Encircling a falling hero

Emperor Haile Selassie I

Over the Christmas break I was able to read a book which was neither theological nor philosophical, which needs to happen far more often than it does. The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuscinski details the final years of Ethiopa's last monarch, Haile Selassie, who fell to a communist military junta, the Derg, in 1974, and who died in captivity a year later. The book originally got on my list since it was acknowledged as a key source for Abraham Verghese's breathtaking novel, Cutting for Stone, which I mostly read on the plane ride home from Ethiopia and wrote about last summer.

The author, Kapuscinski, was a Polish investigative journalist who was able to spend time in Ethiopia before and after the coup, conducting interviews with servants and counselors to the august emperor. Much of the story comes directly from interview transcripts themselves, so the subjects speak most and other than "silent" editorial control, Kapuscinski interjects his voice only periodically.

The stories are at once gripping, mundane, and pathetic. What struck me most about this book was the deep ambivalence on the part of the subjects interviewed. These were for the most part people who served their emperor proudly and took seriously the royal mythology that linked the long line of Ethiopian monarchs directly to the biblical Israelite king, Solomon. The ambivalence arises when these loyal servants and subjects reflect on the anachronistic and horrendously corrupt and inefficient monarchial government, struggling mightily for development and modernization in the rapidly changing world leading up to the last quarter of the twentieth century. These subjects were loyal but they were not delusional.

The stumbling journey onward

With two of my students in Ethiopia

Before coming to EMU three years ago for graduate studies, I could hardly imagine that someday soon I would sense God calling me to be a teacher. The development of this sense has oftentimes been painful, but just as often, it has been exhilarating. My call to the set-aside ministry in the church, which preceded our coming to Virginia, has always been strong, but the steps along the way and the direction it’s heading are often frustratingly elusive.

I suppose this is consistent with the experience of the beloved community in Scripture. The progenitors of it all, Abram & Sarai, were compelled by a god, Yahweh, that they did not yet know into a journey they could not fathom, into lands that God would show them. That Israel, Jesus its Messiah, and his Church should follow in that tradition is a testament to trust and faithfulness, particularly from God’s end of the covenant.

So after stumbling along as a first-time teacher to ministers in Ethiopia, I returned home marveling at the joy I experience while teaching. Encouragement to continue on is met with excitement and frustration as I continue to discern what shape this may take after graduation in the spring.

Theodoodling?

In early June of this year, I had the pleasure of speaking about blogging to a later manifestation of the same class which helped birth this very blog, "Research as Art and Transformation," with Howard Zehr and Paulette Moore. This time around, the class was being held during the Summer Peacebuilding Institute (shameless ad: I just finished the website today and registration for SPI 2012 is open!). SPI draws a significantly more diverse crowd from around the world than the already-widely diverse crowd in the masters program during the normal academic year. The students in this class were some serious artists, so it was a blast to talk about artsy stuff in relation to my theological blogging here.

One of the students, Delia, is a doodler. Her way of processing information in a classroom or in other settings is to listen and draw, listen and draw. She showed me her doodles from my session back in June, and I asked her if she would be willing to send me pictures of the doodles at some point. Well, she and I both forgot about it for a few months, but she just contacted me on Facebook and sent me the doodles and a link to her blog post about "blogoodling".

Chronicles of the state's monopoly on legitimate violence (cont.)

The view from my classroom window; Debre Zeit, Ethiopia

The picture at the right is what I saw every weekday for three weeks, as I taught "Intro to Conflict Transformation" at Meserete Kristos College in Debre Zeit, Ethiopia. One prominent feature of this city is its being host to an Ethiopian air force base, on the opposite side of town from where we were at the college. So oftentimes during class, we would see and hear (and feel) the low-flying fighter jets passing over the college on their way to the landing strip a few miles away.

This is the memory that immediately came to mind when I saw the following story on Global Post...

US building drone bases in East Africa
Drone News: The Obama administration is setting up more drone bases in Ethiopia and Seychelles to target Al Qaeda affiliates in East Africa and the Horn of Africa, particularly Somalia.

The emergence of unmanned drones as weapons of war first became deeply troubling to me a few years ago when I saw the PBS Frontline special, Digital Nation, which near the end interviews drone pilots with cozy middle class lives in the US, who go to work in an office and operate computers just like so many other middle class Americans, but they just happened to be flying remote controlled planes halfway around the world, dropping real bombs, killing real people (which have a propensity to kill civilians). I still shudder thinking of that segment. So that the use of drones is spreading to other areas of the globe in the name of the forever war called, "The War on Terror," is an unsettling development.

Cuts like a knife

I don't read fiction enough, and it's books like these that remind me of that. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese is a novel takes place - for the most part - in Ethiopia, specifically the capital city of Addis Ababa. That's the reason the book was handed to us by a friend at church before we left for that country last month. "Oh, you have to read this!" My wife read it while we were in the country, and I began reading as our plane lifted off the ground in Addis Ababa, returning us home to the US. It's a long novel and it competed with a few other books I was reading, so it took me these past three weeks to finish, which I did last night in a looong sitting.

Part of what thrilled me about this book is the attention to detail that Verghese gives on life in the city of Addis. The fictional narrative is woven in with quasi-historical developments spanning the mid- to late-twentieth century, namely the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie through the revolutionary movements of the '70s, with the Derg eventually taking power until the early '90s. Despite our being in Addis much later, Verghese's account still felt like the city in which we'd spent a week. A number of the locales across the city mentioned in the book were ones we'd at least driven through during our brief stay. The animals everywhere - goats and donkeys. The huge traffic circles with monuments in the center. The sprawling Mercato and the Piazza, the latter a district built by the occupying Italians in the '30s and '40s. And Verghese would know these places well, as he spent most of his childhood in Addis, born to parents from India teaching in Ethiopia. This aspect of the author's own life shadows part of the storyline in the book (or rather the other way around).

At the edge of the Mercato, w/ the ubiquitous blue+white taxi

Peacebuilding in Ethiopia, a story and a request

Sitting with Mekonnen in my class

In the early months of practicum planning for teaching in Ethiopia, one of my tasks involved finding a supervisor for my work. One name was consistently suggested by my mentors: Mekonnen Desalegn. Mekonnen has been working for the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) in Ethiopia for nearly 33 years. He's also been heavily involved in church life and leadership within the Meserete Kristos Church (MKC) since the age of 18.

One of my colleagues in peacebuilding, Krista Johnson, who works for MCC's Peace Office, just posted this interview with Mekonnen: Seeking Justice and Peace in Ethiopia

Building Peoplehood and Peace

Footwashing: Peacebuilding disguised as worship practice;
Photo from the last day of class

Sometimes God can and will work through the seemingly incidental or mundane aspects in the academic endeavors of higher education, such as the sequencing of classes. This was the case for me this summer in the months leading up to our trip to Ethiopia for my teaching practicum. One of my two wonderful summer courses was "Biblical Foundations of Peace and Justice," which I briefly alluded to back in June. The last paper assigned for this class was due on July 11th, my first day of teaching. Thankfully my professor, Mark Thiessen Nation, granted me an extension until the beginning of August, just after the conclusion of my class.

Writing this paper not only provided the occasion for me to reflect theologically on my first teaching experience but it also represents my deepest academic integration of theology and peacebuilding thus far. In it, I take a narrative approach, essentially telling the intellectual story of the class. I wrote most of the paper the weekend before the third and final week of class and finished it up the day after we got back to the States, August 1st. So I was in the thick of things as it was being written.

Lake Hora 360 - Debre Zeit, Ethiopia

Here's an outdoorsy video from our month in Ethiopia. A look at Lake Hora and surrounding valley near the town of Debre Zeit...

Cross-post: An Iowa boy teaching (and learning) peacebuilding in Ethiopia

"Intro to Conflict Transformation" class, 2011
MK College, Debre Zeit, Ethiopia

As co-editor of the Peacebuilder Online blog for EMU's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, it's sometimes a little too easy for me to take advantage of being a professional blogger. For instance, after posting here this morning on a really old book, I wrote up a reflection on the experience of teaching for my "work" blog:

An Iowa boy teaching (and learning) peacebuilding in Ethiopia

On ancient ecclesial books, Indiana Jones-style

While at Meserete Kristos College this past month in Ethiopia, we stayed in the apartment of a missionary couple from the U.S. who had spent a significant period of time at the college, the husband teaching and the wife taking care of the college library. The husband's office in the apartment then became my office during our three-week stay. Shortly after we arrived, we found something very interesting in the filing cabinet...

A Sort of Homecoming

Photo by Matthew Kirkland via Flickr

Two days ago my body arrived in Virginia but my body's clock stayed in Ethiopia, 7 hours ahead. We arrived home at 10am on Sunday but I was fast asleep by 2pm and slept until midnight. For the next five hours I finished writing my last paper for a summer class. At 5am I went back to bed for a 2-hour nap, then it was off to the office after a month away. An overflowing inbox was calling and I need to start making money again.

Yesterday and last night, it seems as if my body's clock was somewhere over the Atlantic. We crashed around 9pm last night but just after 4am this morning, my eyes shot open and I was ready for action. Because our month in Ethiopia was such a radical break from routine and class consumed so much energy, my wife and I ended up not exercising at all while we were there. So this morning I took my first jog in over a month in the pre-dawn hours. In the last two weeks, we had all experienced some disruption to our digestive system and never completely shook it off for the remainder of July; I lost weight and hadn't felt 100% for most of that time. So I was a little nervous setting off on a run this morning, but it was just what the doctor ordered. The air was warm and the ground was dry and my body not only held up but rejoiced at the exercise.

The gift of deprogramming

Greetings from Meserete Kristos College in Debre Zeit, Ethiopia! Internet accessibility has been a challenge and I've been tremendously busy conducting my class, which is entering it's second week today, and is going quite well. My students are wonderfully gracious to their ferengi (foreigner) teacher and are excellent and eager learners, and surely marvelous peacebuilders-in-training! It's hard to believe our time here in Ethiopia is already half over! The first week of class started out slow and anxious but now things are ticking along. Preparation for each day's class takes a considerable amount of time and energy, as I'm flying by the seat of my pants as a first-time teacher in a completely new cultural context.

In addition to the classwork, the family has been enjoying the beautiful natural surroundings. Behind the college compound there is a hill of open pasture land. One afternoon last week, we walked up to the top of the hill and were surprised to find that behind the crest was an amazing view of one of the five volcanic crater lakes around Debre Zeit! On our second trip, we decided to descend the other side to the water's edge. No sooner than we started down than three adorable little boys from the shepherding families around the compound began leading us down. Erin asked one if they were our guides. The oldest one said very confidently, "Yes." The smallest boy is named Buruch and he stuck near me most of the way down. As we neared the water's edge, all three boys were ahead of us, and when they caught sight of the water - without missing a beat - they ran toward it, stripping down completely naked, and jumped into the lake! Our daughter was, of course, embarrassed but we hung around and watched them swim happily in the lake. If the water quality wasn't a health concern, I would have gladly joined them, it looked very refreshing on that hot day.  As we left, they boys were getting their clothes back on. Waiting until Buruch pulled his britches up, I walked over and gave him a 1 birr coin for helping guide us down to the water. My last image of him is giving me a thumbs-up with a bright smile as we started back up the hill toward the college compound.

We've been able to talk on the phone to some of our family, so that's been wonderful to hear familiar voices. Due to bandwidth restraints, I'll have to add photos once we're back State-side. Not being on e-mail and Facebook several times a day is a good spiritual discipline for me, but hopefully I can get another post or two in before we come home.

Dueling calls to prayer

Greetings from Addis Ababa! We arrived yesterday at 7:45am local time and spent two hours in the airport before meeting our hosts and making our way to what will be home for this week, the "compound" for Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), Ethiopia. We've mostly been relaxing and trying to overcome jet lag. Today our hosts, Dan & Karin, who are just today starting their jobs as the new country reps for MCC Ethiopia, met with my practicum supervisor, Mekonnen, and they worked out a plan for us this week which will allow my wife, daughter, and I to all observe and participate in various MCC-related projects around Addis. We'll also be visiting Meserete Kristos Church (MKC) offices and their peace program. We got out of the compound today for separate trips to exchange some currency to the Ethiopian birr, and then Erin and Lauren went with Karin and an MCC service worker to get groceries for the week.

One story I'll share on the dueling calls to prayer. The MCC compound sits on a hill in whose valley is a mosque and an Ethiopian Orthodox (Coptic) church. Both houses of worship have loudspeakers attached to them and both observe what the Christian tradition would call "the hours" for prayer. Both start at about 5am and continue periodically throughout the day until well into the night. And both start their prayers at nearly the same time. From the porch on the compound, one call comes up from the left (I think it's the mosque), the other from the right (Coptic). Erin and I are sleeping in a converted shipping container (we're calling it "the can" or "the box"), outside the main house in the compound with the door open for better airflow. One side-effect of this arrangement is that we hear everything that's going on outside, the neighborhood dogs barking all night, and these dueling calls to prayer.

Over the past day, hearing these calls, it's struck me that hearing both call me to prayer. I've simply never heard anything like this in the U.S. If you observe the hours in the places I've lived, you have to keep your own schedule. I love the communitarian dimensions of these public (and very loud) calls to prayer and the motivation it gives me to attend to the prayerful side of our trip here.

Adrift in a raft of firsts

Talking with my hands,
which I learned from my dad.
(Photo by Paulette Moore)

In the run-up to my family's trip to Ethiopia - which begins in two short days - it has struck me that much of this trip constitutes a number of firsts in our lives. Geographically-speaking, I've never been off the North American continent. The handful of times I've been to Canada and Mexico were in the days before you needed a passport, so we had to figure that out a few months ago. We had to decipher the fear-mongering going on the CDC website and other literature when figuring out what immunizations to get (and upon getting them, being reminded that my body does not like needles thrust into it). And while I've had a handful of Ethiopian friends here in the EMU community these past three years, this will be my first immersion in the Ethiopian landscape and its rich culture(s).

And most pressing on my mind is this: This is the first time I've taught a college course!

While it's true that my syllabus is done (see below) and I'm fairly happy and confident about it, I still have this nagging sensation in my gut and a whisper in my ear: "You don't know what you're doing."

Hometown Heroes

Prairie City Church of the Brethren; Prairie City, Iowa
My home church (There's a cow lot across the road...)

In my inaugural Ethiopia post, I told a little story about how a dear sweet grandmotherly saint called me into the ministry when I was in high school, and how that story connects with the practice of communal discernment, and how that same discipline helped bring about the upcoming trip to Ethiopia. Well, I'm going to tell another story about my home congregation in rural Iowa and why they continue to bless my life to this day.

Back in January, my wife and I decided that our entire family would be making this trip. Because of the significant cost of airfare, one of the conditions in our making that decision was that we were going to reach out to my congregation back home in Iowa for financial support. The letter which came out of that was actually the source out of which I took some of the text for the inaugural Ethiopia post, linked above. It was, as I called it at the time, a missionary support letter in the fine tradition of the Apostle Paul. Theological storytelling with a practical and rhetorical point. When it came down to how much support to ask for, I stalled in my letter-writing task. My wife and I deliberated a bit and I decided to ask for - what is for this small, rural congregation - a decent chunk of money. We printed the letter off on nice stock, stuck it in an envelope, and dropped the letter in the mail (old school!), and prayed. When my pastor, Tim Peter, read the letter a few days later and saw the amount, he gulped and put it on the docket for the next church board meeting.

The response from the congregation has turned into a blessed story in and of itself in the overall story of our upcoming trip to Ethiopia...

A glimpse (or two) at the paperwork

Photo by Colin Harris

Excited as I've been from the beginning about this upcoming trip to Ethiopia to teach, I've also been overwhelmed by the sheer administrative behemoth it's become. Trying to identify and satisfy all the various requirements to all the various parties is daunting. Passports, plane tickets, immunizations, syllabi, finding supervisors and advisors, and on, and on, and on...

While my last post offered a theological back-story to how this trip came to be, this post will contain an only slightly edited version of an important piece of paperwork: My practicum proposal, turned into my practicum advisor at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP), pending approval by the practicum committee. It may seem strange that I'm only just now submitting this proposal, even though real work for the practicum began ten months ago. Such is the nature of administrative paperwork at times. I've been grateful that this exciting, dynamic idea for a practicum was given this long to be wild and free before having to be codified in a boring ol' proposal. But even this administrative exercise was a good one to conduct, as it's offered some much-needed critical reflection on just how I'm going to pull off this endeavor.

I realize the problems with copy/pasting material from a particular medium (a proposal document) for a particular audience (professors) in a particular community (a graduate program) to another set altogether, namely a blog to a whole bunch of not-graduate program people on the web. So I've tried to edit where possible while still keeping it identifiably proposal-like, to give a taste for the administrative side of this awesome, exciting, project coming up in Ethiopia...

The inaugural Ethiopia post

It seems strange to me that I'm just now posting this on the blog. Many who know me personally will have already heard a variation of this story, but it seems right to get some record of it on here. But for those who haven't heard yet, here's what I'm talking about...

All the way back in my first semester at EMU, in the fall of 2008, one of my fellow students at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding planted a seed in my imagination: Go to Ethiopia and be a teacher for the Church. At first it was a suggestion but by the time my friend, Solomon - who hails from the capital of Addis Ababa, graduated last spring it had become an insistent proclamation. You will go to Ethiopia and be a teacher for the church. In fact, this is how he introduced me to some of his family who had come to Virginia to celebrate his graduation. I'll always remember his mother's response, a matter-of-fact nod, saying "Yes, you will come to Ethiopia."

So last summer when one of my CJP professors taught a course at Meserete Kristos College in Debre Zeit, 40 minutes from Addis, I asked him to check into the possibility of my teaching a class there to fulfill my practicum requirement for my MA program. Within three weeks, at the end of August, my name was on the schedule for the following summer's rainy season semester, teaching "Intro to Conflict Transformation." So just a few weeks from now, my family and I will be on our way to Ethiopia for a month-long adventure in a totally new context for us all. The rest of this post is a bit on the back-story of how this exciting adventure came to be...