What a difference a day makes

Well, not a day, actually; a month-but can't you hear someone crooning the song?

Kumba made a very different impression on me this time around. When we first came through in August on our way home from Bamenda, Cameroon was still new to me; the look of towns, buildings, and roads-and the way of life in general-were things I was trying to wrap my brain around. I didn't know what I expected Kumba to look like, but it wasn't what I expected. For one, the city (like all others in Cameroon) looked so spread out-it didn't fit my idea of an urban settlement. The buildings looked so small, colourless, and dusty. Overall, the experience was one of observation overload.

Not so anymore! Driving into Kumba after a month in the village, things are not only familiar, but capable of inspiring appreciation. I was impressed by the size of the buildings (2 stories some of them!), their permanence (built with concrete or sturdy, painted wood), their colour (everything is painted, even if most houses are the same shade of yellow), and the symmetry of the town (straight roads lead off of other straight roads, all lined with buildings fairly regularly spaced). Some houses even had tile or brickwork facades, and some had front porches with fancy concrete railings. Paved streets also highly impressed me. Even the side roads, sprinkled with just enough sand or fine gravel to keep them from turning to soup, are luxurious-how wonderful to walk at a normal pace without slipping in the mud and picking your way around ruts and mudholes!

And it's a city! Granted, not a very big city; I believe it's only some 50,000-despite highly optimist reports of up to 400,000 people (actually reflects the population of the entire district)-but markedly not a village. For a farm girl, I should be ashamed of myself for how citified I've become in the past few years that I was so happy to be in a city again, however small.

Comments

My favourite nativity scene

“There’s no accounting for taste.” That’s my dad’s favourite way of explaining personal tastes that are incomprehensible to him, like living downtown, and riding bike in winter. The inexplicable factors which determine an individual’s likes or dislikes are probably the only way I can explain why my favourite nativity scene contains a horribly caricatured black magus, a random adoring child attired – to my fancy – like a Roma person, an old shepherd carrying some sort of blunderbuss. And a haloed holy family with an 18-month-old baby Jesus. This is the "Christmas Manger Set – the Christmas story in beautiful cut-out scenes and life-like figures." See how the 1940s-era family admires the realistic flourishes, like raw wood beams and straw protruding from the edge of the roofline; the rough, broken wood of the stalls; the tasselled camels; the richly dressed magi; the woolly sheep; the Bethlehemites on the path in the background, ostensibly out to get water, judging...

Upside down economics of Jesus: household action and global change

--Presented at a CAWG event in Altona -- In Living More with Less , Doris Janzen Longacre shares a story about envelopes from Marie Moyer, a missionary in India, who was studying Hindi with Panditji. Marie writes: “From his philosophic mind, which probed the meaning of events and circumstances, I learned more than Hindi.” Just before her teacher’s arrival one day before Christmas, she’d received and opened a pile of Christmas cards and discarded the envelopes as he walked in the room. She writes: “He sat down soberly and studied the situation, then he solemnly scolded me: ‘the reverberation of this wasteful act will be felt around the world’.” Marie was stunned. “What do you mean?” she asked him. “Those envelopes,” he said, pointing to the wastebasket. “You could write on the inside of them.” “Chagrined”, Marie apologized and rescued the envelopes with the help of Panditji, who “caressed each one” as he pulled it out of the garbage. This forever changed Marie’s relationship to p...

Broken people...

After reflecting with one coworker on how often churches in all their forms really mess up and hurt a whole bunch of people in the process -- and how "we gotta do better" -- I stumbled into another conversation with a coworker which highlighted our brokenness, and I suddenly realized what was wrong with my take in the first. I wanted the church to be better at fixing our mistakes, or better yet, at not making them in the first place. But maybe this "fix-it" attitude is partly the reason we keep blowing it again and again! My friend recollected an experience when a church community was in a terrible place: compounded mistakes, hurts, and frustrations had blown up, spewing pain all over all parties. (I'm sure anyone with a long history in the church can think of one, if not several, such occasions in their past.) A new Christian who observed all these goings on responded in an unexpected way. Instead of "you people are a bunch of screw-ups! How could this pos...

kar0ling

Search This Blog