Slapstick soldiers and Emmanuel, God with us

God with us -- an amazing theme in the face of all that troubles the world. Here's Miriam's account of the Christmas play at Lusekele.

Christmas celebrations in this area are traditionally held on Christmas eve, preferably late at night. Many villages make it an all-night service full of choir numbers and the Christmas story played out, usually by the women, not forgetting a sermon somewhere between 1 and 4 am, ending near dawn with a communion service. Christmas Day, people get going slowly, with the main activities being dinner and visiting. Bilili Mandondo, the village just past us, holds a dance in the afternoon.

Ever since we first came, when our children were very small, I’ve been assigned the role of Zachariah, the father of John the Baptist (Luke 1:5-25,39-80), first because he and Elizabeth only appear in the first act of the play, then disappear. It allowed me to leave my small children home asleep for a couple of scenes, then hurry back to them. We Westerners don’t have the appetite for all-night events that Congolese do, especially when small children are concerned. Now, I think it is also because the other women, many of whom don’t read, are intimidated by the idea of learning Zachariah’s long prophecy. Since we have a small cast, most people play several roles. We don’t have children at home now, so this year, I played Zachariah, as usual, played Joseph's mother bringing the gossip from the women at the Nazareth well (he had to have heard about Mary's pregnancy from someone, and I don't think it was Mary), and a second angel (one of the host visiting the shepherds, then a replacement for Gabriel in later scenes, to allow the woman playing the angel Gabriel to play a malevolent Herod's wife).


(a picture of that well-known scene in the Christmas story where Joseph's mother scolds him about the gossip floating around Nazareth.)

Lots of kids of neighboring villages came. By 9:30 pm, the announced time for the service to start, the center of Lusekele resounded with mbodias, home-made firecrackers set off by hurling them against a hard surface like a wall. Some older kids bent on creating real disturbances were sent home. By 11 pm the generator was running and the service started. At 11:30 the curtains opened and we presented the Christmas story, with occasional stops for special numbers and set changes. The audience was, as usual, enthusiastic, especially about the special touches actors put to comedic parts like the census. The most surprising part, to us, the players, was when the soldiers were busy “killing” the children throughout the audience, someone set off three firecrackers. It was absolutely appropriate, but startled the women who were supposed to run through wailing over their dead children so much they completely forgot until it was too late.

We finished at 2:20 am, followed by more special numbers, the sermon and communion. I hear that Songo children got home at dawn. But I had collected my things and gone home and to bed right after the curtain rang down on our play.

Ed enjoyed a rare sleep in. I spent the morning cooking, then we had a missionary Christmas get- together at Vanga: Christmas dinner, then carols until voices, lips (of the trumpet player), and small children got tired.

Merry Christmas!

Rich flavor without clogged arteries

Why are we so positive about palm oil? Isn’t that the stuff that they tell us to avoid at all costs, that clogs your arteries?

Two distinct kinds of oil come from palm nuts, a red oil from the fibrous fruity covering to the nut and a clear oil from the single big nut. The nut oil is the stuff that they’re talking about. It is highly saturated and shows up in many bakery goods, snack foods, lower quality margarines, Coolwhip, non-dairy creamers, ramen noodles and the like. It’s the “palm” in the “Palmolive”, making high-quality soaps. Most palm oil that makes it to the United States is the nut oil. While it is very useful, it’s not very good for you to eat.

What we and the small farmers of our area produce, and want to produce more of, is the fruit oil, the red stuff. It’s a completely different story. Red palm oil is extremely nutritious, and is one of the great flavored oils of the world, like olive oil. Africans have used it for thousands of years as the basis for delicious sauces. It is very high in Vitamin A and in Vitamin E, and resists going rancid, once stabilized. Furthermore, it is the only commercial oil high in relatively rare isomers of Vitamin E, the tocotrienols. While most Vitamin E supplements on the market today are composed of the more common tocopherols, found in a number of other oils on the market, tocotrienols are believed to be much more potent antioxidants. They say red palm is cholesterol free. Certainly African villagers who consume large quantities of it almost daily have a very low incidence of heart disease. It is claimed to lower the LDL or “bad cholesterol” level in your blood, and raise your HDL or “good” cholesterol level to protect against heart disease. Unfortunately for you, it is expensive and very hard to find in the United States (not impossible!). Who knows? That may change.



It is red palm oil that village producers and Lusekele can easily extract with crude technology. It’s hard to crack the thick nutshells to get the nuts out, and crushing the nuts would require better oil presses than villagers know how to make. Unfortunately, village producers tend to let the fruits go rancid before they cook and process them, producing low-quality acid oil only good for making lye soap. People making cooking oil do it laboriously by hand, and sometimes find themselves in competition for the fruit with the young men producing oil to sell. So you have oil-producing villages where the women complain that they cannot find oil or fruit to cook with. Almost all gets exported to soap factories.

With the high-yielding palms Lusekele promotes, there should be more fruit to go around. That gives women palm fruit for cooking. And men can gather enough fruit quickly to process it before it goes rancid, producing hand-made quality oil, saleable at much higher prices. In seminars, Lusekele is educating the village producer associations on improving their techniques.

Currently Congo consumes all of its palm oil itself and is an importer of the higher quality oil needed for margarines and city-dwellers’ consumption. Higher-yielding palms and better extraction techniques could change that, making Congo a palm oil exporter again. Some good red palm oil could even come to you!

Miriam

Palm oil marketing, village style

Friday afternoon as I was walking home after work, I encountered this young man pushing a bicycle loaded with palm oil jugs. Two 20-liter plastic jugs straddling the bicycle center bar and a third strapped to the rickety baggage rack on the back. Altogether the oil weighed about 130 lbs. He was drenched in sweat. Even with the bicycle, transporting his palm oil 10 kms to the local buyer at Bilili-Etat is hard work.

In fact, this is only part of the load and part of the journey. Altogether, he and his friends had 8 jugs of oil. And the bicycle stage of the journey was just from Songo to the canoe port at Lusekele, about 3miles. From there they planned to hire a canoe to take the oil 4 miles down river to Bilili, where the buyer has large storage tanks.

Imagine spending 1-½ days transporting the fruits of your labor in order to earn $40. And extracting the oil probably took a team of four or five guys a week of intense effort. I admire the tenacity of these young men, scratching a living out of very difficult circumstances. But I am also convinced that there must be a more efficient way for five people to earn $40 a week.

High-yielding short-stature oil palms reduce the work because the cutter doesn't have to climb. For the same reason they are safer. Higher yield cuts down on harvesting time for the same volume of oil. And higher oil percentage in fruit bunches means that cutters have to transport less waste.

So far the ACDI oil palm program has worked only with older adults. I'm wondering how can we incorporate these young guys in the program.