Every year during Easter week women in this area hold a retreat. It is so hard to get everyone together. The only form of transportation available to most people is walking. So the district women’s leaders decided to organize retreats around clusters of local congregations and send Bible study leaders to lead them. Three of us were sent to Mupulu, about 40 kms (25 miles) away. Mupulu was the mother church for all the villages around, so it is the logical place for them to gather.
The retreat was to start Maunday Thursday and go through Saturday. So we started out from here Wednesday at 5 a.m., just when it was starting to get light. The two Maries and me. Marie Mubangu is our pastor’s wife. Marie Dekka, lives in Milundu about 2½ miles away and years ago lived here at Lusekele. We got to Milundu about 6 to pick up Marie Dekka, and headed off at a good pace.
Our breakfast was in my basket, on my head. We took a road through the next two villages, had our breakfast, and then took off cross-country on a footpath shortcut down through a series of stream valleys. (The road meanders around on the hilltops.) It was a scorcher of a day and no one had brought enough drinking water. Energy and resolve evaporated in the heat. Down in bottom of the last stream valley, we couldn’t face the steep climb on the other side. Marie’s backpack was weighing heavily on her. The basket on my head was giving me problems. Then two guys offered to lend us a hand. They took our heaviest packs up the hill for us. We got up to the village and got a good drink (again and again), rested, and recovered; 19 miles down and only 6 more to go to Mupulu. By that time it had clouded over. The rain was off in the distance. But the cloud gave just enough respite from that sun to help us the rest of the way.
Our retreat theme was not an Easter or Passion week theme, but unity in Christ. Women from many district congregations had not participated in area women’s activities for the past year. The more active women wanted to know why (besides “having to walk a long distance.”) As we taught and listened to the ladies, it was apparent that these were congregations that were having a hard time, and that our theme was relevant, timely.
In Mupulu, the big brick church building American Baptists had helped build in the 1960s, had lost a roof in a violent storm. The exposed walls fell apart. The congregation was demoralized, meeting in a palm-frond shelter. The women couldn’t see how they could raise the money for materials to rebuild. Even if they donated their produce, it wasn’t going to buy them much. - At Lemfu, they haven’t had a pastor for two years, and also had a building program. While they had a dynamic president, they had a lot of work to do to build up their fellowship.
- At Mukoko, the other site that participated, the church was small and weak, with a lot of neo-paganism in the village. Furthermore, the woman they had chosen to lead them wasn’t really interested. (We said, “Replace her”.)
We suggested that they continue with our theme of unity in Christ and do a series of monthly area meetings, meeting in each village church in turn in order to encourage each other. Furthermore we launched two programs of round robin fundraisers in each cluster of churches this year, to help them with their various building programs. Mupulu’s case is by no means unique. Many of those big old churches built with foreign donations were not well built and are ready to come down, if they haven’t already. In nearly all cases, the present church would be hard pressed to replace them with more than a modest adobe or mud, wattle and thatch building.
Mupulu was also the site of some of our adult literacy classes, but they hadn’t met for a couple of years. The women were anxious to re-start classes. I gave them the good news of the national campaign, with its promise of more support, heard out their problems and promised to restore the teaching books, which had been taken away from them. Nlemfu wants to start too, and can as soon as Mupulu assigns them a spare teacher or two.
When the retreat ended on Saturday, we were determined to get back that evening to spend Easter in our own churches. Marie was playing a part in their Easter play. A Lusekele agent passed through on his motorcycle and offered to take some of our baggage. We gratefully accepted. We finally tore ourselves away by 2 pm, grateful to miss walking in the heat of the day.
We returned by the road this time. Even with the full moon, we didn’t want to have to negotiate dubious overgrown paths, threading our way up and down hills and skirting fishponds in moonlight. We passed another cluster of churches in the midst of the same retreat, and greeted everyone. One shortcut we took through a private farm, then the length of a village. All the kids of the village were outside playing and talking in the moonlight. At 10:30 we were dropping Marie Dekka off at her house, and rested a bit there. We got home just before midnight, sore, but happy.
