Our Gran

 

“Our gran is beautiful.” So is Susan Binion and Kathy Haasdyk’s new picture-book Our Gran. Kathy’s soft water-color illustrations bring to life Susan’s three African children living with their grandmother since their mother died. Gran goes to the ladies’ meeting every Thursday afternoon. “She always comes home singing.” She and the children go to church on Sunday and “always come home singing.” But the day the children’s mother died, their gran didn’t smile or sing.

The problem of AIDS orphans is all too common in KwaZuluNatal where Susan Binion and her family live as TEAM missionaries serving at Union Bible Institute. For generations elderly Africans have been cared for by their grown children, but in these days of HIV, too often those adult children have died, leaving their parents to care for the next generation. The elderly might raise a dozen or more grandchildren with little or no income. This book pays tribute to those hard-working grandmothers.

Our Gran has a special place in my heart because I know both Susan and Kathy (an SIL missionary recently returned to Canada.) The model for the grandmother is a dear Zimbabwean lady, the mother of a friend in my church. My friend’s wedding picture even appears in some of the illustrations.

The book is aimed at pre-schoolers and includes discussion questions appropriate for any child, not just those who have lost their parents. I have read it with groups of elementary school children in Tembisa who embraced it enthusiastically, especially when I showed them copies in both Zulu and Xhosa that they could read for themselves more easily than the English.

Africa needs many more books like Our Gran that reflect the contemporary world and speak to the hearts of ordinary children.

 
To order contact :
Union Bible Institute Literature Department
PO BOX 50, Hilton, 3245
South Africa
Phone: +27 33 343 4547
FAX: +27 33 343 1795
Email: ubi-administrator@wandata.com

Writing for Kenya's Children

 

Violence is an acceptable way of solving problems.
Those people are bad.
Friends can’t be trusted.
Those I love can’t protect me.

One by one we listed negative lessons that Kenyan children learned in the violence that followed last December’s elections.

I drew a line down the board. “What are the positive lessons we want them to learn instead?” I asked.

“Good people still exist!” two students practically shouted. “And some of them are from the other tribe,” someone added. We went on to talk about hope, trust, the power of difference and ways of portraying such themes in stories.

I was deeply moved as I listened to fifteen women, talking so excitedly about the needs of Kenyan children that they practically ignored me, their teacher. They came from different ethnic groups, some 'at war' with one another, but they shared a passion for Christ, for children, for books and for their country.

The next morning we prayed together for the God who heals the broken hearted, who is a father to the fatherless and a defender of widows to use us to share his comfort. As we broke for tea in the afternoon, one of the women received an SMS from her office to avoid Ngong Road—new violence had broken out.

I am not one to panic. I have lived in the midst of a revolution in Ethiopia and a civil war in Mozambique. I am well aware that the media plays up the most dramatic scenes, and Nairobi was probably not going to burst into flames that afternoon. Although the women all expressed the same sentiments in their words, more than one described her stomach twisting in fear. “Not again! Dear God, don’t let it be like before when bands of thugs went house to house asking what tribe you were from so they could decide whether or not to kill you.”

A good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, I tell my students. But this story doesn’t yet have an ending. Kenya’s political problems won’t be easily solved. And what difference will a political solution make for the poor and the hopeless who blame other ethnic groups for their problems? I wonder about the personal ending for these women. Some are teachers; some work with relief organizations. One has HIV and came to the workshop only days after leaving the hospital. Will the refugee children still in the camps be able to unlearn the lessons their experiences have taught them or is Kenya doomed to repeat the cycle of violence in the next generation?

We don’t know the ending to the story, but we can talk to the One who does.

More Maputo Memories

 


Our closest missionary friends in Mozambique in the mid-1980s were Lucio and Rosalee Guimaraes. The Guimaraes family arrived from Brazil the year before we moved to Maputo. No one told them that the road from Nelspruit was too dangerous to travel even in daylight. I can only imagine the guardian angels surrounding their car as they drove through the war zone with their three young children, arriving in Maputo well into the night. (The first time we drove that road was after peace had come in the early ‘90s. The girls counted 108 burned out vehicles. Erika’s comment about having grown up in Mozambique during the war was, “Do you mean we were having an adventure and didn’t even know it?)

The Guimaraes girls were the same age as ours. Lucio, like Steve, was committed to leadership training. We four adults prayed together once a week, and the children turned every occasion to be together into a ‘festa.’ It wasn’t uncommon to hold ‘theological education conferences’ around the grill in our backyard with a Mozambican Methodist theologian who had married a Brazilian girl. I taught Rosalee’s children English, and she taught mine to read and write the Portuguese Katie and Erika had picked up in conversation.

 
Lucio and Rosalee now live in Cape Town where he pastors a Portuguese church and gives pastoral support to Brazilian missionaries in Southern Africa. Their daughter Eunice and her husband Marcos (the son of good friends of ours in our Brazil days thirty years ago) joined them to teach music and Sunday school.
Easter weekend we traveled to Cape Town to welcome the next generation—Davi Guimaraes Rodrigues.
* * *
Our closest Mozambican friends during those same years were Andre and Adelina Malombe. They paid a formal call to greet us our first week in April 1985. Adelina was an enthusiastic and gifted Sunday School teacher. Andre was assigned to teach with Steve, who soon discovered he was working with one of the most gifted teachers he had ever met even though Andre had only an eighth grade education.

The Malombes soon became our closest African friends. Their children were welcome playmates of ours. We arranged scholarships for Andre and Adelina at the Brazilian seminary where we had worked. Both finished bachelor degrees and eventually earned Master’s degrees from a Brazilian distance learning program while teaching in an Angolan seminary. Over the years we have remained close friends.

March 30 their son Elias was married. African weddings are long drawn out affairs with a church ceremony and day of festivities with the bride’s family one day and a second feast with singing and dancing the next day at the groom’s home. We drove across from Johannesburg for the second day of festivities.

 
Elias married a girl in the church whose mother is the director of women’s work for the southern region of the country. She too grew up in a strong Christian home. Many young people these days find it difficult to separate the economic development of the country from the lifestyle of sex and alcohol that they see on television or from the South African tourists who flock to the beaches. Elias and his bride have a challenge before them to build a godly marriage in a world very different from the one in which they grew up.
* * *
Born in Brazil, raised in Mozambique…My children have grown up. They too have married and Katie has given us a grandchild. It is not surprising that their playmates have grown up too. But I look at Elias and see a little boy delighted by pin-the-tail-on-the donkey at a long-ago birthday party under the mango tree in our back yard. I look at Eunice and think of four little girls, dancing and laughing long ago in a crumbling city of broken glass and random night-time shooting.

Easter in Maputo

Our first Easter in Maputo, Mozambique, (1986) we went with a Mennonite family and an Anglican couple to the park that overlooks the Indian Ocean. We sat out of sight beneath an arbor of vines, reading the Biblical story, singing quietly and praying for each other until the sun rose over the water. By the next year the Mennonite family had left the country, victim of the stress of living with civil war in the poorest country on earth. But a few other English speakers had arrived.

I remember coming to the park in the pre-dawn gray of the morning, pretending with our two little girls that we were the women, arriving early at the tomb to grieve, wary of the soldiers and worried that we might not be able to move the stone and sprinkle the spices we had brought for the body of Jesus. We tried to imagine what it would be like to not yet know that Jesus had conquered death forever.

By 1990, our last year in Mozambique, the community of English-speaking missionaries and aid workers had grown and formed an international church. Although we attended a local Shangan service, the girls went to the English Sunday school, and the church always included us in their monthly potluck meals.

In the spring of 1990 Mozambique was just emerging from Marxist-Leninist rule. Our gathering was still illegal. Pieter Botha, a godly South African pioneer missionary, now in heaven, went to the Ministry of Religious Affairs to ask permission for us to celebrate the resurrection in the park. “Don’t ask,” was the answer. “Better to apologize after if necessary.”

This time there were close to a hundred and fifty people seated on a broad staircase, gazing out to sea. The children performed a drama. We sang and praised God openly for what he did for us in Jesus Christ. As we arrived, a soldier approached from the military base only a few hundred yards to the south.

“What are you doing here?” he asked gruffly.

“Don’t you know?” Pieter Botha replied. “Today is the day the Lord rose from the dead.”

The soldier looked confused. “Oh…. Oh.” And he backed away.

After the service, the church gathered as usual for Easter breakfast at our house. We had the largest yard, much of it paved and shaded by a huge mango tree and an arbor of passion fruit. That year we had a gifted cellist and an accomplished violinist in Maputo. They played all the way through breakfast, reluctant to stop even to eat. I have talked with the cellist recently, and that Easter morning is still one of her most precious memories as it is mine.

Mozambique was the most difficult thing God has ever asked me to do. My novel, The Wooden Ox, had to be written from the point-of-view of a child because my own adult view would have been too depressing. But every year when Easter comes, there is a warm feeling in my heart for the fellowship we knew, for the dependence on God that we clung to in order to survive, for the certainty that we were exactly where God wanted us to be. I don’t know if there will be Christians in that park tomorrow morning to greet the sun with songs of the resurrection. I do know that Christ is risen and that has made all the difference in my life.

In the Backlash of Jokwe

It is a cold, wet, dreary Monday. When our pastor thanked the Lord Sunday evening for filling the reservoirs that are so important in this semi-arid land, I felt convicted. Having just come from months of cold Minnesota winter, I had not been looking at the weather in quite that light.

To be fair, neither have the Mozambicans who lost seven lives and 10,000 homes in Angoche last week and I-don’t-know-how-many more in Inhambane a few days later. Steve was in Beira and saw the storm passing out to sea that night with its huge, dark thunder clouds and magnificent display of lightning. But the coast curves sharply to the west north of Beira, and Jokwe’s hurricane-force winds only splattered the shore.

What we are getting in Johannesburg is the back-lash of that storm. The house where we are staying has huge windows with single pains of glass. Not all of them shut. There is no insulation or central heating, but the leak in the roof was fixed on Friday, and our boxes hold all the extra blankets from our old house in Kempton Park. I should say ‘held,’ for they are now spread over our beds in layers.

But I wake up wondering about my kids in Tembisa. Cold as it is to crawl from my bed, I doubt that they slept as warm and snug as I did. Chances are their houses are at least as drafty as this one. They can’t pay to fix a leaky roof. How many blankets did they have last night?

I can’t solve all their problems. I would burn out quickly if I tried to take the whole load on myself. I go and read, give them a bit of practice, and show a little love. Prayer seems inadequate, but in the end, it is the best I can do—to take the needs of the children of Tembisa to the God of the universe. May he act, and may he show me where he wants me to be his hands and feet.

Little Girls with Books

We are back in South Africa. I am surrounded by little girls holding their books, patiently waiting for their turn to read to me. Most of the boys are with Joel, a short term missionary from Canada awaiting his visa for Zimbabwe. The boys practice soccer moves with Joel, but when they are tired, they too get books and crowd so closely to read that I lose sight of him sitting in the dirt, leaning against the wall of the township church. More children sit on the steps. Each one holds an open book. Most are reading aloud, carefully sounding out each word. English is not their first language. Zulu or Xhosa is. But English will be their key to success in school and the job market.

A boy makes a dismissive gesture at a girl who is reading. He looks over the top of the book, and it is clear that he could read it at twice the speed. The girl stands as high as my shoulder. She’s maybe twelve years old, the age of Jairus’ daughter. Yet she struggles to read a story on an early second grade level.

But she wants to read it. Maybe it is an adult paying attention to her. Maybe it is my exotic white skin. But she is reading.

“She’s doing fine,” I tell the boy and shoe him away. I have to tell the girl some of the words. Prompt her here and there, but she finishes the story and looks at me with pride.

“That’s great,” I say. “We’ll do it again next week.

One of the other girls has chosen a harder book. She points at each word with her finger, but she reads more quickly, with less stumbling. “Ow! Ow!” she cries when the boy in the story is frightened by a spider.

I pat her shoulder. “That’s wonderful,” I say. “You’re reading with expression.” She grins and carries on with the story.

My collection of books is getting dusty, red smudges. Some of the covers are bent in the scramble to see who will read what. I try to watch out for the library books and remind the children that they are borrowed from the library right there in Tembisa. There are two libraries in the township, but both are too far for these children to walk. I hope they will remember and always think of libraries as wonderful places where they can get books.

Desert Medicine

 

It was the strong voices of the two protagonists that drew me to Judy Alexander’s debute novel, Desert Medicine. Independent-minded Laurel thinks church would be good for the stability of her five-year-old twins while she goes through what she calls “a marriage transition.” Rhoda Garcia, the cancer patient she agrees to visit to take her mind off her troubles, embraces Laurel and her children and tells deeply moving stories of her childhood in the desert. When Rhoda’s own adopted son suggests that the stories are nothing but lies, Laurel takes off in the middle of the night for Calexico, California, a town that has become almost mythical in her eyes as a result of Rhoda’s stories. It is Laurel’s intention to discover the truth. What she learns is not so much the truth about Rhoda as truth about herself.

Although I write for a religious market, I have no patience with mediocrity in the name of a message. Judy Alexander has an amazing way with language. This is not a fast-moving thriller or a tissue-box romance. It is the patient revelation of two vulnerable characters with whom many readers will identify. Alexander breaks out of the mold of Christian fiction with her realistic depiction of modern divorce. She takes on the sticky issue without contriving her story to give us accepted evangelical answers. She doesn’t preach or discuss theology. She does what fiction is supposed to do—tell stories—real stories, authentic stories. Even the pastor of Laurel’s new church has been divorced. (“She found a boyfriend, and I found Jesus,” he says of his separation from his wife after the death of a child.) And we eventually discover that Rhoda’s devoted Tony is not her first husband.

Laurel takes some missteps along the way. Nowhere does she pray “the sinner’s prayer,” but there is a definite shift in her thinking to ask what God wants with her life. Scattered throughout the volume are some of her wonderful photographs of the desert and the real Calexico, California. Alexander includes discussion questions for Book Clubs and even an e-mail address to invite interaction. Desert Medicine is well worth the read and bound to spark lively debate.

[In the interest of full disclosure, I read this book in manuscript form when Kregel Publications asked me to work on it.]