Have you planted yet?

by Global Ministries | published on Oct 10, 2014

As I write it is Thanksgiving season in the United States, and the start of the rainy season in Timor. After six months of annual drought, the coming of the rains is always something to be thankful for. In the villages this time of year a standard greeting is, “Have you planted yet?” As of yesterday, we can answer yes. We got the last of our peanut crop planted; there are other things I’d rather be growing, but peanuts seem to be what work best in our rocky soil.

So today I’m thankful for peanuts. In fact, I just grabbed a handful of last year’s crop to munch on while I write this letter. And I am even more thankful for the thousands of bags of rice that are stacked to the ceiling of a large storage room in our Synod office—and what that rice stands for. Since the early 1990’s we have been working to change the way the church understands diaconal ministry. “Diakonia” traditionally meant giving a package of rice, noodles, cooking oil, soap, and a shirt to the widows and orphans in each congregation, once at Christmas and once at Easter. What they ate the rest of the year was their business. The deacons were mainly seen as elders in training.

For the last eight years we have been giving workshops to village deacons, urging them to see their role as parallel to that of the elders: the elders look after the spiritual well-being of the community, and the deacons look after its physical and material well-being. Finally, the effort has begun to show some results. Some churches have begun to provide supplementary food monthly instead of twice a year; youth groups have planted gardens to supply the congregational pantry; there are adult literacy and high school equivalency programs in more than 150 congregations, and a few have even opened health clinics. Enough progress has been made that the government’s Social Welfare Department has asked GMIT to handle distribution of emergency food during the annual period of famine (usually September-March, when last year’s crops begin to run out and this year’s have yet to be harvested). Hence the mountain of rice at our office, slowly dwindling as it is shipped out to congregations in the interior of Timor and surrounding islands.

This is all just standard charity, of course. It doesn’t go very far toward building a just economic order, etc. But it is a good step toward getting people to expect more of the church, for the church to expect more of itself, and for people to no longer accept hunger as inevitable. The old cliché is that you shouldn’t just give people fish to eat; you should give them fishing poles so they can catch their own. My friend Yos Boeky, the secretary of GMIT’s Diaconal Commission, has a good answer to that: “There are a lot of elderly and disabled people who aren’t going fishing anytime soon. They will need our help to survive for the rest of their lives. There’s nothing wrong with charity: charity means love, doesn’t it? That’s what we’re called on to do.” Yos, by the way, is high on a long list of colleagues here in Timor for whom I am thankful.

For many of us, Thanksgiving came early this year, November 4th, to be precise. It was actually November 5th here, at about noon (midnight November 4th in the US) when I got the news of Obama’s election. We were doing a workshop on the neighboring island of Rote, and I had my cell phone turned off. At our lunch break I turned it on again, and a flood of text messages set my phone off like an alarm. The first was from a Muslim friend in Makassar (a dedicated worker in interfaith peace-building efforts), and it just said, “Obama Won! Yes! Yes! Yes!” That was how I got the news. By phone, by email, by stopping me on the street to shake my hand, people kept congratulating me. Clearly they saw Obama’s election not merely as the success of a particular candidate, but as an achievement of the American people, a reassertion of their basic human decency.

Time will tell whether their praise is warranted, but it is hard to overestimate the profound comfort Indonesians felt when, after centuries of being psychologically dominated by “orang putih” (white people), the United States elected a black man president—especially one who had spent part of his childhood in Indonesia. Even the few who no longer harbored any illusions about while superiority were nonetheless skeptical about whether whites could ever accept them as equals.

Indonesia has its own racial divides that it has barely begun to acknowledge. It is widely believed that only a Javanese could ever be elected president here; darker-skinned, kinky-haired Eastern Indonesians are considered too primitive. It will be interesting to see whether Obama’s election stimulates any introspection in Indonesia, as it has apparently done in Europe. To keep things in perspective, someone joked, “Wow! Obama could do all this after living only four years in Indonesia. Imagine what he could do if he had spent his whole life here!”

Finally, we have lots to be thankful for in our household. Of the crew of Timorese kids who lived and grew up with us while they were in school, one was just married in her home village on November 9th. Her father is the local patriarch, so feeding the multitudes at her marriage was the direct cause of death for 17 cows and pigs. Another of our “kids” will be ordained as a pastor on December 14th, another has begun teaching religion in a village school, and one has just graduated with a degree in animal health. Karen is working with the Indonesian office of the International Center for Transitional Justice (a human rights NGO based in New York), and a global staff meeting brought her to the US this month. So she is having Thanksgiving with Katie and Sam. Katie is nearing completion of her Master’s in Soil Science at the University of Massachusetts, and Sam has his first post-college job as a field inspector for an environmental engineering company based in western Massachusetts. I continue to serve on GMIT’s Theological Commission and to give workshops and seminars for a variety of partner churches in Eastern Indonesia. Between Karen’s travel schedule and my own, probably the highest thing on our personal list of things to be grateful for are the days and weeks when we are both at home.

Life is empty without gratitude. We wish you all a happy Thanksgiving, and a world of things to be thankful for.

Peace,

John Campbell-Nelson

John Campbell-Nelson serves as a professor with the Evangelical Christian Church of Timor.