Learning in Africa

Salamaha! Good Day!
Mohavaha? How are you?
Kihavahu, Kihikirutu? I am fine, how are you?
If we say this really quickly, it sounds as though we speak Makua, the local tribal language. However, if we get it right, they usually respond with another sentence or two and we are completely lost at that point. So, now we are nearly tri-lingual in saying hello, how are you, etc. but then we revert back to english and feel so dumb! The people try so hard to communicate with us and are so patient with us but unfortunately, we are limited to a few phrases and charades. It’s an adventure and frustration at the same time.

Things are continuing to go well. We are in good health, praise God. This is a real praise asthere have been many sick people in our class. One has been flown to South Africa with some kind of tropical sickness, another is down with malaria and several are sick with different flu-like symptoms. We are both feeling great and only lacking some good solid exercise. Our days are spent in class in the morning and doing some kind of project in the afternoon. Today was feeding the village children. This entails getting about 25 gallons of cooked rice and 10 gallons of beans, a bucket of wash water and about 30 plastic plates to feed about 150-200 young kids, aged 2-15 years. Sometimes it feels a bit like herding ants or bees as it did yesterday, but today it went really smooth. The 30 plates means that there is a lot of washing and re-filling so it is quite a process.

Some of you may wonder what we are learning in school. The school we are in is called the Holy Given School of Missions. There are two primary goals to the school. One, to learn the basics of cross cultural ministry. This accomplished by living in this culture and seeing that the things we accept and believe are not accepted and believed here. We try to understand what their beliefs and values are through friendship and relationship and relationship with them. It’s a challenging and on-going process. About the time you think you understood some of it, you experience something else that shows you how western you are and how much more you need to learn. The second thing we are learning also an on-going thing as well and that is how to have the compassion of Jesus while working amongst the poorest of the poor. Words cannot describe it, we are in a children’s center that is in the middle of a village called Novien. It is perhaps a couple of square miles in physical size and has perhaps 50,000 people! It might be less, but not much and it could be many, many more. Maybe double that. The area is covered with homes of bamboo, mud and concrete block. Most of them are probably less than 200 square feet and have perhaps an average of 5-7 people per home. I know that these are vague estimates but hopefully it will give you an idea of the number of people in this village. Now, imagine another village next to it and another next to that and then you start to get the picture. Most are without work and live day to day, meal to meal. One day in our class, Heidi Baker, the director asked our class and a class of Mozambique pastors whoever had more than 20 metacais to their name to raise their hand (20 metacais would be about .80 cents). Of course, all of us missionary students had more than that but not a single pastor raised their hand. That is the situation of most of the people around here. The on-going challenge is how do we, with so much, respond with compassion to these with so little. We’ll let you know when we figure it out.

The bicycle container situation is that the container is now in Maputo and should be going through customs as we speak. The only problems that I am aware of is some paperwork problem that was supposed to be cleared up yesterday and i assume that no news is good news on that one. The other problem is that our actual freight bill was different than what we estimated to them so we may need to pay some additional fee. Hopefully it won’t be too much and we will have the container on it’s way to Beira in a week or two. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear something.

As Far as communicating with us goes, email is slow and unreliable at best, we may or may not receive an email if you send it but give it a try if you want. No pictures please, it will take forever to load. Our email is: brunk@montanasky.net

If you are real adventuresome, you can try to give us a call. The best way is to buy an international calling card which should get the call down to around .25 cents per minute.
For us to call you is about $1.50 per minute so...

Our time Zone is 9 hours ahead of the mountain time zone and a good time to reach us is in the morning in Montana which would be in the afternoon/evening Mozambique time. Our phone number is 258-82-636-4833. There is the typical delay in speaking but it works pretty well.

We hope all is well with all of you. Thanks for you prayers and support, we’ll try to do a weekly report and keep you better informed but the computer situation is fighting that right now. We’ll see how it goes. God bless you all!!

Ron and Jan