Christmas Cards!

South Sudan's Next Top Model

Ngakidamdams are Toposa celebrations, and most of the time they make absolutely no sense to our team. The things that seem to be fairly consistent are special clothes, whistle blowing, and a lot of jumping up and down in a big circle. Sometimes other things are thrown into the mix, like gunshots, killing a bull, or my personal favorite, switching up the time and doing it in the middle of the night at max volume. I love staying awake all night to gunshots and singing! Not.
Christmas is an especially popular time of the year for ngakidamdams. There will be a big one on Christmas day, plus apparently they like to practice because there have been large ones the last two days. On Thursday night some of the girls who were returning to their villages post-celebration stopped by our gate to show off their moves. Half hilarious, half totally ridiculous.

 Normally the girls wear cloth skirts and a wrap and don't all look the same, but because they had been at a ngakidamdam they were wearing their party outfits.

 You know you're jealous you can't pull off this much attitude in one outfit.

 The short "skirts" are made from shells that are strung together, and these are for really special occasions. We think Christmas was the reason for these skirts, but maybe there was a totally different reason they were celebrating that day. The long green skirt in the middle is the normal ngakidamdam skirt. It's made from goat skin and has yellow and green beads stitched into it.

I'm loving the ear-to-nose ring. I think it really completes the look.

It's Beginning To Look A Tiny Bit Like Christmas

It is so hard for me to remember that Christmas is almost here! Something about the heat and the lack of Christmas parties/decorations/music makes it seem like Christmas doesn't really exist. But Christmas DOES exists and it's not about the weather or Santa or gifts or any of that in the first place.

However.

South Sudan DOES need a liiiiittle bit of Christmas decoration and who doesn't love a good batch of Christmas cookies?!?

Welcome to Christmas, Team Toposa style.

 Our Christmas tree is a thorn branch from a tree limb on our compound. Alyssa's mom had the awesome idea to send us strips of paper, staples and a stapler so that we could make a "thankful chain" for Thanksgiving. On each slip of paper we wrote something we were thankful for. We thought it would make a perfect garland for our tree!

 We hung parts of the chain on our door and along the top of our kitchen area.

 Carrie, Benton, and I made Christmas cookies yesterday. The oven made the inside of their house approximately 1 million degrees.

 Make that 2 million degrees.

 This is Carrie's best friend's baby, Lotikitoi. Lotikitoi is 10 months old and some of his favorite things to do are dance to music, pee on the floor, and eat candy-cane shaped Christmas cookies.

Walker "helped" by cleaning the icing off of the utensils.

A Week (mostly) In Bed, and the Good News

I got strep throat for the first time ever, and I'm blaming Davis. He had it in Uganda, and he should've left it there. This totally kicked my butt and I was in bed starting right after breakfast on Tuesday until Friday. Yesterday was the first day I felt like a human being again and today all that's left of The Plague is a little bit of a cough. Thank you, antibiotics!

Because I was asleep and/or heavily medicated for 4 days I feel like the week flew by. It's already Sunday again! Last week we were in Kop on Sunday night. A big group of us had finished singing and were sitting on the ground listening to a Toposa man named Joseph tell the story of the rich young ruler when all of the sudden a very drunk man runs up to the group and HIGH KICKS his way into the middle. HA! He kept falling down so he would high kick, then lay on the ground until some of the people pushed him out of the circle. This happened 3 or 4 times. High kick, fall down. High kick, fall down. Eventually his friends carried him away and we went back to listening to the Bible story.

This morning we met under a mango tree and listened to the story of Luke 1 where the angel Gabriel appears to Zachariah and also to Mary. We will listen to and discuss Luke 2 in our groups next week in preparation for Christmas. As people in the US are trying to remember the "reason for the season" there are millions of people in other parts of the world who have never even learned about the Reason in the first place! As you are reading/hearing the Christmas story, pray for the Toposa as they hear about "the Good News of great joy which is for all people!"

Justin Beiber Gets A Haircut

So I don't have any biological brothers, but the Lewis boys are filling in those roles quite nicely. Benton hates it when I tell him he looks like Justin Beiber so I try to do so as much as possible. Carrie's House of Hair was open on their back porch this evening so I took advantage of this opportunity. Justin Benton had a mohawk for about 30 seconds mid-haircut. HA! I loved it.

 This is his "before" picture.

 Carrie should've just stopped at this point and let him sport the crazy mohawk for a day or two, just to freak the Toposa out a little.

 Davis was the least dramatic out of the three.

 Umm hi, this is the kind of picture that wins in the "Cutest 4 Year Old of 2011" category. Walker is a mess but he makes up for it by being cute and hilarious. We have five puppies right now and they are each Walker's best friend.

 He does not like haircuts.

We told him to pretend he was a soldier so that he could be still while Carrie did the parts around his ears.

Jacob's Story, Part 2

Thursday: Shannon, Carrie and I went to Lomayen to see what had been happening. There were about 80 people (plus 30-40 kids) gathered while Shannon and Jacob taught about what it means to pray. The Toposa church learned that prayer is talking to God like they talk to their friends. It is from the heart, not something that is memorized. They learned that they can thank Nakuj (God) for things that He has done, things that He has created, and things He has given them. They learned that when someone is sick or their sorghum crops are suffering, they ask Nakuj to heal and to help them instead of going to the witch doctor. A couple of men and one woman stood up in front of everyone to practice talking to Nakuj from their heart.

We listened to the first chapter of Acts on the proclaimer, and Shannon and Jacob taught about how Christians are to come together to listen to God’s Word, pray, and help each other.

Friday: The whole family (Shannon, Carrie, Benton (11), Davis (9), Walker (4), me, and Alyssa!) went to spend the night in Lomayen. We got there around 6 so we had enough light to set up tents in Jacob’s father’s village and to set up a sheet and projector in a cleared area. White people tend to attract a lot of attention in the middle of Nowhere, South Sudan, so 7 white people plus a vehicle plus funny looking cloth houses plus a loudspeaker was a total freak show. In this case it worked to our advantage because by the time it was dark and we had sung a couple of Toposa songs together there were almost THREE HUNDRED people gathered to see the Jesus Film.

The Toposa notice VERY different things in the movie than I do. There was a lot of laughing when Jesus sends the demons from the man into the herd of pigs. They would all point out the camels whenever they were in the background of a scene, and they made fun of the Roman soldiers’ helmets. The Toposa don’t ride any animals (considered animal cruelty…hmm) so there were comments whenever anyone in the film would ride horses or donkeys.

This was the first time most of them had seen a video so even though I think they understood that it wasn’t real, a lot of the guys sitting in front of me scooted back a little bit when Satan came in the form of a snake to tempt Jesus in the desert.

There was a shooting star right about the part in the movie where Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey.

About halfway through the movie a guy plopped down about three feet away from me and sat the rest of the time with his AK-47 on his lap. This is normal, right?

After the film was over Jacob stood up and talked about it for a little while, and we sang a few more Toposa songs. By the time we were all in our tents it was around 10:45pm.

Hopefully you are now more aware of how you can pray for the Toposa! Ask God to encourage Jacob and the other new believers in Lomayen. Thank God for saving so many people in that area and ask Him to help these men and women understand what they hear on the proclaimer. Pray for Shannon, Carrie, Alyssa and I, that we could know how to best help these new believers and encourage Jacob. Shannon is going to help Jacob teach every Wednesday, and Carrie/Alyssa and I are trying to figure out how to do some sort of women’s Bible story group, too. Jacob speaks enough English that he can help translate when Shannon is teaching, but if we want to do a women’s group at the same time then we will need another person to help us tell the Bible stories.

Please keep praying that we can find a consistent person to help us with language! The group in Lomayen is a perfect example of why knowing the Toposa language is so important to our ministry here. Your prayers DO make a difference in South Sudan!

Jacob's Story, Part 1

This really isn’t Jacob’s story. This is God’s story of how He is using Jacob to tell the Toposa about the hope and salvation found only in Jesus.

Let’s back up: When the Lewises first got to South Sudan 2.5 years ago they had to wait for the land to be cleared for their house. This meant they had to live at a tented camp in Kapoeta, which is the closest town to us that you can find on Google Maps. It’s about 10 kilometers south of Paringa, the area we live in now. While they were living there their 3 boys would play with different kids in town, one of them being Jacob.

Fast forward: The Lewises moved out to Paringa. Davis and Benton became good friends with Peter, a Toposa boy their age. Peter left Paringa and went to Kapoeta to go to school there for a while. Shannon gave Peter a proclaimer (a solar-powered radio-type of thing that plays recordings of the New Testament in Turkana, a sister language to Toposa) to take with him so that he could continue to listen to Bible stories while he was away at school. Peter met Jacob at school and they would listen to the proclaimer together. There is a fairly decent church in Kapoeta so the boys would go there and hear more Bible teaching. Peter left that school and he (and the proclaimer) came back to go to school in Paringa several months ago. Jacob stayed in school in Kapoeta and continued to go to church and learned about who Jesus is. Somewhere in this timeframe he became a Christian.

3 weeks ago: Jacob had finished school and returned to his village. He lives in an area called Lomayen, which is a 30-45 minute drive from Paringa, depending on "road" conditions. Jacob remembered the Lewis family from when he played with their boys a couple of years ago and came to our compound to tell Shannon his story. He had come to talk to Shannon three or four times and kept asking Shannon to come to his village to share God’s Word with everyone. Right before the trip to Uganda Shannon agreed to go. There is a group of Toposa men that he disciples every week so he took several of those men with him out to Lomayen. When they arrived there were around 40 people gathered and listening to the Jacob as he told them how the message of Jesus changed his life and how God's word is true and important and they needed to listen. Each of Shannon's friends told a story from God's word, including Luke 10 and Romans 8 (none of them can read so they hear God's word and memorize it), and by the end of it there were over 120 people listening! Shannon explained a little more about what it means to be a follower of Jesus and around 80 people stood up and said that they wanted to follow Jesus, too. Shannon explained that no one can follow Jesus AND witchcraft, it's either one or the other and even after several people sat back down there were still 40 men and 20 women who kept standing and one by one cut all their witchcraft beads and necklaces off. Shannon then shared about baptism from Acts 2 and all of those people said they understood and wanted to be baptized. The guys who had done the Bible stories walked everyone to a big mud puddle near the village and baptized everyone. So there were 60 new followers of Jesus among the Toposa people! Shannon left a proclaimer with Jacob so that everyone could listen to God’s Word together.