Witch Doctors, Blood feuds, and CHE

9/14/12

Witch Doctors, Blood feuds, and CHE

    How do I explain today?  Today had more drama than a Nigerian Soapie.  I know that I’ve used this analogy before.  Nigeria’s entertainment industry or Nollywood is to Africa, what Bollywood is to India, or what Hollywood is to the Western world.  In an American Soap Opera like General Hospital or Days of our Lives, petty jealousies rage, lovers cheat, girlfriends scheme against romantic rivals, folks are hospitalized, and illegitimate heirs try to steal the family inheritance.  In an African soap opera, for example the popular serial Generations, petty jealousies rage, lovers cheat, and witch doctors curse romantic rivals, make folks ill, or grow illegitimate heirs in a jar. 

       I never expected when I was sitting in a training about Community Health Evangelism (CHE) learning about preventing dependency, holistic ministry, and community empowerment that I would be summoned to the church of a local pastor with allegations of witch craft, devil worship and sheep stealing.  The pastor didn’t make these allegations directly but these were some of the rumors we had heard were circulating in the community about the women involved in the CHE training.  Some of our ladies countered that the mother of one of the ladies closest to this pastor was an Inyanga or traditional healer.

       There is lots of history in communities that we will never know about, tribal affiliations, blood feuds between groups, and just plain old human nature and jealousy.  We thought that we had asked permission for the CHE from the proper authorities and leaders of the migrant labor camp where we were doing the training.  This migrant work camp represents folks from many home areas and communities so the authority structure here is somewhat fluid when compared with traditional Swazi villages.  However, the pastor of two of the sewing ladies involved in the training had called them to church to apologize for not informing her about the CHE and going outside the pastor and the church’s authority. 

     This pastor has been working for decades in this region.  She is very gracious and loving in person, but she is also very protective of her flock.  She has done a lot of good in this area and has several ministries serving families and children.  However, these ministries mostly benefit regular church attendees.  This is one strategy for allocating very limited resources.  However, while there is a faction of people in the migrant camp that attend the Pastor’s church, there are others that do not attend church at all. 

   We were summoned to a nice well maintained church and a gardener faithfully trimming the hedges into perfect round balls. We wait 2 hours; until the woman who administers one of the ministries and had made the allegations was able to make it on the bus.  The pastor greeted us, offered coffee, and invited us into her large office plush with sofas.  It looks like any pastoral office anywhere.

   Finally the woman arrived, and we started the meeting.  Swazi style is that everyone gets a chance to tell their story and no one rebuts.  The pastor explained that she has been hurt by rumors that she had heard.  Our friends shared the stories and accusations about themselves that they had heard. Namely that the CHE was about devil worship and that they were spreading lies about the pastor.  The church administrator shared that she thought our ladies had not accessed proper channels when starting CHE.  She vehemently scolded the younger women.  The sanitized version of events is that both of the women apologized for any mistakes or misunderstandings on their part.  At one point, one woman’s church record was pulled and her spotty attendance was cited as evidence of this woman’s alleged “backsliding”. For these women, the whole episode seemed pretty humiliating.  For me, it was surreal that something conceived out of good intentions on my part could result in divisiveness and hurt feelings for my friends.  I was relatively unscathed but I was worried how this meeting would impact these women and their faith.

     In the car on the way home, we talked with the ladies, and praised their graceful responses.  “I’m going to be exalted in heaven because I humbled myself so much I could almost taste the dirt, “ joked one woman.  “Jesus is everywhere.  He is not just in a church.  He is in my home, “ shared another.  The ladies continued to attend that church but this experience was still painful.  I hoped that the ladies could distinguish the person of Jesus from His flawed and imperfect disciples, myself included.  Petty jealousies, territorialism, legalism, control, and human sin all threaten to distract and separate us from our Christian brothers and sisters even on the mission field.  And sometimes the best intentions, ours, the pastor’s, the ladies’, can wind you up smack dab in the middle of a daytime drama. 

     The CHE is still meeting. The ladies gave the community members involved in the CHE the option to stop.  However, few ministries in the camp allow everyone to attend regardless of church membership so the community chose to continue.  Sometimes revolutionaries look like women in schway schway 1950s style aprons with a baby wrapped in a towel on their back.