July 4, 2011 Weekly Update

Fast and Testimony Meeting in rural Kenya
I sat in Church yesterday morning and thought, “What a unique experience this is.” We meet in a very primitive rough building with unfinished walls and cracked cement floors. There is no glass in the windows, although every place of entry has bars to prevent theft. There are no curtains or other adornments, but the saints are trying hard to conduct the meeting in the way prescribed by the Handbook. Only a couple of the people in the room have been members more than 3-4 years.

We just worked to reactivate the branch president and his wife 3 months ago. He’s been a member maybe a year. His counselors have been members less time. A sixteen year old girl was sustained as the YW President (a shocker to us), and a new R.S. President was called, who has been inactive for awhile.

The room was filled to the brim! We were thrilled. I looked out the windows to see piles of mud and weeds all around us. Two cows and two staked goats grazed right outside my window. A woman walked by within touching distance with a huge load of wood on her head and a toddler dragging along behind her tugging at her skirts.

Several kids walked under my window chewing on sugar cane….the African candy. It is a woody stalk they pull apart with their teeth and chew to extract its sweetness. They can’t afford sweets (candy) like we use, so their teeth are really quite beautiful for the most part. A boy rode by on his bike loaded with an enormous bag of grain tied on each side and one on the back.

We had a hard time hearing the testimony meeting because of thundering drumming combined with chants in Swahili for a religious group next door. At the same time we were drowned out with the loud beating of the drum, two competing ministers fought for converts across the street and on our side of the street screaming into their microphones at a high rapid pitch as if their volume would somehow endorse their message.

We had a lovely meeting however, with no lapses in time between speakers. The members jumped up one at a time to make sure they would be able to bear their testimonies before the close of the meeting.

Baby Blessing
A new baby was blessed, 1½ months old. The mamma looked so young, I had thought earlier she was either in Primary or YW until she began to nurse the baby. I found out she was 18 years old. The father has 5 children from a former marriage. He is 52 years old. They have been married 2 years, and this is her second baby (the first one died). He told me he met her by going to her parents and offering to pay a dowry of 6 cows and some money when she was 16. She is a pretty girl, very shy. I tried to befriend her, but she speaks no English. She looked frightened when I tried to approach her.

I looked around our small congregation. Many sat with muddy bare feet, almost all with ragged, worn clothing, stained and hanging on their thin bodies like shrouds. That was true regardless of age or gender.

Almost all the little girls wore tattered, fancy, dirt-stained dresses unzipped in the back. I don’t understand that style, but almost all girls and many…maybe even most women wear clothing that is unzipped in the back…Some have torn or broken zippers, but many just don’t zip them up. I’ve wondered if it is because it is cooler—but it really isn’t that hot here. I don’t know. Maybe it is too hard to reach.

Little kids were falling asleep on their hard little plastic chairs, seemingly oblivious to the discomfort. We have a Muzungu (white American) elder in this branch now. He played his mouth organ to accompany the sacrament songs (the ones he knew). It was surprising, but really very nice after all. Hey, whatever works.

After church we had many people come to us with requests. We refer almost all of them to the branch president. The car is a problem because they all would like us to take them home and we are not supposed to do that. Neal was feeling so sick. We really debated about going to Church at all, but he really wanted to attend this branch presidency meeting (their first). So, we had planned to leave after Sacrament, forgetting that Sacrament was last in this branch. Then they had no Primary leader, so little 11 year old girls were conducting Primary. No YW leaders turned up, so I taught YW and went to R.S. where the new president was conducting for the first time. YW was conducted during SS. Things run a little differently here.

Sometimes we continue to be shocked:
The other day we were trekking up a steep hill on a narrow path with tall (12 feet Neal says) maize on either side of us. We were following 3 members of the branch presidency. As we came out into a little clearing on a very muddy patch of path, the men veered off into the corn, and we noticed a little girl sitting spread legged on the edge of the corn with her legs and bare feet extending into the mud, flat in front of her. We were shocked (the men ahead of us were completely oblivious to the little girl). Our surprise arose out of the idea of this little girl (about 3 years old) sitting all by herself out in this path.

We conferred together asking each other, “Where is the mother? Should we do something? What if someone takes her?” We agreed we should confer with the branch president up ahead. As we walked past her, we looked back and were further shocked to see a brand new baby lying in the dirt a little further back in the corn.

I ran up to the branch president and mentioned the children. He just shrugged his shoulders and said, “Oh her mamma is working in the maize. It is okay. Don’t worry.” I said, “Oh, in the states, we would never do that. They might be kidnapped.” He laughed at me. “They are economic liabilities here! There are so many of them and no food.”

Neal had to go back to the car maybe 15 minutes later to get some copies of the Book of Mormon. He said when he passed them, the little three year old was whimpering, “Mamma, mamma, mamma.” It just broke our hearts. Economic liabilities….so sad!

The Branch President told us there were 50 orphans in the school his child attends. He was relaying that there are just so many kids alone and hungry.

NEW INSIGHT and PROFOUND WISDOM:
We were working with another branch presidency this week in a different area. This area has had the Church in its midst longer than any other where we work (in the 5 branches). There have been many leaders who have lost their memberships here. Many former members and their families harbor resentments and bitter feelings that have never been resolved. We have worked in this area many times with the former branch presidency. The new branch presidency wanted to go down there to see if we could help to soften some of the feelings. We went back to places we had been several times before. We visited one sister who was so angry whom we had missed before on previous visits. We could not understand her words, but boy could we understand her feelings. After we finished visiting for the day, we felt so badly for them and for their feelings of blame and anger.

We mentioned to the branch president that the experience pretty well mirrored the experiences we had had in this area in the past. Then he said, “My father was a farmer. He gave me advice when I was young and working in the shamba. He said, “ Don’t start working on the shamba (farm) where there are many weeds. You will tire yourself out so much that you won’t be able to have the energy to work in the more productive part of the field. Additionally, you will allow more weeds to move from the dense area into the good and productive area by spending your time where it is so hard. It doesn’t mean that you don’t care about the hard area, or that you neglect it, but it does mean that you measure your energy and work where it will be most fertile and produce the best yield.”

NEW RELIEF SOCIETY PRESIDENT
As we have mentioned before, we have all new branch presidencies. Most of these men are really new in the Church. We are trying to do training (when they will let us) each week by going over the Handbook and trying to help them with forms, etc. One of their biggest obstacles is they have no calendars of any kind, no paper or pencils of any kind, etc.
We talked to this branch president (mentioned in the last paragraph) about the importance of having every person have a Church calling. We talked with him about how important it is to pray about callings.

We were surprised last week to hear in sacrament meeting the name of a lady as Relief Society President that we did not know. We asked the members sitting around us who she was. None of them knew her either.
We finally discovered that we did know this sweet woman. We’ve mentioned her and her family in this journal before. They live way, way out in the bush on the top of a long hill. They have 4-5 children. Her husband is the branch clerk. They are really quite new converts less than a year. He rides his bike to church over really rocky and muddy roads. It takes him about an hour-hour and a half to ride to Church one way. To bring their family to Church for one Sunday would cost them $28 American. There is no way…no way in the world they can afford that. They, like almost everyone here, are hungry right now.

Her name is Carol. We were so impressed with their family when we visited them. She has a sweet testimony, but doesn’t speak hardly any English at all. Our R.S. meetings are all in English.

We didn’t get around yet in the 3 weeks we’ve been training in this branch to talk to the branch presidency about what callings entail in detail. I don’t think the branch president has a clue what a R.S. President does.

Carol has never been to a Relief Society meeting. She can’t afford to visit members because she lives so far away from the branch and the other women.

We are trying to visit each branch for a month. We needed to be in a branch far from where Carol will serve this week. We worried about what her first day would be like conducting R.S. We asked the Branch President and young missionaries to visit R.S. to support her. It was a hard experience they reported. I don’t know how we can help her, but that is high on MY priority list for the next month.

Dancing Road We took the entire branch presidency (minus the clerk) out to visit the Clerk and his wife, Carol. As we bumped along---it is a TERRIBLE road---the branch president laughed and said, “We call this the “dancing road” because you swish and sway and go up and down!

One of our Institute Teachers had to leave a branch council meeting (3 hours on a Friday morning) to go visit his sister in the hospital, who has suffered from cancer. She had her ear removed because the cancer had spread there. I had never heard of that before.

Learning curve: Still a third branch president approached us one morning as we were getting ready to go visiting with him. He said, “Is it okay for children to pay tithing before they are eight years old?” We were a little surprised at his question. We assured him that it indeed was. We assume so much, and never think to talk about things that we take for granted. Many of these brethren are so humble.

A Sunday School teacher remarked in class, “Now we have hunger. This is not a time to curse God. It is a time to rely on Him and pray fervently to Him for help.”

TEACHING EXPERIENCE:
We went to visit the 2nd Counselor in a branch presidency. Almost none of the men in these branch presidencies have wives in the Church. Our congregations are mostly men because women stay mostly at home and work on the shamba or the women do not speak English. Anyway, we went to visit him at home. When we arrived, his wife had her sister and a neighbor woman (also married to a leader in the branch) in her home. They had a ton of questions. We opened with prayer, and that resolved a big issue for them. We opened with addressing Heavenly Father and ended in the name of Jesus Christ. They didn’t think we believed in either. We accidentally observed that we didn’t worship Joseph Smith. They questioned if we used the Bible. That was when Neal went to the car to get the books. They were really neat ladies, spoke English well, and had so many questions. We hope they will feel the need to come to Church We gave their names to the missionaries.