$1 of organic produce -- and "death by coffee"

Most nights, I go shopping at the small market really close to our house, where women start to gather around 4:00 p.m. to sell the vegetables and fruits they have brought from their gardens. The market is a great place to practice my newly-learned phrases in Gbaya, and to receive plenty of encouragement from the women who are glad to help me learn to speak their language.

For about $1, I got a couple papayas, a pineapple, some freshly-roasted and ground peanut butter, and spinach. Not too bad for locally grown organic produce, right? Fresh from the garden too!

Oh, speaking of language learning...this morning when I approached the payote (grass-roofed place for sitting) where Adam was having his Gbaya language learning, he and the teacher were howling with laughter. I was approaching with a cup of coffee. Adam had attempted to say, "Ruth's bringing coffee." Instead, what he said was basically, "Ruth died by coffee." Death by coffee? I guess I could think worse ways to go.

planting the garden

The ground beside our house is all tilled, and we have started planting our garden. So far, we have planted pineapples, carrots, beets, sugar peas, a couple types of beans, sweet corn, a few varieties of tomato, and a couple types of pepper plants. We shall see what comes up.

There has been only one brief rain shower the whole time we’ve been in Berberati so far, but several days recently we have seen cloudy skies that seem to promise rainy season is nearer. Once the rainy season begins, we will not have to water our garden every morning and night, but in the meantime John and Sam help me fill up the watering can and make sure the garden beds get well soaked.

We planted herbs and flowers in front of the house about a month ago, and amongst the many weeds that have sprouted up, we also see some cilantro, Thai basil, Genovese basil and some flowers (cosmos, I think). John really likes seeing little plants just beginning to sprout out of the ground. He likes to bring green leaves to me and say, “Look, chlorophyll!”

After watering the garden this morning, John and Sam and I played a little soccer while Adam had his Gbaya lesson. I got a couple pictures of the boys while John took a rest (using soccer ball as pillow) under one of the palm trees in our front yard.

Your promise gives me life! (thoughts on Scripture use)

Tonight I’ve been considering, once again, how absolutely necessary God’s words are to me. How much I need to hear from Him in order to have any meaning at all to my existence. And how, when I do really consider what He has said to me, my existence does have meaning, and life starts to make a lot of sense (even the suffering that I see in the world around me).

The incredible thing about the Bible is that it is actually the message of a Creator for His created ones, the information that we absolutely need in order to know who we are, why we are here, and most importantly of all, who He is.

So, tonight I was reading a great article by Wayne Dye (one of our professors at GIAL) about the “Conditions Necessary for Scriptures to be Used.” In this article, he talks about the seven most important factors that must be in place if people are to actually use the Scriptures that are being translated into their language.

The whole article was so great that it got all the gears in my brain moving—so many ideas about how the Scriptures could be used by the Gbaya-speaking people (not only the NT which has already been translated, but also the OT which is going to be translated in the future).

There is a big gap here in this culture between what the Bible says, and how people believe and practically live out their beliefs (isn’t it like that everywhere in the world, though? )

One specific area here in which I am starting to understand this gap between God’s truth and people’s lives is in the spiritual belief system. I have been learning about Gbaya spiritual beliefs, and am going to try to keep learning, since of course people’s beliefs about the spirit world are such a crucial component of their lives. I am learning that in people’s perception, spirits and spiritual forces are involved in nearly every aspect of life. The result of this is that much of people’s lives are wound up in trying to protect themselves from evil spiritual forces, trying to obtain good things from spiritual powers that can give good stuff, etc. Ultimately, people live in a great deal of fear, and their desire is to manipulate spirits in order to get good things and avoid calamities. But very few people are aware of what the Bible has to say about spirits and related issues – and it says so much about these things!

With all these things bouncing around in my head tonight – the amazingness of the truth God has offered us in the Bible, the need for Scripture to actually be used as it is translated into languages (Gbaya specifically), and the spiritual belief system in which people here live – I asked myself, “What can I practically do to help people here actually use their Bibles, and to help them realize that God in fact offers truth about Himself that will set them free from spiritual bondage and fears?”

The conclusion I’ve come to, or at least a preliminary one, is that the best thing I can do is to be into the Bible myself, and through God’s help to be living out the truth I find there. I often find myself wanting to exemplify something good to others (my kids, friends, people around me) and then realize that the point is not to be an example of the thing, but actually to be the thing myself.

So if I want to help people around me find all the answers to life in the Bible, then the best way to do that is to find answers to my own questions there. And of course that (going to the Bible for myself, rather than just getting others to go to it for the help they need) – is the point after all.

This year I am trying to read through the Bible, and as I am reading on this more purposeful accelerated reading plan, already I’m finding myself reminded of a lot of things about God and His workings in history that I had forgotten. I think that reading the Bible more is just a good cycle – God shows me so many things that in turn, I just want to read it and obey it more. Hopefully so that I will keep becoming more and more like that man who wrote Psalm 119, and who seemed to have a pretty good understanding of how vital God’s words are for our lives –

“Remember your word to your servant, in which you have made me hope.
This is my comfort in my affliction, that your promise gives me life.” (Psalm 119:49-50)

 

 

 

Road Trips, Recipe and Rambunctious Kids

The past couple weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind here. Adam made a 16-hour road trip to Bangui with our friend André to get medical attention for his broken jaw. Two days later, Adam and our branch director Larry drove back to Berberati, making record time—they left Bangui at 5:00 a.m. and arrived in Berberati at 4:00 p.m.

Larry, and another of our branch members Will, have been meeting with us for a number of days, and we are covering a lot of ground and having fun in the process. It has also been a blessing to have two wonderful ladies helping us cook some of the weekday meals so that we can give more time to our meetings.

Esther’s wood stove is pretty impressive, and you can keep a lot of pots going at once above its blazing heat.

Next door on our own back porch, I continue to experiment with my more humbly-sized free standing charcoal grill. I’m finding that one simple and effective way of baking is to steam breads or cakes in a lidded pot over the hot coals. I have altered a recipe for Boston brown bread to use ingredients available here:

3 ½ cups flour
1 ½ tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
½ tsp baking soda
2 ¼ cups milk
½ cup molasses or honey
½ cup raisins

I pour the batter into two lightly oiled and floured milk cans and place them in the boiling water. After a couple hours of cooking, we have two delicious loaves of bread (they slide very easily out of the milk cans!)

Here are a few photos of the kids, who spend much of the day playing in our yard and on the big front porch…

Cute baby Elliot, who loves to eat dirt and is learning to walk...

Sam, Louisa and Elliot...

Louisa, John and Tishik on their "motorbike"...

Elliot, Louisa and Sam...

And two of the ever-present onlookers who find us fascinating to watch...

Please Pray for André

In the most recent blog post, I posted a couple pictures of our Gbaya language helper (and friend!) André. This morning André was in a bad motorcycle accident and was seriously injured. Adam and Neil are driving André and his wife to Gamboula, a town several hours’ drive from here where there is a missionary-run hospital. Please pray that God will heal André and give his family peace in this traumatic time.

Gbaya Learning, More Caterpillars, and Brownie Experiment

We are into our second week of Gbaya language learning. We got connected with a really neat guy, André, who is helping us learn Gbaya three times a week. 

André’s mother tongue is Gbaya, but he also speaks Sango, French and English. He is a teacher by profession, so helping people learn languages is his specialty. Despite the fact that learning a new language is a monumental (and sometimes daunting) task, we have enjoyed diving in to the new sounds and new words. This is going to be a fascinating language learning journey for sure.

I have spent almost two out of my first three lessons with André talking about Gbaya beliefs about the spirit world. As André has explained what people believe about evil spirits, and about people’s interactions with the spirit world, it is becoming all the more clear to me how much people need God’s Word in their language so that its light can dispel the darkness and fear that many of them live in.

The other day André was telling Adam how he has enjoyed reading a copy of the Gbaya NT which Adam gave him; even though he speaks other languages well, he found that he was able to understand the meaning of a particular passage better when he read it in his own language.

André loves the Lord and has a desire to preach the truth of God’s Word to them. Some mornings he rides his motorbike out into Gbaya villages as early as 4:00 a.m. and preaches before he has to go about his daily work. Adam has had the opportunity to go with André twice and preach in nearby villages (with André translating into Gbaya). They have been encouraged to see how God seems to be working in people’s hearts as a result of hearing His Word presented and explained.

Plenty has been going on around our house. John has made a new friend, Tishik, who has been spending much of every day playing at our house. Tishik is four, and is just as talkative as John (can you believe it?) I think John is going to pick up a lot of Sango from Tishik. The boys are good little helpers; recently they have given me a hand at planting beet seeds and making tortillas.

Tishik also really enjoys John and Sam’s alphabet movie. It seems his is now learning the ABC’s in English, right along with Sam. It’s pretty cute to hear them shouting, “A! B! C!” together.

By the way, when I went to the market with John last week, he was begging me to buy him some caterpillars to eat. So I did. The lady selling them broke one crunchy little caterpillar in half, and handed it to me to eat. So I have eaten my first caterpillar. It was peppery tasting, and very crunchy. Here is a picture of Esther, also eating her first caterpillar (look closely and you can see how very caterpillary it looks):

Today I baked something for the first time in almost a month! My makeshift oven consisted of a heavy pot I borrowed from a friend, with hot coals above and beneath.

I thought things were going pretty well when I finally pulled the first pan of brownies from the “oven,” and it was just about perfect (if a little doughy in the middle). But the second pan burned to a black crisp in a matter of minutes…and the inside of the brownies were still soggy. I guess I need to figure out how to regulate the heat better.

happy new year - trusting God's faithfulness

I will remember the deeds of the Lord; yes, I will remember your wonders of old.
I will ponder all your work, and meditate on your mighty deeds.

Your way, O God, is holy.
What god is great like our God?
You are the God who works wonders;
you have made known your might among the peoples.
You with your arm redeemed your people...


Psalm 77:11-15

Remembering God's goodness -- most of all the fact that He has redeemed us from our sins -- is really an amazing way for me to build my faith in Him when it is waning. I find that I tend to have a pessimistic mindset. Sometimes, even when life is going so well, I find myself wondering, "When are things going to turn bad?"

Of course, it is certain that difficult times will come. But it is also certain that God has been very good to us, and will continue to be. So whether the coming months bring new hard challenges or not, I can be certain that God will be with us through them all, and that He will be lovingly and powerfully working out His perfect plan in our lives. And I know He will continue to give us reasons to rejoice in Him.

I know this, but it helps to be reminded from time to time. That being said, I am amazed by how good God has been to us in 2011 and I am excited about 2012. We have lived in Africa almost one year now, and in a lot of ways I really do feel like I have stepped into a new world. I am starting to get the sense that even when we go back "home" to the States, something about us is going to be so changed from our time here that we will never completely fit in back there again.

Anyways, a stomach bug of some sort seems to have bitten us and our neighbors...but in spite of that, we have celebrated our way into the new year. Esther, Neil and Kathleen came over last night (new year's eve) and we enjoyed hearing about what different cultures do to celebrate the new year--Austrians (like Esther) light lots of firecrackers, Scots (like Kathleen) have a big dancing party called a Celeidh, and Canadians (or at least some of them like Neil and his family) buy fireworks in the US to set off back home where they cannot buy fireworks.

We discovered that New Year's Eve here is somewhat like Halloween in the US, in that children go around in groups, playing homemade drums (I know that part is not like in the US) and singing a little tune asking for money. So many kids came to our door! Thankfully, I had bought a big bag of candy in order to fill a piñata that I hadn't yet made, so I had lots of candy to hand out.

At one point, Adam also handed out the last coin he had, a 500-franc piece worth about $1.00. The group of boys to whom he handed this big piece of money (10 francs is normal) jumped up in the air, cartwheeled and sang out in happiness.

In other news, I've been getting ready to plant a big vegetable garden. A great local gardener has been doing   a ton of work to help get the space ready -- uprooting a few small trees, tilling the ground, and shaping the raised rows. So we have been talking a lot about planting and about what we will put in our garden.

Yesterday morning, while I was washing clothes in basins on the back porch, John hopped off the porch and began to gather small avocados that had fallen too soon off the avocado tree behind the Zubots' house. He put them all in a dip in the ground behind the porch and announced, "Look, Mama, I planted an avocado garden!"