The Day The Rain Didn’t Fall
Written by Sarah Baker
If you come into our little isolated village the first greeting you receive will likely be from very small hands, waving and grasping and little feet running, they will want to touch your skin and hair. Some, the older and bolder may ask you, “what is my name” (meaning of course “what is your name”) but ALL will plead or shout for “pipi” pronounced pee-pee. This is Swahili for candy.
There are so many children in Mloka Rufiji.
It is not an easy place to be a child. For many families food is scarce, these children bear the tell-tale signs of malnutrition. Many children are neglected, the product of prostitution or having lost parents to AIDS. Few have fathers who are aware of them or actively involved in their provision or upbringing. Many young girls are abused or taken advantage of, even at a young age. The boys all hope that someday they might be members of a gang, somewhere they can belong. Most do not progress beyond third grade.
Tucked away in the wild, a place where generations of satanic worship and a corrupt society have hardened the villagers, it was our belief that love revealed to these young hearts and minds might be the most obvious open door among a closed people.
It had been an especially wet year in Tanzania, good for the cashews but otherwise, in a place with very little infrastructure, a swelling river, mud roads and malaria, this becomes an incredible challenge. A typical year in our village in Tanzania has two wet seasons, one small, usually a couple weeks in December and one that last almost three months from March to June. In 2017, the small wet season started mid-October and lasted until January. The village roads were mud and the mozzies (mosquitos for you Canadians) were a plague, not to mention the humidity. But we had it in our minds that it was time for us to launch our first Mloka-church-led ministry endeavour.
The people of Mloka, population numbering in the thousands; the large Rufiji village where we have established our Lighthouse mission outpost, are both Animistic and Islamic. The doors of the small church which has been planted in this village have not been darkened by any members of the local tribe. The church attendants are, like us, outsiders. They are Tanzanian but have come from other regions to work at the Safari camps and lodges surrounding the Selous Game Reserve or teach at the government school in the village. These Christians face persecution of various kinds from the populace and forces of the village into which they have come. The spiritual darkness is thick, and it manifests itself in many different ways.
Our bush services on Sunday mornings are a little different from those we had been raised with, growing up in mainly Baptist churches in Ontario. They are loud, very loud, even our small church of a dozen people or so runs a sound system hot. There is music and dancing and loud praying. There are colourful banners and sheets pinned to the rough walls. The local children like to wander close, peek inside and of course, check in on what the wazungu (white folks) are doing in there. But they themselves do not come inside. In a place where kids run the street, generally unsupervised, this is one rule which has been enforced. The church is off limits. It is not known what kind of strange ceremony goes on in there and what might happen to children who enter. Tanzanians believe in the supernatural. The Rufiji practice all kind of dark spiritual rituals. It is a given, a curse might come upon a person who entered the spiritual centre of Christianity in Mloka.
But our Lord loved children.
Their hearts are softer, their faith simpler, their lives still brimming with the potential of gifts and many years. Here they are vulnerable and starving for affection and attention. I imagined these little ones with hungry eyes and tummies engaging with colourful Bible stories, sweet songs of truth with silly actions, lost hearts hearing the Good News, Jesus loves them. Who can know which hearts have been prepared by the Father, in whose life the Lord of the harvest will reap the hundred-fold. We could not know, but we could tell them of Him, they would listen. Sometimes that is all we need to know in order to move forward, we don’t need to wrestle with whether it is God’s will that we should tell them.
We needed our local church community to come along with us on this outreach adventure, for it was an unprecedented thing in this village, in this tribe. We needed their bodies and brains and hearts, we needed to know that they were devoted and equipped to keep it going during the seasons that physically we were away from the village. We wanted this ministry to become an institution, a new yet predictable part of the lives of the least in the Rufiji – the children.
And so, we held a Saturday Sunday School Seminar in order to launch a children’s outreach; to share heart and vision with the members of our tiny Mloka village church, to light the fire and then to train them to teach – children. It was a beautiful thing to see the names of every single person at the church signed up to teach Children’s Sunday School, even the pastor and his wife, both of whom confessed that they had no experience in ministry to little ones and even felt a touch nervous. Two of the men signed up to teach Sunday school who were managers of safari camps, two were teachers at the government school, the church-going staff members of our camp signed up, also two mothers from the congregation and the pastor and his wife. We paired them up based on comfort level and spiritual maturity and then we helped them prepare their lessons on a schedule prearranged to take the children through the major Old Testament stories, careful each week to build with them the natural bridge that leads from each old passage to the Gospel. As we prepared together many of our church fellows were learning these things themselves for the first time.
Still it was rainy. Truly, it was a wet year.
We knew that the village children would not be allowed to enter the church, we had to find another place for their Sunday School. If only the Rufiji knew that the church is not the building.
We chose a fairly large tree next to the church which we thought might lend some shade and be a good landmark for the kids to meet under. It would not however, be a shelter to stop the rain.
While we, the small group of women from the church met for our usual Monday prayer meeting, the menfolk armed with machetes began to clear away, with almost prophetic vigour the thorns and brush that grew up all around that tree. We all felt that this battle against the natural hindrances was a reflection of the very real battle that we were waging in the other realm. We parted ways with bloodied hands and full hearts as we anticipated our first week of class. All that week it rained. What would Sunday bring, how would we hold our Sunday School out there under the tree in the heavy thundering African rain? No children would come in the rain.
But Sunday dawned bright and clear. Beautifully warm in a way that dried the earth for us to lay our grass mats for a crowd of excited little bodies. It was a very lovely thing, not only for the unchurched children who curiously wandered over but for the children of the women who attended church and our own three. The brothers of one family offered to sing for us a Swahili Bible song that they had learned somewhere before. They also brought for circulation some well-worn, well-poured-over Sunday School take home papers which had been given to them at another church before they came to the village where their father had been recently employed. They generously allowed these precious papers to be sent from hand to eager hand before they were carefully folded back into their plastic bag for safe keeping.
Week after week our teaching pairs took turns leading these precious ones in Bible songs and lessons, and week after rainy week Sunday dawned bright and clear sometimes with heavy rain falling half an hour after we’d finished. This went on for the duration of that not-so-small wet season. Not unlike the way God’s invisible hand pulled back the Red Sea for the children of Israel, to us it seemed that His hands were holding up the African showers every Sunday morning. This miracle did not dawn on us until about week eight of our Sunday School lessons under that tree. Sometimes it’s possible for the people of God to be so focussed on the muddy footprints in front that we fail to look around and notice the walls of water miles high on either side. Our unchangeable God is still holding back waters for the good of His people and His purpose.
Finally, thanks to the grace of God shown through your generosity the construction material for a permanent Children’s Sunday School structure arrived. The need for a proper roof was made known and answered by the investors of East Africa River Mission. A truck filled to the brim arrived down the bush road, we stacked the materials in the church awaiting building day. That first night the pastor, from his modest home beside the church was awakened from his sleep to the sounds of Rufiji villagers trying to break down the church doors and steal our donated building supplies. Whether it was the sound that roused him from sleep or the Almighty Himself we can’t know.
The theft was prevented and we shifted safari camp mattresses to the church; our long-time trusted Tanzanian construction crew relocated their sleeping quarters for the duration of building. You could see them, for those couple months, brushing their teeth and making their tea at the door of the church. They pushed their mattresses to the sides Sunday mornings. Practically, guards were needed night and day, so these guys made the church their temporary home and, over time Jesus made His permanent home inside some of them. It was a few of these very men who were baptized in the elephant water hole at the completion and dedication of the Sunday School construction. As the local crew devoted themselves to protecting your Kingdom investment, they became themselves invested in the Kingdom! God writes a perfect story.
Over Christmas ‘17 the young adult team from Cosperville, Indiana came to host a VBS for the village kids in Mloka, Rufiji marking an exciting conclusion to the OT Sunday School lessons and setting these kids minds to the coming of Immanuel, Mary, Joseph and Jesus, the Shepherds and Wiseman. The mission team acted out the whole Christmas story, costumes and all. At that time, we began the physical work of the Sunday School building, it would be a tin roof with posts, open air, unlike the church next door. Without walls, the Sunday School didn’t hold the same fear for the Rufiji parents, it wasn’t a ‘church’ as far as they were concerned.
It was completed with much rejoicing, coupled with a playground and soccer field to provide the children of Mloka with a place of their own. The kids came by the hundreds. The parent church of our small Rufiji congregation from the big city Dar es Salaam sent representatives for the dedication, so encouraged were they that they gifted our church with 30 small child-sized plastic seats in faith and hope that young souls would take their places in the congregation. In another Rufiji village several kilometers away, a small congregation of believers, even smaller than ours, has asked for us to come and teach them how to establish a Children’s Sunday School of their own.
We pray that these young ones will be the building blocks of the first truly Rufiji church. Because really, it matters not whether our structure has walls, God is not in the business of building churches with brick and mortar.