Kampala, Uganda
GO! The message from Jesus for the church.
GO means get out and meet the people where they live. See who they are. Be among. Watch and learn.
We go - into Banda and see among the drinking shacks the children of the Tentmakers school.
We go - and find in the rural areas the villages with no school in sight. We see the roadside lined with children, smart in their uniforms, walking for kilometers to whatever school they can find.
We go - and we see, hear, and from a distant house comes loud mourning. Another family member dead. AIDS claims one more. Villagers start their way toward the house but stop just outside. For inside it is a private matter. And no one claims AIDS is the cause. It is always something, but, not AIDS.
We go - and we begin to see the gift of teaching in the heart and soul of one who knows this is not a job, but a calling. One who engages the children, games with them over math and spelling, sings the multiplication tables, and always a little story with every lesson.
“Let us all clap for Moses!” and the whole class cheers,as the young boy spells the word correctly on the pitted chalk board, with the stub of the clalk the teacher has left in her supply for the month.
“Cheer for Shiffa” says the teacher and immediately the room explodes with excitement, as loud as a rock concert, and the Shiffa stands to spell the new vocabulary for the day.
We go - and begin, only just begin, to learn, and not yet understand, the real schooling here, the truth of Christian education for a ground-floor worldview. The essence of the matter we professionals have lost far back in our first year in the classroom ourselves.
We go - and find it again. The soul of learning. The heart of teaching. The time when each day and each child were blessings, before the methodologies, pedagogies, and practiced lesson planning which were never truly followed anyway.
We go - we see. We who call ourselves educators, now again must become students, learners. Like Jesus who said we must be born again, and Nicodemus who wondered how can this happen. Before we think we can teach anything to any of our sisters and brothers here who teach from their souls, we must watch and learn, and perhaps better go back to from where we came, unless and until we can come close to what is achieved with so little.
We go - why?
Because it is a sin to say, “Come unto us, and let us teach you the ways you should teach”
We go - Where?
To the places God is showing us and revealing what true Christian education is in the flesh. To where we believe in our professional minds that it cannot be, but only because we are blind to see what is there before us.
We go - When?
Now, because we know the time is at hand. The days are few before all of Africa will be threatened with forces and religions whose sole agenda is to bury Christianity in the sand of the deserts or the red earth of the fertile regions.
We go - as Jesus went. We go and encourage and build up the sisters and brothers in the classroom, the aged grand mamas with their dead children’s children to care for.
We go because they cannot come, and if they did we would not find how it is, truly, and honestly, and, because we are called to go.
This is why we in Uganda are packing up our conference and taking it on the road rather than calling the few who could come to the big city - Kampala.
The sheer numbers are the rationale. Rather 500 or more coming from the countryside within one-day’s walk, than 50 affording the transport to the capitol. Rather we GO and by going, perhaps we discover we are the learners and they the hosts.
Dale Dieleman, WWCS Field Director for Africa
Writing from an internet cafe in Kampala, Uganda
