Mission moments

Ten Islanders with Malawi Team 2007 return home from church-building mission in Africa with tales to tell of this life-changing experience.

A trip abroad can result in many take-home memories and material souvenirs.

But Garnet Stewart of Cornwall left a little bit of himself behind when he and a team of Islanders, most from the Island Wesleyan Church in Hampton, P.E.I., volunteered to help build a church in Chilambula, Malawi, recently.

That’s because Stewart was given the honour of naming a new baby boy while he was there and bestowed the gift of becoming godparent to the infant.

“I got thinking, ‘what am I going to call this baby . . . .’ I thought there are no Garnets down here so I’m going to name him Garnet,” a smiling Stewart says of his new namesake.

The 10-member Malawi Team 2007’s church-building venture to Africa began with Crapaud physician Hank Visser, who had lived in Nigeria with his wife, Cathy Visser, for five years in the 1980s. When Visser returned to Africa in 2005, he visited Malawi and met Dr. Chris Brooks, an Alberta man who founded Lifeline Malawi medical ministry.

Brooks, in turn, visited the Island Wesleyan Church in P.E.I. in the spring of 2006 and challenged its members to help the people in the village of Chilambula, Malawi, to complete work on a church there.

The P.E.I. church responded by raising the $7,000 needed to complete the project. Nine members and Visser’s brother volunteered to lend a constructive hand from mid-March to mid-April.

The Island church had sent funds ahead of time, so when the P.E.I. team arrived some of the clay brick walls were already starting to take shape. The team stayed at Lifeline Malawi’s mission lodge at the village edge.

The Islanders worked alongside the people of Chilambula who showed up each day to help raise the walls and roof of the new church.

“I think the beautiful part of this for me is that the synergy — our presence and their presence together — is what allowed this church to be built so rapidly,” Visser says.

“If we had worked two weeks and they had worked two weeks, this would never had happened. But it was (us together) that made this happen. They all thought it was a miracle that it went up so fast.”

The gifts that the team brought were left with their host for distribution, with the exception of teddy bears made by some Summerside women, which were presented to children at an orphan daycare facility.

The team also presented a guitar to the church pastor to make beautiful music in the new church.

“We took it with us and decided it would be nice if someone would be interested in learning how to play and then they could use it in their local service at the church,” says Janet Lake of Crapaud, who travelled with her 17-year-old daughter, Chelsey.

“When I spoke to (Pastor MacDuff), he just lit right up and said he’d love to keep it and learn to play it over time.”

The team quickly learned that small things such as this can have a large impact on a person’s life in Chilambula, including new bicycle tubes and tires for Pastor MacDuff.

“He had yarn all sewed on old tires, trying to make them last because they had split,” Stewart says, noting that it only cost $15 Cdn to put this pastor back on the cycling path again.

“If you gave him a million dollars he wouldn’t be any happier.”

Stewart’s million-dollar moment came when Moses, the foreman of the church build, invited him and Chelsey to meet his very pregnant sister and the rest of his family in a neighbouring village.

“They got us to sit on two hardwood chairs and then they started piling in,” he says.

“They were trying to explain who was related to whom, like ‘She is the mother of her,’ and ‘He is the son of him,” Chelsey adds with a smile.

A few days later, at the request of the new mother, Stewart returned to name the baby, who is now his overseas namesake.

On the usual day of rest, the team members experienced church African-style. They split into pairs and were taken two-by-two to different village churches to experience as much as possible.

“It was very lively,” Lake says of her church service.

“A lot of singing goes on — not just for a time and then it’s done, and then you move on to something else like we might in our services — it’s sort of interwoven all the way through the service.

“And they have quite a long service, more than we would here. (It would) probably run about three hours and the time just flies.”

Some of the team visited the village school where they built a few latrines. The school has more than 1,000 children with eight teachers, and the younger grades have class under a tree with the chalkboard just leaning against a tree.

“There’s a lot of need at that school,” adds Lake.

Within 10 days, the church was raised. Spirits soared on the official dedication day, Sunday, April 1.

“We all were so excited . . . and Pastor MacDuff, I think, was a bit speechless at times, he was so touched by having a church now that he could pastor,” Lake says.

“(The team was) excited, but you knew your time was coming to an end and you were sad to think about going. There were a lot of emotions going on.”

A second team is already committed to returning in 2009 to assist Lifeline Malawi with a maternity clinic expansion project. Visser hopes to take a medical team in 2009 as well.

Some might say the money used for travel costs, which was a personal responsibility of each member of the team, would be better sent to Malawi and spent on projects there, but Visser says it is the personal connection that counts most.

“If people don’t have the relationship, you don’t have the impetus to raise the funds. You can’t raise funds that people really can’t see or aren’t part of. So people give because there’s a connection. There are people on the ground that are going,” he says.

“(Then there) is that synergistic relationship — that you could accomplish things together that you could never accomplishment separately or working concurrently.

“The friendships, the ongoing relationships, that’s really the reason. And of course our growing, what we experienced just by going there and it’s a tremendous growing experience.”



mmackay@theguardian.pe.ca



Malawi at a glance



‰ The Republic of Malawi is in Southern Africa. Countries bordering Malawi are Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia.

‰ Lilongwe is the capital.

‰ The population of Malawi was estimated at 13,013,926 in 2006.

‰ English and Chichewa are both official languages.

‰ Approximately 80 per cent of the people are Christian, one fifth are Muslim and some Malawians have indigenous beliefs.

‰ The name “Malawi” is derived from “Marawi”, the name of people who migrated to the region hundreds of years ago.

‰ In 1991 Friedemann Schrenk discovered the two-and-a-half-million-year-old remains of homo rudolfensis in northern Malawi.

‰ In 2002 around 13 million people in Southern Africa faced severe food shortages. Countries particularly affected were Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Food shortages were announced again in 2005.

‰ AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) is recognized as an important public health problem in Malawi.