CAMPAIGN FEVER!

posted by Ed
UDPS supporters help launch the election campaign period on October 28 in Kinshasa. General elections for president and parliamentary representatives will be held on November 28. (photo AFP)

Late Thursday afternoon I was repairing the back road (long since turned into a dirt trail) that runs down to the Kwilu River canoe crossing, when the sound of a laboring two-stroke engine echoed from the forest down by the beach. I stood at the side of the trail, shirt soaked with sweat, boots covered with dirt, waiting to see what was coming. A couple of minutes later a motorcycle chugged up the hill in a blue cloud of 2T oil smoke. It labored under the weight of two young men and their loaded backpack. Campaign stickers for a woman running for parliament covered every possible surface on the motorcycle (except the headlight.)

As the driver tried to negotiate the soft dirt of the newly regraded road, the engine died. The driver smiled at me and kicked the starter a couple of times. The engine sputtered and died. Finally, the passenger dismounted and the driver restarted the motor and pulled up out of the soft dirt. The campaign worker got back on and they took off, leaving only a weaving tire track in the deepening shadows of approaching evening. The campaign passed but the road still needed repairing. I went back to work.

Campaign fever is upon us. The official campaign period for president and parliamentary candidates opened on October 28. Candidates and their supporters are criss-crossing the territory passing out campaign goodies and holding occasional rallies. Promises, promises, promises. But the second exercise in electoral democracy will have a more discriminating voter. Many people think about the facile promises of the incumbents and say, "Yes, but what did you DO to make our lives better?" Now people will gladly accept the campaign t-shirt or cap, but they want someone who will work for better schools, passable roads, improved jobs, and less interfering petty officials.

But how does one know who is the right candidate in a milieu without newspapers, with almost no universal access to news or even advertisements. Three hundred and eighty-five candidates are jostling for six seats for Bulungu territory in the national parliament. Literally hundreds have visions only of a fat salary and a house in Kinshasa. But who are the six best, the six who can and will work for real change in the prospects of their constituents.

In morning prayers the staff and workers of ACDI have been praying for discernment, the wisdom to distinguish between the good, the less good and the gawdawful. They have been praying for the election officials: that they hold on to integrity amidst all the pressures and temptations. For the election preparations -- that everything may be accomplished in time. For God to quench the flames of hate that some candidates are trying to fan into an inferno of success. For peace. For a group of people and a single leader capable of rebuilding a functioning government that creates the conditions that encourage the creativity and productivity of its people.

For many young partisans the campaign is an adventure or a party. Riding around on a motorcycle, handing out flyers, crossing rivers in a dugout canoe. The real challenge, however, is cultivating the imagination -- having the conviction that fixing things is possible and knowing how to pull people together to cobble the fixes together. Eventually successful candidates have get off their motorcycles and start working on roads. God grant us the wisdom to know which candidates can do that -- and who want to.

Another palm puzzle

The ACDI oil palm plantations (totaling about 12 hectares or about 30 acres) serve three purposes in the extension program. First, they are a somewhat more controlled production trial of the ASD Costa Rica varieties that we have promoted in the central Kwilu River region. Second, they provide a living laboratory and practice plantation for teaching practical plantation management to cooperating farmers. Third, they generate some income for the extension program, though not yet as much as we would like. So when a block of palms begins to show signs of distress our anxiety levels go up.

Last week I described a more generalized problem in the 8-year-old planting of Ghana x Deli palms.

In the same block the technicians have run across another problem, apparently affecting four palms. A fifth palm was removed last year, exhibiting similar symptoms. The following pictures and descriptions show what we found in dissecting the palms.

Photo 1 - partial cross-section of the trunk about 60cm below the growing point. A cylinder-shaped portion of the trunk, about 5-6cm in diameter, appears to have rotted, turning a light brown. The brownish section runs parallel to the trunk axis a bit off center. The fibers remain intact, but the supporting matrix seems to have been digested. There is no disagreeable smell associated with the brownish fibers.


Photo 2 - peeling off the leave sheaths and bases we find an undeveloped flower rotting. It is not clear where this is related to the central stem rot or not. Stripping off the tissue under the flower bud we find no indication that the rot from inside extends to the bud tissue here.

Photo 3 - a full section of stem through the base of the growing point, shows that the rot ceases before reaching the growing point.


Photo 4 - a close up of the fibers at the upper limit of the rotten area. Two red nematode-like larva can be seen just to the left of center and in the lower right hand quadrant. The palm with similar symptoms last year was heavily infested with these creatures feeding on the fermenting stem tissue.


Photo 5 - 90cm below the growing point, the rotted area seems to be larger.


Photo 6 - cutting off a corner of the base of the palm bole, we find a small circle of partially digested tissue oozing copiously, as if all the fluid in the rotted section of the trunk runs out through this drain. The rest of the bole tissue looks healthy, normal.


Photo 7 - slicing out a vertical section of the trunk, we find that the small soft circle near the base of the bole is connected to the rotting center of the trunk. The coarse, fibrous tissue has completely lost the whitish matrix that normally holds it together.


Photo 8 - this final closeup shows the broom-straw like fiber mass. There is a near brownish transition zone between the central rotted tissue and the whitish-yellowish healthy tissue.

There are no obvious signs of mycelium in the dissociated fiber of the rotted portions of the trunk.

My theory is that a careful dissection would uncover insect bore holes somewhere in the central trunk behind the incompletely trimmed frond bases, giving access to an organism able to digest the sugar-rich portions of the stem tissue. But my experience is limited. We could use some help diagnosing this.

e-mail: renoyes@gmail.com or our visiting soils specialist, Patricia Lazicki, patricia.lazicki@gmail.com

Puzzled over oil palm distress at Lusekele - suggestions?

posted by Ed

(Ed’s note: If your interests extend to the arcane details of small-holder oil palm growing, READ ON. If not, you may want to just skip this blog entry and wait for the next one.)

Drought stress? Potassium deficiency? Fusarium wilt of mature palms? Something else?

For over ten years ACDI Lusekele, the Baptist agriculture extension program, has been promoting high-yielding hybrid oil palms to renew small-holder palm plantations along the central Kwilu River. Over a thousand small farmers have benefited from the program. Altogether, between 850 and 1,000 acres of small, family-operated plantations have been established or renewed, generating enough extra income to cover simple health care, basic school fees for children and perhaps make simple household improvements, like a roof that doesn’t leak.

But a troubling development has hit the inaugural plantation at the Lusekele ag center itself. Last year, about 1.5 acres of the 2003 planting began to show signs of drought stress. The telltale signs of potassium deficiency (orange blotches progressing to leaflets dying and drying out) were widespread and sometimes quite marked. Older fronds dried out, leaving the plantation with an unusual open sunny aspect rather than its normal shade. Sometimes palm ribs would break midway along their length, even when still green.

Two years ago the palm canopy was closing nicely, creating almost continuous shade in the this portion of the plantation.

2008-2009 was a lean rainfall year with only 1233 mm of rain from July 1 to June 30. July 2009 to June 20010 had nearly 1600mm of rain, only to give way to an erratic 2010-2011 year ending with less than 25mm in May. From May 24 to August 26 only 4.6mm fell, all before June 15th, making this the hardest dry season in years.

In October 2010 we responded with a split dose of 178 kg / ha of muriate of potassium, followed by improved ring weeding and regular cutting of Chromolaena odorata competitors. No immediate change occurred in the vigor of the palms.

Broken and dessicated older palm branches. This is one of the worst affected palms.

This year, as the severe dry season continued week after week, stress symptoms began to spread across the rest of the 2003 planting and into the 2004 planting adjoining it. In searching through the literature we have on hand and on the internet, drought stress seems to be the primary candidate. Apparently potassium deficiency can exacerbate the stress by contributing to limited root uptake. Fusarium wilt seems to produce symptoms similar to drought stress and none of our varieties are specifically bred for resistance. Ganoderma could be implicated, but no palms display the characteristic skirt of drooping fronds.

The newly-affected areas of the plantation this year seem to coincide with the area over which we significantly improved weeding practices. Is it possible that clearing off heavy weeds (cutting not digging up) could create problems for superficial palm roots – something similar to removing shade from nursery seedlings? As you can see we are grasping a bit, trying to understand what is happening.

If you have any comments or suggestions about what this might be, how we might narrow down or confirm a diagnosis, and what we might do about it, please feel free to contact me ( renoyes@gmail.com ) or Patricia Lazicki, our visiting soil scientist, (patricia.lazicki@gmail.com )

Carbon dioxide, increasing food security and improving family livelihoods

posted by Ed

We planted the acacia plantation in 2002 as a way to restore soil fertility. But on the poorer savanna-covered plateaus of our region tree planting not only improves the soil but contributes in the fight against global warming.

What in the world does carbon dioxide have to do with improving livelihoods and increasing food security? And what does any of this have to do with the Kingdom of God? If you live in an American suburb, get your food prepackaged in a supermarket, and make your living working in an office, the relationships may not be so obvious. But those of us living close to the world of slash and burn shifting cultivation see what happens when farmers are pushed by population pressure or by the drive to increase their income. Hard use eliminates the forest and impoverishes the soil. Constant burning and decomposition of vegetation release enormous quantities of greenhouse gases that are not reabsorbed in the normal cycle of production.(1) The Lord God put human beings in the creation to “cultivate” and to “guard”. In my part of the world many farmers have failed in this fundamental charge. Persistent and profound poverty is often the result.

Imagination is a gift of God. Knowing the will of God, I can imagine a different world where God’s will is more perfectly realized. If my heart is changed and my mind renewed, I can imagine an approach to farming that restores the land and sustains the people who depend on it. The best imagination informs life-giving changes on the ground. Restoring the land leads to more productive crops and healthier, more prosperous lives.

For three weeks in late July and early August, a group of us got together to imagine how we might change the world in a small, but significant way. The group included extension agents, university instructors, development workers and one jack-of-all-trades agricultural missionary. Our goal was to come up with a practical plan for 125 farmers to abandon slash and burn agriculture and adopt a sustainable mix of woodlots and cropping on fire-degraded savanna lands. The plan would reduce destruction and degradation of gallery forests and increase household income by 50 to 100%. And it would increase the farming system’s ability to absorb and hold on to an additional 135,000 tons of CO2 by reshaping the long-term use of 3700 acres of land.

9-year-ol trees in the ACDI acacia plantation have created a thick layer of litter on the forest floor.

A commitment to caring for the earth is one of the keys. If I plant leguminous trees with my field crops on annually burned savanna I can set into motion a whole raft of beneficial effects. By moving from gallery forest to fire degraded savanna, I give my forest land a chance to recover. When I protect my field crops (and trees) I stop fire from burning up all that organic matter every year. Humus increases in the soil and litter accumulates on the surface. My trees grow, absorbing carbon dioxide and using it to construct trunks, branches and leaves. Dead branches and leaves add to the litter layer and increase soil organic matter. A hectare of mature artificial forest has more than 90 tons of biomass, the equivalent of over 183 tons of CO2. If I wait patiently for seven years my land will begin to give me rich crops, firewood, charcoal, honey and thousands of dollars a year rather than the hundreds my family makes do with by slashing and burning the forest.

Moving from imagination to life-giving and God-honoring change usually requires figuring out ways to remove inconvenient obstacles. Our biggest obstacle is paying the costs of investing and waiting patiently. The transition from slash and burn to sustainable agroforestry will take seven years before the new system can begin to deliver its full promise. How does a struggling farm family make investments in the land and live during that time? Farm credit would be the logical answer – if it existed here.

The Lusekele study group has set it sights on another kind of financing – carbon credits. In effect we trade on our ability to provide long-term storage of carbon in our permanent succession of woodlots. The service fee helps to pay for tree nurseries, planting labor and more efficient tools for the transition to sustainable agroforestry. But clients will queue up to buy the service only if we can show precisely how much carbon our system has absorbed and demonstrate our ability to ensure that the carbon will be locked up for the duration of the agreement.

In a long-term agroforestry project 71% of the land is growing or mature woodlot. Standing trees, accumulated litter and soil humus all hold on to the carbon that would otherwise be contributing to the greenhouse effect.

Clearly we have a lot to learn. I continue to imagine. In that vision, the science instructors at the local teacher’s college become expert technicians in measuring biomass and carbon content. Students hone all kinds of skills as they collect data, analyze samples, and map results. Farmers themselves learn ways to manage soil fertility better, preserve valuable forest reserves for future generations and still improve their standard of living. I imagine a world in which the way we farm, the way we think about the land and our place on it, and the priorities we pursue all recognize the Lord God who put us here.
-------------------------

(1) Land use changes, such as clearing forest to plant food crops, account for 15 to 20% of the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.

Training shepherds for children

posted by Miriam


Tonton is lucky. He has a Sunday school to go to at Lusekele. Every week before church he gets to sing, and play and listen to Bible stories with 15 to 20 other kids. Although he sings in the little boys’ church choir, Sunday school is probably the first place he heard the stories of God’s love for him and the way people walk with God. It might be the most important chance he has to see beyond “church” to a real relationship with Jesus Christ.

With a national average of seven kids per family, anywhere you go in Congo there are a lot more kids and teenagers than adults. That goes for church too. In any congregation you would care to name, unless they have Sunday school before church and send the kids home afterwards, a large part of the congregation will be kids and teenagers.

Curiously, though, it’s the rare rural church that has any program for their kids, let alone their teenagers. Most churches ignore their kids, fully two-thirds of the population and the people who could be tomorrow’s church. They enjoy youth and kids’ choirs, but neglect loving discipleship of young people. That is why launching a viable Sunday school movement here in rural areas is so important. When I was asked to help with the second annual Sunday school teacher training seminar, I eagerly accepted the invitation.

Joseph Musa shared his experience with 20 participants in the workshop.

Effective Sunday school teachers teach from their own encounter with Christ and walk with God. If not, they are the blind leading the blind. So I was asked to give the challenge every morning to the participants to examine their Christian life, and see whether or not they were really following Jesus.

In a group-oriented society, many church members get baptized into the church as a rite of passage. They join “the club”. Others, in this animistic society, join to make God happy. If God is happy enough, he will help their projects succeed, assure that family members stay healthy and prosper their lives. It is works-religion measured by material results.


Being a mom and participating in the Sunday school workshop had its own special challenges.

But the real question is: Is God at the center of my life? Am I really “born again”? What does it mean? Am I living in the fullness of what Jesus offers to his followers, or am I settling for a minimum of justification before God? How can I live in Christ, in power? Do I know that I have a choice to walk “according to the flesh” or “according to the Spirit” every day? These are excellent questions for anyone who claims to be a Christian.

A rousing game of chickens and hawks wakes up any drowsy participants,

Whether you were a chicken or a hawk, everyone had a good time.

The training material had a fondness for abstract theology and complicated diagrams that often had little connection with the African Christian’s village experience. My job was not only to translate the words from French into Kituba, but to translate the ideas by examples that participants could relate to in their lives.

I was pleased to see that this year there was much less insistence on French as the medium of training and of Sunday school. It is appropriate for some groups of people, but the vast majority of rural Christians, and certainly the majority of rural children, only function well in local language. They can handle a song or two in French, but that’s about it.

The range of people participating was inspiring. Students, moms, school teachers, nurses, young and old.

Future teachers learned the importance of loving the children you work with, of walking through lesson material with them and not losing sight of making the Gospel clear. They learned how to develop a lesson from a Bible story, how to bring a child to Christ, and how to use songs, games, Bible verse memorization, etc. to reinforce lessons.

Twenty people participated in the training. Some participants who missed part of last year’s training repeated. And some people from new villages joined them. Lusekele’s Sunday school is conducted by young people who finish their schooling and leave, so we needed a new group of teachers and had 3 participants.

There is an urgent need for more people like this young man: people who can be a friend and a shepherd to children.

While I was happy to see a few people from additional churches, I was sad to see how few local congregations responded to the invitation to send people to become Sunday school teachers. A local women’s president told me later: “We intended to participate. I don’t know what happened that we never sent anyone.” Today my house worker said, “They came with the announcement to our church. I don’t know why the pastor didn’t do anything…” Other church events that week could have distracted churches and their pastors just when they should have been getting someone to send. The challenge is to move beyond distractions and bring the focus back to the children who continue to be abandoned in so many congregations.

Pray for this movement: that God would bring to all his churches in this area a real, compelling concern for their children and youths’ spiritual state and for the opportunities to pass on life’s real Good News.

Rapid reconaissance finished

What do soils in the five sectors of Bulungu territory look like? And how do the differences affect recommendations for soil-building legumes and agroforestry projects? Those questions have preoccupied part of the ACDI team for nearly 5 weeks now. They were the questions that drew two teams of extension agents off on rapid reconnaissance trips covering well 1000 kilometers and collecting over 350 observations.

Maybe what we learned is not all that surprising. Soil profiles tend to be deep and usually free from hard impermeable layers. Color varies from very light, dusky browns on the sandy soils of the plateaus to vivid hues of yellow and red in the valley soils. Texture ranges from almost pure sand (again on the plateaus of Kilunda, Luniungu and Mikwi sectors) to slick, slightly expansive clays, particularly near the Kwilu River. But most soils are basically sandy with a modest measure of clay. Sandy soils support grass savanna and brushy or woodland savanna. Loamy and clay soils support brush and forest - with land cover very heavily influenced by the history of agricultural use. (Finding an intact primary forest or even old secondary forest in the territory is very difficult these days.)

People here are tied to the forest. They clear and cultivate land that has been lying fallow for several years, grown back to dense, scrubby brush with occasional tall trees. They depend on this natural cycle of regeneration to renew soil fertility.

The mineral soil itself is poor to dismal. Highly weathered, acid, exerting a weak hold on nutrients. Fertility depends almost entirely on the vigor of the vegetation; the mineral nutrients that sustain growth are all locked up in the vegetation, roots, and soil organic matter. Like a plant nutrient mine. Exploited every 4 or 5 years.

Mines reach a point where extraction costs surpass the production value. Forest treated in the same way, with no effort to restore nutrients, works the same way. It is not sustainable. That's where many farmers in Bulungu find themselves now. Sustainability requires replacing the nutrients one extracts. Fertilizers cost money that people don't have. The resource-poor farmer turns to plants that collect nitrogen from the atmosphere or essential nutrients slowly released in the deep soil. Rotted leaves, roots, trunks and other organic matter provide good nutrient storage.

Our observations over the last five weeks show that soils generally have good physical structure and a balance between good drainage and reasonably good water-holding capacity. The key to success is managing fallow vegetation and organic matter. The challenge is to produce more with considerably less -- land and length of fallow period.

We now have a clearer idea of where we can try leguminous cover crops and crop rotations that include woodlots. And increasingly the international aid projects in Bandundu are open to underwriting experiments in sustainable agriculture.

A closer look at the earth beneath our feet

A heavily eroded road makes a deep cut through the soil in hill country near the Nko River. Philippe and Philo take notes on soil characteristics.

If a traditional farmer practicing variations on shifting cultivation wants to increase surpluses, she can choose from a wide number of strategies. At Lusekele we have focused on new varieties that use limited resources more efficiently or minimize losses from pests and diseases. These usually give an immediate boost to yields without major changes in the basic way that people farm.

But in areas with growing population and limited land resources, the increasing intensity of agriculture uses up limited soil nutrients more quickly. Traditional bush fallow sometimes cannot accumulate nutrients (particularly nitrogen) quickly enough to sustain the demands of more frequent cultivation of a particular piece of land. As a result, even the most efficient varieties of basic food crops are susceptible to declining yields.

Women from the agricultural high school near Nzala watch Philippe enlarge a sample hole.

One strategy is to use nitrogen-fixing cover crops to capture atmospheric nitrogen and fix it in a form that becomes available to food crops in the rotation. Managing cover crops is still a new science in Congo. Even a basic question like, Where can we plant Mucuna pruriens (Velvetbean) for acceptable results? does not have a precise answer.

The extension team at Lusekele is starting to whittle away at the questions. With encouragement from the Catholic charity CARITAS and the European union, Philippe Kikobo and Philo Bidimbu are leading a rapid reconnaissance of soil and vegetation complexes to identify those conditions where leguminous cover crops are likely to prosper.

Most soils in the central Kwilu region are sandy. But occasionally one runs across soils with enough clay to be slick and very sticky when wet.

The rapid reconnaissance started with a 2-day shakedown survey to make sure that we all know what basic observations we want to make: soil texture, color, depth, distinctive layers (if any) in the soil profile and the characteristic land cover type. If all goes well, we hope to sample more that 300 sites over the next two weeks.

While this is no substitute for a serious soil survey, this reconnaissance WILL give area extension agents their first chance to begin to see the variation of soil and vegetation conditions in the region.

Philippe explains the soil reconnaissance to ag teachers at the Baptist high school of Ngulanko.

It also gave the team a chance to encourage the principal and teachers of the agricultural high school at Ngulanko. Often high school teachers despair because they lack the most basic facilities and equipment -- forget about a lab or soil sieves. The team showed those teachers how students themselves could begin to deepen the understanding of their physical environment with nothing more than a shovel and basic skills in mapping. And of course that basic observation begins to raise questions about how the environment came to be like it is, how soil helps define land cover, and how to adapt agriculture to particular environments.

Knowing more about God's creation is always better than knowing less. Often in our impatience to wrest a better life from the earth, we blunder ahead in ignorance, understanding little about how we can work in closer harmony with God's plan. Here we have a chance to deepen our knowledge and modify our farming approaches to minimize our impact while increasing the benefits we draw from creation.

It ends with a walk in the moonlight

Presidents of the Zaba area Baptist women's associations gather at the end of the pre-Easter retreat to talk about the retreat themes and plan women's activities for the coming months.

Every year the women of the Vanga church district hold a spiritual life retreat during the Easter school break. It’s a tradition. But these days it’s impossible to get all the women together in one place for it, so they send speakers out in different directions to local gatherings of women. We had the retreat last weekend, and 4 of us went to Zaba. I’ve been through Zaba on the way somewhere else a long time ago, but this was my first visit and the first time on foot.

The week before three of us had gathered to plan. We went through the texts and teaching together, and decided who should do what. Then we talked about the trip. Had anyone done it? On foot, I mean. Mama Eugenie said she had gone there a couple of years ago for a funeral; that they’d started out at noon and gotten there, with a break along the way, at 3 p.m. If we did the same thing, we’d get there mid-afternoon: plenty of time to rest, get acquainted and talk about the arrangements for the retreat. It would depend on how fast we walked, and she looked dubiously at me. I assured her that I was a good walker and we agreed to go along with her proposal.

Thursday came and Mama Veronique and I started out for Mama Eugenie and Mama Love’s village. We duly picked them up and took off. It was very hot and soon Mama Veronique, then the other two were dragging. I was the only one with a parasol or a hat. No one else had brought any water. I shared around some oranges. About 2 p.m I got suspicious. We didn’t seem anywhere close yet to our destination. “When could we expect to arrive?” I asked Ma Eugenie.

“Oh, 5, 8, midnight; what does it matter? Whenever we get there, we get there.”

We did get there around 5 p.m. and were welcomed by the pastor’s family and some women, but it became apparent that there were some problems in the congregation and in the community. There was a local self-proclaimed prophetess who was deliberately splitting the church, and the women’s leadership and the pastor had some hard things to say about each other. Very few women were coming to women’s meetings, whereas before these stresses they had numbered one or two hundred. We were cautioned not to expect too many. But we were given full rein. We were even given the Sunday service to wind up our retreat teaching in. It’s not every pastor that will do that, especially on Palm Sunday.

Our retreat theme, building on the women’s theme for the year that “this is the year of the Lord’s favor, for the salvation of all”, was that there is no one too weak, young, old, or somehow insignificant to share the Good News and be Good News to those around, in God’s providence. We would encourage them with the story of the lepers in 2 Kings 7 with the good news of the disappearance of the besieging Syrian army and abundant food that they’d left behind, David and Goliath, the boy who provided the loaves and fishes that Jesus multiplied, and the promises that God’s glory would be made perfect in our weakness, and that He would give wisdom and guidance to all those that feel inadequate and ask for it.

The first day rain was threatening and several villages didn’t turn out. There were only 50 participants. In fact a heavy rain with strong winds started as soon as we entered the church, and went on for an hour. With the tin roof, nothing could be heard, so we contented ourselves with singing till the rain stopped. Then we started the program.

Women bathe these kind of events in prayer. The local Bible-study league members lent a hand with the music and prayed too. We talked with the folks there to get a sense of what was happening, pondered it and prayed for them all in our off time.

Nearly every place is taken on the second day. And no rain pounding on the tin roof either.

The second day participation doubled. In rural areas something like this becomes a community event. Since it was vacation time about 40 little kids, a number of adolescents and several men joined us.

Sunday morning the church was full to overflowing. Even the notorious prophetess was there. Maybe the draw was the novelty of having a white missionary in their church. Whatever it was, many women who might not have come otherwise celebrated Palm Sunday, enjoyed each other, heard the messages we felt God wanted to say to them, and came for prayer afterwards.

Counseling and prayer for people’s problems are important parts of every retreat. Wherever you are in the world, people often leave their relationships to deteriorate, the problems to accumulate in their lives. To hear my comrades, “delivering” people from malign spiritual forces is the best part of leadership in a retreat. We had urged leaders and participants to deal with their failures in relationships before Easter, starting that very day. While the assistant pastor mostly took charge of prayers for general problems like student exams and illness, we speakers also prayed with individuals. Women came with problems like a family member haunting them in dreams, a high school daughter pregnant …again, and their anger, or a daughter’s problem pregnancy that the prophetess had predicted would end in death.

We were, in a sense, emissaries of the district leadership, given responsibility to help the fellowships we found to resolve their problems, and to bring a report to the district leadership. So we met with the women’s leadership for all the villages that had come to the retreat together with the pastors to start the resolution of what had been dividing and discouraging them.

The walk back home would end in the moonlight. Here are Miriam's companions in ministry (from R to L): Eugenie Bitolo, women's president from Bilili Mandondo; Veronique Manunga, pastor's wife from Lusekele; and Pongo Love [what a great name], a high school teacher from Bilili Mandondo.
Then we could leave. A girl going to visit relatives would accompany us. By this time it was 3:30 in the afternoon and we knew we wouldn’t get home by dark. But no matter. We had a full moon to walk under in the cool of the evening. It would be good walking. God had acted at Zaba, and we were content.

Miriam.

You didn't know?

Pastor Manunga shares a message at a riverside baptismal service. Many isolated pastors don't have the connections to the rest of the body of Christ as he does.

After our Good Friday morning prayers this morning, people were talking about the church in a nearby village. Last Sunday church members were split up for services in surrounding villages and had no Palm Sunday commemoration. The pastor had made no announcements about Easter services for this Sunday. But he did announce a fundraiser service. His church members were puzzled. "Maybe the pastor didn't know," I suggested tentatively.

Didn't know? Just imagine your pastor forgetting Easter, or not knowing when it was and passing it by! But think about it. Where is a pastor in the rural heart of Africa to get such information as the date for Easter? Theoretically from his district pastor. But what if the district pastor doesn’t know either?

This year Brother Thomas, a short-term German missionary-pastor living in Vanga, and I have been revising a 20-year-old training curriculum for lay pastors. As we were working on the “worship” module, this question of the important faith events came up. Twenty years ago church leaders in Kinshasa circulated the church calendar each year. They don’t do this anymore. An isolated rural pastor, with no television, no radio, no local paper to help him keep track, may not know when Christians around the world are celebrating the central event of our faith. So now a table of Easter dates for the next 30 years is part of the new curriculum. That rural African pastor and his congregation can stay connected to the rest of the body of Christ.

Cherish your connectedness. As this Easter dawns think about that wave of voices rising from the international dateline, across Asia, Africa, Europe, South America and North America and out across the Pacific Ocean again.

CHRIST IS RISEN!
HE IS RISEN INDEED!

The Easter "tomb" set up on the platform in the Lusekele sanctuary. It will be open and empty tomorrow morning.

Miriam


p.s.: I’ve sent a discrete note to the pastor from the next village wishing him and his congregation a good Easter celebration this Sunday, and an inquiry to his women’s choirs as to whether their Easter songs are ready.

Nourishing the soil and producing sustainable yields

The Mucuna vines climb up the corn stalks and engulf the field three months after the corn harvest. In dry season the Mucuna dies back. When the rains start we plant corn seed directly in the mulch.

The corn was finally harvested from the small experimental field in the ACDI demonstration garden in January. Antoine set the husked ears in the sun for another week. Then the research guys shelled the corn, cleaned the seed and weighed it: 69 kilograms of gleaming white kernels filled two large basins.

No Iowa corn master would be impressed. Even an indifferent Iowa farmer produces 3 times as much per unit of land as we did in this small experiment. Still the 69kg translates into 1,586 kg/ha. And that is on a plot of weathered, sandy soil, using no fertilizers, in the sixth year of continuous corn cultivation on the same plot. To put the yield in perspective: a Congolese woman planting corn on a newly opened forest field would be delighted to produce 700 to 1,000 kg per hectare. And even she would never consider planting a second crop of corn on the same land until several years later.

How do we do it? The secret is the nitrogen-fixing capacity of the leguminous cover crop that follows the corn each year. Mucuna pruriens is a vigorous bean plant that buries the field in 3 feet of lush vegetation during the second rainy season. The leaves, vines and roots store up nitrogen. When the rains start again we plant the next corn crop. The nitrogen locked up in the decomposing organic matter is released, nourishing the young corn plant and favoring rapid growth. When the corn is maturing the next Mucuna cover crop is already developing. We harvest the corn and the cycle continues.

Agronomists have estimated that the Mucuna cover crop provides the equivalent of 17 to 35 bags of mixed chemical fertilizer for each 2.5 acres of land. That's about $1800 worth of fertilizer at current Kinshasa prices.

The yield in the experimental field was down a bit this year. But still the average over the last five years has been 1,733 kg/ha, about twice the yield in a traditional Congolese corn field - despite continuous cropping. This looks like one productive alternative to traditional slash and burn agriculture. Corn-Mucuna is one way to increase productivity and income and reduce the human footprint on increasingly scarce prime** agricultural land. That's the kind of stewardship ACDI is trying to encourage.


** "prime" agricultural land in much of Bandundu is misleading. These are old soils. They are highly weathered, stripped of most of their basic nutrients and chemically altered, impairing their capacity to hold on to nutrients. Most agriculture here depends on fertility locked up in the organic matter that accumulates during extended natural bush fallow intervals between cropping cycles.

Nearly 20 years, a work of love

Twenty years ago Timothée Kabila was a school principal. His deep faith and interest in how the church can contribute to the economic and social development of a country like Congo led him to a position on the board of the Lusekele Agricultural Development Center. He joined the staff here as administrator in September 1991.

Two weeks after he arrived, Congo experienced the first buck of political upheaval in the form of riots in Kinshasa. That upheaval cleaved Lusekele’s US- and Canada-based funding and interrupted one mission partnership for a year, the other permanently. Suddenly he was learning how to support extension work without significant outside financing. Financial crisis fostered conflict. Lusekele barely survived. You can imagine how he felt. Why had God led him to this place at that time?

Those first two years were not the only time when he has asked that question. Lusekele has known other financial crises. Timothée became the director of Lusekele. He has tenaciously fought encroachments on the land set aside as a base for regional extension work. He has patiently fended off predatory government officials looking for a part of any action, even before it wiggles. And he stoically tries to ignore the envious church people who can’t imagine that a “large and distinguished agricultural project” like Lusekele doesn’t net Timothée a handsome personal profit every year. He puts up with the guff so that six dedicated extension agents can work regularly with poor farmers and have a place to come home to at the end of every week.

It’s not just Timothée who has made sacrifices. He and his wife Marthe have long balanced vocation and the practical demands of raising a family of 6 surviving kids – not without difficulty. They have always had to supplement the meager Lusekele salary. When it came time to put everyone high school and college, Marthe decided that one of them had to look after their independent family business full-time. She runs the pharmacy and store 100 miles from Lusekele on the main Kikwit-Kinshasa highway. They are apart much of the time, but the sacrifice frees Timothée to continue his ministry here.

Timothée and the others that work here have chosen a vocation. They rarely receive a word of praise, encouragement or thanks. Still, the litany of the positive changes Lusekele has to semi-subsistence farmers is impressive. It has worked with over 580 local groups of farmers in over 400 villages. Innovations have covered poultry and animal raising, gardening, field crops, fruit trees and plantation crops over the years. Current improved varieties of manioc, peanuts and cowpeas promise to double agricultural production and expand opportunities for rural households as their use spreads. This is the fruit of a relative handful of Christian believers who have dedicated their lives to the Lord and to making the lives of neighbors who are even poorer than they are better.

Timothée has often said that ACDI’s work has prospered in a modest way only because God has protected and sustained it. This is my appeal to you to pray for Timothée and Marthe particularly.

• Thank the Lord for their sacrifice and the fruit they have borne
  
• Pray that the Lord will give them the tangible encouragement in their work and ministry.
• Ask the Lord for a vision of where Lusekele should go from here
• Pray that competent and enthusiastic young people will bring their energy to Lusekele
• Pray that Timothée will have the wisdom to seek out capabilities that Lusekele doesn’t yet have.

A working farm wagon

The crew from the oil palm processing operation load jugs of fresh palm oil on the new tractor wagon.

The wagon that Emmanuel Souza and I built a few weeks ago went on its maiden voyage last Friday. Filled with a load of palm oil jugs, the wagon followed the tractor down the hill from the garage to the Lusekele store. Internal roads at Lusekele have deteriorated over the years. So except for the flat expanse of the soccer field, the route included a steep descent and a couple of rough spots.

Kester Mukebwanga hitches up the wagon for its maiden voyage.

The goal is to reduce costs and shift workers to tasks that have a direct effect on improving production and profits. Producing palm oil profitably from its own small plantation is a key part of the strategy that ACDI has for sustaining its agriculture extension work. Transporting a single chunk of firewood can take a worker close to 30 minutes, time much better spent keeping the plantation clean and harvesting ripe fruit bunches.

Kester unloads the last jug of oil.

This week they are going to run the wagon through its paces: collecting palm fruit bunches, hauling sand from the stream near us, collecting dead wood that fuels the palm fruit boiler. Then comes the next lesson: how to organize the work to full advantage wagon capacity and time.

A start in Moliambo

The new district pastor at Moliambo, Mozart Mulama (his true given name), introduces the first day of a district-wide retreat featuring reflections on the church and life-giving change in our villages.

Pastor Mulama is the new district pastor in Moliambo. In fact he is so “new” that the old district pastor’s family is still living in the pastor’s house and he himself hasn’t yet moved to Moliambo. But he has spent this week working at Moliambo – gathering pastors, deacons and deaconesses together for three days of training and starting a four-day retreat for members of the 14 CBCO churches in the district.



Yesterday was the first day of the retreat. More than 500 adults packed into the long, narrow cement-block building with a tin roof, the Moliambo center church. This was a remarkable show of enthusiasm from people who (from all reports) have been discouraged by church leaders and the difficulties of life. Someone asked Pastor Mulama, “How did you get so many people to actually respond to an invitation?” It’s a mystery even to him. But it is clear that many people hunger for renewal in their churches.



But we even saw signs of unexpected and encouraging openness as we drove into Moliambo yesterday morning. The last four or five kilometers the road winds down through red-clay hills to the church center. We found villagers out in force, fixing the road, and hardly anyone asked for a handout. This is unusual. Only a few days before the road had been in very poor shape. But by 7:30 that morning every place where heavy rains had gouged deep gullies out of the road holes had been filled. The road was mostly leveled and mudholes filled in. We learned later that Pastor Mulama had met with village chiefs, partly to tell them about the retreat, partly to urge them to improve the infrastructure that is their link to the outside world.

Three of us from the Lusekele team responded to Pastor Mulama’s invitation: Philo Bidimbu, whom a few of you may have met; Philippe Kikobo, ACDI’s lead extension agent; and me. Philo spent an hour talking about how deacons and other lay leaders can be effective leaders of life-giving change in their congregations and villages. Philippe gave a similar message to a group of intercessors.



I talked to the gathered group about how working hard is often not enough. Farming “smart” as responsible stewards of God’s land is part of the deal. I illustrated this with examples of how disease-resistant cassava can unlock opportunities that the average poor farm family doesn’t even dare to hope for right now.*

What all three of us want people to understand is that God has already prepared a blessing for us and even for our non-Christian neighbors. This is a blessing that would guarantee basic food security for the average family. This is a blessing that would make it possible for every child to get a primary education and most to get a secondary education if they are motivated. This is a blessing that would make primary health care accessible to most families. Our churches can be the channel of this blessing. And I hope that the resulting changes in our congregations would give us an opportunity talk about God’s love, his concrete provision in our lives, and his purpose for us and for the world.



Pray for Pastor Mulama, the pastors of those 14 local congregations in the Moliambo district, and the lay people that came together for reflection this week. Pray that this is a week not just for enthusiastic worship and encouraging Christian talk. Pray that leaders will capture a vision and turn it into concrete, life-transforming action and powerful witness to the many non-Christians who live beside them.


*I have said this before. Mosaic-resistant, high-yielding varieties can double or triple cassava yields in central Bandundu province. A typical family could move from having a surplus of about 14 sacs (about $130 worth) each year to having from 45 to 80 sacks of surplus (worth $400 to $720 a year). Yet there are still literally hundreds of villages in our working area who know practically nothing about the blessing that God is offering farm families.

Building a simple tractor wagon

How do you build a simple tractor wagon from boards and an old LandRover rear axle? Emmanual Souza is helping me answer that.

“I don’t really care about the money. I just want Lusekele to make some headway.” Emmanuel Souza and I were looking down at the rear axle from an old cannibalized LandRover. “Pretty soon you will have palm fruit bunches coming out of your ears and you will need a way to transport them. I’m glad to help.”

Those are rare words in a world dominated by project-induced dependence where many people are looking for the next patron to get themselves through the year. He was casting a vote for a renewed rural economy based on shared knowledge and local innovation. And the thing that struck me most was that it was done in the spirit of Paul’s admonition to the Philippians: “Look out for one another’s interests, not just for your own.”

Last year Emmanuel was sick for months with some ill-defined digestive track problem. His energy dissipated. He hardly got out of bed. Almost everyone thought he would die. But he didn’t. He says that God healed him. Over the last couple of months he has gained strength and regained some of his long-term interest in adapting simple technology to the local people’s needs and opportunities. He is a gifted mechanic and millwright. Joining me in a do-it-yourself tractor wagon project was a way to keep a hand in life.

The rear wheel assembly of the LandRover will make a perfect axle for a simple wagon able to carry ½ to ¾ tons. ACDI’s immediate concern is to quickly move palm fruit from its own plantations to the small oil extraction installation here, save money, and free workers for better plantation maintenance.

However, more fundamental concerns drive me. First, make the plantation and oil extraction operation profitable. That’s kind of a strange concern for a missionary. But the long term ability of the Baptist church’s extension program to help members and their neighbors depends on stronger local income. A profitable business provides the surplus that makes it possible for a few believers to serve others and proclaim God’s good news.

Second, innovation, combining the best of our own experience with the creative inspiration that comes from God, is part of our mandate to join God in the continuing creation of this world. Building a suitable wagon out of local materials and discarded hardware is a local solution to a local need. It demonstrates in a very small way that God has NOT destined us to live within the limitations of our current poverty.

Third, small successes help Lusekele Christians to maintain hope and a measure of enthusiasm. I want people to have enough confidence in God and in themselves that they are willing to take well-considered risks that have a good chance of creating new opportunities. An old proverb says, “Nothing succeeds like success.” My colleagues in the business and technical side of the Lusekele ministry need a few good successes.

Emmanuel tests out an idea as we cobble together a tractor wagon for transporting palm fruits and other produce.

We finished half the small wagon bed yesterday and played around with ideas for mounting the axle. Kester, the Lusekele mechanic, is scrounging around Vanga for parts we lack. In a couple more weeks we should have another very small piece of the Lusekele sustainable ministry puzzle in place. Emmanuel’s willingness to serve others with his experience and enthusiasm encouraged me. It echoes Jesus’ orientation to life : “He was humble and walked the path of obedience . . .” – for others, for all of us.

Mama Luti learns to read and lead

Luti Makunu Mayumbu (right) of Kikosi village, and her Bible, with other members of their League group

People come to our literacy classes for a variety of reasons. For Luti, it was her ardent desire to enter God’s Word in the Bible for herself. We had our first literacy training in the Vanga area in 2001. One of the participants, president of the Kikosi village Baptist women, who was also a primary school teacher, immediately started classes and Luti joined.

Luti’s father was a skilled mason who worked in construction in a variety of places. On of these places was Lusekele, where we live and work. In those days people weren’t sure that girls should be in school. What could a school teach a girl what she needed to know when she grew up to be a woman?

Luti started primary school, but when she was in third grade her mom got sick and needed help. Her older sisters and brothers weren’t available to take care of her mom and see that food got on the table, but she was. She dropped out of school. When her mother died, she continued to be her father’s housekeeper and farmer. School became a dream of her childhood past.

In time she married, children came, and in time she started sending them off to school. Maybe that’s what reawakened her regrets at her aborted school career, and the door to knowledge that had only just cracked open for her. She faithfully participated week after week in church and women’s meetings. She watched the speakers bring story after story and teaching after teaching from the Bible. She longed to be able to go to that well herself and sometimes she would hold someone’s Bible. But the treasures and mysteries remained locked inside.

Finally the Kikosi women's president started a literacy class for them. Here was her chance! It was hard work. Other women dropped out, but she was going to get what she wanted at last. Little by little she learned, until she finished the class. The last part of the class even consisted of Bible stories. She read them, and read from the teacher’s Bible, and anyone else’s that she could take a peek at. She started using the stories in teaching herself, and joined the Bible study league in Kikosi.

At this point I heard from her teacher about her one graduate, but didn’t meet her. In my subsequent visits to Kikosi, Luti was too shy to approach me to talk about it. Finally 2 months ago, a League retreat took place at Lusekele, and she was there. We were in the same small group. She pulled me aside and said, “I was in the literacy classes at Kikosi. I learned to read and write. Now I am the leader of the League Bible study group in Kikosi (learning all these marvelous things from God’s Word myself and with his people). Thank you!” She even had a Bible in hand.

Thank you to the literacy workshop trainers. Thank you to Rose Mayala the literacy coordinator. Thank you to all those friends who have shared a special gift over the last ten years. God has brought us together to change the world just a little for women like Luti. Because of this movement of God's Spirit, another dedicated Christian is able to exercise her gifts in leading the church.

Miriam

God doesn't abandon us in our poverty

Brother Matondo's name means "Gratitude". Here he leads a Bible Reading League retreat session on how League members can transform their villages.

The Ligue's* 3-day New Year's retreat started off with very challenging questions. How do Ligue members become a truly transformational force in local villages? Do they share Good News? Do they make village life healthier, safer, more satisfying, more productive? Do they care for the land and the other creatures that depend on it?

The scope of these questions turned out to be too large. Retreat organizers decided to look at transformation through the lens of one specific issue: how Ligue members relate to former Ligue members who have dropped out, who are losing their faith, or have lost it. Too often people stop coming to Bible studies, drop off the fellowship map without a trace, and no Ligue member bothers to talk with them again.

This led us to think about how Jesus handled discouraged people with wavering faith. In Luke 24, we find Cleopas and his companion crushed by Jesus' arrest and crucifixion. Their dreams had vanished. In this disappointment, Jesus sought them out. He listened to their deeepest concerns. And then he explained from the Scriptures how God's purpose was being worked out in the chaotic events in Jerusalem, even though that purpose was different from what they had expected. In a matter of a few hours, the wavering disciples understood God's plan in a new way and recognized Jesus alive, tangible evidence of the plan. Their faith revitalized, they immediately returned to Jerusalem to testify.

What are the "deepest concerns" of Ligue members who drop out, even repudiate their faith in Christ? Obviously there is no single answer. But a surprisingly common concern that young Christians have is: "Why does poverty have such a stranglehold on rural Congolese, even those who follow Christ? Why have so many dollars been poured into development activities here for so many years, with such meager results? We pray; does God not hear us? Does he only hear and help foreigners? Has he only chosen them and abandoned us?" By listening to and addressing this preoccupation, we might be able to point the way back to God and his purpose.

This is where Pastor Mulama Mozart and I had a chance to share reflections on poverty, development, and literacy. We often think of the evil, brokenness and waste around us as something that simply happens to us, caused by others. What we often don't see is that we ourselves contribute to it. We are responsible both by what we do and by our inaction. We need to be changed in order to restore the world.

Pastor Mulama pulled no punches. "God," he said, "has given Congo so many resources that he might well resent Congolese Christians constantly badgering him in prayer and song to do something about their situation." Other Congolese have described the poverty in Bandundu as “poverty from lack of initiative.” Pastor Mulama pressed the point.

"We cannot go on blaming others," he said. "We can't depend on handouts from the church, the mosque, the government, the United Nations, the Americans, the Europeans, or the Chinese. SOPEKA is not for us." SOPEKA is a popular acronym here for the dependent mentality that is going nowhere fast. It comes from three phrases. SOmbela ngai - “buy for me”. PEsila ngai – “gimme”. KAbila ngai – “share with me”. SOPEKA says "Take care of me, it's not my fault."

But we don't understand how our values and decision often entangle us and mire us in poverty. When we neglect the infrastructure and means of production we already have (roads, buildings, water sources, or machines, for example), poverty is inevitable. When we encourage ignorance, isolation and conformity, we close ourselves off from the knowledge and tools that can help us to escape poverty. When we tolerate corruption and oppression, they siphon off important parts of our production and discourage initiative. Our rivalries and conflicts create insecurity which consumes resources and discourages people from building for the future. And of course laziness, alcohol and drugs weaken both resolve and strength to change. We have choices to make.

Pastor Mulama offered this advice:
1. discover, define and accept responsibility for what we’re doing wrong or failing to do that is right (giving 2 Kings 7:9 as an example)
2. seek the change within ourselves that is necessary (Rom. 12:2)
3. define the plan that is needed in order to change what we can in our exterior situation
4. work the plan

I started by suggesting what true “development goals” are. It is a “shalom” of health and well-being. Development becomes possible when we allow God to step in and straighten out our relationships: with him and the spiritual world, with the physical world around us, with others and society. We care for God's creation and become productive stewards of our particular corner of the world. This responsible production allows to take good care of our families and share generously and graciously with others. We nurture and extend community life. In healthy community, God adds to our knowledge, intelligence and personal gifts from the stores of other people. We reflect God's image more clearly and we regain the purpose He had for us from the beginning.

I told participants how literacy lets us hear God's Word in his scriptures. Our hearing the word is an important part of His transforming work in us. But being able to read also opens a door to the accumulated knowledge and experience of hundreds of generations of people from all around the world. The knowledge and experience available from the Lusekele agricultural development center are part of God's enabling gifts. High-yielding, disease resistant varieties of cassava - a mainstay of the diet. High-yielding varieties of protein-rich peanuts and cowpeas. High-yielding varieties of oil palms. Much improved crop-management techniques. New vegetables for combating malnutrition. Improved processing techniques. Mastered and incorporated into everyday life, this is the kind of knowledge that can transform traditional agriculture and reduce poverty and protect the long-term health of our environment.

I spent the rest of my time describing a technique for doubling or tripling corn yields while reducing the work and the land needed, and saving precious forest.** The idea comes from Central America. Corn is associated with a soil-restoring legume called velvetbean. A farm family can cultivate corn every year on the same plot and actually improve yields over time, all the while improving their farmland.

In the scriptures God constantly reminds us that he has made provisions for our lives. These allow us to live sufficiently, to care for those close to us, to be gracious to others, and to care for his creation on which we depend for life. But He also calls us to be full partners in this endeavor of living abundantly (even if simply.) The Holy Spirit illuminates God's word, making it living direction for us personally and for our world. Meditation on God's word aids the process of apprehending and understanding. A willing spirit that asks God to change us first opens the door. And obedience to God's direction leads to action that actually touches the world around us.

It was refreshing to see God's people wrestling with the word, trying to figure out how to share Good News for their neighbors.

Miriam

* The Ligue is the Ligue pour la Lecture de la Bible (the Bible Reading League.) It is the Francophone equivalent of Scripture Union. Chapters encourage people to encounter God through Bible reading, regular study together and prayer.

** See Roland Bunch, Two Ears of Corn, World Neighbors