on serendipitous and gut-busting misadventures because it plans to give me a wallop in the very near future. Only time will tell. In the meantime, another support e-mail for the general internet's viewing pleasure:

Dear endlessly patient and perpetually gorgeous supporters, friends, and peeps,

Well, approximately 57 million things have, I think, happened since I last wrote. So, in summation, I offer this medly: hiking, rocks, dust, Thai food, weddings, grammar, peanut butter and jelly, taxis, clever dogs, Independence Day, airborne money, red stew, basketball and electric mayhem. I don’t know that I will be able to thoroughly cover all that ground in the course of one e-mail, but for the record, all of those things did happen in just the past few days.

One of the most glorious things that has happened was also one of the seemingly smallest. I was in the CARE center out in the village of Gyero playing cards with a couple boys when someone else brought out a couple of small drums. I asked the boys if they could play and one told me that he did. After very, very little cajoling, I find myself aptly learning to play this small but difficult drum through the tutelage of a remarkably able teacher. The style of this particular drum was the typical hourglass-ish shape, but connecting the top and bottom skins of the drum was a bunch of twisted leather cords. The drum is worn over the shoulder like a purse and when you squeeze the cords with your elbow, it changes the sound of the drum beat, which definitely added an additional layer of difficulty. So Jonathan, my teacher, would begin to play a pattern and I would watch a couple of times and then join in and we would play the pattern together until he would stop and let me see if I could play it alone. Keep in mind I have had no formal drum training whatsoever, so it was really fun to be able to pick it up so fast. Sometimes I would mess up just because I would start laughing because I enjoyed the sound of us playing together so much! And what a great way to connect with the kids, they all love to crowd around and gawk at the Bature on the drum! (Bature is the Hausa word for a white person, and one that you grow accustomed to hearing quite often.) Of course, even the little ones can already play better than me, but they are gracious enough to let me have a try.

Then on Sunday, I was privileged to witness a very Nigerian celebration called a send forth. A send forth is kind of the Nigerian equivalent of a bridal shower, in which the bride-to-be is the guest of honor and all of her family and friends gather to send her forth into her married life. This particular send forth was for a girl who had worked with a lot of the missionaries in Jos, so the festivities also had much of the flavor of a church service, with prayers and a short homily and two sung performances, one in English and one in Hausa, of Prov. 31. But the centerpiece of the celebration was definitely what was simply called “dancing time.” Something like the “Dollar a Dance” tradition at American weddings, various groups of relatives were called up to dance with the bride-to-be, but instead of paying for the honor, all the other relatives and friends would come up and give the bride or the dancers money by touching it to their faces and then dropping it to the ground. Then the various bridesmaids would scramble around picking up all the money off the ground. They had by far the most difficult job in the bunch, as it was a windy day and sometimes the money would go sailing off and kids and bridesmaids would have to run chasing after it! But the kicker was when the MC called out all the Batures in attendance for a dance of their own! So out we all came, and I have to say I don’t know when I’ve seen such a stiff group of dancers. But I must, unfortunately, include myself in that description, because for me at least it was hard to balance between not wanting to seem like a stick in the mud and not having any idea what kind of dancing would seem provocative to the Nigerians and sully the good name of SIM. But we all made it through in more or less one piece and the effort was much appreciated by the Nigerians. Another very African feature of the experience was that, even though we had to leave early for another engagement, they insisted that we take our food with us. Fried chicken and puff-puff anyone?

Monday was a holiday for us because we were celebrating Nigerian Independence Day! I’ve been told that in the past there have been parades and festivities in town, but this year there’s a new governor who, for whatever reason, did not see fit to host anything this year, to the irritation of many Nigerians, some of who talked about ousting him for this one grievous social sin. But, in lieu of parades, me and a few friends and fellow missionaries drove out of town for a little hike in an area known as Golf Ball Rock, so called because of the rock formation that looks strikingly like a golf ball set up on a tee. We had a nice climb up to where we could sit in the shade of the golf ball itself and look out over the landscape. It was a gorgeous day, and so nice to be out of the city for a while. I have to confess that the piles of trash and endless dust get old after a while, so it was nice to be reminded by soft-sided green mountains and quiet corn fields cradling grass-roofed huts what a beautiful country Nigeria actually is. And climbing on rocks is pretty much always fun no matter where you are.

However, it hasn’t been all fun and games, though because of the long weekend that’s mostly what it’s been. :-) I am continuing my glorious library work and had a great opportunity to have a long chat with one of the boys’ Nigerian teachers and hear his views on educational changes that need to take place at T.H., the educational system in Nigeria and where Plateau state fits into that, life, the universe, and everything in general. People here really love to talk! But I’ve also started another one of my projects, which is working with Abigail, a young Nigerian woman, on the biographies of boys at T.H.

SIM has set up a sponsorship program for the different CARE centers which is similar to Compassion or World Vision. Right now some of the SIM team are hard at work trying to get out annual reports to the boys’ sponsors, but although Abigail’s English is pretty stellar, it’s not quite to the point where American sponsors could understand what she writes. So I am trying to work with her on her English skills and computer skills as well so she can take over the biography project more completely someday. Yet again, this was not something I had any idea that I would be asked to do when I came and definitely presents its own unique challenges. It has been interesting though, to see the way this project dovetails with work in the library because many of the written mistakes Abigail makes are the same as the ones the boys make when reading out loud. There is the additional difficulty that spoken Nigerian English is very different from American written English. For example, there are a number of words (like live and leave or bird and birth) which sound exactly the same in Nigerian spoken English, but come across very differently on paper. And once again, I am in no way trained in teaching ESL, but we continue to slog through. Fortunately Abigail is a good student and lots of fun to work with and continues to teach me lots about Nigerian thinking and ways of life.

The other thing (and this could really use intense, miraculous breakthrough kinds of prayer) is that the technology we are trying to work with here is not the best. The mouse on the computer Abigail has been should have been marketed as a tool of spiritual formation because it absolutely requires the patience of a saint to operate the stupid thing! You push it right, it goes left, or else it absolutely refuses to move, and everything takes three times as long, which is really frustrating considering how much work there is to get through in the first place. But what can you expect from a machine that was manufactured when cell phones were the size of bricks?

As far as actual prayer requests go, please pray that I could continue to build and strengthen relationships with Nigerians and with individual boys at the center. I am starting to feel that a foundation has been laid, but I hope that God will show me who specifically to focus on for the next few weeks. And please pray for grace in learning names! There are at least 85 boys who I’m trying to keep straight, not to mention house uncles and aunties, other missionaries, tailors, cooks, vendors in the market…every relationship in Nigeria is a personal one. And please pray for the boys for help in their studies. I feel like a number of circumstances in the center right now are coming together to push them towards more enthusiasm and discipline in learning to read. Please pray that they would not be discouraged and that they would be captured by the power of the written word and their potential to master it!

Thanks for sticking with me through another tome, friends. Just remember, as I said at the beginning, I didn’t even cover the half of it! And, as always, if you no longer wish to receive these e-mails, make like a fisherman and drop me a line. (Yes, I did make that up just now.)

Embracing the adventure,
Shannon