The Pastor’s Kind Words & the Feather Men
Wednesday, what a day! Honestly, all the days so far have been filled with different excitements, but at Mbulumbuzi and Namitambo today, we had some pretty unique experiences!
First off, it really made our day at lunchtime when the Pastor at Mbulumbuzi told us that he was really proud of us. He told us that he does not often see Canadians/Americans eat nsima as enthusiastically as we did and that gave him much joy to see! He also said that if any of us were to get called to Malawi for work in the mission field, we would have no trouble adapting to the land at all. He said we are part of the Malawians now!
We also had a big eye opener today that we were able to see at Mbulumbuzi. It all started when our group was teaching the Psalter and Bible verses when all of a sudden the children let out giant screeches and high pitched shouts. For a minute, Emberlynn, Karianna, Willaena and I were just plain terrified - we had no idea what was going on! The children fled the daycare centre and we frantically looked out the open widows to see what was going on. We seen three men decked out in feather-like headdresses but they were made out of pieces of cloth. The men were yelling and running, at times they would flop on the ground and then they proceeded to do pull-ups on the soccer posts. The teachers at the daycare tried to keep the children back, but due to the excitement, it was hard to contain them! Most of the children did come back and we were able to continue to teach them! I later asked Bep Klok what this meant and she said that it was a traditional dance meant to lure children just around puberty years to teach them explicit adult education in much detail. Often the children are too young to understand it and so they try to preform said adult activities even at school so they can better understand what it is like. This is very sad and upsetting to Christian organizations. After hearing this explanation, we realized why our older group was so small in the afternoon and it broke our hearts!
Thankfully, the group at Namitambo did not have a similar experience! They just had so many children at their centre this week that they already ran out of snacks! Today alone they had about 300 children at one time which made them especially exhausted!
We cannot wait to see what the next couple of days have in store for us!!
Written by: Heidi Scherpenzeel
**Editor's Note: At Timotheos we remain committed to the belief that Christian education remains the best hope for Malawian children to be saved from these destructive cultural practices and continue to educate the villages on these matters.