I. Introduction--C. Why Africa and Why Malawi
For many Westerners, Africa has two faces: the Africa of safari brochures: the Serengeti—acacia trees standing in
silhouette against the big skies, warm red sunsets, great plains stretching
from horizon to horizon, endless herds of wildebeests, zebras, gazelles, kudus,
slowly migrating north to south, south to north, in search of water and grass;
Masai warriors, villages, clusters of round thatched huts, shamans, chants and
dancing. Then there is the Africa of
poverty and grief: tribal hatreds and
violence—Rwanda’s Tutsi and Hutu; brutal dictators; uncontrolled or
uncontrollable bands of militia, patrolling the countryside with machine guns
and machetes, committing unspeakable acts of violence, often against the most
vulnerable—children and women; droughts, famines, floods, widespread
misery—orphans, babies with distended stomachs, flies covering round baby
heads; sprawling refugee camps, on the edge of nowhere; epidemics of cholera,
malaria, HIV, and Ebola; international peace keeping teams; the famous cover
page photos featured on Time Magazines of poverty, misery, grief, violence, and
pillage. Nice place to visit as a
tourist, if at the right time and right place, far away from the trouble spots,
in controlled environments, catering to well-heeled tourists. But a miserable place to live, only suitable
for peace keepers; doctors, nurses and other medical specialists, on temporary
assignment; foreign diplomats, living in secure compounds and working out of air-conditioned,
well-guarded embassies and consulates; missionaries, NGO workers, Peace Core
volunteers. For most, it is hard to
imagine why anyone else would go to Africa to live or, if they did, why they
would stay very long in that largely forgotten and benighted continent. Obviously, this is an uninformed, typically
myopic view of a continent largely untouched and unknown by Westerners.
Yet it is still a fair question as to why Carole and I
wanted to serve in Africa and how it was that we ended up in Malawi—one of the
smallest, poorest and least known countries on the continent. In short, the answer is Carole. About 12 years ago Carole and I visited Kenya
and Tanzania, because our youngest daughter, Catherine, then in her early 20s,
had spent a semester during her junior year of college, studying and doing
survey research in a small village of fifty huts high on the southern flank of
Mt. Kilimanjaro. After flying into
Nairobi and meeting up with Catherine, we spent close to two weeks on safari,
touring three game parks (two in Kenya, one in Tanzania), before finishing up
with a visit to Catherine’s home village in Tanzania. Our safari experience was thrilling, Carole
and I have both said it was one of the two trips we hoped to do later in life
together with all of our adult children and their spouses, if we could ever
pull it off.
But it wasn’t the safari, fun as it was, that spoke to
Carole’s soul. Carole responded
instinctively to the incredible vibrancy of African life: the colorful chitenge (long cotton wraps) the
African women wear; women carrying children strapped on their backs and
balancing upon their heads, in ways unimaginable to us, bundles of kindling,
drums of water, sacks of maize meal and pigeon peas, and virtually anything
that can be balanced; the chaos, swirling dust, incessant activity of local
markets with milling crowds, chickens in cages, hanging slabs of meat, small
fruit and vegetable stands, children under foot, mini buses; everything and
everyone bathed in the warmth and glow of the late afternoon African sun. The highways, most unpaved, red, and dusty,
choked with people—the elderly, men and women, children, young adults, peddlers
taking wares to market—most walking, alone, in pairs, or small clusters,
occasionally men on bikes, sometimes with women or toddlers perched behind—an
endless stream of humanity, slowing moving, flowing off into the distance, stepping
from time to time to the side, as they move off quietly to their villages and
distant homes.
Almost instantly, without conscious effort, Carole felt an
undefinable connection with those Africans. We
didn’t become friend with Africans during our short visit, so it is hard to
claim there was a real kinship with them.
Yet even now, all these years later, Carole and I carry vivid images of
those earlier scenes. The Africans we
met were friendly, open, and welcoming.
If there was hostility or “attitude” toward whites or Westerners,
neither of us was aware of it. And that
experience imprinted in Carole a desire to return to Africa as a missionary,
when the time came for us to serve.
Like Carole, I was drawn to Africa as well, but not with the
same passion. My attitude was colored no
doubt by a sentiment I have shared often, over the years, with young men and women
considering mission calls. There are
many places where one can serve, the Church needing faithful hard-working
missionaries to serve in cities and countries throughout the world—from Memphis
to London, Tokyo to Seattle, Provo to Toronto.
From a worldly perspective, different worlds, vastly different cultures,
different appeals. What matters most is
not where one serves, but how one serves.
Bringing the gospel to souls in Africa, or helping those in need in a
poor country, is surely in the eyes of the Almighty no more noble or valuable
that doing the same in Nashville or Anchorage.
The world may consider one opportunity to serve more valuable or
intrinsically appealing than the other, but I have no doubts but what the Lord views
it quite differently. For as we are told
in Samuel, the Lord “seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward
appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.”
1 Samuel 16:7. Hence, I was
inclined to submit our mission papers to the Church without expressing a
preference and without trying to elicit support from a missionary president who
needed senior couples and was ready to lobby for us. I was prepared to let the Church leaders
decide where we should go without guidance from us, other than answering
honestly the questions put to us in the mission application.
Of course, that is the process used to assign the younger
missionaries, they being called to serve by Church authorities, as they feel prompted
and not in response to the missionaries’ preferences. Members
everywhere believe that these callings are inspired. Missionaries are called to labor in specific areas
for reasons known to the Lord, even though we may not know why the callings are
extended. The sentiment is frequently expressed that the
missionary is called where he or she is uniquely prepared to touch someone with
his/her testimony or has some skill or talent that can be uniquely tapped. I was prepared to let the process run its
course, without guidance from us, trusting in the Lord. Even though the Church is open to getting
input from senior couples (indeed, of course, that’s precisely the reason for
posting specific callings throughout the world, for which senior couples may
apply), lobbying for a specific calling seemed to me to be “unseemly” and out
of line with what we think of the “right” way to be called to serve in the Church—i.e.,
through the inspiration of the authorized leaders.
Though Carole and I may have differed in how much we wanted
to influence where we might be called, we shared a common vision of the type of
mission we wanted. Years ago we listened
to Dave and Marilyn Uffens, good friends and long-time members of our home Ward
in the Seattle area, report about their mission to Durban South Africa. They spoke of doing each day at least one
thing they found good or meaningful. We
wanted to replicate that experience. Our
aim was to have a personal hands-on mission, working directly with members or
those in need. We did not want to work
in an office or to have administrative work.
In early 2014, after returning from our year in Paris,
Carole made a list of all the Africa countries where English was at least one
of the primary languages; then we scratched off the list those having huge
populations, not wanting to work in congested urban areas. I hoped
to be assigned somewhere beautiful, but didn’t have any way of knowing how to
screen the list for that factor. In the
end, the list was pared down to a handful of southeast African countries: Botswana,
Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Namibia, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.[1] A random, or depending upon one’s faith an
inspired, factor then came into play. In
Paris, we met Joe and Holly Andrus, a couple of roughly our age and background,
where Joe was working a tax attorney for a quasi-public entity addressing trade
imbalance issues for the European Union. Formerly from Boston, they knew President
Erickson, recently called to serve as the Mission President in the Zambia
Lusaka Mission, and offered to contact him on our behalf if we had interest in
serving in either Zambia or Malawi. So
by the time our application for a mission was submitted we were able to
indicate to the Mission Department that we had written to President Erickson
expressing an interest in serve in that mission if he could use another senior
couple.
After getting our calls, and before leaving for Africa,
Carole and I routinely spot checked the blogs of the senior missionaries
working the Zambia Lusaka Mission. Of
the two countries covered by the Mission, Malawi seemed to me to be the ideal place
to go—it had the third largest lake in Africa; just south of the equator, it
had great weather, was sited in part on the world famous Rift Valley, had a
relatively manageable population of 17 million (compared to Nigeria with its
staggering population of 175 million), many of whom lived in small villages and
throughout the countryside; and it was called the “warm heart of Africa,” an
appealing, if sappy, marketing-driven slogan.
The Church in Malawi is small, but growing, with two centers of
strength—Blantyre in the south, and Lilongwe in the central district. I could not imagine serving in a part of the
world more different than northern Germany where I served as a young man in the
late 1960s.[2]
[1]
Most of the west African countries dropped off the list either because they
were too populated or because there were former French colonies, where French
was the primary non-native language.
[2]
Carole and I talked about the possibility of our going to Germany, Austria or
the German speaking part of Switzerland as senior missionaries. And though it would have been a wonderful
opportunity for me to refresh my German, and to get back in touch with a people
and culture I had grown to love, I thought it would be a bad idea for us as a
couple, because we would be unevenly yoked.
I wanted Carole to have a good mission experience. So we opted for an English speaking country,
where we could both communicate with the members, and hopefully do something
good for them rather than spending 18 months trying to learn the language. I had been blessed once in learning German as
a young man, but after our recent experience in France, neither Carole nor I
had much confidence, this late in life, in our ability to master a new
language.
Now Sister Griffus in back in the States and Elder Hiltbrand is in Lusaka.
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