Highway in the Desert

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Gospel Opportunities

Bible Club, a couple of weekends ago, was a time of great fun when I decided to teach them how to play musical chairs. Not having chairs, I used the front and back sheets of cereal boxes. There were always less cardboard pieces than children. They had to dance around to the music, then sit on a cardboard sheet when it stopped!

You can also see Aune teaching the main lesson. She is very good with children. For those of you praying for Aune, she has one more exam left to write (maths). This weekend she went to Windhoek for an aptitude test with the hope of going there to study teaching. Now we wait and see if she gets invited back for an interview. She stayed with the Gillhams. It was her very first time to Windhoek and they kindly took her around the Big Smoke and gave her a lovely time. Aune has also applied to the teaching colleges at Ongwediva, Rundu and Katima Mulilo. This will also mean trips to each location, if she gets invited for interviews.

There is also a photo of the children drawing (resting on their cardboard pieces!). Because using coloured pencils is such a rare treat, even the teenagers enjoy the opportunity to create masterpieces. In this photo (standing, in brown), and again with 2 other girls on the last of the 10 photos, you will see a young girl called Kaino. She lives over 3 kms away but is willing to walk the 7 km round trip to come and learn about the Bible. The two girls with her are friends of hers she brought for the first time on Sunday.

Other photos show us at a small church in Onamimbili where David preached (in Oshiwambo) on Sunday. At the end, we taught them a song (‘rejoice in the Lord always’ – Phil 4.4), which they loved! Étienne took the photo and it is a bit blurry but at least it gives you an idea. As you can see, the ‘pews’ are not very comfortable – just planks balanced on concrete bricks!

The weather is so so SO hot now. Humidity is about 3%. It never gets below 30 in the house and outside is VERY hot.

David is off to Opuwo today (Wed-Friday). Next Monday we celebrate his 40th birthday, which will be fun. Next weekend we will have a joint ‘party’ for him with two families: the son of the Dutch family turns 2 and the husband of our French friends also has a birthday around now so we will have a little barbie/braai/bbq together. Then David heads off to Rundu for a few days for more workshops. As for me, I have started packing. As we may not be able to come back to Namibia (if we do not get a visa), I am having to pack with the view of not being around to sort them out so I am marking a few boxes of very special things ‘To Keep’, and the rest I am designating to whom they should be given, should we not come back.

One of David’s NETS students, who has also done one of my Sunday School workshops, has a daughter (now in Grd 6) with a heart defect. David has encouraged her to send Megameno (pron. Maya-meno) down to Windhoek for tests to see if an operation can be done. I put together some pencils and books for her to take down as she will be going alone. And then I gave her a New Testament. She and her mother were very overwhelmed as just that very morning Megameno had prayed for a Bible of her own! How wonderful to be an answer to prayer! (After 2 years, there are still no full Bibles available for her in her home language, Oshindonga, after they went out of print, but it seems the revised Oshindonga Bible is due to arrive in Namibia at the end of this month! The hold-up has been a paper shortage in Korea where Bible Society gets its Bibles printed.) Please pray for Megameno.

I have also posted a couple of shots of us with orphans in Oshakati. David helped me with the singing as I am hopeless at keeping a tune! I usually teach them the words then tell them to listen to the guitar, not to me! At Bible Club I have Colin Buchanan and Johnny Burns on CD to help me :-)

Friday, September 12, 2008

There and back again

Well, we have arrived safely back from a wonderful week away in Kaokoland, one of the last ‘wilderness’ areas on the planet (apparently). We covered 830 kms on roads that were mainly sand or gravel (see photos); some so bad we had to drive in 1st or 2nd gear! Our destination was the far North of the country – the Kunene region. It is apparently one of the last Wilderness areas on the planet. You can see the route on the map I will attach. We drove to Ruacana, a small town and where the tar road ended. Then went to Swartbooidrift then, via Epembe, to Epupa falls. We came home via Opuwo.

Our first campsite was on the bank of the Kunene in a lovely, though isolated, spot. It had a pool, which the children loved. It was filled with river water which meant lots of bugs to collect. There were crocs to avoid, birds to admire, thieving monkeys to chase, squirrels to surprise, monitor lizards to avoid and mozzies to swat!

The first morning, when we woke up, we discovered we had a flat car battery. Providentially, we had not broken down on the road coming in as no one could have been able to tow us on THAT road. We were miles from shops, electricity (the place had a generator which ran in the evenings), mobile phone towers etc. But, using a satellite phone on the site, and the trip of the owners back into Ruacana for supplies, we were able to purchase a replacement battery. There was not a big choice as it is a very small town. The battery too big, designed for a diesel (we are petrol), and with the wrong poles – but David used the Brute Force method and got it in!
It was lovely just to sit and read by the river, or play with the children, or go white water rafting. I fell out on the last rapid – a rather dangerous one as the river was low – and was held under by the current for a while. A bit scary … but it adds to the story, hey! The children followed in the car, but were able to join us in the canoes for the last leg.

A sundowner cruise was a feast for the eyes. Lots of baby crocs - most of the big ones have been shot by the local people (Himba and Dhemba) because they are a danger to their goats and to themselves – though the crocs are not so much a threat as simply feared. They account for very few deaths, though the toll would probably be higher if people lived along the river.

We had 5 nights there, then headed further West to Epupa Falls for 1 night. You will see a dotted line on the map along the river between the Swartbooidrift and Epupa. That route takes about 3 days! The road we took had been recently graded in places and was ‘miles’ better. Along the way, we stopped at a Himba village to have a look round. They invited us to come so we went in. They speak a form of Otjiherero and it is very different from Oshiwambo so conversation was rather limited but I was rather proud of how well David did. Unless you have watched the documentaries on TV, you can have no idea how primitive it is there. They have NOTHING. They sleep on the ground. Men have a little wooden stand to put under their heads to stop bugs crawling into their ears at night or something but women and children just lie on the hard ground.

All along the route people wave cars down, begging for various things: a lift, sugar, salt, water and sweets. We gave one lady a lift and she left an ochre trail over the seat. I think the ochre is made from the red soil and goat fat. It is used by the women and protects their skin from the sun, as well as being a traditional adornment. Girls grow their hair in two plaits that are brought over the face. When she becomes a woman, they are unraveled and she then gets the hairstyle of the women, which is a number of thick plaits, half-bound with goat skin. Goats provide skins, milk and meat. (More about this in the next Ongaipi.)

At Epupa, we camped about 200m from the Falls. Sadly, a tourist ,swimming where he shouldn’t have, had been washed over the day before and the body not recovered. But we were safe where we were, though a big croc eyed us from a rock mid-river that evening! There were green ‘fever’ trees (in the olden days, pioneers thought the trees, which grew where mozzies abounded, was the cause of the diseases they got. You can see the children feigning fevers in one photo!). The shower was very basic but perfectly adequate. The wind from the river kept mozzies away. It was very pleasant there. That night we were not ‘quite’ so cold as we had been every other night. But the days were all in the high 30s.

The children paddled, and Caris delighted in tiny fish that tickled when they nibbled her feet (see pic on their blog). It really was a lovely place.

The next morning, we discovered a flat tyre. Providentially (again), we had not been stranded or had an accident on the road to Epupa. David was able to change it and get the tyre repaired in Opuwo on the way home.

Étienne is turning out to be a good little photographer … though I was unable to keep ALL his 72 pictures of a skink and 64 of a collared-dove etc!

We got home and I had time to do the mound of washing before the water stopped in the taps. The pressure is off while they fix a problem. It has been off now for 3 days. And now the electricity has just gone off for a while! I guess I would not be a very good Himba – I love my showers too much :-)

We knew we had come home as there appeared, the next day, 25 boys and 2 girls waiting at the gate to come in and play. And one person arrived for financial help. And the phone rang to arrange workshops and more registrations. Well, at least we know we have been missed!