A letter from Burkhard Paetzold in Germany
November 2008
Dear All,
Blessings to you and your loved ones! I pray that you may enjoy peaceful Advent and Christmas seasons.
In my personal life I am happy to tell you about the birth last January of our second grandchild, Milan, and about the joyful times we were able to spend with him and his parents as well as with our granddaughter, Cecilia, and her parents.
In my mission work I want to talk about several exciting journeys, for instance a trip with mission initiators from Winnetka and Erwin Presbyterian Churches to Csonkapapi, Ukraine, to spend a week at the summer camp for Roma kids. At the end of the week one of the Roma leaders, Elemer, invited us into his house in Beregszasz, a Roma ghetto. The invitation let us compare the living conditions in the Roma ghetto with the joyful atmosphere in the summer camp.
In the camp, our visiting group was trying to entertain the kids or to teach more or less helpful skills. One of my roles (as the “German engineer”) was to prepare paper airplanes to serve as models to be copied by the kids. It was hard for me to remember what I did when I was a kid myself, so many of my “sophisticated” models crashed without making any of the elegant, smooth gliding flights I loved about them in my youth. One paper airplane was stable enough to be presented, but it was hard to reproduce. So we said, “Let’s go and try to explain it to the kids, maybe it will work anyway!”
But for them it was boring to listen to my long-winded instructions and their spluttering translation. Meanwhile, it took the kids just one minute to make their paper airplanes using their own “technology.” They folded their paper planes in a strange way (I never imagined these stumpy wings could fly,) colored them hastily with their new pencils, and they were just perfect! They glided 20 or 30 yards through the orchard—some even with additional loops. And they were replicable. I had to ask the kids immediately for two gifts for my own grandkids!
You may say this experience was too short to draw cultural conclusions, but for me it was very clear. I made the typical mistake of so many Westerners who come to tell “them” what to do instead of asking them what they do. This is only one small example of how we always want to teach “them” and never ask the Roma to teach us.
In September I was blessed and privileged to travel with a group of 28 Presbyterian Women throughout the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Carpath Ukraine for the PW Global Exchange 2008. I was so glad that the national PW leaders had decided to come to Central and Eastern Europe, “my area,” and I tried to do my best to prepare a good visit. People in this region are known for their hospitality, and I heard many stories about this in particular from the different home stays.
People here are proud to talk about their history and their experiences. The Presbyterian Women learned about the Czech history of Reformation, the Velvet Revolution in 1989 that ended Communist rule, and the difficult times of transformation to a market economy and learning democracy—and so on. Some of the women felt that if this is intended to be a global exchange, we should have ways to share about the United States as well. They’re well aware that it’s not as perfect as it looks from the outside.
Later in September I attended an event in Louisville for the leaders of the Mission Networks. Mission initiators from across the PC(USA) came together to share ideas about how to cooperate with our partners in different countries. I was impressed by how many countries were represented (Russia Mexico, Uganda, and many others) and how many people groups (Kurds, for instances) are engaged. What a wealth of new ideas!
I strongly believe that networking is one of the solutions to the obstacles I described above. Mission initiators are able to learn from each other and to share and involve their partners in this learning and teaching process.
And I wish there would be a Roma network as well.
May the peace of Christ be with you all,
Burkhard
The 2008 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 156.
