Perservering with hope

It happened six months ago and it has been one of the most challenging experiences to write about.

May was a good month, my parents came to visit us in Arusha for the first time, it was wonderful to share our life with them for 3 weeks. They have been my greatest supporters through all the years of working for my pilot's license, preparing for MAF and throughout my time here in Tanzania. Finally, they had the chance to share in our experience here and of course spend time with their grandson.

During the last week of their time here, they even had the chance to join me on a flight and spend two nights in Malambo, a Maasai village where we do outreach with a Bible School.

After finishing the first day's flight, I had just sat down in the pilot hut when my phone rang with a message that came via one of the evangelists I dropped off in one of the mountain villages. A girl in Ole Milei was in labor and experiencing complications. I prepared the plane, did the 5 minute flight up the mountain, then 15 minutes to Loliondo where she could get hospital care and 20 minutes back to Malambo. In less than one hour, I was back in Malambo having coffee with my parents. An hour that possibly meant the difference between life and death for that young mother and her unborn child.

At the end of the last day people came with a sick girl to the pilot hut asking for a lift back to Arusha. It is pretty normal that this happens, it's normally non-emergency patients going from the very basic medical dispensary in Malambo to a hospital in Arusha. However, this girl was in real pain. After a discussion with the health worker and family about her condition, it was decided that we would go for lunch and then she would join the flight with her father to Arusha. So, about an hour later, the family had the girl washed and everyone boarded the plane. About halfway into the 40 minute flight my mom tapped me on the shoulder and indicated that the girl was not doing well and we needed to pray. After arriving in Arusha, the father was wailing in the back of the plane with his daughter resting lifeless on his shoulder. We tried to get help from the airport fire & rescue personnel, but it was too late. It all felt so unreal at the time, but I had gather my thoughts and decide what to do next.  I could not leave them in Arusha, thankfully there was still enough time to get back, so we prepared the turnaround and I flew the distraught father and his child back to Malambo. During the flight back, my mind started wandering, thinking if there was anything I could have done differently that could have made a difference. I realized that I needed to increase my scans in the aircraft and do more frequent radio calls to the MAF base in order to stay focused. As we flew over Malambo the father started wailing out loud as the reality set in once more. It was a difficult experience, but the family were thankful that we were willing to try in order to give their child a chance. We later heard that they suspect that she had rabies.

However, this was not the end of the day yet. After landing in Malambo I was approached to fly a sick boy back to Arusha. We went through the process again, speaking with the health worker and the family and loaded the boy on a stretcher into the plane with a family member. This time we also had Elisha, who runs the Evangelism School, and a nurse on board who works with German missionaries who run a primary school in Malambo. They were all very helpful during the flight and helped to get the patient from the airport to the hospital in Arusha. Unfortunately, a few days later we received news that the boy had passed away in hospital.

These were not easy experiences to live through or to share. I spoke with the German missionary who has been working in Maasailand for many years and she told me that children die in Maasailand all the time and we helped by giving these two the best possible chance. It does not turn this experience into a success story, but it does help to come to terms with the fact the I did my best with the resources I had available at the time. One of the lessons I learned through this is to never underestimate the seriousness of a situation. The Maasai often leave seeking medical help until it is almost too late and even then they do not seem rushed because they do not understand the severity of a patient's symptoms themselves.

Perhaps this has not been the most encouraging story to share at this time of the year, but it is the reality of the world we live in. It is the reality of the world into which Christ came in order to give us hope of salvation beyond the realities of this world and we persevere with that hope in our hearts. As we all know, things do not always turn out as we hoped or prayed for, but we know that God is in control despite the state of this fallen world. As we celebrate the Incarnation this year, let us remember the fullness of that message and pray that the whole world will come to know Him.

a quick summary...

It has been a year many changes and uncertainties, however during the last few month things have started to come together in terms of the management and operation of the program in Tanzania. Although there is a lot of work ahead of us, at least we now know what needs to be done. Despite it all we still managed to continue serving our mission partners with medical and evangelistic outreach throughout the year. Our services in the south of the country had to be suspended when the pilot based there was diagnosed with a heart condition while on furlough in the US. He also served as Operations Director and since his replacement did not work out, it left me to take on the role in the interim. As things go, the temporary solution became permanent and I completed the training and serve as Ops Director as well.

During the first 6 months of the year 10,215 pregnant mothers and babies attended our monthly mobile clinics which we support in partnership with three local health centres. We encourage local evangelists to attend these clinic days in order to use it as an opportunity to reach those who attend it, with the Gospel. At some of the places we are also able to take teams of evangelists with us who attend to the spiritual needs while the medical clinic is in progress.

I recently had the privilege to attend the Lausanne Younger Leaders Gathering in Jakarta, Indonesia, where nearly 1000 younger evangelical leaders from 140 different nations involved in a variety of fields gathered. Together with senior leaders and mentor, we made connections for partnerships and learned from the knowledge and experience of others so that we can go out and more effectively serve and bring the Gospel to all people. One of the workshops I attended was Health in Missions where we discussed ways to better integrate our medical missions with a Gospel message and to bring physical and spiritual health together. I am looking for to incorporate these concepts in the work we are doing here.

At home, Johann has grown into an energetic toddler and brings us endless entertainment and joy. Amelia has recently started working full-time at the Christian International School just down the road from us. This term she is standing in for one of the teachers who went back to Australia on furlough and from next term she will start working full-time as a music teacher for the school. We are all healthy and doing well, we greatly appreciate all the support from family and friends.

An experience I was blessed to share in

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Younger Leaders From Over 140 Countries Connected for Global Mission in Jakarta

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Jakarta, Indonesia—12 August 2016—The Lausanne Movement’s most ‘connected’ gathering, the 2016 Lausanne Younger Leaders Gathering, came to a close last night. More than one thousand younger leaders and mentors convened for a week from over 140 countries to connect for global mission, in Jakarta, Indonesia, at the Global Campus of Universitas Pelita Harapan.
 
The vision for YLG2016 was rooted in the same conviction out of which Billy Graham started the Lausanne Movement, namely to help influencers of global mission, who were often working in isolation, to meet and collaborate. Participants for this gathering have been invited through an extensive, prayerful, regionally based selection process after receiving thousands of nominations. About two thirds of the participants were from the Majority World, and about one third were women.

 

 

‘I’ve never seen the mission of the Lausanne Movement—connecting influencers and ideas for global mission—more powerfully displayed than during this amazing week’—says Michael Oh, Lausanne’s Global Executive Director/CEO.

 

Connections took various forms during the programme, such as the 160+ mentoring groups where participants connected their personal life stories to God’s grand narrative of the world. In addition to regional gatherings and 35 workshops focused on many of the most significant missiological issues set forth in The Cape Town Commitment, there were also hundreds of pre-scheduled one-on-one meetings between senior and younger leaders throughout the course of the carefully crafted programme. To emphasize the importance of connecting at YLG2016, the planning team put significant amounts of free time into the week which was key in making space for numerous divine appointments.

Building connections, however, began long before the gathering itself. In perhaps the most ambitious effort in the Lausanne Movement’s history to prepare participants for a gathering, participants had to commit to an entire year of monthly preparation. This included both substantive reflection on the narrative of Scripture around which YLG2016 was focused, and also starting to make individual and national/regional connections long before setting foot in Jakarta.

 
In a survey participants took, nine out of ten indicated they had made connections and friendships with other YLG2016 participants before arriving in Jakarta. This was largely facilitated by an online platform called the Connector, launched in the year prior to the gathering to connect participants with each other and the preparation materials. A mobile app version of the Connector was released for the gathering, and was heavily used by a vast majority of participants, far surpassing the expectations of the planning team. The app was accessed over 170,000 times as younger leaders and mentors used the app to communicate throughout YLG2016.

Morning plenaries gave room for Scripture Engagement with Anne Zaki, Richard Chin, and René Breuel as Bible Expositors, and the evening sessions centred around ‘Wisdom for World Evangelization’, with speakers representing every region including Os Guinness, Ravi Zacharias, Becky Pippert, Marina Silva, David Platt, and others.

‘The theme of YLG2016 was “United in the Great Story”, centred on the biblical story of God’s purposes across human history. We heard afresh the call to create, repent, bless, love, reconcile, and worship. Through sharing our stories in the context of widespread cultural diversity, we have been inspired to re-imagine what it looks like to cultivate God’s world, turn from idolatry, respond to redemption, restore peace, and work for God’s glory’—says David Benson, Programme Chair for the gathering.



Throughout the gathering, major challenges for this generation have been tackled: how to proclaim the truth of Christ in a skeptical world, what does it mean to preach the whole gospel and the Lordship of Christ over poverty and the environment, how to respond to different conceptions of human sexuality, the persecuted church, and major challenges facing evangelicalism in the next decades.

In between the plenary sessions, there was much room for prayer and strategizing for global mission. Over 50 topic-based meetings were spontaneously organized by participants. The programme also included a series of laboratory sessions to guide participants through a creative brainstorming process and work towards tangible ways of partnering together through new missional initiatives. By the end of the gathering, over 59 submissions were received of possible missional partnership projects, some of which will be awarded initial funding through spark grants.

The presence of the Chinese delegation at the YLG after their hindrance to attend the Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in Cape Town 2010 was a particular joy. The Chinese participants intensely pursued strategic discussions with nearly every other region of the world seeking to discover how they could partner for global mission. They have a vision called Mission China 2030 to send 20,000 missionaries overseas by 2030. Their meeting with African participants at YLG2016 was particularly fruitful as more than one million Chinese live in Africa and present a largely unreached people group for the African church. Another strong connection point the Holy Spirit was orienting many to was North Korea (DPRK).

‘The gathering has been organized by younger leaders and for younger leaders, most of whom are likely to become the shaping voice of global evangelicalism. But we know we’re not self-sufficient as a generation. I strongly believe that this week has been a defining moment, when our generation consciously stepped into the rich heritage of the Lausanne Movement, looking at God’s mission from a global perspective’—reflects Sarah Breuel, Chair of the YLG2016 Planning Team.
Summarizing his experience at the gathering, Michael Oh reflected: ‘I believe that years later we may look back on this week as an historic gathering where many of the leaders of the global church first connected to one another and were uniquely inspired to lay down their lives in partnership for global mission. Our heart is full of gratitude. To God be the glory!’

A summary video about YLG2016 is accessible here.
Photos and quote images, freely usable for any reporting on this gathering are available on the Lausanne Movement’s Facebook page.
In case of media inquiries or interview requests, please contact Attila Nyári at media@lausanne.org

END

BACKGROUND
The Lausanne Movement grew out of the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization convened in Lausanne, Switzerland, by Rev Billy Graham. John Stott was chief architect of The Lausanne Covenant. The Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization (October 2010) in Cape Town, South Africa, brought together 4,000 Christian leaders representing 198 countries. The Cape Town Commitment serves as the blueprint for the Movement’s activities. Learn more about the Movement.

The Chicken Run and Other Animals

In the last few months we have been expanding our little farm thanks to the vacant areas of land on our compound, and the skills of our caretaker Colimba. Kirstein and Colimba decided to start a small chicken business together so we could benefit from free organic free-range eggs, and sell the surplus to friends. Even a small supermarket we use a lot was interested in getting a tray of our eggs regularly. So Kirstein starting flying in chickens from the bush until we had seven or so, including Dommy (from Domanga), Dabby (from Dabia) and our rooster The Colonel. All of them are kienyeji (village) chickens rather than kisasa (mostly battery farm chickens), and so they produce eggs with bright yellow yolks mmmm. Colimba bought his own chickens also so that there was 50-50 ownership. He had a chicken business growing up and paid for his school fees that way, so he knew how to look after them.

Motivated by the success of our first cohort, Kirstein decided to buy fifteen day-old-chicks, and returned home instead with forty-one! I loved the stripey ones. One died since it had digestion problems and wasn't eating, so we have had forty chicks in a box under a lamp in our garage for the last couple of weeks. They are doing swimmingly. Which is great, since the rainy season brought along some sort of bacteria that has meant that ALL of the chickens outside died. Even attempts to bring them inside the coops did not stop the chicken tragedy, and Colimba told us that even his chickens back home were dying too! Five died in one week alone. Eggs prices are starting to rise in town as well, so there must be a chicken epidemic going on.

Colimba, however, has got fingers in lots of pies, not just chicken but also rabbit-pie! He bought two six month old rabbits and they have already had two litters. There were six in the first litter, but two escaped and got swiped by a bird of prey. Out of the remaining four, three are white like their father and one is grey like the mother. The grey one I have called Mkaa (charcoal in Swahili) and we let her jump about the living room for a little bit whilst Johann was napping, until Kirstein's allergies couldn't cope anymore. The recent litter are only two, and they are strange pink squirmy alien things curled up in a bed of fur that their mother pulls out to make them a nest.

We were out in the garden with Johann last week, and I looked up into a tree to see some particularly noisy yellow-fronted bulbuls chatting to each other. Instead I looked straight into the eyes of an eagle owl! It wasn't the bird of prey that had taken the rabbits however, Colimba had seen another hawk and later we saw an augur buzzard fly over.

Finally, we have been trying to get a friend for Shiloh for some time. Our MAF friends in Dar had a litter of Ridgeback/Great Dane/Alsatian puppies and we were promised one of them, but we couldn't find a way to get her from Dar to Arusha. In the end, I overheard a friend talk about going to Dar at a restaurant and I cheekily asked if he could drive her back. She is chocolate and orange coloured so Becky, our neighbour, and I have called her Jaffa. After a bit of a hairy start, she and Shiloh are besties.

A month of challenges

School children running to greet the plane and collect food in Dabia village

I’ve been back in Tanzania for more than a month already and this first month back was challenging in the case of each of the four outreach trips I did. The short rainy season, which usually finishes at the end of the year, has kept on going into 2016. This has created some unpredictable and difficult weather to fly in, as well as causing issues for farmers who are waiting for a chance to plant their next crop.

 

All three of us arrived back home from South Africa just before midnight on 17 January, and two days later I went on the South Maasai outreach. Things were difficult from the beginning; more than one third of the first runway I landed in was overgrown with grass with hidden termite mounts in between. The usable part of the runway, with the slope and tailwind, meant that I could carry less than 200kg, making it impossible to take a full medical team for the outreach. The strips I was planning to use for the next day were in good condition as usual and we were able to serve the villages. After that, I had to take the plane to Dodoma for maintenance, catch a flight to Dar es Salaam and fly our other plane back to Arusha. Home for the weekend just before Amelia and Johann left for their month in the UK on 24 January…

The following week was the North Maasai evangelism outreach, and there the mountain winds were all over the place and mostly from the wrong direction, which made landing and take offs from the already challenging mountain strips even more challenging. Thankfully all went well there and we were able to complete all the trips.

The third week back was the Kilimatinde Medical & Evangelism outreach which takes place around Dodoma in central Tanzania. On Tuesday I flew the 1.5 hour flight down from Arusha, I did a Certificate of Airworthiness test flight for another plane, and minutes after we landed the heavens opened! There was a torrential downpour for more than an hour and once we managed to establish communication with the nearby villages, we found out that the storm had caused major damage on the airstrips which would not be usable the next day. It did not rain the following day and we remained hopeful that the airstrips would have dried up enough to be usable. We received a positive report on the Thursday morning so I set out to start preparing the plane. Just as I was getting ready to go however, we received another report from the medical team that the rain two days earlier had indeed caused major damage on their airstrip which they would not be able to repair on time. That meant the Thursday and Friday outreach had to be cancelled as well! Frustrating, but all that was left for me to do was to fly back to Arusha. At least I was able to drop off a bag of food for the school children of the village with the only usable airstrip. It was a good thing I did not take a medical team out, since the runway was very soft at the take-off end and there was a another big storm approaching.

The forth week back was the busy Haydom medical outreach and things started off pretty normal. The fourth day was a complete washout, however, with low clouds and rain all day making it impossible to take the two teams out or to go and collect the team that normally stays a night at one of the busy mountain villages. By noon we had to send a car to go and collect them and they arrived back at the hospital 12 hours later! The final day of the outreach also had to be cancelled due to heavy rain and all that was left was for me to return to Arusha again.

On the way home I stopped for some fuel, and whilst I wasn’t paying close attention, the attendant put diesel instead of petrol into my car! So, I spent the next 4 hours waiting for the fuel tank to be drained, with a live chicken in the back of the car that I had bought in one of the villages. When I finally got home that evening, I was greeted with the smell of burnt plastic as I stepped into the house. As I opened the study door, I discovered that everything was covered in black ash! Thankfully, the fire only burnt the bottom edges of the curtains, melted a plastic paper tray and scorched the top of the wooden desk. It was a big mess that took weeks to clean, but we are thankful that all the wood, paper and books in the room did not catch fire which could have caused major damage.

After that I did one more outreach day to South Maasai, where again one of the two airstrips was still unserviceable from the failed trip last month. Then I had some time to catch up on some office work and finish small jobs at home (including operation fire clean-up) before Amelia and Johann returned. The rain storms still continue, including one almost directly over our house last night. We are praying for enough breaks in the weather to continue flying as many clinics as possible.