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9th March 09 Newsletter from Togo
In Africa, there are many reasons why planned travel is cancelled at short notice. The past two months have seen several of our project support and assessment visits postponed by political instability.
We were due to visit some projects in Guinea Bissau in a couple of days. But the current unrest (which was a surprise to everyone) including the assassination of the President means that travel to this country is forbidden. We were also to check out a project in Guinea but the security issues there persist, making travelling difficult to say the least.
In the north of Ghana we have two good projects – one Eye project and the other an Orthopaedic project (one of only a few in Ghana: population 26million!). There is chronic tribal unrest and a flare up last year,including shootings in the street, drove our Argentinean orthopaedic surgeon away. It has not been possible to secure a permanent replacement but a short term team of surgeons and anaesthetists form Germany were due to go soon to help the most desperate cases. The tribal conflict has flared up again and now this visit is in jeopardy. The Eye unit has temporarily relocated to a safe town to continue their work. CBM is helping with the refurbishment of a building to work in. CBM projects doing such valuable work at these times. CBM workers hope and pray for personal safety and for the security of the resources of the project so work can, hopefully, resume when all settles down. We keep in daily contact with them, mindful that if the situation deteriorates they may need to be evacuated promptly.
Always, the most needy and disadvantaged in these situations are penalized by the unrest with vital impactful services suspended and all too often destroyed. It is difficult at times to understand why these things continue to happen, and testing of one’s faith.
Tania and I have some significant changes coming up over the next few months. Our advisory work here, which frequently involves financial and clinical audit activities, has prompted Tania to decide to return Down Under to study for her accountancy qualifications. These will make her work here even more valuable.
Accordingly, we will move to a different role with CBM in West Africa as of the middle of the year. The eye hospital we have been involved with here in Lome has been handed off as a functioning unit. CBM has asked that we continue our advisory work, together with project evaluation and capacity building visits in the region. The plan is that we return to West Africa twice a year for 2 months on the ground at a time. The rest of the year we have undertaken to be email accessible and will continue to do what we can as needs arise (and one thing is for sure, needs arise all the time!!). We plan to be based Down Under, and are looking for a place where Neil can get appropriate work and Tania can pursue her studies.
We have always appreciated everyone’s support of the work we do. We feel blessed knowing that your prayers and thoughts were with us in often difficult circumstances. These have been a tremendous source of strength. Thank you.
We will keep in contact as our plans unfold,
Adieu & God Bless
Neil and Tania
The classic shot – blind man being led by child – both confined to life of begging. As if this part of the world isn’t hard enough – to be disabled is a double blow. This is why we continue do what we do.
Also.....
Salut nos amis,After 3 years away we are reflecting on the amazing journey we have had - life can take you down some interesting pathways and sometimes it is only to step out in faith, face the challenges that come your way and trust the process. We have been privileged to have amazing longtime friends & family who have encourged and supported us. We are also honoured to have met wonderful new people who have been generous and gracious and good fun. We simply want to thank you for all for coming across our path and being there to share the journey with us.
With that said we send our latest newsletter and, for those who are interested, an article that appears in The Times around Christmas. Most of our project partners in this region are with the mainline churches- Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, Anglican - as they are the ones who stay put in the times of instablity and war, which has been so prevalent in West Africa. So an interesting articled titled "Atheist review of mission work in Africa"
Adieu
Neil and Tania
From The Times
December 27, 2008
As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God
Missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa's biggest problem - the crushing passivity of the people's mindset
Matthew Parris
Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.
It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.
Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.
I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.
Background
* British missionaries plead guilty to sedition in Gambia
* Soulgasms of the Christian Right
* Have Pentecostalism, will travel
* PROFILE: warlord who kills in name of Christ
But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.
First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.
At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this impression. From Algiers to Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, then right through the Congo to Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya, four student friends and I drove our old Land Rover to Nairobi.
We slept under the stars, so it was important as we reached the more populated and lawless parts of the sub-Sahara that every day we find somewhere safe by nightfall. Often near a mission.
Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers - in some ways less so - but more open.
This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. You do not encounter missionaries in the lobbies of expensive hotels discussing development strategy documents, as you do with the big NGOs. But instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. “Privately” because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service.
It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man's place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.
There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for “them”; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours.
I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.
Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.
How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds - at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it's there,” he said.
To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.
Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.
Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.
And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.
* Have your say
This is one the best articulations of the African worldview I have read. Having lived in Malawi a short year and a half, my wife and I have been confronted with the stark contrast in conceptual schemes. We are missionaries & of course appreciate affirmation, but agree the core issue is worldview.
Daniel Robbins, Lilongwe, Malawi
Indeed any lasting positive impact is found where a change of heart has taken place.It is only through a personal encounter with Redeemer and creator God.I believe Christianity has done alot of good in the continent of Africa and also in other parts of the world.
Rev.Joe Michael Kamau, Nairobi, Kenya
Dear Matthew, As someone who also grew up in Africa, born in South Africa and living in Rhodesia for three years and now living in the USA, I completely agree with your observations. The fact is that there is no liberation without the liberation that is brought by Christianity .
Glynn Smith, Laguna Hills, CA, USA
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