22 November 2008

Greetings from Obama-land! At least, that’s what Kenya feels like these days, thanks to the US election. One of the major Kenyan TV stations suspended their programming on election day to run hours and hours of CNN coverage, so Bill and I (Stephanie) got to watch US election returns in real time for the first time since I can’t remember when. Of course we had to stay up all night to do it, because of the time difference, but it was worth it. Then the Kenyan president declared a national holiday to celebrate Obama’s victory, and we had a day off from classes. Our Kenyan friends were amazed when we told them that people in the US don’t get a day off work to vote, and didn’t get a day off to celebrate the election. But watching this election from the vantage point of Africa, it’s not hard to understand why it captured the imagination of people around the world.

We’ve also been watching the US financial markets since that has a global impact as well a personal one. But it, too, looks a little different from here. In my work with the Accrediting Council for Theological Education in Africa (ACTEA) I have a colleague who’s a white Zimbabwean. He and I happened to be sitting next to each other at a conference in South Africa last month checking the internet on our laptops. I was looking at our rapidly diminishing retirement investment account and made some comment about it to him. “Yeah,” he said, “my wife and I used my entire pension savings to pay the electric bill one month, back when the hyperinflation was just beginning.” Sort of puts things in perspective. He’s the development and finance director at a theological college in Zimbabwe, and he said that in light of the global economic crisis he and the rest of the college leadership had a meeting recently to consider what the implications might be for their school. He said that after a short discussion they all just threw up their hands and laughed, saying “What further difference can this possibly make?!”

Compared to those international headlines, our life here at the Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology (NEGST) has seemed fairly serene for the past month or so. For various reasons I missed sending our supporting partners an update in October—my apologies!—and several of you have emailed to ask how we are, since you hadn’t heard any news. But part of it was that there wasn’t much to tell. As they say about writing, ‘no conflict, no story’, and actually, we’re enjoying being here so much I couldn’t think of anything interesting to put in a newsletter. You may have to wait until we’ve been here long enough to develop some juicy problems before the newsletters get more entertaining! God has been really good to us to bring us to this point in our lives, and we’re grateful. We recently informed our NEGST and SIM supervisors that we’d like to stay on through the 2009-2010 academic year, so please do pray that the Lord continues to provide all the financial resources needed for us to do that—in a year when we know many of our individual donors and supporting churches may be struggling financially.

NEGST is on trimesters, so we’ve just finished our first 10-week teaching term and the students are preparing for exams. At the moment they’re all completely stressed, but we faculty members are enjoying the break from classes. This term Bill’s been teaching Systematic Theology I to the second-year MA’s and MDiv’s, plus Old Testament Survey to a small group of undergraduate extension students. He has also been busy helping his Ghanaian department head get the fledgling African Society for Evangelical Theology (ASET) off the ground. Bill is serving on a couple of ASET committees and has been overseeing the writing of the constitution. I have half of the first-year MDiv’s and MA’s for Hermeneutics, and a very keen group of second years for Intermediate Greek—which is quite a tough course, sort of like Greek ‘boot camp’ (military basic training), so it’s a bonding experience for all of us! Actually, most of my energy goes into trying to teach my hermeneutics students how to think logically and write clearly. I’m constantly intrigued by how many very bright African students we have whose poor educational background means that they can’t put a coherent thought together and write it down. When I push-push-push them, at first they’re surprised, and then eventually they rise to the challenge and start producing some decent work. But it’s a process… We’ve just received our teaching assignments for next term, starting in January: Bill will continue with Systematic Theology II, and also take the MDiv’s for The Ministry and Mission of the Church, while I continue with my Greek students in Greek Exegesis (Narrative Books). I’m only teaching one class next term because I have a lot of ACTEA work and travel scheduled for January through March.

In fact, that’s probably my biggest challenge at the moment—keeping up with the ACTEA work. Besides the backlog from the two months I was away this summer in the US, I’ve inherited about a year’s worth of undone projects from a staff colleague who’s just gone on study leave. In my mind’s eye it’s a towering pile of tasks that’s going to topple over and bury me. But it’s interesting work. Right now I’m organizing an on-site assessment to accredit a large Baptist seminary in Nigeria (will travel there with an ACTEA team in February), and workshops in Kenya and Ethiopia in March to train instructors from theological colleges in educational goals and methods (faculty from Trinity and Columbia seminaries in the US coming to lead those). And in January I’ll go to Zambia for an ACTEA staff meeting, so all that will keep me on the road.

            Bill and I made a small road trip of our own the week before last, driving several hours into the Kenyan countryside to spend the weekend with Samuel and Esther Chege Ngarachu. When Bill was a university student he spent two months living with Samuel and Esther and their three young children in their tiny rough plank home and following Samuel around the circuit of five small rural churches he pastored. Bill was the first ‘mzungu’ (white guy) they’d ever had stay with them, so it was a learning experience on both sides! That was 28 years ago. Since then Samuel and Esther have been our father and mother in Kenya, and we’ve been able to visit them a number of times and to watch their kids grow up into well-educated Kenyan professionals. Now Samuel’s 71 years old, and he and Esther have retired on a small farm. No electricity, no running water, but lots of warmth and good times at their house! We sat around and reminisced, met some of their neighbors on Saturday night, and on Sunday morning Bill preached to the little congregation of twenty people at their local church. Then they sent us home with our car loaded with produce from the farm. (Esther wanted to send a live chicken with me, but I passed on that.) A great reminder for us of what the multi-cultural family of God is all about.

            Linnea (20) and Caroline (18), both at the University of Virginia, are in the last stretch of their semester, with exams looming. Now we’re counting down the days until they come to Kenya for Christmas, especially since it will have been a whole year since Bill has seen Linnea. Actually, it would’ve been cheaper (because of the dates we’re able to travel) for us to go to the States for Christmas rather than for them to come here. But when we floated that idea we got a stream of incensed emails: “We are Africans! We want to come home to Africa for Christmas! You don’t understand who we are as missionary kids and what we need!” But you don’t even know anyone here in Kenya… “It doesn’t matter. It’s Africa and we want to come!” As missionary parents Bill and I felt a certain sense of gratification in that, so now we’re looking forward to a relaxed tropical Christmas together.

That’s our news, and here’s a list of our current prayer requests:

• Praise for a good first term teaching at the Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology (NEGST), and prayer as we prepare next term’s classes: Bill teaching systematic theology and ministry of the church, and Stephanie teaching Greek exegesis.
• Prayer for Stephanie’s work with the Accrediting Council for Theological Education in Africa (ACTEA)—especially for the preparation she’s doing now for projects in Nigeria in February and in Ethiopia and Kenya in March.
• Prayer for Caroline (18) and Linnea (20) finishing the semester at the University of Virginia, and for their long-distance travel to see friends at Thanksgiving and ‘home’ to Kenya for Christmas.
• Prayer for the continuing legal conflict with Stephanie’s brother over selling their late parents’ house and resolving their father’s estate, and prayer for the family friend who’s agreed to take power of attorney over the house to help move the process along. This situation is a sad and bitter one; please pray for Stephanie’s brother’s salvation in the midst of it.

Happy Thanksgiving to our American friends! And we pray for all of you wherever you are, especially in these uncertain economic times around the world. God is good, and we’re trusting him to provide for each of us. It will be interesting to see how he does it…

blessings,

Stephanie

for Bill, Linnea and Caroline Black

Here’s me (Stephanie, second row at left) with my hermeneutics class. I told them to wave to our supporters!

One of the things we appreciate about NEGST is the diversity of the student body. In this snippet from our hermeneutics class photo there are students from Kenya, Nigeria, the Gambia, the UK, the US, and Korea.

Doing group exercises on the chalkboard in Intermediate Greek class—my attempt to make learning all that grammar interesting for the students. Njeri, George and Daniel (all from Kenya) laughing as they struggle to come up with the answers…

Soren (Denmark) writes for his group…

…while Mary (Kenya) writes for hers as Sharon (US) and David (Kenya) cheer her on.

Uchay (DR Congo) shows off the finished product.

You Anglicans and Episcopalians out there may be interested that we spent Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago at Kenya’s Anglican cathedral…

…watching one of our American NEGST colleagues being ‘made’ a deacon (first step toward ordination to the priesthood). Just one more way Anglicans in Africa are influencing the church in the US.

A completely different setting: the farm owned by our Kenyan ‘parents’…

Samuel…

 

…and Esther.

Me getting dressed to visit their church on Sunday morning. No electricity or running water, but there are ways around that.

Bill sitting with the elders before church, to plan the worship service.

Afterwards, the three pastors: Samuel (retired), Stephen (current pastor of this and several other congregations in the area), and Bill (guest preacher).

Back on the home front, Linnea (L) and Caroline (R) show off their university colors at a weekend retreat for their Christian fellowship group. (They claim they did not plan to wear those shirts on the same day!)

28 September 2008

Greetings from… Kenya! We’re one month into a whole new life since our move from Ethiopia. Bill and I (Stephanie) have been walking around in shock at the differences between Nairobi and Addis Ababa, as relocating to Nairobi is like stepping forward thirty years, especially in terms of consumer culture. I stood in a hypermarket the other day (whoa! no more going to four tiny grocery shops searching for supplies?!) looking at the gift wrap and ribbon section, thinking that my days of bringing all our Christmas and birthday wrapping paper to Africa with me are over. Then we bought a sofa suite for our new house and after they delivered it we discovered that the frame of one piece was broken. Thinking back to similar situations in Ethiopia, Bill and I braced ourselves for extended negotiation with the sellers, with limited language ability on both sides, and very little hope of resolution for the customer. Just visualize us the following day, with our jaws hanging open as the sales people immediately apologized profusely, took full responsibility, and promised to bring us a new one a.s.a.p. (And they did.) Add to that the ability to use our US debit card to buy groceries—no cards or ATMs in Ethiopia—and you can see why we feel we’ve been catapulted into the 21^st century. Not to mention that we can sit in our garden and use our wireless internet connection to video chat with our children in the US, a sharp contrast to Ethiopia’s 53 kbps dial-up. Of course there are things we miss about Ethiopia. But we’re not quite to the point of feeling nostalgic yet.

We’re in a similar state of awe at the differences where we teach. Since the Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology (NEGST) is about five times the size of the Ethiopian Graduate School of Theology (EGST) and has much more infrastructure (no criticism of EGST, who are doing an amazing job in a pioneering situation with few resources), we’re constantly experiencing things we’ve never encountered in Africa before. I asked a question about my computer the other day and the receptionist told me to check with the IT department. Whoa! we have an IT department?! Bill and I have beautiful large offices with phones and internet connection, the classrooms are plentiful and spacious, there are regularly scheduled faculty and department meetings, the NEGST staff took us through a well planned and informative orientation program, we receive college news and faculty memos several times a day by email, and there is a gorgeous academic bookstore on campus. Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.

The mix of students at NEGST is also new to us. EGST is the only masters-level theology program in Ethiopia and is specifically geared to the Ethiopian context, so with rare exceptions all our students were Ethiopian. But NEGST has a much broader African focus. Bill and I have students from Kenya, Uganda, DR Congo, Malawi, Nigeria, the Gambia, and more. The ethnic diversity is a learning experience—and occasional challenge—for the students themselves. Friday at our ‘Grace Group’ (students and staff are mixed in these small fellowship groups on Friday mornings) one of our African student members was missing because he was out buying goats for the welcome party for new students on Saturday. The Student Association had decided to bring the goats to campus live and slaughter them there before roasting them, so that everyone could have the part of the goat their ethnic group likes—e.g. if you like to mix the fresh blood with milk and drink it, the blood would be right there available. The goat buyer’s wife is also in our group and I asked her how many people you calculate per goat when you’re planning a big event like this. “Well,” she said smiling, “It depends on who’s eating the goats.” Then she proceeded to give me a run down of a half dozen different Kenyan ethnic groups and which ones are likely to eat the most roasted goat meat per person. “But what about your own community?” I asked. “Oh, we don’t eat goats,” she said. I never figured out why they sent her non-goat-eating husband to buy the goats for the cookout the next day, but the answer to how many he’d been told to buy was eight. In addition to the variety of African students, about 15% of our students are from outside Africa. In my hermeneutics class I have a Chinese-American Harvard grad, a physician from the UK, and a Korean guy whose first degree was in Russian literature. Even more interesting for me, after years of having at most one or two women in each class—and usually none—about a third of my students at NEGST are women.

Which is not to say that all of life in Nairobi is euphoric. The crime rate is dramatically higher here than in Addis Ababa, so security issues are a daily matter. Bill and I have inherited a guard dog named Rambo who is three quarters Rotweiler and one quarter black lab. Somehow his personality turned out all black lab, so what we’ve really got is a huge Rotweiler who wants to be your best friend. We call him the world’s largest lap dog. Just don’t tell the thieves. (Fortunately he barks at the appropriate moments.) Nairobi is also expensive, and getting more so, with inflation running at 27% this year, and the cost of electric power up by 94% since January. We’re especially getting hit by the steep rise in basic food prices that people all over the world are feeling. And compared to our nice, comfortable 4-bedroom house in Addis, we’re living on the NEGST campus in a tiny sort of tumble-down cottage which Bill is convinced was built by the original British settler in Kenya and not updated since. But it has a glorious garden. Bill’s been working hard to make the house more functional, and I love the ten-minute walk along a dirt road, in the African sunshine, to class each day. Our little cottage is quite the contrast to the neighborhood around us, as NEGST happens to be situated in probably the most upmarket suburb of Nairobi, the main ‘white settlers’ enclave since colonial times, with large homes and horse paddocks lining the leafy roads near the college. Think ‘Out of Africa’—which is fairly accurate, since Karen Blixen’s original house is nearby. After years of being some of the (relatively) richest people in Ethiopia, it feels a bit odd now to be the poor relations in the neighborhood.

So that’s where we are. Bill is teaching systematic theology to the 2^nd-year MDiv students and Old Testament survey to a small group of students in the undergraduate extension program. I’m doing hermeneutics (theory & methods of Bible interpretation) with the 1^st-year MDiv’s, and intermediate Greek with the 2^nd years. I’m also continuing in my role as accreditation officer with the Accrediting Council for Theological Education in Africa (ACTEA), for which I’ll be traveling to South Africa next month. We’re enjoying getting to know the other NEGST faculty and trying to learn the names of all the students. We’re slowly getting to know our SIM colleagues, since we’re seconded to NEGST and don’t actually see the SIM people very often. And we’re church shopping for the first time in years. Lot of transitions, including suddenly being ‘empty nesters’ after twenty years of parenthood.

Caroline (just turned 18) is experiencing her own transitions in her first year at the University of Virgina (UVA). It’s quite a change to go from a small mission high school in Ethiopia where your class consists of your ten best friends, to a large state university in America, but she’s slowly acclimatizing. She says she’s at that point, though, where she’s met lots of people but doesn’t yet know who her real friends will be. On the other hand, Linnea (20 next month), in her second year at UVA, is fully acclimated and has hit the ground running, enjoying her new apartment mates, her Bible study group, and (apparently) her classes. Both girls are at a student Christian fellowship retreat this weekend, so we’re praying that it’s a great time of connecting spiritually and socially for each of them.

And for those of you who’ve asked, my time in the States this summer to close out my late father’s affairs and buy a small house in Virginia to serve as a home base for us Blacks was spectacularly unsuccessful. My brother (only sibling) was planning to buy my share of our parents’ house, but his personal situation continues to deteriorate, so eventually I had to leave everything in the hands of lawyers, and return to Africa. A sad situation, but—based on the number of people who told me their ‘brother stories’ this summer—one which happens in many families. Please pray for a good outcome to this conflict, and for my brother’s well-being.

That’s our news, and here’s a summary of our current items for prayer and praise:

• Praise for such a positive beginning to our new teaching ministry at the Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology (NEGST) in Kenya – Bill teaching systematic theology and Old Testament survey, and Stephanie teaching hermeneutics and Greek
• Prayer for clarity about whether we should extend our time at NEGST to a second year
• Prayer for Stephanie’s travel to Johannesburg, South Africa, 13-19 October, for the Accrediting Council for Theological Education in Africa (ACTEA)
• Prayer for Caroline (18) adjusting to her first year at the University of Virginia, and praise for a good semester for Linnea (20) in her second year at UVA
• Prayer for a satisfactory resolution to the family conflict over selling Stephanie’s late parents’ house (which needs to be done before we can buy a house for ourselves in the US).

This update is a little longer than usual, so we appreciate those of you who have read through to this point! With a brand new mission assignment, and a new African country to learn our way around, we crave your prayers more than ever. Thank you so much for being the givers and prayers that make this ministry happen!

blessings,

Stephanie

for Bill, Linnea and Caroline Black

New life in Kenya…

Stephanie lines up for Convocation to begin the academic year…

…and chats with colleagues after the ceremony

Bill teaching his systematic theology class

The NEGST community worships together in chapel three times a week…
 

…and then we all have morning tea together

Some of our faculty colleagues discussing really serious academic stuff over tea

Our new home, ‘Rose Cottage’. The original house has been divided into three units, so that window on the far right belongs to someone else—the bit from the door to the left end is ours.

The best part is the huge front garden, which we have all to ourselves. Note that the very large dog wants to be wherever the people are!

Back in the US of A, Caroline settles into her dorm room. “OK, I’m at college now. What’s supposed to happen next?...”