A letter from Marcia Towers in Guatemala
August 2012
"Who is rich? The one who appreciates what he has." Rabbi Daniel Smith shared this quote* during the conference I attended with the Society for Intercultural Pastoral Care and Counseling this July in Tanzania. The conference was on “Caring for Creation—Caring for People” and was centered around disasters and climate change. I had the privilege of participating and giving one of the presentations on Cedepca’s behalf, talking about Cedepca’s work in psychosocial care in disasters and on the changes in weather patterns we’ve had in Guatemala in recent years.
Marcia, Shite, and Shite’s daughter in their extensive vegetable garden. Shite has undertaken many creative and generous projects with her family.
Part of the program was a two-night home stay with a local Lutheran parish, where I saw thoughtful Tanzanians living with this sense of being rich by appreciating what they have. Shite picked up a group of four of us from the conference and took us to her town of Karansi, west of Mt. Kilimanjaro. She told me that African women aren’t specialists, but they’re generalists because they do a bit of everything. She is a public elementary schoolteacher in a reality where she has 70 children in a classroom. She has an extensive vegetable garden in her backyard, which the family uses for their own consumption and to sell. They’ve purchased three small solar panels that give power to one bulb each, so that at night when the electricity frequently goes out they can still light their house. They have a series of tanks in the backyard that use cow dung to create biogas, which they use for cooking. Her husband has a mill where people come to grind their corn into cornmeal. She and her husband have three children at home. Together they have also taken in three children of another family whose parents weren’t sending their kids to school, and they asked the parents to let them keep the kids in order to send them to school. When I was there each morning there were two elderly men who may have been extended family eating breakfast as well. Shite was energetic and welcoming and shone with creativity and generosity.
Pastor Joshua, who hosted us in a local Lutheran parish, praying for an elderly Christian woman in a Maasai community after a visit to provide her with communion.
Pastor Joshua from the church was from the Maasai tribe, one of 125 tribes in Tanzania but especially famous for maintaining distinctive traditions like a semi-nomadic pastoralist lifestyle, colorful clothes and extensive beaded jewelry, and traditional ceremonies. We could experience Pastor Joshua’s sense of feeling rich by appreciating and valuing his culture. He had written about Maasai traditions and talked about how as many Maasai convert to Christianity (the traditional faith is also monotheistic), they’re engaged in figuring out which traditions are good and are to be kept, and which traditions are not acceptable and are to be left behind. Other Lutheran Maasai women pastors at the conference had a similar love for their traditional culture but also rejected the fact that Maasai girls were not often sent to school. They are promoting wherever possible for young Maasai women to be able to get many years of education.
A view of Mt. Kilimanjaro from our conference center. We learned that Mt. Kilimanjaro could lose all of its glaciers within 10-20 years because of climate change.
The conference had many participants from Tanzania, other parts of Africa, Brazil, Nicaragua, many European countries, the U.S., India, Japan, and elsewhere. We were from diverse socioeconomic levels, and this provided for challenging discussions about working in favor of taking care of God’s creation in the face of climate change. We heard about how nearby Mt. Kilimanjaro will likely have no glacier within 10-20 years and has already been reduced to 25 percent of its size several decades ago, and how this will reduce the flow of water in an already dry region. We heard about how droughts are increasing in intensity and frequency, also affecting people’s food supply.
I was challenged to think yet again about how I can make changes in my lifestyle in order to use less energy and stuff (and likely be just as happy or more happy), and just as important, how I can be part of changing the structures that make us depend so much on energy and stuff in order to live. Please do the same! And please continue to keep me and my work in Guatemala in your prayers.
Marcia
The 2012 Presbyterian Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 6
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*The quote is from the Ethics of the Fathers section of the Talmud, a series of discussions between rabbis that is an important text in Judaism.
