Week 11 - We stumble across traditional faith healers

The time does fly; day after day and week after week passes so quickly. We've already been serving in Botswana over 2 months, and this troubles me because I am so in love with this country, this people, this work, and I don't want it to pass so quickly.

At my secretarial desk, I pulled up the profile of a newly assigned young missionary coming from Uganda, and immediately I was given from the Lord a taste of how precious in His sight this young man is. My heart filled with love for this young man grinning a huge white smile into the camera, and I sensed God's immeasurable love for him and for His missionaries everywhere. Was a brief but poignant experience, and I wept with love and gratitude for the pivilege that is mine to support in a small way the work we are engaged in.

General Conference was this week, and 50 young men and women from Gaborone convened in the mission home to enjoy dinner and a session of conference. They are energetic, vibrant, faith-filled youth who work diligently for the Lord, and I love them so. My emotions are amply summed up by Elder Holland's quoting of G K Chesterton, "I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder."

I love this country. The bush is stark and tough, dry and inhospitable with wicked thorns on every shrub and deadly snakes and insects potentially lurking under every rock. But it has its own compelling beauty, and it calls me to wander through any number of trails leading from the roadside into the otherwise impenetrable bush. Most intriguing here is the sky filled this season of the year with massive thunder heads, mesmeriaing lightning strikes at night, and some of the most beguiling sunsets I've ever seen. The sky here seems endless, and I frequenlty find myself lost in its grand beauty.

But the best part of living in Botswana is the people. Their huge white grins when we engage with them and their gentle quiet demeanor endear them to me. The children are particularly curious about us, and they are most unrestrained in their eagerness to engage. Especially when we are out in the villages, young children stare as we are possibly the only whites they've yet encountered.

While hiking to a sacred cave not far from the village of Molepolole last P-Day, we stumbled across a small group of people singing and chanting. Not wanting to intrude, we tried to quietly skirt them on our way up the path. But they were very kind and called out a welcome to us. As we inquired about their song and dance, they told us they are students of the elderly man of the group who was teaching them the ancient art of traditional healing. They threw out a bunch of small animal bones from a pelt to show us that these bones predict the future, and they claim they are Christian followers of Job from the Bible who also cast lots. They then demonstrated for us their song and dance. Good natured, congenial, and as polite as we have found the vast majority of Batswana to be, they'd have performed for us much longer, but we decided we'd infringed on their generosity enough and pursued our journey to the cave.

The cave was not much to speak of other than its significant history. Anciently, Kebokwe's Cave was thought to be the abode of witches and demons who take the form of giant snakes. These myths were challenged by the famous physician and missionary David Livingstone of the 1860's who converted a Bakwena king to Christianity by spending a night in the cave unharmed and thus dispelling their black magic myths. Today it remains a site of pilgramage and revered superstition. As we ate lunch at the mouth of the rather unimpressive cave surrounded by candle stubs left from worshippers, our faith-healing group arrived with bottles of beer and a live chicken we assumed would be used for a sacrifice. That's when we chose to take our leave.

On the return trip, we engaged the driver of a donkey cart who happily posed for pictures. Toothless, horribly malnourished, and wearing tattered rags and shoes, this congenial man was neverthelss more than happy to pose for a pic and to show off his dilapidated cart with his wife in the back who spoke no English. His poor donkeys were also skin and bones as are most of the humans and animals living in the bush. He takes his derelict cart into town periodically for supplies he can't produce himself, and I wonder how he is able to scrape out any subsistence from his parched inhospitable piece of ground. Where does he get enough water to sustain himself and his donkeys and what meager food can he possibly produce? He pointed the way towards a body of water, but we couldn't find it on the map nor after driving some distance along a dirt road into the bush. But it proved to be a most interesting and educational P-Day for us.

Good old-fashioned tent revivals are a frequent occurence here.

Outfitting missionary homes is one of our more enjoyable responsibilities as it affords us the privilege to engage one on one with these wonderful young men and women.