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| ECWA Guest House |
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| ECWA Restaurant |
I got up this morning to see the ECWA Guest House in the sunlight and have breakfast in their restaurant.Bishop Ben picked me up around 10:30. He had spent the morning coordinating the next phase of the journey of the Song visitors to Pai and making sure their guide knew how to get there. If I had not been in town he would have guided them. The last two times I was in Abuja Bishop Ben was out of town. Today I will accompany him out to Pai and I can talk along the way. This will be my second trip to Pai. The first trip was in 2008 when I spent a few days in Abuja waiting for my luggage to arrive from Amsterdam. While there we took a day trip out to Pai to see the Bible School, their mostly dry hand dug well and the new government drilled borehole. There was a man collecting money from people collecting water. This was to have money for maintenance. Of course it is broken now and there is no money to fix it.
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| Church in EWCA Comp |
(For new people reading my blogs I need to tell you the difference between a well and a borehole. In American we call everything dug down to remove liquid from underground a well. Here and in most former British colonies a well is a hand dug hole lined with rocks or concrete. When a drill rig is used to drill down to the groundwater it is called a borehole. Water is collected from most wells with a rubber bucket which is designed to fall over on its side to collect water when there is only a couple of inches of water in the bottom of the well. Many wells are now being covered and fitted with hand pumps to help maintain the sanitary condition of the well. Boreholes in the bush and some in the cities usually have hand pumps. A few have solar powered electric pumps and some have generator powered electric pumps. Solar power have a high initial cost. Generator fuel has to be hauled into the bush and is expensive. If the fuel for the generator is supplied by the government then the generator is not run very often.)
Back to this trip. I accompanied Bishop Ben on this trip without a water and sanitation agenda. We had about a hour and a half ride out to Pai to chat. I was more interested in how the new dioceses was coming together and also in the group from Song who had driven two days to Pai, will spend two days of evangelism in the villages and then drive back to Song. As we drove out to meet up with the group from Song we diverted into Gwagwalado where we met one of the village chiefs of the Pai area. He directed us to the regional chiefs house. Bishop Ben had brought him a 25 kilogram bag of his favorite rice and wanted to great the chief. As we arrived at the house Bishop Ben’s phone rang, there was trouble with the group from Song. They had stopped short of Pai.
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| On of the two vans from Song |
We met up with the group at a market on the main highway not far from the dirt road leading to Pai. We stayed there for more than a half hour as there was a disagreement of some kind. After leaving the market we hit a long line of stopped traffic. We drove along the shoulder past dozens of semis. As we approached the junction we found out that there was a military checkpoint at the junction. We merged back onto the blacktop not wanting to show up at the checkpoint out of the queue. The road to Pai is a seven mile dirt road with many areas of washout. Some time we are only traveling a few miles per hour. Thank goodness for power steering. You are constantly dodging holes and ruts.
At Pai we met with the groups at the Pai Bible School. This is a school for adults who have no education. They spend 4 years learning to read and write in English and Hausa, basic math, social studies and bible studies. They have enough theology to work as a lay evangelist. The school is not certified by the government. The students have enough education to enroll in 5th grade and in a year they can test out of out of Primary school.
The Abuja Diocese would like to establish a higher level bible school in Gwagwalado to better equip the graduates and evangelist. In Gwagwalado they may also be able finish their primary and secondary schools while getting a higher level of instruction from pastors coming from Abuja. Some of the students will go down to Adamawa and enter the Dashen Bible School and College and get their primary and secondary school certificates and become a certified evangelist or catechist. Some of the graduates have been employed in the area as evangelist in one to the more than a dozen villages in the Pai area. The area is split be a small river. In the dry season you can walk across it. I the rainy season you cross with a canoe. There are 4 churches on the Pai side of the river and 3 on the other side. In addition to the churches there are preaching points and meeting areas. Currently, there are 4 trained catechists and 10 evangelists working in the area. Two men are down in Adamawa going to school to become certified evangelist. (one at Dashen Bible College and one at Pella Bible College). Most of the LCCN Bible College trained evangelist are from Adamawa State and do not speak the local language and are not familiar with the local culture and customs. By sending Pai Graduates down to Adamawa the Abuja Diocese will have native speakers as certified evangelist.
Most of the people in the Pai area speak Bassa or Wari as their tribal language. The trading language is Hausa which is also the trading language of Adamawa State. So evangelism for adults is can be in Hausa. When we were discussing the language problems I mentioned that the morning TV show had a discussion of children not learning their cultural roots. He said that was true in his house. He is Ga’anda and his wife is Kilba. They speak Hausa at home. Their children speak Hausa. When they visit his home village the family speaks speak Ga’anda. He said he has more problems in Abuja and Lagos with pastors. Many members of the church in Abuja and Lagos are professionals with college degrees some with Masters and Ph.D’s and mostly communicate in English. Most of the pastors coming from the Lutheran Seminary have a diploma in religion and some are now getting a Bachelors degree. Their English skills are not to the level of their parishioners’. The other problem is that they are not used to the metropolitan culture of the Capital. Bishop Ben is a from a small village just outside of Ga’anda but has a Masters of Divinity from Wartburg in Iowa. (If you think this blog is wandering, you should have heard our conversations. We both are masters of tangential conversations. I more than him.)
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| Bishop Ben on left with opening prayer |
After introductions of the evangelist and some explanation of what was going to happenere, the visitors from Song were broken into small groups. Each group will accompany an evangelist to a village. They will spend 2 days in the villages and then come back to Pai and report on their visits. It would be interesting to go along on a village visit, but Bishop Ben has to go back and I have my mission in Abuja to accomplish. My work supports evangelism but it is not require me to preach. We all serve in different ways.
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| Well with rubber bucket |
The people of Pai brought some food out for the visitors. Bishop Ben and I passed on the food and returned to Abuja. I had shown him my smart phone with the GPS and maps of West Africa. The dirt road to Pai was on the map. He showed my his Samsung smart phone and asked if he could get the maps on his phone. As we drove down the bouncy twisty dirt road I play with his cell phone. He had his Bluetooth turned on but did not own a blue tooth device. I turned off the power consumers that he did not use and checked out his phone. It has GPS capacity but does not have a decent GPS app. When we finally, got on the highway I put away his phone but my stomach was still bouncing and twisting. We stopped along the highway for a little dry heaving. I have not had motion sickness for many years. We got back to the hotel I laid down to watch the evening news and woke up at midnight.
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