Delights 10.6.2008

What delights me here? I enjoy the early morning drumming from nearby schools when I walk Pihla to school. The powerful singing and dancing at churches gives me thrills. I like to watch the magnificient dresses and hairdos African women wear. One of the best things in life is to sit at the campfire in a bush, early in the morning when it is still cold and sun is just rising. To make a fire, sit in quiet, wait for the first cup of coffee.

It is easy to enjoy things like that. Who wouldn’t? Other things, that can eventually become enjoyable, can take more time and adjustment. First, I was not quite sure how to relate to eloquent, expensive, loud, long-lasting, ritualistic celebrations that you attend once a while. I have sometimes criticized the waste of money, the complete lack of keeping any kind of schedule, I have got bored in listening to speeches that never end. Well, this is not the case so much any more. I go there, I will not pay attention to how time passes, I give up the criticism, I just be there. I have noticed how important role rhetorics plays, how even the most modern-looking celebration follows some unwritten rain dance code – I have learnt to attend, to enjoy, to see and hear, and let time flow as it flows.

Frustrations 27.5.2008

It has been far too long time since my last entry in this blog. I have started with some topics, and always rejected them. There is no excuse for that, I admit.

It is winter coming here. Rains that were plenty this year, have stopped. Grass got yellow in few days, as if it knew the year’s job is done, time to rest until new rains wake it up again. Mornings are crispy, evenings cold when winds start blowing at sunset. Day’s sunlight is clear and hot. This is the best season for a campouts. We are planning one weekend soon, can’t wait for that!

Jyri is in Finland at the moment and we others have continued our normal lives here in Iringa. Things are pleasantly busy at work, we have quite a lot of activities at hand but people working for the project are all skilled, reliable, energetic and independent. That is a reason to be grateful about. Thank you everyone involved!

I have had to do some thinking lately. I realise the way I live now in Africa, differs from the past years. I have become less tolerant towards certain issues – I allow myself get angry at times when I come across with certain shameless indifference. I don’t take cultural differences as an excuse any more when I see people deliberately dismiss the work they are supposed to do, for instance. Or what would you say about the fact that I found tens, if not hundreds of parcels at post office store room – parcels that everyone thought had gone missing, parcels that we had been waiting for up to three months, parcels containing long-awaited work-related books, parcels that people were wanting for Christmas, parcels that I made inquiries about everywhere, starting from the sender, up to Dar es Salaam – only to find out that the local post office workers were absolutely ignorant about that fact that what I wanted, had been with them all the time. Craziest thing is that I made a formal inquiry letter, copied it to local post master, who handed it over to one of the workers, who actually contacted Dar es Salaam head post office about my missing parcels– but did not bother to check a store room just behind her own desk.

I have even more examples of that kind, but never mind. The news is, that when I previously swallowed my frustration and anger, and just stretched my patience up to unimaginable lengths, now I just don’t do it. I let people hear what I think of this kind of attitude – and it is not that I snap - I give myself a deliberate permission to react.

What was the result? I am now known by my first name at post office, I am greeted by everyone there, I am asked how things are, how is the work, am I happy - and for sure the parcels are in safe place waiting for me. Let us see how long this goes on.

I am not proud of being so outspoken, it is not reason to boast – in a way I do it for the sake of the progress and development of this country! If I am not happy with a hotel, restaurant or any other service, I give feedback about it – and this is one cause for some discussions between me and Jyri. He thinks it is better just leave it and “never return again”. I think that does not help anyone – least it helps the service provider who probably will never notice that we did not ever return. I believe it is only fair to let the service provider to know hoe s/he is doing. So, it is a favour I am doing here…

Then there are things that I have agreed with – because I know they will never change. They are things that could be annoying at least to some extend if you think it that way, but which I have accepted as truly cultural characteristics. Maybe I have also learnt to like them, not only accept. Maybe, I have found them as source of joy, too? Maybe, they give me something I would not get elsewhere? Maybe, I sometimes miss them?

What am I talking about? I will tell you in my next entry. Which hopefully will appear soon.

Just Another Day 7.2.2008

How does a regular weekday go for us? This I would call a normal Wednesday:

Alarm clock goes on at 6 am – earlier than usually, since Jyri is supposed to get on a safari today. I want to help him with early breakfast and packing the car. We have a cup of coffee, I feel still tired and slowly, Jyri’s mind seems to be on the road already. At 7, other travellers arrive at us and by then also girls are awake, so it’s goodbye to Dad and Pihla manages to produce a couple of tears. Mari and Mikki (yes, he is he) make their usual morning fuss, running and playing all over the place. It is raining, Kaisli wants to walk to school as normally but Pihla prefers a ride. At 8, Atu and George arrive at work, I give some instructions to Atu about today’s work – she is an excellent cook and today she will prepare potatoes with mushroom-onion sauce for lunch as I happened to get some from a friend – doesn’t happen very often. She is also an excellent baker: her latest achievement is sunflower seed-apple-carrot-graham bread which is absolutely fantastic. As Finnish people often are, we too are great fans of good bread. I don´t know how I would manage this household without her.

After breakfast I take Riitta’s car to carage as there is something wrong with the steering. Back to home, collect the laptop and today’s shopping list, then to Tumaini. I quickly make a few emails, write some letters, negotiate over the upcoming Research Methodology training. I also try to develop an idea what I should teach to Kaisli and her classmates on their Religious Education class- I have been invited to give a lesson at International School, maybe I will talk about image of God in religions? Can’t be too theoretical, but the approach should be comparative as the students come from variety of religious backgrounds. I appreciate the invitation and will take the task seriously.

Time is running short, at 11 Lotti and I drive to town to check a house that is for rent. We need to find a house for some new people who will move here later this year. House was supposed to have a great rose garden as the previous tenant was famous for her roses, but to my disappointment, they are redoing the garden and most roses are gone! The house is big but feels like a maze, also the wood panels are too dark and there are 3 layers of bars on the windows! The overall feeling is far too dark – I will not consider this.

After taking Lotti back to university I do some shopping in town but fail to get all I need – then back to home, and after a cup of nice spicy Indian tea I make some phonecalls, arrange something for a visitor from Finland, do emails again, read and comment a project report - normal office work. At 2 pm, I am asked to help to take some IIS school children for Neema Crafts as they are having the community service club there but no transportation. No problem.

After lunch with girls, I see over that they do their homework. Also there is the daily portion of extra Finnish maths and reading. Pihla protests, she is tired – which is true. She works hard for the school and has done some quite amazing progress in reading and timetables. Kaisli prepares her science notes and reads for a word test. I promise to make some waffles with strawberry jam for evening meal. Also we make a plan to make some miniature clay food during the weekend with Pihla.

While girls watch a movie, I steal an hour for my daily workout. That’s the best way to keep myself going – together with a weekly massage at Neema Crafts. Beatrice, the physiotherapist, is definitely the best masseuse I have ever been to. Looking forward to the next appointment – wondering how agonizing it’s going to be this time…

Later in the evening, when I alone am awake, I start preparing a sermon for Iringa International Fellowship service where I occasionally volunteer. Some late emails I leave for tomorrow. It has been a good day, as is my prayer every morning when I am awaken by prayer calls from local mosques.

Updates 31.1.2008

Erne, thanks for making an entry here, and reminding me of the existence of my blog. And, karibu Tanzania!

I have found it rather hard to maintain these pages. Not that there would be nothing to write – far from that – it is just surprisingly hard to write when I can not picture the average reader, or any reader! I have always thought my writing is for myself only, but now it seems that a writing has to have someone to read it so it becomes meaningful. Is that so?

A lot is happening here on the hills of Iringa. Sometime at the end of last year we crashed our car on the road to Ruaha – well, I did that, not “us” as my friend pointed it out. I lost the control of car, hit a tree and rolled on to the right side of the car in between two large rocks. It was a lot of screaming, shattered glass, climbing out of the wrecked vehicle – getting dark, no people, no villages and of course no mobile signal. All ended well though, we were helped by a bicyclist, other bypassers, and some Iringan people driving past. Thank you all of you who stopped there – the Good Samaritans were many. As a matter fact, all bypassers stopped there to help – and unlike I have always been warned, no-one tried to rob us, no-one even wanted any money for their help.

Work is keeping us pleasantly busy and motivated. Jyri is at times traveling for weeks and I have to say I am a bit envious about the new places he has seen so far. It makes me feel my adventures are limited on the route between Ilembula-Makambako-Iringa-Dar es Salaam. However I also know the other side of the coin: days and days behind the steering wheel, at times nearly impassable mud roads, every night in a new guesthouse, sometimes next to a noisy disco, long meetings, heat and tiredness, and eventually when you return home, you return with a stomach bug, malaria or bad flu. It takes a week to recover from such a trip. This is not a complain in any sense, it only tells how the external factors take a heavy toll on what one can do or accomplish here. It has also taught us to take things easier and agree to be more slow and less efficient than you think you should be.

This year is going to be busy and active in my work as well. Probably the busiest year of all those four years this project will take. We will have quite a number of marriage seminars in Southern Diocese area, we soon begin training the voluntary focus group leaders in Makambako, we put remarkably more resources on school counseling programme development and research in general. Also the diaconic activities at Ilembula hospital will increse in terms of home based care and hospital counseling. I will also do some teaching at Tumaini, a bit of gender issues and HIV/AIDS. This is going to be an exciting and eventful year I think.

Kaisli and Pihla are working really hard at school. Pihla is developing her reading, writing and math skills - and all of them both in English and Finnish. Kaisli’s curriculum is also getting quite serious now with more demanding subjects than previously. Pihla is being active in football, community service and dance clubs, Kaisli does community service and horse riding. There is not much free time after school, clubs and homework.

Then we have also faced a terrible tragedy. Our Cookie, the best and most human-like cat in the world, was brutally slaughtered by neighborhood dogs the other weekend we were in Dar es Salaam. It was such a shock, poor Cookie being eaten by a pack of six half-wild dogs! And she was being pregnant, too. Now we have two 5-weeks’ old kittens at home, Mari and Minni (the latter may turn out to be Mikki as we are not sure if she is she or he). They are helping the post-Cookie situation a lot.

Dark Light, 8.10.2007

The most common and well known understanding among the Christians is, that God is an active creator, loving father who wants to communicate with us. But does God have to talk to us, and does he have to talk to us the way we think he should talk to us?

Silence is one form of communication. Bible gives us numerous accounts of painful human experience about God not answering. It is not uncommon for a Christian to experience a period of spiritual dryness. However, what I have in my mind now is still something else than that: what if God chooses to send you to a road which is permanently characterized by such attributes as silence and absence?

Some Christians very rarely get any concrete prayer answers. Some people have great difficulties hearing about other people’s positive spiritual experiences. They may not bother very deeply when things are otherwise all right – until one is taken to a place where suddenly everything is lost and gone, and life is in pieces – and same thing repeats itself: the things just don’t come together no matter how fiercly you pray. You are still left without God’s help, but this is not a game any more, this is something very serious. At those times, it is impossible to relate to that biblical image of active, communicating God. It is also impossible to get any help or consolation from other people’s experience about active God. God is not the one you can love easily any more, he is not the one who pours out his gifts for you, he is not the loving father you used to know. God has become an enemy to you.

We can endure and survive anything if only we have the experience that God is with us in our pain, that he is carrying us through it all. The hell breaks lose, when God leaves us alone in the suffering, and that can happen, too.

This is a very important, and very genuine and divine experience of God. In all this, it can be so, that we have just begun traveling on the road towards silent God, but this road is a place where we are invited to let it go. On this road, we are invited to let go our false image of God, that small God whom we think must talk to us, whom we cen define easily, who is predictable and whom we can manipulate through our prayers. This is a painful road towards something else, and it is a road where we are taken away our understanding of God – but here comes the miracle: when our image or understanding of God is taken away and wiped off, it somehow strangely does not rob our faith to God. When we have been made to give up our false image of God – when we are taken to place where we are asked to become non-believers – then two things happen: firstly, we come to realise how restricted and narrow our image of God has been. The picture of active, communicating, succesful, healing God probably does not reflect all the aspects of God who truly exists. Secondly, this painful experience does not only make us thoroughly naked first, but it will teach us to know a different kind, great yet mysterious God. Losing faith can renew the faith.

In Christian tradition, there are two spiritual roads: via positiva, the positive road, and via negativa, the negative road. If I simplify it: via positiva is the road where we travel together with loving, active, powerful and communicative God, whose presence is experienced as comforting and very real. People who travel on via positiva, are somehow very lucky ones. But via negative represents God whose presence is sensed as non-presence, and whose voice is heard as a silence. God has laid his hand on your head but it is a heavy, silent and crushing hand, not comforting nor seemingly blessing.

Via negativa is not very much know among Christians. We very rarely describe God as Silence, we are much more familiar with words such as a Shepherd, Father, King, Healer and Redeemer. They are all expressions that belong to via positiva, but to someone who has been taken to travel on via negativa, they seem and they feel quite remote, empty and cold. Christians in general have more or less neglected via negativa, or have never even known about it in the first place. We have not dared to build our theology or spirituality on God’s silence – that is perhaps because number of great spiritual teachers such as John of the Cross have had the opinion that via negativa is a secret, and most of us are meant to travel on via positiva. And those who are meant to travel via negativa, but are mistakenly directed to via positiva, always feel somehow odd and never really figure out why is it that I never feel easy when people talk about how God answers to them. It is not uncommon that in those situations, people blame the weakness of their faith when failing to encounter an active God, when as a matter of fact they should have been told that perhaps you are meant for via negativa, not via positiva. And it definitely is not about the quantity of faith that is the issue here.

Suffering, lack of love of God, his absence etc may be the indicators that we are being directed to via negativa. Noboby wants to suffer, nor does God want us to suffer, nor does he cause our sufferings. Suffering does not make us any better nor noble, it does not even necessarily teach us anything. Suffering in general is a consequence of fall of sin when the creation was still new, and there is nothing noble in it. Suffering is simply horrible, but it belongs to the world and it belongs to us.

Suffering can, however, lead us towards a more prayerful life – but what does God do to turn suffering into grace? What does he do to help us? Now comes the hard part: he continues being silent, and that is the whole point in this: if he came to resque us immediately, it would of course take the suffering away – no, he does not do it, but he continues being silent in order suffering to be suffering.

God is silent, does not respond. We are rejected, thoroughly hopeless and we have no prayer left. We rebel, in case there is any energy left for that. Doesn´t he care for me any more? The stronger our faith in him has been, the more devastating is our disappointment. The next challenge is to give up all the expectations and demands, that God should help us. We simply must stop demanding nor expecting anything from him. And then, only then, things start to change: God’s silence starts talking to us. Little by little, silence becomes meaningful. Step by step, God embraces our wounded hearts and broken souls - and silence which was so devastating, becomes filled by grace. There´s still no words nor replies nor prayer answers, but there’s a silence that is not crushing any more but healing. We get a notion that through pain and sorrow we are about to enter into the deepest secret of God’s love, the miracle of Easter morning. We begin to trust God, only because he is who he is, and our relationship to him gets built on the faith that he has granted to us – it is not built on some image of him we have developed – because that was taken away already.

Via negativa is a road where we are called to let it go all the time – to let go also all those expectations we have towards God. Our fault often is that we love gifts more the we love the Giver. Via negativa takes away everything else and leaves only God. Via negativa cleanses our prayer. As John of the Cross says: to own everything, your must lose everything. To become saved, you need to die first – and this is really hard for us to accept both in our own case or in someone else’s case. If someone has the experience that God does not talk, it is not a fault, it is not a deficiency nor sin, and it does not indicate lack of faith. If we see it happening around ourselves, in other people, we must not try to fix it. We simply have to resepct the fact that someone is being directed towards via negativa. It is a holy road.

White Light 1.10.2007

White Light, 1.10.2007

When I wake up on Sunday mornings, I wake up into white light. Firstly, because on Sundays we can sleep in and day is already there when I open my eyes. Secondly, our bedroom is all white: white curtains, white carpets, white tablecloths, white mosquito net, white beddings. It is exactly as I want it to be. And when we have three large windows, nearly 7 meters of them altogether, you can´t stop the sunlight from pouring in with its all potential. Light and sun is never the same in Finland as it is here.

Sleeping in a white bedroom and waking up in a white light is not only what I want, but is also what I need. I am a notorious dreamer: my nightlife is often so wild, actionful, sometimes so dark that it gets nearly morbid, at times exhausting and awful – as if all my inner life is put on display in my nightly dreams. And of course this is excatly what it is – whatever happened the previous day, whatever problems I am having, whatever plans or happenings are there, I repeat or pre-live that all in my dreams. Nightmares – just name the genre, I know it.

I thirst for light. It seems only in Africa I can have it enough. When my inner world is dark, the outer world and all its light keeps me alive and breathing. Sometimes the rays of light come unexpectedly. One of those rare moments I experienced one day last week. I was busy and also to some extend burdened by the coming management team meeting, by my coming travel to Ilembula, not the mention sorting out the theft of our luggage in Dar es Salaam port. In one instant, I just felt huge happiness and gratitude for all this: that I can live here, work here, even sense the burden of work and all other problems that are so inevitable here. The short experience of light, lightness and gratitude was overwhelming and left me longing for more.

Days In Iringa 17.8.2007

Dear friends. In spite of of long silence, I still exist, so does the family, and all is fine. We arrived in Dar es Salaam at the end of June, then drove to hometown Iringa and took the first week or two to start a home again. Then followed four weeks at Riverside Campsite language training course. It was such a good opportunity to get some more practise in Kiswahili. I have to say it was high time to learn some more modern msamiati (vocabulary), e.g. one can not manage every day life any more without barua pepe (email).

I have started my new job, mostly trying to create the needed management routines and re-establish myself at university where I was given a new, spacious office. That I am very grateful about. The next challenge would be to learn to work there and not to bring work to home as I have done all my life - I wonder if that is even possible.

Girls have also updated their former friendships here. The very first weeks were not easy to Pihla, since all her friends were on holiday and traveling, and we found Iringa rather empty and quiet. I could tell she was missing back to Finland a lot. It broke my heart to notice the absence of joy and laughter in her life those days. Everyone who knows Pihla can tell she is always joking ang laughing: that was missing. Now I have seen the spark in her eyes again. Kaisli on the other hand seemed to find her “another me” here: more relaxed, more into books, more into being on her own, not spending all the time in the internet or sending text messages… there we have a child to whom Africa does only good. We all are expecting to have our first weekend campout somewhere in the bush, that is something we have missed a lot.

We also have a new family member, a kitten called Cookie. I have to admit she has become a real indoor pet, who even was allowed to travel with us to Dar es Salaam last week. She has a crush on Jyri: one morning when she noticed we were waking up, she jumped into our bed, completely ignored me and walked over me, put herself at front of Jyri’s face, patted him gently, kissed him, stretched herself carefully and started purring. That I would called shameless flirting!

Weather is getting warmer and warmer every day. Roses are so beautiful in the garden: some pink ones are as big as an adult’s fist. Every week I buy two large bunches of lilies from nearby flower garden – one white and one red to bring some colour and beauty in our sitting room. That luxury is not easily affordable in Finland, but here practically free of charge. Another delight is the vegetable and fruit market in town. As you notice, I have allowed myself to enjoy fully the best Tanzania can offer: ukarimu (hospitality) of people, nature’s richness and beauty, sun and warmth. We were also reminded of the darker side of this country, when Kaisli´s mobile phone was stolen – the real miracle was to get it back next week! I have never heard of any case when one would get a stolen phone back. I still find it hard to believe – but as we should already know, Tanzania is full of surprises.