The new kid at school

Do you remember what it's like to be the new kid at school? I felt a bit like that on my first day at NETS (Namibia Evangelical Theological Seminary). I was glad to have been able to get to know about half of the students before that first day, and that helped... and of course I was there as a teacher, so that was quite different too.
This week will be my last week teaching in my first semester. Back in August I was full of doubts and uncertainties about how I'd go as a teacher... now I can look back and see my mistakes, and rejoice in some success. I have thoroughly enjoyed it! I haven't enjoyed everything about being a teacher... but I have enjoyed it overall.

I have learnt to set lower expectations about how much I will be able to teach, and concentrated more on teaching the really important things well. I have learnt to allow more time for discussion in class, because it always takes longer than I would expect, and is more fruitful than I anticipate. I am convinced again and again that using the 'right' word is a waste of time, unless it is a word that everyone in the room understands. Given that I am the only one in the room that has English as a first language, this has meant re-thinking my communication over and over again. I know that missionaries who have to learn a new language to communicate the gospel often find this frustrating at first and then enriching as time goes on... I feel that I am having a small taste of that experience, in English.

The other area of great learning for me has been in the field of education and theological education in particular. From January I will be the Academic Dean at NETS, which means that I take responsibility for running the academic program for all of the full time students. 2009 is slated as a year for updating the strategic planning at NETS and my main activity in all of this will be a revision of the of the curriculum. I am wanting to lead others in thinking clearly about what we teach and how we teach it. There are many factors involved in this, and while I can now get a little excited by it all, I recognise that for most people it's like chewing on a sleeping tablet. I'll keep you posted with the really exciting developments as the year rolls on.

Margie the English teacher

Just thought you might like to see some of my English class! We have up to 20 students, the lady in orange is Aune - the director.

How's the weather?

Since it has been so long since we have blogged, we thought we would start with something REALLY interesting.....like the weather!

It's raining in Windhoek!!! We have never lived in a place with a designated "wet season" so we have never felt the excitement when the rains finally come! It hasn't even looked like rain since March. The smell is amazing, like God has given the baked earth a refreshing shower!

We planted a Lillipilli in our garden today. It is nice to have a little bit of Aus just outside the kitchen window.

Cricket Camp

Let us just take you back in time a little - since we have been a tad slack in the blogging world!!!

In the last school holidays, Margie, Maddie and Noah headed over to the coast (4 hours drive) so Noah could play in a cricket tournament. It is amazing how many beautifully green cricket grounds they have in the desert. Noah's team was a 'development team'! So we were all very excited as they scored more runs every game they played and they even one a match! Noah was awarded the 'Team Player of the tournament' and even recieved a medal.

Maddie and I were shown around Swakopmund - the tourist town - by a local, so we now know where to buy gelato in Namibia!!! Yummmmmmm

Mission trip to Botswana

by Simon

On Friday night I came home after spending a week in Botswana with a team of students from NETS. Here's some of what we got up to.

Saturday June 21

I packed into the NETS mini-bus with 12 students for the 8 hour drive from Windhoek, Namibia to Ghanzi, Botswana. for the entire length of the trip, the scenery changed very little. On the Namibian side of the border there were some hills and mountains even in the distance, I don't remember seeing so much as a hill anywhere in Botswana!

We were partnering with the Ghanzi Reformed Church for the week, and they had a grfeat variety of activities planned for us. The first of these was a welcome brai (BBQ) at a farm just outside of town.

Sunday June 22

For Sunday morning our team split up into pairs and went to attend and preach at 7 different churches. I preached at the host church, Ghanzi Reformed, on what it means to live for Christ from Philippians 1. I was translated into Tswana which is, along with English, an official langauge in Botswana. I've managed to add another greeting to my growing list ("dumela")... but didn't make a whole lot more progress with the language.

Monday June 21

We spent the Monday travelling another three hours into the centre of Botswana, to do 'walk up' evangelism around the shopping area in Maun. Maun is a busy town and we had no shortage of people to talk to. I spent most of my time with a young bloke and his two sisters who were operating a kind of stall in a carpark. He was a keen Christian and owned a Bible, but had been encouraged not to read it apart from church on Sundays, in case he misunderstood it. By the time we had to leave, he was very keen to start reading Mark's gospel for himself... and he was on the lookout for some other people at his church who might read it with him. Unlike most of my experiences of contacting strangers like this in Australia, we found no hostility at all and most people we spoke to were very happy to hear more about Jesus. We were able to put some of those who indicated an interest in knowing more, in touch with local Christians before we left.

Tuesday June 22

Groups of students met with business leaders and in the local prison from 7am on Tuesday. There is an amazing openess to beginning the day with a Bible reading and prayer time, and we had been invited to lead many of these regular times for this week.

The rest of the day we spent in a settlement called West Hanahai. It was a 45 minute drive on dirt roads to get to the settlement. These settlements (there are several like it) were created by the government to relocate bushman from their traditional hunting grounds which were being turned into game parks for the tourists. West Hanahai reminded me of Aboriginal mission Stations in the Northern Territory of Australia. The same kind of social problems. The same sense of hopelessness, lack of motivation and dependence on welfare. These people had been moved against their will from a land which enabled them to live contentedly for hundreds and hundreds of years... and been dumped too far away from any commercial centre to have a chance at making a new kind of life. There is an ongoing case against the government in the High Court. We spent our day doing manual work to restore and maintain the church building and yards. It was great to see the willingness of the students to get their hands dirty and simply serve others in doing jobs that needed doing.

That evening I was invited to be the guest teacher in an informal Bible school. 8 church leaders from around Ghanzi were getting together to learn more about the Bible and ministry. I taught an over-view of the Bible as part of their Old Testament program. Although what I did was well received, as I saw their regular teacher interacting with the students, I was convinced again of the great benefit of long-term ministries where learning and teaching happens in the context of real relationships.

Wednesday June 23

On Wednesday we again began by sending various smaller teams of people to lead 'devotional' times in busnisses and government departments.

From there our team split into four groups and went in four different directions to observe a variety of ministries. One group attended a training session which had been organised for local church leaders, tackling marriage preparation and counselling. A second group spent time with a program called 'True love Waits', which has been designed to encourage abstainance before marriage in response to the AIDS pandemic in the country. Programs encouraging condom use have made very little impact on the spread of HIV, and, among others, the Botswanan government has recognised that programs which are 'faith-based' and encourage sexual morality are much more effective at saving young lives. A third group of students travelled to another remote community to watch a leadership training session, where a group of uneducated church elders are being taught to preach. I was part of the fourth group that spent time with a ministry called Bridges of Hope.

Bridges of Hope was established in partnership with the Ghanzi Reformed Church, to bring relief and health services to the most culnerable people in the area. Most of the 'clients' are HIV positive and live in utter poverty. Many also have TB and routinely die from other 'preventable' diseases. In my time we visited a lady who was so ill that she had been left lying in the sand in her hut to die. She is in the final stages of life as an AIDS sufferer. She has all but wasted away, and most of her bones are clearly visible. She had almost no energy to even lift her head. As I helped wheel her into the hospital on a gurney one of the nurses said, "You are going the wrong way. The morgue is that way." There is a free anti-retroviral drug program in Botswana (as in Namibia), but many AIDS sufferers don't understand enough about their plight or the services available to access the program. The staff of Bridges of Hope (a mixture of Botswanan nationals and TEAR fund volunteers) have an amazing ministry of love to the unloved! They seek to empower the dispossessed and bring hope to the hopeless. What a wonderful example they are to those of us who live such comfortable 'Christian' lives.

Thursday June 24

Unfortunately during the course of the week, there were a number of little niggling incidents between some of the NETS students that betrayed a lack of love and trust of one another. Rather than just let these things pass, I decided to put aside time on our last day in Botswana to deal with these things and pray together. I was very nervous of how this might go, as I still didn't know many of the students well.

As we met together and reviewed things that had happened over the week, we found many things to rejoice in and learn from... and we found a shared grief over the 'culture' that had emerged amongst NETS students. We read the Bible together and talked about how love should be seen and experienced amongst us. We allowed time for different students to approach one another, aplogising for and repenting of past behaviour. There were tears and smiles amongst brothers. We then spent an hour in prayer individually and came together to pray again.

Although it might seem very cliched to say so, it was a deeply moving time for me... and most of the students. As we sang together about unity in gospel... I felt that we truly meant itand that God had done something wonderful amongst us. PLEASE PRAY THAT THE EFFECTS OF THIS TIME ON US WILL LAST... AND WILL SPREAD TO STUDENTS AND STAFF UNABLE TO BE THERE WITH US.

We spent that afternoon beating the locals in a volleyball game and being humbled by them in a soccer game. There were many significant friendships formed during our time together.

Friday June 25

We bade a very fond farewell to our hosts at Ghanzi Reformed Church, deeply indebted to them for the warm welcome and wonderful experience they had given us. We hit the road for the 8 hour return trip. The singing quietened down shortly after we left the town and most of the trip was spent in exhausted, contented silence... apart from the defeaning noise of the rattly bus.

Radio Show

by Simon
Each Thursday night between 8 and 10 there is a program on one of the local Christian radio stations designed exclusively for Ovambo men. The Ovambos are the biggest tribal grouping in Namibia and make up more than half of the population, as well as a significant part of the Angolan population. Tuhafeni, one of the students at NETS, has been co-hosting the program for a period and he invited me along to be the guest speaker.
It was my first time in a radio studio and quite a different experience. The three of us (Tuhafeni, the host and me) locked in a sound-proof booth and going live to air for 2 hours. There were three songs played but apart from that, we had to fill the space.

Introductions are very important in most African cultures, so I took a deal of time sharing my story and the way that God has worked in my life, not just to save me, but also to shape and mould me as a man. I had prepared and spoke on being a husband and father to the glory of God. I made a focus of modelling our fatherhood on God's fatherhood of us, and modelling our attitudes as husbands on the Lord Jesus. Everything that I said had to be translated into Oshiwambo (the dominant tribal langauge) which of course doubles the time it takes to say anything. Even with all of that, I had used all of the material which I had prepared after an hour and twenty minutes... which left 40 minutes to fill!

I now have some appreciation of the unique kind of pressure that comes with live radio! For the next 40 minutes the host plied me with questions about the implications of what I had said for men who had been involved in adulterous affairs, and men who drank too much, and men who beat their children, and men who beat their wives... He was a good listener and had a great gift for being able to see the concrete applications of what I had been talking far too politely about. He also had a great way drawing me out to explain things that I had said in too complicated a way. It was a great blessing to be guided by him.

As our time drew to a close he asked me, on air, if I had a phone... and then what the number was. I wasn't quite redy for this, and didn't know what else to do other than give the number. Apparently they give out their mobile phone numbers every week. Almost immediately my phone began ringing and it continued as I walked out of the studio and the five minutes or so to home... and then it kept continuing to ring for until I turned it off some time after midnight. Mostly it was just a stream of encouraging text messages, but there were also requests for me to pray for people... and one lady called asking me to find her a husband who was like I was describing! The calls came mostly from northern Namibia... and I was really quite surprised by the number of them!

Talking to Tuhafeni afterwards he told me that they're not quite sure how many people the program reaches, but they often have untrained pastors contacting them to let them know that they rely on these kind of programs for their own spiritual input.

The radio station has a great ministry to people all over the country. They broadcast in English, Afrikaans and Oshiwambo, and have a variety of weekly programs aimed at discipling particular people groups. Praise God for this ministry to men and for the many men who seem to tune in. Pray for Tuhafeni and the others who regularly give input into their lives. As I have been invited back sometime, pray that I will be a better communicator of the truth of the gospel and all its implications for men in this context.

Doing the tourist thing with friends from Oz

This month we had a visit from Margie's dad and our dear friends the Bayleys! They came bearing bags and bags of books and gifts from our very generous friends and family around Maitland. How we miss them all!!

They stayed for two and a half weeks and we managed to pack a lot into a short time. Margie travelled with them into the Etosha Game Reserve and had three days shooting wild-life (with a camera of course).

We also travelled to the coast together. It was the first time that we had been to the coast since arriving in Namibia. The smell of the 'salt air' was just beautiful after nearly six months without seeing the beach! We had a great time... but we'll let the pictures tell the story!

We were able to introduce some of our old friends to some of our new friends too, which was very special. It makes us feel less as if we are leading separate lives now. Any tangible connection between our lives here and now and the friends we have left behind in Australia is very precious.

As the photos testify, our God is good and His work of creation is amazing. We are so privileged to be able to enjoy His goodness where-ever we are.