Interesting Places, Interesting People

I want you all to meet Jean Pierre.  He is a pygmy man from the town of Yandoumbe, a village 3 kilometres up the road from the Centre De Formation, our home in Bayanga each summer.  He is originally from a forest village in Cameroon but came here six years ago where he met and married his wife and is now the father of 4 children.  They say there is a sickness in Yandoumbe that causes people not to farm and its primary cause is unknown.  Some say its laziness, others say it's an aversion to becoming 'permanent', but whatever the cause, Jean Pierre is immune.  Having learned from his father long ago that life without fields is no life at all, he has been farming here since he arrived.  Every morning in Bayanga between five and six in the morning you will see streams of women coming down from Yandoumbe heading to the manioc fields of the Bilo (otherwise known as thr  typical village African).  These pygmy women will work from six in the morning until two or three in the afternoon and in return will receive a small bowl of manioc flour insufficient for the needs of a single family in a day.  Why would one want to farm for someone else for a little bit everyday when you could easily farm for yourself and gain as much as you wanted?  This we are unsure of and it is this that we are working towards changing the ideas of these pygmies but it is a slow process.  This Saturday night we will be showing a film in Yandoumbe about the work of the Centre De Formation in order to gather together a large crowd of people.  Before showing the film Jean Pierre, Capita and I will do our best at evangelizing the people of Yandoumbe about gardens.  Why farm for others when you can farm for yourself and reap all the benefits.  Jean Pierre will be our chief witness to what self reliance means.  He and his wife are not in the garden everyday, and their fields aren't the prettiest looking, but they also find the time to hunt and fish and to carry on with more traditional activities that also go a long way in providing for his family.

 

We sat down for a planning meeting with Jean Pierre, Capita and Bernadine this morning and as with most meetings here, it included a lot of story telling.  Jean Pierre told us about when he first got here he met Louis, an American that has been living among the pygmies for twenty years now.  He saw how Louis would give away money or food or soap to people without getting anything in return and immediately he told his wife that no way were they going to take things from that white guy.  He saw how dependent they could become and instead they put all their efforts into making their fields which is a pretty difficult task in the rainforest.  After having cut down all of the rather awesomely large trees in your field you then have the task of turning over the soil containing all of those trees' roots.  However, they are healthier and better off than most of their neighbours and for Darren and I, his family is a rare treat to work with.  Should you ever visit Jean Pierre's garden, you will find fruit trees planted here and there and if you walk to the end of his field, there underneath the trees at the edge of the rainforest is a fruit tree nursery containing the best of the best; Jackfruit, Mango, Avocado etc. 

 

This is the short story of Jean Pierre and we are priviledge to work with him and will be travelling with him all next week as we evangelize the masses about the importance of gardening.  Pray for us and our message.  After all, God was the first farmer on this earth!

Taking evil to court

The following true story I am about to relay to you comes only thanks to my mother who said that people are interested in knowing all about what goes on in the lives of the people we work with.  While this story may cause you to think the whole continent is crazy, if not just C.A.R., my only hope is that it challenges your world view, and that you may begin to see things amongst the unseen. 

 

Let me introduce you to a few people first.  I have changed the names of most everyone in case for some reason someone gets a hold of the cow involved.  (Will explain later.)  Christy is a young, vibrant midwife at the mission hospital.  She is widowed with 4 children and she is an active member of the church and the choir.  Her Dad is a retired pastor, her brother Rick works for agri and her sister Janet is the head of the women's bible school.  About three months ago Christy went, well, crazy.  At first her family thought she was only praying and prophesying but after two days of not eating or sleeping she began to say all kinds of crazy things, pointing out sin in the lives of many of the nurses in our hospital and church, including the pastor and the top people at the hospital.  She claimed that the hospital was killing people through the nurses use of black magic.  The pastors at the church went and prayed for her, the doctor tried to get her to go to the hospital, but nothing was helping her.  In fact she just got worse and worse.  She refused to have anything to do with modern medicine or the hospital, she stopped eating, talking and was nearly always awake, never sleeping at night.  After a week she confessed that her sickness was the result of black magic performed on her by the accountant and head lab technician of the hospital but of course there is no way to prove this.  The two hospital guys both deny having anything to do with black magic.  One is an elder and the other is a deacon in our church here. 

 

Two weeks passed and Christy just got worse and worse so to help solve matters, they called in a village doctor to perform his own magic on her using village medicine.  For the last three months they have been performing this medicine on her, which involves washing her body with the right kinds of herbs everyday.  They say her sickness isn't all that uncommon and has been seen up north.  They call it the cow sickness because when she first got sick she stripped all her clothes off and wanted to run into the bushes and eat grass.  They said she was acting like a cow.  Now it is 3 months later and she is showing little improvement.  They have moved her to another city where she is still receiving very expensive treatment from a witch doctor which is eating up three peoples salaries each month.  They are all very afraid she will die.  But it isn't quite like you think.  It isn't the physical symptoms that may eventually kill her.  What they believe is that the person who sold her to the original black magician has put her soul in that of a cow somewhere in Nigeria.  Should the cow in Nigeria die, then so too will Christy. 

 

If this in itself isn't sad enough, not two weeks after she first got sick, the father, a retired pastor, let's not forget, went down to the local police station and put in a request to sue the two hospital staff members because they caused her illness by selling her to a black magician.  I know this may sound crazy, and no this isn't  a remake of the Salem witch trials, but it is possible to be charged with causing illness or deaths by means of black magic, sorcery or witch craft, whatever you want to call it.  I have no idea how such cases are judged since to my knowledge, the hospital does not give out death certificates saying "Cause of death: witch craft".  It remains as one more example of how everything here has more than just a physical cause.  You don't just die of a heart attack here, there always has to be some underlying cause. 

 

I can't truly say what is wrong with Christy.  Maybe she just snapped, maybe she is possessed by evil spritis, maybe her soul is in a cow, or maybe she just thinks it is and fear itself has driven her mad.  I can't say but I wish I could.  I remain a physical evidence kind of person though the longer I am here the more my worldview continues to shift and challenge me. 

 

One more quick example.  My friend Elise recently moved away from Gamboula.  Her husband took a second wife after having some 15 affairs and Elise left him and took her children with her.  Technically, she isn't allowed to leave with her kids but she is frightened for their safety so they are with her. (She has 10.)  Only 2 days after she left town her ex-husband had a bad motorbike accident, breaking his femur and doing incredible damage to his leg.  After only 3 weeks in the hospital he left and headed for a small village in order to seek village medicine (which, by the way, after 4 months, is not working and he may never be able to walk again because of his stupidity).  He has since filed charges against Elise and Clarisse for 'causing' his accident by magical means to prevent him from following after Elise.  While it would have been a good use of magic the charges are false and how on earth do you prove that in a court of law.  Could you imagine a black magic episode of CSI?  Anyway, as long as her ex is hobbled, Elise is safe, though the military have come to warn her about the court case twice since she has moved.  They won't proceed with the case until he can travel and the way he is going that won't be for a while. 

 

You may think I am anti-village medicine but I am not.  However, there are some things that work and some that don't and in the case of a broken femur I think traction and a hospital bed are better than herbs and rubs.  I am also deeply concerned about women's rights and I am sure you will here more about this from me later. 

 

Ange

Life turns upside down

What is a reality in every big city weekly, is a rarity here in Central Africa.  Yesterday we were hit with the sad news that Constant, the head African of our agroforestry program was involved in a head on collision in a village south of here.  Constant was driving the centre's landcruiser truck while the other was a car.  They were both approaching the top of a blind hill from opposite directions at high speeds when they hit and two people in the car were killed along with a three year old boy who was riding in the back of the agri-truck.  To make things even worse, the two dead are the secretary of the province of Berberati and the vice-Mayor of Berberati, who also happens to be the younger brother of a recent presidential candidate and minister in the government.  There are four other people seriously injured and in our mission hospital, including a pregnant woman.  We are all in a state of shock and we are unsure as to what the final outcome of this tragedy will be.  Constant is generally a good driver, if not a little fast, but I know he must be beside himself right now knowing that his vehicle was involved in the deaths of three people. 

 

Not unlike the United States, lawsuits are common here and we are bracing for what could be an expensive battle with the families of these very important men.  One of the men has left behind four wives and numerous children.  The judicial system is very corrupt and we are hoping for the best but won't be surprised by the worst.  What this means for our programs here we are unsure.  Our work here will be unaffected but we are concerned about the mission as a whole.  We are asking for prayer from all our readers.  Please pray for Constant and for his family.  He is in protective custody as it is likely that if he is free family members of the dead men may try to harm or kill him.  Pray also for the impending court cases and for Roy who will likely be involved in much of the details as he is Constant's boss and the vehicle was a work vehicle.  Pray that we would have a positive attitude as we handle the fallout from this tragedy and that we respond appropriately and with love. 

 

Thank-you, Angela

The day I ate my genetic cousin.

Sounds kind of gross, but ask any scientist and they will tell you that monkeys are our genetic cousins, and even though I swore to my mother that I would never eat one, when it's the only thing on the table and you are the honoured guest of a Baka pygmy you have relatively little choice.  Okay, so we returned to Bamba last Sunday to plant trees with the Baka pygmies we met a few weeks earlier.  The same town where I got in trouble for taking the picture of a monkey.  I guess it isn't so bad if you eat one, only if you take it's picture!  We arrived Sunday night at the Baka village to find that in the two weeks since we had been there they had put up a house for us to stay in and they had high hopes that we had come to be 'their white people'.  This, I learned, meant that they were hoping we had come to live with them, to give them jobs, to provide food and clothes and school for them until the end of eternity, just like the Catholics are doing over in Cameroon.  I was immediately sadden by their request and though I could understand their desire for such a plan it also seemed to me like just another form of enslavement.  We suggested, that instead of us employing them, they employ themselves.  Why garden for me, I asked them, when you could garden for yourselves and then you would be the owner of both the garden and all that was in it.  No, no, no.  That wasn't a good idea at all they said. 

 

The Baka pygmies are a people between cultures fighting to find a place in both; not a very easy thing to do.  They have a natural fear of cities and the Bantu people in them and they are often taken advantage of.  However, if they could get over that fear, they would make nice profits selling their own produce in the town of Bamba, along with the sale of bush-meat.  One of the many problems is that even though they are currently selling meat in the Bamba market, they generally take that money and buy alcohol and cigarettes, not giving a thought to what they will eat next week.  Working within a culture like this is very difficult and progress is very slow.  There is a fine balance between helping out and causing dependency and I only know one or two missionaries who have succeeded at it.  We have very little time left in CAR this time around so we are doing what we can.  We planted 40 fruit trees in their village and started a small nursery with them.  We also bought them 25 high quality oil palm trees that produce high amounts of the red palm oil that is high in Vitamin A.  There is a severe shortage of oil palm in that area and it would make a good commercial product for the Baka.  After spending the night on the floor of the mud house they constructed for us we spent the day eating fruit and planting trees before going back to Bamba, the mill town, where we spent the night in the church's guest room.  Tuesday morning we went to visit another family of Baka on the West side of Bamba and were pleasantly surprised to see 2 simple mud houses surrounded by flowers planted all around and trees from the Bamba seminar.  We again ate fruit and planted trees and visited in their garden that has a very rich and productive soil.  They are very keen on planting a tree garden and are starting work on it tomorrow.  Then we sat down and ate a meal of gozo and monkey.  It is a very dark meat and tasted a lot like, well, meat.  I am not a connoisseur of meat so that isn't saying much coming from me.  I can't say I would want to eat it again but I was proud of myself for having tried it and feel initiated into the ranks of a 'real missionary'.  Darren said it was pretty good tasting if not a bit oily, but he too wouldn't be bothered if he didn't eat it again!

 

On the garden side of things, everything is growing well with the rains in the nutrition garden.  We are harvesting the Mung beans now, the first of the 17 plus varieties we have planted in the nutrition garden.  From quite a small plot we have already harvested 3.765 kg and we will be picking one or two more times yet.  It is turning out to be a very desirable bean for this area as it only took two months from planting to first harvest and total time from start to finish will only be 2 and a half months.  It seems to tolerate wet and dry conditions and the bean itself requires very little cooking time which is essential here as everything is cooked over open fire.  We are clearing space in the garden right now in order to plant a larger crop of mung beans to build up the number of seeds we have for distribution to all of the agroforestery cooperatives.  We will also be giving a large amount to the nutrition centre to cook for the children there.  The mung bean seeds are one of the 17 varieties of beans we brought back from Kenya last October for trials in the nutrition garden.  It is very satisfying to find something that works here so quickly.  We are also looking at replicating a red cow pea from Congo that I gave out to a group of women last Spring 2005, and received favourable reports about. 

 

The nutrition garden is becoming quite a model of variety on a small piece of land.  We have 5 different starch/root crops growing, beans, vegetables, bananas and peanuts on one hectare of land.  In a year and half there will be lots of food available for the nutrition centre in terms of the root crops and bananas and this summer we will be able to give them a lot of beans.  Things are happening and I am glad to be able to share the excitement with you all.

 

Till next time, Angela

Mail update

Dear friends, I hope you read this quickly and then continue on the next blog I sent out this morning about the monkey...

Just a note to inform anyone out there who has a mailing address for us that is Yaounde, Cameroon.  Please do not continue to use this address for mail.  We found out TODAY that we are not supposed to recieve mail at this address.  Why no one told us this before I do not know.  If you want to know how to mail stuff to us please send us an e-mail to bossbugs@yahoo.ca. 

Thanks for your help, Angela

Ask the monkey first....

...before you take its picture.  Well, maybe not the monkey so much as the monkey's owner.  So the story goes something like this.  I was recently in the village of Bamba, about 2 hours south of Gamboula, with Noel and Chrysler, the agroforesterie seminar teachers, and Josefine, a short-term Swedish missionary.  Bamba is a town of about 3000 people on the edge of the rainforest and the town itself is almost solely supported by a large sawmill and the trade in smoked bush meat.  We went down for 3 days (Darren stayed behind to work in Eden), and it was on day two of our visit that Josefine and I received our first Convocation in CAR.  Not conviction, but convocation.  This is like a summons to an government official's office when you have done something wrong. 

 

Okay, so Josefine, Noel and I were haplessly wandering around Bamba Thursday afternoon around 5:00 when I spotted a monkey tied up outside someone's house.   I asked Noel if he thought it was alright for Joesfine to take its picture and since we couldn't find anyone around to ask, he said no problem.  So, without getting too close, Josefine snapped a picture on her digital camera and we were on our way.  Friday afternoon we returned to Bamba after having planted trees in a nearby Baka pygmy village, only to hear that we had been summoned to the office of the Eau et Foret authority.  These are the government guys in charge of water and forests and anything that happens to live in them.  Actually we had been summoned that morning but we failed to receive their notice until the afternoon.  Noel and the Evangelist we were staying with promptly went down to the office to ask forgiveness of the head guy for missing our 'appointment' and they were told what our grievous errors had been. 

 

According to Mr. Eau et Foret, our first fault was that we did not ask the monkey's owner for permission to take the monkey's picture.  I told the guys that since the owner wasn't around we should have asked the monkey if it was alright instead.  So, yeah, I guess we were at fault.  Our second, even larger fault, was that neither of us has the proper authorising papers to take pictures of any and all things in Central Africa.  This was a new rule to me and all our immediate reactions was, oh, so the guy wants money! 

 

Saturday morning at 8:00, under a heavy canopy of a rainforest downpour, we made our way on foot to the office of the eau et foret, and wouldn't you know but it was the same house as the monkey's.  We entered the head guys office with our peace offering in tow (a lovely little fruit tree) and we proceeded to be chastised for our grievous error in photo etiquette.  If I hadn't had been shivering with cold I might well have had to suck on a lemon to keep a ridiculous and inappropriate smile off of my face.  The whole thing seemed so funny to me.  I asked forgiveness for our sins and told him that we couldn't find anyone to ask permission and we had no idea it was the office of the eau et foret since they neglected to put a sign out front of the office.  You can bet when I go back to Bamba next week there will be a sign up!  I also told him how hard it is to be new in a country and to not know all the rules, especially when such rules do not exist in our own countries (Canada and Sweden).  I even offered to erase the monkey's picture but he refused.  We chatted him up for another 45 minutes until I concluded that perhaps the rule he mentioned does not apply to Joesfine and I since we technically are not tourists but rather residents and that we had already paid a hefty price for that very privilege.  After giving him our tree offering we left without paying a dime. 

 

Needless to say, Friday and Saturday we continued to joke about the monkey and the officer and I am not sure I have laughed that hard in a very long time.  I was thankful that I contained myself enough not to say anything stupid to the eau et foret officer and that my Sango proved better than that of the officer, who grew up in Cameroon.  I was more Central African than he was at that moment.

 

In fact, the whole time we spent in Bamba was one of the best times I have had here and was one of those occasions where you think to yourself, how can I possibly leave this place.  Chrysler, Noel and I meshed together like we had been friends for a long time and it was one of the first times I have spent with Chrysler where the colour/culture barrier almost seemed non-existent.  He didn't call me madam the entire time we were there.  While I was happy to be home with Darren it was also a little like the week after coming home from summer camp, all the fun and excitement left behind in exchange for the daily grind.  Not that there is much a daily grind feeling here but I think you know what I mean.  In fact, it has been an excellent week in terms of work and Monday we had a chance to group ourselves together and plan the weeks work as we were forced inside due to rain. 

 

Darren, Chrysler and I will be returning to Bamba on June 4 to work with two different groups of Baka pygmies who are interested in planting trees, especially improved oil palm.  The red oil taken from the fruit of the oil palm is very high in Vitamin A and a rich source of oil.  A Baptist evangelist lives and works among one group of Baka and he has started a school for the Baka children using the government curriculum.  It is an impressive little school, just poles and a thatch roof but he is a dedicated, if not somewhat discouraged man.  He receives next to no salary from the EEB church and is thinking about moving back to his own village where his wife and 12 kids live.  I told him that he wasn't an evangelist so much as a missionary and that hard times are part of the course.  We are helping him with trees and vegetable seeds but that is about as far as we can go with him.  It seems to me that a denomination as old and established as the EEB here in CAR ought to be financing their own missionary campaigns.  We shall see. 

 

We are off to Berberati for the day tomorrow to look at our possible future work sight with a Central African NGO.  The roads had been fairly calm but there have been two incidences in the last week so we remain cautious and only travel by night.  It is a pain but is also just part of the routine of working here. 

 

Better get going and pack for our day away.  Remember, always ask the monkey before you take his picture, otherwise you might get in trouble!

The keys to my canoe

Walking along the streets of Gamboula is a feast for the eyes.  From the bright coloured outfits of the women, half-naked children running about, goats and sheep lying across the road and houses in all states of repair.  However, if you look really close, you might notice the pineapple top hanging from someone's orange tree or the wad of rolled up leaves sitting above the door of someone's house.  A village form of decoration you might think to yourself.  But no, actually, this is the lock and key to your house, your protection against thieves stealing your ripening oranges.  How can a rolled up wad of leaves possibly protect your garden, your fields, your home or your possessions from thieves?  Because the belief is that the curse on those leaves is so strong that anyone stealing will drop dead as a result in no time at all.  The point was driven home for Darren the other day when he went fishing with his friend Bruce.  When they arrived at the river they came to two canoes sitting side by side.  One, belonging to a missionary, was chained and locked to a tree.  The other, belonging to Bruce, had a wad leaves sitting on the bow.  This, Bruce pointed out, was his lock and key for his canoe, and a fundamental difference between Western and Central African thinking that affects every aspect of how we live and work here.  Bruce, a church member, went on to explain that while he himself does not belief in the magic behind the leaves, everyone else does and so that keeps his boat safe which took many hours of hard work to make. 

 

This belief is not just something from the old animist religious ways.  In fact it is alive and well in the Christian church.  Not so much that Christians here practice using leaves but they remain in the fear of those leaves.  You see, while you can put leaves out to protect your things from thievery, the leaves can also be used as a means of thievery.  My good friends sister, Anne, is a prime example.  Anne is an active member of the Catholic church west of here but she recently came to Gamboula because of bandits in her village.  She asked around for a piece of land to farm and was given some to which she promptly set to work clearing and turning over the soil.  At about the time she was ready to plant the field, she arrived one day to find the garden littered with wads of leaves--medicine.  The result being that she completely abandoned the garden and moved on to a field somewhere else.  Why?  Because the fear is that if she continue to farm that field harm would come to her and her children.  The person to put the leaves in the field was likely the original owner who thought he could profit from someone else's labour, and he was right.  The next field that Anne got resulted in the same thing and she is, to this day, without a garden.  When I proposed that the church elders go to her garden and pray over it, thereby cleaning it of the evil curse on it, the idea was rejected.  They will only come back and put more medicine in it. 

 

Not surprisingly, this kind of thing only happens to Christians and in my view forms a kind of religious persecution here.  If she had put a wad of leaves in her new garden at the start, no one would have dared counterattack with their own cursed leaves.  Only Christians refrain from using this type of medicine and so they are prime targets for theft of all kinds.  I am not a theologian and so have little comment as to what to do about the problem except to write things as I see them.  It is however, a frustrating aspect of our work here and affects us as well.  We have a lot of thievery problems in the nutrition garden that could easily be solved by hanging leaf wads around our fences.  Not that I am suggesting this is what we do!  Nor am I genuinely surprised that this is the way Satan is working against the church here.  Reading the New Testament it is clear that we are to face trials of many kinds and things that test our faith and convictions.  That doesn't mean that I am not angered when it happens in my neighbourhood and against my friends, many of whom work very hard only to have the fruits of their labour stolen from under them.  My question is, how do I counsel them? 

 

The other day we had an early morning call from one of the sentries who was unlocking the mission gates.  One of the locks was stuffed with leaves and he was asking for bolt cutters to cut it off.  Darren told him to just dig the leaves out to which he responded absolutely no way could he do that.  When Darren arrived on scene he was informed that it was stuffed with medicine (cursed leaves) and so they couldn't touch it.  Darren had to dig every last bit of leaves out of the lock before the sentry would put his key into the lock to unlock it, so powerful was the belief that he would die from touching the leaves.  Darren, however, is alive and well and a testimony to the power of God. 

 

I can neither deny nor agree with the power of such medicine.  I can say that in many cases, fear can cause illness in and of itself.  We have seen it at the hospital here many times where people come in very ill even though medically, there is nothing wrong with them.  They are paralysed and diseased by their own fear.  Can this be enough to kill someone, or can an evil curse on a pineapple top be enough to kill someone?  I suppose if you believe in something strong enough it can do just that.  Our witness is that the Holy Spirit is stronger and more powerful than any curse in heaven or on earth, including the death curse on the wad of leaves I picked up and threw away yesterday!

 

In other news, we are alive and well and working hard.  The rainy season has been blessing us with wonderful rain and things are growing like weeds, including the weeds.  The bean trial looks great, minus the soy beans which apparently are a favourite of goats.  A side effect of our thievery problem in the garden is that people keep stealing the metal wire used to tie the pieces of woven fence matting together.  This makes ample opportunity for goats to sneak into the garden where they find a restaurant menu of things for them to eat.  The fight against goats is one that we will never win, but small victories would be nice. We plan on being in Bayanga June and July and I will try and be better at sending updates.  Until next time, your thoughts are welcome and your prayers appreciated.

 

Angela

 

 

 

Please note that this address sends and receives e-mail via a satellite phone connection.  All e-mails over 25 kb will be returned to sender unopened.  Sorry for the inconvenience.  For more updates on the Bosses, please log onto http://thebosses.blogspot.com