I have produced the 'Prayer Prompt' for this month here in Kenya. I have been searching for some inspiration for a few days, when it came from Father Hans book I was re-reading ! Here it is ......
November Prayer Prompt
I'm in Kenya at the moment, working on
a HATW building project in Kisumu. Its very hot and humid, and we
spend some afternoons lazing around outside our rooms, watching the
world go by and doing nothing much at all, (only please don't tell
David !) (The head of HATW)
So I've been re-reading a book written
by one of the Mill Hill missionaries here – 'Words of Passage' by
Father Hans Burgman, which is a record of his pilgrimage and his
return journey, from his native Holland to Compostella, on foot, all
the way. Its full of philosophical wisdom, humour and Biblical
knowledge.
It suddenly struck me that working for
HATW is a sort of pilgrimage. We decide to help on a project in
India or Africa, really knowing very little about what to expect. We
are taken out of our 'comfort zone' and put into a strange place, in
a strange country, among people we don't know, not really knowing
what to expect along the way, despite advice given before we leave
home.
So this is good stuff ! It forces us
to make new relationships with our fellow volunteers, and more
importantly, with the people we meet in the new country. We have to
cope, we gain new knowledge and insight about ourselves, we are cut
down to size and have to reconstruct ourselves to fit into the new
country.
And like travelling on a successful
religious pilgrimage, we never know how it will end and how we will
think on it in the future, but of one thing we can be sure; we won't
be the same person that started off on this journey with a phone call
to David ….....
Wherever you are, please pray for the
success of the Paluoc workshop in Kisumu …. and all the other
ongoing HATW projects in Africa and India.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I went with Wendy to try and buy some maps of Nyanza from the Survey of Kenya, which I discovered no longer exists. They used to produce excellent Ordinance Survey type maps back in the 1960's and 70's, and I wanted some of my favourite areas of Nyanza.
So we went instead to the Land Registry offices. We hung around for a bit until someone appeared to ask what we wanted, and took us upstairs from office to office, until she found someone who could help, a young lady called Teffy ! She wasn't sure she could help, but took us to another room where we were shown a huge map of Kenya divided into little squares (like the back of an OS map in UK). I picked out four that might be what I wanted and said I'd like to buy copies. 40 years ago the whole process would have taken perhaps ten minutes ?
Oh dear ! A.S.B. .... or 'Africa Strikes Back' as we say here when things don't turn out as we expect !! The maps weren't actually for sale ... they had to be ordered from Nairobi, when they would be sent in a .pdf format to my email address ! Teffy said they could be sent to her office via the phone ... and she proceeded to request this. An hour later, they came .... but no-one had a memory stick with enough space for the .pdf files to be saved on ! I whipped out my camera and removed the card, which I put in the computer there and had the files saved on it (just in case that email never arrived !)
But Teffy managed to get them saved on another memory stick. Oh no, they couldn't actually print them for me there .... that had to be done in a shop down the road ! So we followed Teffy, and went up some stairs into a room with a huge printer that could print large maps ! And three of the maps printed OK; the fourth had been sent as only HALF a map !
All this took over three hours ........ and I go back to the Land Registry tomorrow, to see if Nairobi have sent the whole map, and go through the process again ! .......... A.S.B.
Something pretty and calming to the nerves to end with .......
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