Congo mules

Anybody traveling to Congo may be bombarded with requests to carry stuff to and from the country. This is certainly the case for my July 12–August 1 trip to Kinshasa, Tshikapa, and Mbuji Mayi. I will be one of those Congo mules. So far I have agreed to take, on behalf of specific people:

• Herbal tea
• Vitamins
• Surgical lamps
• A new laptop
• A camera to replace one that another Congo mule carried to Kinshasa but it was stolen there.
• Shoes belonging to that Congo mule, which he forgot to take.
• A small suitcase full of clothes and other gifts for the family of a Congolese friend living here. It will be filled, on return, with Congolese clothes for his American friends.

I will also be loaded with pictures of people that my friends and I took on the trip two months ago. On that trip I also carried a new laptop and accessories to a digital projector. We brought back about 36 yards of cloth printed in Pepto Bismol pink to celebrate the centennial. We were asked to carry 150 yards but said no.

For this trip I have said yes to all requests so far but I will have to pack my suitcase soon to make sure I have room for everything. It’s all fine as long as I have plenty of advance notice. It’s the last-minute requests and gifts that pose a problem.

Congo mules serve an important function that the national and international infrastructure is not up to serving. No such thing as free delivery to Congo—if any delivery at all. At least email functions in Kinshasa. So this morning the email request came to buy and bring a new laptop, for which I will be reimbursed by the friend in Congo. It was something of an e-miracle that, after a few hours of intermittent research and communication—Vic researched, I communicated while I cleaned house and did laundry—we were able to agree on the product and make the purchase, which will be delivered to our house, and I will carry it to Kinshasa.

Vic was amused that the friend was buying the computer for himself, so he could pass his old one on to his daughter as a graduation present. It’s exactly what he would have done. A son will be responsible for setting up the computer. Later in the day I called our techno-nerd son to consult on which iPad Vic should buy me for my retirement gift. Families in Congo and USA have much in common.

Congo mules carry more than teabags and electronics. We carry the threads of obligation, reciprocity, generosity, and the stories behind the goods we exchange. These are threads that bind relationships.

That’s way better than the UPS guy who zooms up our driveway and deposits packages in the garage, without even knocking to see if he can hand it off in person.

A creativity reboot

The cable guy’s ladder clatters outside and the connection disappears again. I can tell because the TV, which is turned on as an indicator, goes silent. This intermittent, chaotic connection-disconnection is symptomatic of my life this month.

Yesterday I felt unaccountably sad, today I feel unaccountably happy. I lose things and find them in strange places (Poltergeist, are you back?) I had several tense talks with my husband but I now miss him terribly and he has been gone only two hours.

Is it me or is it something in the air? I read the shamanic forecast for June. The themes of this month are creativity and vision.

The vision has certainly happened; I can date it to June 7, when I began to take seriously the idea of writing about Mennonites in Congo. And on June 8 I started to make it happen by setting in motion plans to attend the church’s centennial in July. Creativity.

Along with creativity comes chaos, according to the forecast. I am creating this chaos myself and it is driving me nuts. I can’t find things, the technology is out of whack (hence the cable guy), the cat gets sick, I can’t keep track of my schedule. I am overbooked—but enhancing social contacts is what I need to do right now, also according to the forecast, and I am sure doing it. Chatting on FB with the Mukendi kids in Kinshasa, throwing a small African dinner party last Saturday, helping with a move and spending time with both our children and spouses and the granddaughter and at a family wedding, taking Vic up on his offer of a July 4 retirement party, right before driving to a family reunion in Pennsylvania July 7, right before going back to Congo July 12. It has been a very social month and it has been great.

I have felt lots of support for this creative move and transition (including contributions to the Mimi fund, only $95 to go as of today). One theme of this transition, according to the forecast, is taking charge of your own life. What is more charge-taking than retiring from one very good thing and starting another very good but quite different thing? It requires some explanation and openness, especially as I move from more secular circles to more religious ones. I am not exactly breaking ties but I am reknotting them, saying this is who I am, both secular and religious.

The temptations of the period, according to the forecast, are also real. The cable connection is back up momentarily so I go online and copy those that have applied to me in the last few days:

·      Feeling scattered and unable to handle the chaos

·      Depression, lethargy or feeling unmotivated

·      Anxiety related to lack of control

·      Extreme sadness or nostalgia over perceived loss

·      Feeling alone, lonely, flat, weird and disconnected

·      Fear and dread of how the future may unfold

But here are the opportunities that come with this month of creativity and vision:

·      Finally letting go of some really old baggage, patterns and imprints

·      Rebooting your creativity

·      Accessing a whole new level of information, wisdom and downloads

·      Finding new solutions that were not there before to old problems

·      Manifesting previously unimaginable things (keep them positive)

·      Higher centered experiences of love, beauty, awe

·      Miracles, new vision, ideas and bursts of creativity

·      A heightened sense of wellbeing and inspired excitement about what the future holds

I do indeed have "a heightened sense of wellbeing and inspired excitement about what the future holds."

But the forecast is not just for me. It applies to you, too. And to the cable guy. He comes in and tells me he climbed all the poles, found the problem, and solved it. He is beaming. "It was fun," he says.

Rev. Mimi needs a ticket

 

Mimi Kanku is about to become the first ordained woman in the Evangelical Mennonite Church of the Democratic Republic of Congo. But the ordination is not a done deal. You can help make it happen.

Mimi lives in Kinshasa. Her ordination, along with others in the denomination, is scheduled to take place in a few weeks in Mbuji Mayi, denomination headquarters, hundreds of miles away. A round-trip ticket costs $450. She has to raise her own funds to get there.

I met Mimi in Kinshasa last month. She was one of the women theologians who received us so warmly the first day of our visit (front row, far right). She came to both church services where Nina Lanctot preached. At the second, she and her friend, Annie (front row, white skirt) sang a duet.

But I had known about Mimi before the trip because her story was part of the collection I’d been editing to mark the centennial of the Mennonite Church in Congo, The Jesus Tribe. I arranged to meet and interview one of the writers and one of the story subjects—Mimi—for a video that will accompany the release of the book later this summer. Her story sounded like she was an engaging young woman.

She is. This young mother speaks softly and has a demure, gap-toothed smile. She comes to life when she starts speaking about her studies, her faith, her family, and her hopes for ministry in the church.

It was in the course of this interview that I learned Mimi had been selected for ordination. This is a big deal. Only one of the three branches of the Mennonite Church in Congo has ordained women. The small Evangelical Mennonite Church (with some 25,000 members—the other two each have about 100,000) is the second to take this overdue step. It will happen during the centennial celebration in Mbuji Mayi.

I will be there! I want to make sure Mimi will, too. She does not have $450 for the plane trip.

Other things might stand in the way besides money. A leadership struggle has divided her denomination. It’s not inconceivable that a coup at the top could throw everything up for grabs, even ordinations—though that is very unlikely at this point. Congo church politics are, shall we say, exciting. But the perpetual conflicts are a perverse indication of just how important the church is in that society. That role intrigues me and it is drawing me back to the country to observe and write more.

But before I go (July 12) I’m collecting cash, checks, or pledges toward Mimi’s ticket to Mbuji Mayi. Email me at njmyers@mindspring.com if you’d like to help send Mimi to her ordination.

Seventh Heaven

“Mom would have been in Seventh Heaven,” said one of my four brothers last weekend at the gracious inn next to the Smokies, where we had all gathered for a family wedding.

“Maybe that’s where she is right now,” I said.

Our mother passed away more than 20 years ago but we still think of her whenever we get together, especially on the rare occasions when all five siblings are present. “The whole family together” was her mantra.

Of course, she would not have been satisfied with gathering just her five biological children. Her family included our spouses (also all present at this occasion), and any subsequent available generations. But that kind of completeness got too complicated for her to pull off in her lifetime and we don’t obsess over it. She would have been happy to see just the five of us in one place—and secretly gloated that we are all still married. She would have regretted some of the health problems she has passed on to us, including a stubborn obesity gene. She would have adored the great grandchildren who were there, niece and nephews of the groom. She would have cheered the prospect of a happy marriage for her grandson.

And perhaps she did. Maybe Seventh Heaven is a place reserved for the dead to witness happy continuities in the lives they engendered.

Groom with cousin, nephew, uncle, sister

Sam has inherited a mischievous grin from two grandpas

    

 

My brother Marv's clan was all there

Going back to Congo

Exactly one month from today I will be getting back on a plane to Brussels and then to Kinshasa, and a few days later even further, first to Tshikapa and then Mbuji Mayi, in the province of Kasai.

Five days ago when I was meeting with my traveling sisters of last month (we all drove an hour plus to meet at a Bigby’s in Kalamazoo), the idea came up again, the idea that I had dismissed as an extravagant impossibility: the idea that I should attend the centennial celebration of the Mennonite church in Congo. This time, however, it came up in the context of a glimmer of an idea of what I want to do in the next phase of my life.

The idea came together just in time. I am retiring from my job at the end of June. The centennial celebrations begin July 16.

Nina says the idea is “of God.” I hesitate to say this about anything I do, but it does seem that the whole adventure of the Congo Cloth Connection has been that way for me, unlike many previous stops and starts.

For example, I have had the idea of going back to Congo for a number of years but it has never worked out. I actually applied and was accepted to join a Christian Peacemaker Team delegation to eastern Congo several years ago and then was dropped from the team because they needed more women of color. OK fine. I wangled an invitation to go to Liberia instead. I was so moved by that 3-week experience that I assumed it was the beginning of a new Africa venture for me. I took a six-month sabbatical from work to investigate and allow room for that to happen. It didn’t.

And then in the summer of 2010 I went to a church conference and came upon a workshop called the Congo Cloth Connection. It was led by some women who had been to Congo and had fallen in love with the cloth. It revived my own love of cloth and all the crazy Africa love that I had been trying to get a handle on, the pull that had me asking, What does this mean? What should I do about it?

Without asking any of those big questions, I joined the Fellowship of the Cloth. We worked on cloth and connections. We followed the love that linked people to beauty and each other. We started with no plans but they unfolded as we went along. Putting on a cloth market here. Hosting a Congolese visitor there. Pulling off a big market and auction at the Pittsburgh Mennonite Church USA gathering, raising money to fund workshops teaching sewing and tailoring skills to Congolese women who needed to support their families. Hosting more Congolese visitors, each time reviving my dormant French language skills a little more.

When we heard that the Congolese visitors we had been hosting were expecting some of us to visit them as well, I raised my hand as the first volunteer. And then I helped raise money and do the planning to make that happen. The plans took shape on the Congo end as well. It all seems inevitable now, but at no point along the way did it seem certain until I actually bought our tickets and saw those visa stamps in our passports. And then we went last month.

I have a chastened view of big plans. My personal experience is that they seldom work out. I have learned not to get my hopes up. But the Cloth Connection was never about big plans. It was only about making and following the connections between Mennonites in Congo and the USA, and maybe even just one Mennonite congregation in Kinshasa and three congregations in northern Indiana and southern Michigan. And maybe it’s not even so much about cloth.

But the time last month in Kinshasa and my reflections on it afterward gave a new precision to my dreams and my crazy Africa love. Just a week or so ago I put it down in my journal: I want to “spend time in Congo writing about the Mennonite church. Not just about the church but my personal experience of it, much like a travel writer.”

I stated the dream aloud to Nina and June last week in Kalamazoo. Immediately they said, OK if that’s what you want to do then you really must go to the centennial. Well of course. Here was a once in a lifetime opportunity to observe the Congo Mennonites gathering and celebrating, to make many contacts, to connect with people I already knew through working on their stories for the centennial collection (The Jesus Tribe: Grace Stories from Congo’s Mennonites, 1912–2012, to be published later this summer.) And of course I will get to see our Kinshasa friends again.

I am so thrilled that I couldn’t even settle down to write about it until just now.

The photo that will be used on the cover of The Jesus Tribe

The Interpreter

I came across a piece I wrote five years ago that would have been a blog post if I had been writing a blog then, a private reflection but a little more than a journal entry. I filed it away at the time and promptly forgot about it. But looking at it again helps me understand why I am ready to leave my current job and environmental work, even though I remain in total sympathy with the cause.

The piece began with my recurring frustration with defining my peculiar set of gifts. “I took this frustration to the swimming pool late yesterday afternoon,” I wrote. “On the way a word came to me, a role, a definition. ‘Interpreter.’ Later, ‘master interpreter.’ I am trying it on. I swam a half mile with it, put it away for the evening, asked for dreams about it. It is still with me today.”

And so it is five years later.

It begins with my facility with languages. I recall, as a young teenager, admiring simultaneous translators at the UN. Marveling at how they do it. I learned languages easily. I could maybe do that. But did I want to? I didn't think so. I knew then already that it would be too narrow a use of my gift for… what? What was the nature of my gift? I could hear, listen well. I had a good ear. I was also intelligent. I could understand patterns, pick them up, reproduce them, use them. I could pick up signals--not only the signals of words but also the signals of cultures, personalities. I could read people and their intentions, guess at what they were saying even if I didn't understand every word. I could reproduce their ways as well as their words.

This gift of course goes way beyond language, or, rather, it applies to the infinite array of languages of the world and of humans in the world. It is a gift of perceptivity, a gift for attention--fascinated, devoted attention--and empathy, which combine to produce quick understanding and insight. I have learned in my life to speak and appreciate many languages and what they express and communicate. French, Japanese, science, cat. Idea language. Spoken and written language. Body language. Spirit language. Dream language. Group language. The language of circles and hierarchies. Male and female. The language of beauty and trees and oceans. I could learn to speak dolphin without much effort, if that was called for. Economics and policy language and storytelling language.

When I understand I can interpret, and this is not a simple matter of translation from one language to another (though that is never as simple as people think it should be). It is a matter of making connections, forming synapses. It is a matter of insight, putting things together in a new way that is appropriate to the situation. Spoken words into written ones. Aspirations into statements. Half-baked ideas into fully baked ones. I also have the gift of interpreting people to themselves, mirroring, though this is a gift that has to be used with great care because it is seldom asked for.

It is a question of how my brain works, I think. I do not experience the onset of full-blown original ideas. Rather, I experience the potential for connection and the longer I live and the more I know the more subtle, sophisticated, and truly original that gift for insight can become. I say, ‘the more I know’ as if it were a matter of knowledge but I do not have a good detailed memory. My mind is literally like a sieve, sifting out forgettable things but saving somewhere much that is, I believe, truly important. Or perhaps I forget things until they become important. And being ‘important’ means, to me at least, connecting with something else in a way that promotes understanding, that gets at truth.

Writing this helped me understand how I had been operating in the organization, from grant writing and reporting to fleshing out the implications and uses of the precautionary principle. My work was not separate from the work of others. My role was different, however. No one did this as consistently as I did, although we all fed off each other’s ideas. No one was as devoted as I was to making other people's ideas, or the group ideas, presentable, useful, appropriate. Helping them sing out in the world. Yes, this was a devotion. A sacred act. The Interpreter was a priestess in the temple, serving.

But now I see that the work is maturing. The songs in that arena are being sung in certain growing harmonies, and new voices are joining. My attention wanders off, pulls out old languages (French, Congo culture) and plays with them. I marvel at new languages (toddlerspeak, the latest brain science). I want to understand different sets of mysteries. I want to interpret them.

10 things to do before 8 on a Sunday morning

1.     Take the 6:30 wake-up call from the Almost Two and let her parents sleep in.

2.     Try to get her into bed with you. Give up. Get dressed—quickly.

3.     Make coffee and try to get some extra horizontal time in. Let her bounce on your belly.

4.     Give her breakfast. She will show you where the granola is and indicate just how much yogurt she wants with it. She will eat as much banana as she wants and squish the rest into little pieces and offer them to you. 

5.     That is a cue that she is done eating but she will refuse to get out of the high chair because there is more to be done here. Accept her explanation of what happens to the water she is pouring back and forth between the glass and the cereal bowl even if you don’t understand the words. Get out the floor rag and mop up.

6.     Don’t try to get her dressed yet. You will have to bargain even to change the diaper. Tell her she can wear the tutu if she lets you do that.

7.     Get started with your day. Let her help. This will not last long for either of you.

8.     Watch out for objects flying out of her room. Remember, she likes to put things from one place to another. Try to put her neatly folded laundry away before it succumbs to the chaos. Try to get the beads off the floor before somebody slips on them.

9.     Follow her through the open door that Grandpa is fixing. Grab her shoes and catch up with her before she gets to the street.

10. Surprise a bunny rabbit who doesn’t expect to see people at this hour of the day. Have a little chase. Do not, repeat, do not go anywhere near a mud puddle unless you are ready to get splattered.

But by now you are ready for anything, right?