The Missional Life. What I Learned From Engaging in Missions in East Africa.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Where it all started.

Chapter 2. Seeing Africa for the first time.

Chapter 3. Wood smoke and diesel.

Chapter 4. It's not the Ebola, it's the water.

Chapter 5. I used to be able to throw a pigskin a quarter mile.

Chapter 6. Let the dead bury their dead.

Chapter 7. To the uttermost parts of the Earth.

Chapter 8. The church and the water tank.

Chapter 9. Africa doesn't need your used dancing shoes.

Chapter 10. The importance of the team back home.

Chapter 11. House hunters international.

Chapter 12. My first impressions of Ethiopia.

Chapter 13. Lots of firsts.

Chapter 14. Kibera.

Chapter 15. Back from Kibera.

Chapter 16. Children of agreements.

Chapter 17. Check your shoes.

Chapter 18. Oh, sorry. Don't use that religion. It's just for looks.

Chapter 19. What is kingdom?

Chapter 20. I didn't see anything.

Chapter 21. On the road to bulletproof.

Chapter 22. Congratulations! Your comfort zone just got bigger.

Chapter 23. The terrifying sound of silence.

Chapter 24. And please give me a million dollars, and huge pectoral muscles.

Chapter 25. Civil war (again) in South Sudan.

Chapter 26. An update to the civil war (again) in South Sudan.

Chapter 27. A season of change.

Chapter 28. The snake woman and the blind man.

Chapter 29. The Africa everybody has seen, and the other Africa.

Chapter 30. When I picked God for my kickball team.

Chapter 31. The weatherman says we're all going to die.

Chapter 32. The rope began to hang the butcher.

Chapter 33. Not seeing your face for a very long time.

Chapter 34. Revisiting the woman who had never seen her face.

Chapter 35. Fear, greed, guilt, and love.

Chapter 36. The one you're not going to hear in church.

Chapter 37. Praying that the truck stalls.

Chapter 38. But enough about me, what do you think of my hair?

Chapter 39. The foolish things.

Chapter 40. The God of lost keys.

Chapter 41. Planes, no trains, automobiles, foot, and a buda buda.

Chapter 42. When the mission gets canceled.

Chapter 43. Distraction. Running the race set before us.

Chapter 44. The giddy prophet of doom.

Chapter 45. A shield only works when facing the enemy.

Chapter 46. Anfechtung.

Chapter 47. Where the chains of doom are kept, I find my shoes.

Chapter 48. Harar, Ethiopia.

Chapter 49. The hyena gate.

Chapter 50. Two car accidents, and a baptism in the Nile.

Chapter 51. Crippling unbelief.

Chapter 52. Trip advisor, South Sudan style.

Chapter 53. When virtual activism causes harm to non-virtual people.

Chapter 54. The smell of rain.

Chapter 55. Eternity practice.

Chapter 56. Overcoming my deathly fear of accountants.

Chapter 57. On fathers, children, and lovers.

Chapter 58. Littering for Jesus.

Chapter 59. Trying to understand Juba.

Chapter 60. When the mission ruins the missionary.

Chapter 61. What would it look like?

Chapter 62. When the Tin Man met the Scarecrow.

Chapter 63. Comfortable being uncomfortable.

Chapter 64. I'm twelve years old and I'm going to die.

Chapter 65. Rocks in the road is not a business plan.

Chapter 66. The talking drum.

Chapter 67. Indulgences for narcissists.

Chapter 68. Drowning Jesus.

Chapter 69. The man who doesn't exist.

Chapter 70. Killing the wolf that was sent to save you.

Chapter 71. Where it all comes together.

The Missional Life, What I Learned From Engaging In Missions In East Africa

Words and Photographs by John Wollwerth

Copyright 2017 by John Wollwerth

Chapter 1.  Where It All Started

When I started writing, it wasn’t so that I could eventually put a book together. Rather it was so that I could keep my thoughts in the right place as I got ready to go to some dangerous places and situations where the outcome was unknown. For me, putting things down into the written word helps me to clarify ideas and thoughts that would otherwise be scattered and unintelligible, and aids in my focus.

The journey itself started back in 2009 or so. I am the son of a missionary to Nigeria. My brothers have been missionaries to Senegal, Swaziland, and China. So you would think that I had some calling to missions, but until 2009 that had not happened. My church was involved in projects in Romania, but that had never interested me. In hindsight, this was the way it was supposed to be. Just because a ministry is available doesn’t mean God has called you there. Sometimes He has something else in mind, and you have to wait for that opportunity to be placed before you.

Then I got wind that my pastor might have an opportunity for some ministry with an indigenous church in what at the time was Sudan, later to become South Sudan. I didn’t even need to think about it. I knew that if that opportunity ever came to fruition, I needed to be a part of it. In 2010, that opportunity came.

Most people don’t make Sudan their first mission. It’s hard to get to, it’s incredibly hot, difficult to travel in, and to top it all off, it was at the time the second most dangerous country in the world for aid workers. (It’s since moved to number one.) I was also incredibly green, some might say foolish. I remember sitting on the airplane asking, what in the world am I doing? But hindsight is 20/20, and I can look back now and see the beginnings of the journey that God would take me on.

You’d think that being the son and brother of missionaries, I’d have some understanding of what it means to be a missionary, but you’d be wrong. Just as you can’t learn to ride a bicycle from watching somebody else, you can’t really learn what being a missionary is until you become one. My purpose in opening my writings to other people is to try to make that transition from learner to doer that much easier. It’s a wise man who learns from his own mistakes and triumphs, but it’s a wiser one who learns from the mistakes and triumphs of others as well. So please take this opportunity to learn from mine.

I am a professional photographer, and for the first few years, that was my primary function in missions; taking photos for the missions organizations I was working with. They used the photos and videos I took to create awareness, raise funds, and try to put the often difficult and even confusing story of what happens in Africa into something people can understand. I have traveled in this capacity now to South Sudan, Kenya, and Ethiopia.

Then in 2014, I was at a prayer meeting in the home of an Ethiopian pastor. During the prayer, one of the pastors prophesied over me (through a translator), that God would take me not only to Ethiopia and South Sudan, but to many countries, and that God would give me many new skills. That prophecy has been coming true, and I can see the beginnings of things that have not yet happened. I am now not only a photographer, but I’m also an advocate for getting other people involved in missions. I have even had to put the camera down to be a team leader in Kenya.  I teach classes on missions and poverty alleviation. I see the future bringing my role in the spread of the gospel not only East Africa, but elsewhere as well.

I have placed my entries in this book not in the order in which they were written, but rather in an order that would make more sense according to subject. Some are simply stories of people I’ve met and places I’ve been, while others are more complex concepts and thoughts. I sincerely hope that there is something to be learned from each of them. All photographs, except where noted or obviously not, were taken either in Kenya, South Sudan, or Ethiopia between 2010 and 2015.

The author in Eastern Ethiopia.

Chapter 2.  Seeing Africa For The First Time

The first time I saw Africa was not looking out the window as I flew into Nairobi. It wasn’t when I got off the plane in Jomo Kenyatta Airport late in the evening to the cool air and the smell of charcoal smoke. It wasn’t the next morning waking to the cawing of the large ibises that are ubiquitous to Kenya. It wasn’t even the next day when I stepped off the next plane into the suffocating heat of Juba, South Sudan. The first time I saw Africa was several days later.

In the book, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad writes of nineteenth century travelers, Most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them-the ship… In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, and changing  immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance… A casual stroll or a casual spree on shore suffices to unfold for him the secret of a whole continent, and generally he finds the secret not worth knowing.

I believe this to be the case as much today as it was in 1899. People like the idea of seeing another culture, but would rather do it as one looks at fish in a bowl. This is why cruises are so popular. Go to a new place every day, take the sanitized, expurgated tour designed to solidify preconceptions and stereotypes you came with, and at the end of the day be safely back within the insular confines of familiar comforts.

This is why the first time I saw Africa was several days after I got there. It was when everything familiar was left behind that I really saw Africa, and it was a day I will never forget. It was the day that I realized this was not a one time event, but something that was to become part of me. It was the day it occurred to me (because it hadn’t yet) that I would be back many times.

The day I’m referring to was about my fourth day in South Sudan. We originally had no plans to go where we ended up going, but the pastor we were there to visit arranged for us to go and visit his home village, about a three hour off-road drive from Bor, where we were staying. That day I saw things I never imagined I would see. The cattle herders herding cattle with horns so immense it’s hard to imagine how something could carry something that large. The grass fires rolling across the plains, set by people deliberately to renew the land with fresh grass for the next season. We met the chief of the village of Liliir, a man with three wives, seventeen children, and I’m not sure how many grandchildren. He had been the chief of this village of 60,000 for fifty years, and ruled not with an iron fist, but with wisdom and respect. I met a man who was 110 years old that day, and who could remember when the British colonialists came. His wife was much younger, and when I asked to take her picture, she hurried into her hut to put her best clothes on.  As we traveled back that day, by chance we came across a gathering of two cattle camps. They were there for South Sudan’s favorite sport, wrestling. We asked the driver if we could stop and watch, and the cattle camp got the first foreign audience they had probably ever seen. It was absolutely amazing.  That was the day I became immersed in the culture; where all the familiar was left behind and I was able to experience Africa as part of Africa, and not through the glass. It was a turning point for me, when the foreign became not so foreign, and my worldview changed. It was the reason I am now writing this.

Children in a remote village in South Sudan with grassfires in the background

Chapter 3.  Wood Smoke And Diesel

Soon I leave for Nairobi. I have to say, it’s one of my favorite cities. This is the first time I will be going to Kenya for the sake of going to Kenya. I’ve always visited there on the way to somewhere else. This time I’m going just to see Kenya, and my wife is coming with me.  So what is Nairobi like? I will answer this question as much for my wife’s benefit as for anyone else’s.

Nairobi is the smell of charcoal fires with a bit of underlying diesel smoke as you get off the plane. Most people (at least that I’ve met) still cook with charcoal, even in their homes. Most vehicles run on diesel, because fuel is very expensive and diesel will get you farther.

Nairobi is a city of contrasts. You have expensive homes, gated communities, shopping centers, Mercedes Benz dealers, immense slums, destitute people, the highly educated, the uneducated, skyscrapers and tin shacks, motorcycle taxis, movers and shakers, and the hopeless. It’s street merchants and professional beggars. All of these are thrown into a blender and spread evenly. Kibera, the largest slum in Africa, is right across the road from entrance to the trendy restaurant, Carnivore.

Nairobi is leaving the airport and seeing giraffes over the fence on the side of the road. It’s seeing a warthog running down the side of Langata Road. Nairobi is eye candy. The people walking down the street wearing 25 hats that are for sale, or bunches of bananas for the hungry motorist- these are the things you see as you drive down the road. It’s the brightly painted metal fences and the students in uniform as they walk to class. Nairobi is the political signs that literally wallpaper everything that isn’t moving (and probably some things that are) during election time. There is always something to look at in Nairobi.

Nairobi is the people. They are very friendly. If traffic in the United States was like it is in Nairobi, road rage would be rampant. But there it works. Drivers look for the hole in the traffic and take it. No one gets upset about it. You don’t drive on the right or the left side of the road. You drive on the good side. Surprisingly there are few accidents.

Nairobi is the small shacks on the side of the road that look like nothing, but contain the most amazing cultural artifacts. If you want to come home with a piece of Kenya, avoid the huge markets and try these little places. Want a 100 year old Rungu? (a weapon the Maasai carry made out of the root of a tree.) You’ll find it there.

Want to get a couple miles down the road? Don’t call a taxi. Thumb down a matatu, or a small bus. It’ll cost you about 50 cents and it will be a cultural experience, along with about 15 of your new friends.

Try the local foods, especially the fresh fruit juice. Just avoid unpeeled vegetable and fruit, if you want to avoid dysentery. Try the sukuma wiki, or the meat pockets. If you’ve come this far, don’t go to Kentucky Fried Chicken. You can have that at home. Sit at the Nairobi Java house and have a really good cup of coffee, or go to a local restaurant and have fresh Tilapia that came out of the lake that morning.

To sum it up, Nairobi is an absolutely amazing city. It’s modern, but different from anything you’ll find in America or Europe. It’s a pleasure for me every time I go.

Downtown Nairobi, Kenya.

Chapter 4. It's Not The Ebola, It's The Water

It’s only a few weeks until I leave for Kenya. Things are starting to come together. Today I picked up my anti-malarial pills. This is always one of the more difficult things, because there are really no good choices. I’ve always taken Meflouquine in the past because I react well to it, and also because it’s cheaper. However, the evidence is mounting that it causes long term neurological problems, and I’ve decided that there’s only so many empty chambers in the revolver before I find the one with the bullet. I unfortunately (for some things) live in the United States, and this means I pay about four times for medication what the rest of the world does. As I showed up at the pharmacy (the chemist to the rest of you), my prescription was three times what I was told it was going to be.  Furthermore they didn’t have