Haiti Blog

We've leaving this morning! While we're gone, I won't be updating this blog because our internet access will be very limited, but we will be periodically updating a blog on the church website at firstpreslax.org.

"Mission of Romance"

The La Crosse Tribune published an article about our trip to Haiti a few days ago, the title of which was "Mission of Romance." The article itself is a fair depiction of our trip, and I recommend you read it (some people I love a lot are quoted!), but it misses the mark in a key area: Romance is not our mission. Ours is a mission of redeeming, of affirming the covenant of marriage and celebrating love that is commitment, not ceremony, of reawakening--or at least celebrating, for who is to say that it has not already been awakened, or even that it has been extinguished?--the joy and wonder of the gift of marriage.

Granted, so far my firsthand experience with marriage is limited to that of an observer. But during the last six weeks of my freshman year, my Bible study examined love, sex, and marriage in the context of the Bible and tried to build a framework of understanding how Christians are called to live out our sexuality, and as I consider the mission that is set before our team I've fallen again and again back on this framework. I had the privilege of working with my dad, who I'm co-leading the trip with (along with a third leader, Laura), on a set of daily devotions for our group while we're in Haiti, and although I'm excited to see how God uses each of them--and not only the devotions, but the whole experience, really--to open the students' eyes more and more to His goodness, the one I'm most excited for explores marriage: What does our culture say it is, and what does the Bible say it is? I'll share with you some of the ways that we're going to look at marriage in our devotions--and since the students won't have access to the internet for the next 10 days, they won't have all the answers ahead of time! Let's look at some of the reasons marriage is important...


1) We were created to be in relationship

Then God said, ‘Let us make human beings in our own image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’ So God created human beings in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:26-27)

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made…. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1:1-3, 14)

Basically, even though as God's children we are fundamentally complete in Him (so I'm not saying that celibacy or singleness means people are less than fully human), the foundation of the world--before it even physically existed--was relationship: between God, the Word (Jesus), and the Holy Spirit. We're created in God's image, so we, too, are built for relationships, both with God and with others--particularly the relationship of marriage.


2) Marriage helps us understand God’s love for us and relationship with us

God and Israel (Old Testament)

She [Israel] will chase after her lovers but not catch them; she will look for them but not find them. Then she will say, “I will go back to my husband as at first, for then I was better off than now.”…
“In that day,” declares the Lord, “you will call me ‘my husband’; you will no longer call me ‘my master.’… I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion.” (Hosea 2:7, 16, 19)

For your Maker is your [Israel’s] husband—the Lord Almighty is his name—the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer; he is called the God of all the earth. (Isaiah 54:5)

Jesus and the Church (New Testament)

Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory! For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready. Fine linen, bright and clean, was given her to wear. (Fine linen stands for the righteous acts of God’s people.) (Revelation 19:7-8)

I love this; the imagery that the Bible gives us of God's love for us is so incredibly intense. In the Old Testament, the relationship between God and Israel is often described as that of a passionately loving husband and his adulterous, unfaithful wife, respectively. Even though I've only excerpted Hosea here, I recommend reading the whole book (it's not too long) to get the complete story, but it is one of my favorite books for understanding the marvelous depth and furiousness of God's love for us. Note: it's written by a prophet whom God called to actually embody the metaphor of God and Israel as husband and unfaithful wife by marrying a prostitute. Then in the New Testament, a common theme is that the church is Jesus' bride, being purified for their eventual marriage. The imagery in Revelation is stunning, but it appears in other places in the New Testament also, including in the Ephesians passage that follows this one and 2 Corinthians 11:2.


3) Marriage sanctifies, or makes us holy as we serve someone else

Submit to one another out of reverend for Christ. Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, people have never hated their own bodies, but they feed and care for them, just as Christ does the church—for we are members of his body.
“For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and will be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. (Ephesians 5:21-33)

I wondered about including this passage in our study because it can be a touchy one for Christians when that "s" word in verse 22 comes up. But consider the context: this is an incredible love! What a vision for marriage. In contrast to a culture that seems to promote marriage for the sake of increasing one's own pleasure ("How happy does he/she make me?"), this is an image of humility and service ("How can I serve him/her?"). Certainly happiness is a vital consideration for entering into a marriage, but what makes it endure is a commitment to humble service, which also sanctifies. What a privilege to walk alongside couples in Haiti who are reaffirming their dedication to each other!


We leave tomorrow morning, bright and early, and after a day of driving, flying, and stopping for the night in Ft. Lauderdale, we'll be in Haiti on Saturday morning to begin our preparations for the wedding of 21+ couples on Tuesday. Please keep Clair, Annie, Kendall, Rachel, Fred, Soren, Richard, Evan, Chet, Hudson, Taylor, Laura, and me in your prayers, but alongside us, please lift up the couples we will be meeting who are, in a sense, renewing the vows to each other that they made not in a church before friends and neighbors, but before God "who sees what is done in secret" (Matthew 6:4, 18)--or at least outside the walls of a church.

Prayers for Haiti

I just had my first meeting (over the phone) with the high school missions team I have the blessing to co-lead on their trip to Haiti this summer, and I am so encouraged. Our team of 13 will be partnering with a family of missionaries, the Wrays, for an unusual project: conducting weddings! Many couples in rural Haiti are confronted with the cost of having a public wedding and are simply unable to pay it, so although they have committed to be husband and wife and are living faithfully, their marriage is not recognized by the community or by the church. Thus they live as second class citizens who are condemned as sexually immoral. By performing weddings for them, we have the chance to restore to them the dignity and celebrate the value of their marriage in a way that few have recognized it before.

Please pray for us in the coming two months before we leave. Here is a list of some the prayer requests we generated together during out meeting, but please also pray as you are led:

*safety
*effectiveness
*clarity of purpose and ability to accomplish that purpose
*gratitude for the opportunity to serve in this way
*the individuals who are enabling us to go to Haiti by their financial support
*the people who will be left behind in the US (parents, siblings, friends, our church)
*people in Haiti who we have yet to meet
*our anxieties, impatience, weakness, etc.
*hearts that align with God's, that love as He loves and break as His breaks

Please also pray for each member of our team: Soren, Evan, Fred, Richard, Chet, Hudson, Kendall, Annie, Clair, Rachel, and Ethan, as well as my dad and me, who are co-leading the trip.

One of my favorite Biblical prayers come from Nehemiah, and I often have to humble myself and remember that God is awesome, able to help in trying times. As Nehemiah was rebuilding the wall around Jerusalem he confronted immense opposition, and this was his simple prayer, one that I want to pray in its wise simplicity and totally trusting dependence for myself and for my team:

'They were all trying to frighten us, thinking, "Their hands will get too weak for the work, and it will not be completed." But I prayed, "Now strengthen my hands."'

Revitalizing the Blog for Summer 2011

Hi friends,

It's been a long time! I'm in the process of updating this for my summer 2011 adventures: Haiti in June and Uganda in August, so things will be changing around in the next few months.

Also, I have two requests for you:
(1) First and foremost, please pray! I would love your prayers as I prepare to serve and while I am abroad--not only for me, but for the teams I will be traveling and working with, and for the people I will meet in Haiti and Uganda.
(2) If you would like to contribute financially to my Uganda trip (I have to raise several thousand dollars, and I know God will provide), please visit www.Christian-Union.org/Uganda2011 (select "J Haley" from the list of student designees) to donate and get in touch if you have any questions.

Something I'm learning about God's faithfulness and provision, which comes from Deuteronomy 8:3-4, is that even in the smallest of things God is sovereign. "He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. Your clothes did not wear out and your feet did not swell during these forty years." Wow: what provision, and what faithfulness! I trust Him for all things.

Love,
Jessica

Home

After long hours of traveling (in total, about 48 from the time I left for the airport in Accra to the time I landed in La Crosse!) I have finally made it home! Thoughts will be forthcoming as I readjust to my familiar life, but for now I am simply thankful to be back among some of the people I missed dearly during the last nine months. Your prayers, support, and encouragement have been invaluable the entire time I was gone, and I thank each of you!

For those of you who live in or near La Crosse, I am having an evening of sharing and celebrating on Friday, June 4 from 6:30 pm to 8:00 pm at First Presbyterian Church in La Crosse. All are invited to come to hear me share a bit about my experiences, see some pictures, and enjoy refreshments afterward. I would love to see you!

Shea!

I have been living in a village called Dalun, nearby Tamale in the Northern Region of Ghana, for the past week, working in a shea butter cooperative. This means that most days of the week I and my four counterparts, who are all staying at a center known as the Ghanaian Dutch Community Programme in Dalun, work with local women as they process shea nuts into shea butter, some of which is exported across the world. So far we have been directly involved in almost every aspect of shea butter processing, from harvesting the nuts to boiling them to removing their soft outer coating to washing them to grinding them to roasting them over a fire to milling them into a paste to mixing that paste with water until it releases a fatty substance similar to shea butter to boiling the resultant shea compound until it is refined. The entire process takes about a week.

On the 22nd we will leave Dalun and make an excursion to Mole National Park, where we will hope to see some of the animals that have always bounded into my imagination when I think of African wildlife, before beginning our journey back through Tamale and Kumasi and finally Accra, where we will spend just under a week before (hopefully, depending on the consequences of the British Airways strike) departing on the evening of May 30 for America. Scarcely can I imagine that in hardly more than 2 weeks I will be back in my original home (original because in some, though not all, ways Ghana has become a home for me)!

For those of you in the La Crosse area, note that I plan to have a small presentation of pictures on the evening of Friday, June 4, but I will get more details out soon.

Keep me in your prayers as I keep you in mine, friends; by God's grace we shall meet again soon.

City Living

Before I get into how life has been for me during the many weeks that have elapsed since my last few feeble posts, let me make you a promise that I will try to get a more substantial post up in the next week or so and apologize (though without any guilt whatsoever--it couldn't have been helped!) that I have not been posting regularly.

The latest update from our Ghana cohort, a sketch of our life in the village of Oguaa written by Kathleen Ryan, one of the five of us in Ghana, is available here, if you care to peruse and get a better picture of our daily life in there. Now that I am sharing it with you, though, it is a bit outdated; on April 17, we moved from Oguaa to Kumasi, Ghana's 2nd largest city, where we have begun working at orphanages and creches (nursery schools). It is good to be back among some of the more familiar things in life--I missed my commute to work by tro-tro, and internet access is more convenient now--but I miss Oguaa and its people. I miss Nana, the grandfatherly chief whose constant refrain is "Come and chop!" (Come and eat!) and "Afriyie, wodaa yie?" (Jessica, did you sleep well?). I miss Sewaa, the chief's sister and constant presence in my daily life who makes me wish only to be that energetic, caring, and lively in my old age; her tears of goodbye triggered mine when she wept, "Yerenfere mo; nrefere yen." (We will never forget you; do not forget us.) I miss Akwasi, my 14-year-old (or 9-year-old, depending on who you ask) friend whom I would help every night with his homework and who would sometimes bring me mangoes or call me to check in when we went on trips, and who still calls me almost every day. I miss Malia, my 4-year-old host sister, who would come grab my hand and say my Twi name, "Akua!" when I emerged early each morning from my room. These are people I will never forget.

And yet, as I said, life has moved on, and now I am getting to know Nana Amma, my 32-year-old host sister, her 18-month-old son Kofi, and her mother Ma Afia and my new route to work at Swift Montessori (catch a car to Kotei, then from there take one to Tech Jct, where cars are waiting for passengers like me who are going to Anwomaso). But more on this later! For now best wishes as we close out April, and greetings to all!

Still Doing Well

Just checking in... Internet time has been ever scantier, but let me assure you that God continues to bless me and pass on a few links:

*A Princeton article: http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/76/33K78/index.xml?section=featured
*Nick's "Update from the Field" for February: http://www.princeton.edu/bridgeyear/updates/archives/?id=2649

Life is good! I am looking forward to sharing more when I return to the United States, but I am enjoying every day for the next two and a half months in the meantime to the fullest!

Love,
Jessica

We don't need blankets in Ghana, but we need to wrap ourselves in prayer

Thanks to all of you who have interceded for me and the other four students in prayer over the last 6 months. I only have a couple of minutes at this internet cafe, so I can't say much, but suffice it to say that although living here continues to be a blessing and I thank God every day for having brought me to Ghana, I am experiencing a lot of spiritual growth here too, and it is not always easy. Part of that growth is a deeper understanding of God's hand in the world as He manifests Himself through the Holy Spirit, who I am getting to know better after having attended a Pentecostal church each Sunday in Accra and now talking to people in the village who have a much different concept of the Spirit's presence in life. In contrast, I have met priests and priestesses (there are about four or five being trained in our village) and seen them go into trances, wildly dancing at festivals.

So I believe that spiritual warfare exists on a much more real plane that I ever understood back in America. Because of this, I now realize how absolutely vital your prayers over me are. In Ghana, I am outside my usual circle of faith--my community and family of believers. Here, I regularly go to church and actually read the Bible and pray more frequently than I used to, but I still plead with you to lift me and the rest of the group before God frequently. Please pray for spiritual fortitude for us, for protection against evil, and for the joy and strength of the Lord in all that we do.

I wish I could give you a longer exposition, but know that it is well with my soul, for I am resting in the Lord. I pray for you, and I simply ask that, although the distance separating us is great, so is the power of the Father, His Son, and His Spirit, and so let us pray for each other as brothers and sisters.

Love in Christ,
Jessica


P.S. A few pictures...

A View of Transition and Life Beyond

As of today, I have been living in Oguaa, a small village of perhaps three to four hundred people, for 40 days—and though they have not been without challenges, these 40 days have been remarkably joyful. So many things here are so different from my past experiences (both in the US and in Accra), but I think the most noteworthy is the fact that I have stopped noticing many of them. Things that once may have surprised or shocked me are normal, and one-time nuisances have come to be just what I need to brighten my days. Life in Oguaa is good.

I won't give you an extensive recounting of our journey from Accra to Oguaa via Kumasi, Ghana's second largest city and the nearest place (at about 2 hours away) where I can find reliable internet access. Each month one of the five of us Bridge Year students writes an update from the field and submits it to Princeton for publication on their website, and so when my opportunity to write the update came in January, I chose to write about our transition. You can find my report here (and roam the site to find the archived updates written by Nick, Kathleen, Cole, and Aria) if you want to fill in some of the gap between my last blog post and the previous ones.

But for the most part, as I alluded to, the transition is over, replaced by living. No longer do the not-uncommon power outages seem terribly inconvenient; as long as my phone has enough battery to last until the power comes back on in a few hours, I have come to enjoy the respite from the constant background din of peoples' radios that a “lights off” brings. The surprisingly terrifying grunts and bays of the fattened ram who is tied up nearby are now more apt to make me shake my head as I bid him goodnight than to make the hair on the back of my neck bolt upright. Many times a day when a child stares after me as I pass, singing out, “Oboruni kכkכ, maakye!” (“White person/foreigner, good morning!”) at any time of the day, I answer quickly with a little dance and a sing-song call—“Yaa, fikyiri gon-gon!” (the expected gibberish response)—rather than bewilderment at why kids are wishing me good morning at 4:00 in the afternoon. All of this is just part of how I live.

In short, the details of how I live are thus: I stay in a house which is basically one row or bank of rooms (a toilet room, bathing room, kitchen, and chicken coop) opposite a small, empty, cement “courtyard” from another bank of rooms, which shaped like a block-lettered “C”. Basically, my house is a square, but one side of the square is not connected to the others, and in the middle of the square is an open area which is flat and cemented. Each of the rooms has door that opens onto this “courtyard.” My house is not occupied by a single family; rather, there is the elder of the house, who is called “כpanin” (“Elder”), an old woman and her two young granddaughters (Sekina and Malia), who have become the equivalent of my host family under these odd living circumstances, and two teachers (Owusu and Akwasi Edward) in their early twenties.

Because I don't quite live with a host family (I am more like the other two teachers, who are renting the rooms, than an exchange student living with and learning from a family as a temporary member), I spend a lot of my time with Aria, Nick, Kathleen, and Cole at our Bridge Year headquarters, located in the village chief's house. Like me, Cole and Kathleen stay in houses in the village, while Aria and Nick have rooms in the chief's house, which is a compound similar to mine. However, when we are not sleeping or spending time in our rooms or with the other residents of our houses, we tend to gather at Nana's place, as we know headquarters. Whether cooking our communal meals, doing the dishes, or just hanging out, simply spending time together has helped me to develop friendships that I really value with each of the other four students. To be honest, it has been a struggle at times to adjust to the new living circumstances after my wonderful host family in Accra, and I sometimes feel that I should spend more time at my house than Nana's place, but I am learning to divide my time well and look forward to continuing spending time with the best friends I have in Ghana.

In terms of work, I am teaching at a middle school called Seniagya Methodist Junior High School, located in a village about a ten minute walk from Oguaa. In the school—a fairly new building comprised of three classrooms and an office—there are three “forms” equivalent to 6th, 7th, and 8th grades with about 25 students in each form. Initially I expected that I would be assisting teachers and tutoring and generally trying to be helpful, but I am in fact the form 1 (6th grade) math teacher. This means that if you need any help calculating a fraction's lowest terms or talking about the relationship between a plane shape like a circle and the net of a solid such as a cylinder, I am the person to come to, particularly if you would like a faltering explanation in Twi! I teach my 25 students, who range in age from 12 to 19, four times a week for about 70 minutes if the school is running on schedule (or about 60 minutes if it is a typical day) using a mix of a little English and as much Twi as I can muster. No class ever goes quite as expected according to the lesson plans I write, but I am proud to say that my students know the difference between a ray and a line, and I am pretty confident that I know all their names. Never could I have guessed how simply rewarding and mind-blowingly frustrating teaching can be and is—but my name is now Madam.

To distill these details, this life is unlike anything I have experienced before, including life in Accra—but as I stared in wonder at the magnificent, sizzling purple thunder tearing through the resolute black sky two nights ago, I realized I don't want to live any other life right now.