We Should Pray For Enye

On Easter Sunday, May 5^th, we were invited to eat dinner with people from the community in which we live. A sheep had been slaughtered and the women were busy preparing when I and a friend arrived. After a moment of scanning the scene, my eye caught a little white boy toddle out of the kitchen-house - Micah. He was happying chewing on something as he made his way over to me to show off his great find. I inspected his hors devours carefully – something white and rubbery. “Is that fat?” I asked my Gmz friend, “No, it’s intestine,” he responded with a smile. I mustered a tight smile and turned back to Micah as he turned and ran off to play. “May God give him a stomach of iron!”

 

After another minute, up walked probably the oldest person I know, a Gmz man named Enye, estimated to be over 100 years old. I am amazed at how well he gets around, despite his back being bent at a 90 degree angle. Incredible! But that’s not all. I’m even more amazed at how sharp his mind is. After greeting him, we sat down together and talked. He had remembered that we had left for the States last summer, and he also remembered that I had promised to bring him back some clothes. He was happy to hear that I had followed through, after all how could I forget? You see, many nights before Micah goes to bed, we pray together asking him who specifically we should pray for. Most often he says,  “Janey, Work’u, and Thomas,” the three Gmz translators. But wasn’t uncommon, especially early in our time in the States for him to say, “Enye, we should pray for Enye, and Wotaak.” WoTaak was our old friend who came and drank tea at our house probably twice a week and so Micah knew him well, but Enye visited us only once in the months that preceded our furlough. Yet somehow, Enye had made in impact on Micah, and so we prayed for him many nights.

 

The next morning, Enye came to our house to collect the clothes we had brought back for him (including a nice Pizza Hut polo shirt!). As he came in and sat down, Micah greeted him with excitement. He gave Enye his hand (which is somewhat rare for Micah to initiate). Enye took Micah’s hand in his left hand and kissed it (Enye’s right arm was shot off by his son years ago in a gun accident). Then Micah, brought Enye’s hand to his mouth and kissed it, just as was expected of him.  Amazing. Many times we are pulling metaphorical teeth in order for Micah to give verbal greetings to strangers, but here Micah was demonstrating that Enye was no stranger. He had a special place in that little heart.

 

After drinking tea together and sharing some breakfast, Enye took his new clothes and headed home. I guess Micah wanting to say a longer goodbye, and so walked behind Enye up the hill and out of sight from our house. What is about Enye that has captured Micah’s love? I don’t know. Maybe it’s his small frame or his bent over posture. But maybe it’s just God stirring Micah’s heart so that we as a family might not cease to pray for him. Maybe it’s God’s way of fine-tuning our hearts closer to his.

 

Longing For Home

Recently, we were contacted by someone from Moody wanting to write an article about the things God is doing among the Gmz. As part of the article, we were requested to send several photos, which meant that one of us had to rifle through our collection of pictures from the past few years. This morning was a quiet morning, and so I decided that I would take a look. I guess I should have realized it was bad timing. For pictures are memory-triggers. Memories of events, memories of places, and memories of people. People we don’t know, people we know, and often…people we love.

I scrolled through the thumbnails looking for action shots of one of us working with the teams, or singing Scripture-based songs, or the reading of Gmz Scripture, but, of course, these type of photos are mixed in with every other kind of picture we have taken along the way. And so, inevitably, I came across pictures of the best wife and the two most beautiful children I know, all three for which my heart would reach out and want to hold! You see, it has now been officially two weeks since Andrea, Micah and Grace left for the US and the countdown until their return holds a prominent place in my mind. “Three more sleeps” Micah told me on the phone today. I wish, it’s still more like nine.

Some pictures made me laugh.

That's what happens when we find an abandoned tube of partially used hair gel.

I love your mommy too, Miss Papaya Face!

Packed and ready to fly!

I wish you could hear the sound effects that go along with this picture...two little gigglers egging each other on!

Hey, where is my ice cream?

Some pictures made me thankful to God the giver of good gifts.

I love my wife!

The pebble pit is hours of entertainment!

Pajama party!

Her beauty is not "only skin deep"!

Is that a smile or just gas? (I'm talking about Grace).

I miss my girls!

But all the pictures made me long to be HOME once again, wherever that might be.

There's no place like home

He Is Our Child

Last Saturday evening, I waved goodbye to my family at Bole International Airport; Sunday morning I returned to welcome Matthew, the summer intern who will have a front row seat in our adventures these next three months. When we accepted the possibility of having an intern, we knew that we were taking a risk. You see in our mind, an intern is different from a normal “short-termer”. “Short termers” often come to accomplish a special, well-defined task, usually in support of an ongoing work, and they rarely stay long enough for the newness to wear off. Interns, on the other hand, come to observe and participate in the work, much like an intensive job shadowing time, and they are hopefully able to stay long enough to feel the real stressors of cross-cultural living. The purpose of an internship is often not to make an impact, but rather to be impacted, gaining a feel for the work, experience that God might then use to provide clear direction down the road. A successful internship should either make, or break any aspirations of such a career! Our risk is having to pick up the pieces if there turns out to be more “breaking” than “making.”

I’ve been with Matthew now one week, and honestly, I am thoroughly impressed.  He is a good thinker, with lots of travel experience (being an MK himself). He is intelligent, well-read, and communicates very well. But more than that. He has a real desire to dive into the work of Bible translation.

Tuesday morning, Matthew and I met with the Gmz translators for the first time. We found ourselves an empty conference room, set up computers and dug into team checking Luke 11. Despite our bouncing around between Amharic and Gmz languages (with very little English), Matthew stayed engaged, doing his best to pick up on words here and there. At the tea break, he sat with the translators, learning new words through charades and what broken English they could muster. After lunch I met the translators in the hallway, “So what do you think of Matthew?” I asked as we walked toward our room. They looked at me with smiles, “He is our child!” responded Worku to which the others nodded in agreement. Wow I thought, what a compliment to him, as in effect they were already saying of him, “He is one of us!” How could this be? In just four short hours, how were they were able to look past his white skin, his tall frame, his blonde hair, his foreign language and culture? How could they so quickly identify him as one of their own? And then it hit me. From the initial meeting, Matthew was not just an observer. No, Matthew’s interaction with the guys reiterated over and over again, in no uncertain terms, “I want to learn your language.” I’ve always believed that one’s mother tongue is something held very close to one’s heart, a vital part of their identity, but here was a living example. “He is our child,” Worku’s words echoed in my head. Why? Because Matthew isn’t asking them to become like him, instead he making the effort to enter into their Gmz world by means of something most dear to them, their language!

It is our prayer that Misa (God) powerfully breaks through, deep into his people’s hearts via that same cherished channel.

Wanted: Baboon As Temporary Pet, Must Be Medicinally Potent

I’ll be honest, yesterday was not a very good day. Both kids were mildly sick, I needed to have a productive day of checking, but didn’t, and our evening was full of washing two week’s worth of cloth diapers, pumping a dozen jerry cans of water from a well that is drying up, washing a mound of dishes and the obligatory fulfilling the invitation to go to a Gmz friend’s house after dark to drink their homemade keya (ie “beer”) and eat their goat meat which had been barely shown the flame. After all this was said and done, (including my taking my second round of Pepto Bismo in two nights to chase down all the microorganism I had surely ingested), it was nearly an hour past our 10pm bedtime. Andrea, fulfilling her last duty of the night, turned off the house lights and pulled Grace out of bed for her nighttime feeding. And I, not wanting to go to bed before her (somehow I always feel guilty doing so, knowing that her day was likely MUCH longer than mine!), I looked around for one last thing I could do. Micah’s toys – as usual they were spread out all over the room, perfect for tripping the nighttime bathroom runner (that may be literal “runner” if the Pepto didn’t do its job properly!)

So in the dim light of a single 12-volt light bulb, I reached down and started throwing toys into a big box. Dinosaur flashlight, goofy and his helicopter, a stuffed turtle and its squeaking baby, you know the typical. Having finished cleaning up the normal “play area” in our house, I saw about a dozen of small toys: action figures, street signs, and wooden blocks all bunched together in the middle of the room. “Get those put away” I thought to myself, “and I could probably justify sneaking off to bed.”

Working in tandem, my hands moved in to scoop up the majority of the toys in one crushing blow, but much to my surprise, the toys had a secret weapon of their own and weren’t going to give in without a fight. My right hand no problem sliding under the toys on its side of the problem and arriving at the middle where it expected to meet its companion. However, the left never arrived! For somewhere between the left side of the pile and the point of rendezvous, lied a nasty little devil who was enjoying his new home, whose poison-filled, fang-wielding tail likely took pleasure in sinking deep into my wedding-ring finger. It didn’t take but a microsecond for the scream of pain to travel from finger, to my brain and then out my mouth! “EEEyao!”I yipped and Andrea guess it right away, “What, a scorpion?” I grabbed the flashlight with my only good hand and sure enough, there he was, a vicious black scorpion posed perfectly still in attack position.

Meanwhile, my ring finger was now throbbing in mounting pain. I ran it under cold water, didn't help. I raised it in the air, didn't help. I lowered it, made it worse. I tried pressure and ice and soap and everything else I could think of, but the pain only got worse…and spread! First my pinky finger join its neighbor in screaming out pain, then the outside of my wrist, then I could feel the army of venom marching down my forearm and before setting up a base camp at my elbow. All the while I am pacing back and forth in our small house to verbally release my pain in the strongest whisper I could muster.

After a few minutes, Andrea pulled out the medical manuals and with me looking over her shoulder we both read silently “some scorpion stings prove fatal...” Yea, not exactly what I wanted to hear. “…it is best to apply a tourniquet as soon as possible, releasing for five minutes every twenty minutes to slow down the progress of the toxin…” Once again, the “every twenty minutes” note was unwelcome news as it meant to me that I wasn't going to be seeing my pillow for quite some time.  Andrea helped me tie on a half-hearted tourniquet up at my shoulder, which then stopped the river of pain, instead allowing it to pool up behind the tourniquet damn. For the next twenty to thirty minutes I paced back and forth with a constant stream of ouches, ahs and groans in pain. I had to let Andrea, who, somewhere in there went to bed without me, know that I was still alive.

Shorty before slipping into bed Andrea started a thought, “I’m glad it happened to you…” Just a word of wisdom to all you wives out there, don’t attempt to start a sentence like that late at night unless you are confident you can finish it without an unfortunate break. Andrea, on the other hand, paused just a bit too long before continuing, “…I mean, I’m glad it happened to you, and not to Micah.” Now that I could agree with. Yea, the pain was not fun, but the worst of it was the longevity. How would we ever manage a 2-year-old who has trouble holding back tears for close calls, much less actual pain or injury. I’d take this one for the team, may earn an extra star sowed onto my cub scout dad uniform!  For two hours, I paced back and forth in our living room, before managing to relax enough to lay down in bed, and that still with a throbbing pain in my whole left arm.

This morning I woke up to the same throbbing pain, somewhat dulled and somewhat focused back in the ring finger where the excitement all started. I decided to drive the truck to Gilgel Beles for work this morning since the motorcycle required more use out of my finger than I wanted to entrust it with. When I arrived, the Gmz translators shared with me stories of their encounters with scorpion bites. First, I found it interesting Gmz witch doctors say that the toxin travelling through the body is really baby scorpions walking around under the skin, stinging as they go. Though I doubt its scientific basis, I’d say it’s a pretty accurate description of how it felt. The second interesting thing I learned was that the pain of a scorpion sting with disappear if one puts either the skin or the meat of a baboon onto the location of the sting. “Why is that?” I asked. “It’s because the baboon has a natural tolerance to the scorpion venom. In fact, if a scorpion stings a baboon, he feels no pain, he just reaches down picks it up and eats it.” I asked if that was a witch doctor lie, and one translator’s eyes got really big, “Its real, I did it and the pain went away immediately.” I don’t know about you, but that is enough reason for me to get myself a pet baboon and keep a sharp knife handy.