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