It’s 5am and I’m up in the dark listening to the Myna birds
begin their daily welcoming of the morning (they are joined by roosters, dogs,
and some other critters whose identity I can’t quite discern). One blessing which has been completely new to
my adult life is that I have been consistently sleeping very well – almost 8
hours a day. Today is an exception but
still I’ve had nearly 7 hours. It’s the
first time I can remember being regularly rested and feeling good as I approach
a day because for years I have slept very restlessly, getting up several times
in the night and logging an average of 4-5 hours sleep. Don’t know why it’s different here but it’s
just been a wonderful blessing.
We’ve had a blues crisis recently where Annie broke down in
tears again over the frustration and lack of fulfillment at being on this
mission. Since the very beginning when
we received the call, things have never seemed “right” for her. More than once she has felt she could not go
on, but what do you do – quit and go home in shame? It’s been a terrible time in that
regard. At home she has “her world”
defined and in control. She has all her
creative outlets in the home, sewing, making things for kids and grandkids and
for many others in need. She can
decorate and visit, bring relief and love to others, and have a calling that is
defined and measureable in completing tasks and being successful. And we can clean things, vacuum them, wipe
them down – and they largely stay clean (everything here is perpetually dirty
with a coat of soot over everything daily from the continual fires in the cane
fields, sugar plant emissions, and back yard burning that goes on regularly).
But here on a mission everything in her life is upside down. We control so little, we have nothing except
the basics of living, and it’s endlessly and monotonously hot and sticky and
dirty – with bugs and critters everywhere.
We live in a very noisy area with trucks, busses, and people passing by
all the time and with endless bands of barking feral and domestic dogs – so
loud you can’t do anything, let alone sleep (and you can’t close your windows
because it’s too hot). But the worst is
feeling that we only make a narrow contribution that is frustratingly slow and
questionably long lasting.
The culture here is simply made for failure. Very few phones, so you generally can’t
confirm a visit and we often go somewhere or wait for someone who never
shows. Time means nothing and people are
regularly late to everything if they do come at all (no clocks or watches). And travel is so frustrating, time consuming,
and expensive for the Fijians almost none of whom have cars (we don’t know a
single one). Annie struggles each time
we do a lesson to feel adequate in her preparation and delivery – and of
course, she’s always measuring herself against me. I’ve had a lifetime of teaching and study and
it must be so intimidating to her, so even in this one arena of satisfaction
and meaningful activity she feels less than successful. She actually does a great job and I have felt
the Spirit many times as she has taught and born testimony.
In the Church, we are starting from scratch with the most
frustrating set of circumstances I can imagine.
We came to a “ward” (small struggling branch, really) that has had no
bishop and no officers for 16 months. It
has been run by a high councilor and EVERYTHING is a shamble. No records, no success, progressing
inactivity (314 people on the rolls and 20-30 attending), and NO preparation
for any Sunday meeting. You’d just
arrive, the high councilor would walk over to someone and ask them to teach a
class or give a talk and you’d have a pathetic Sunday experience. People often can’t read or understand the
materials, have no background in understanding the gospel, and can’t get
anywhere for training because of the time and expense involved (and who would
train them anyway?). Most members have a
Book of Mormon but few have read it (Fijian version is in an old language and
is very difficult and the English is also difficult for them to understand),
very few have even heard of the Doctrine and Covenants or Pearl of Great Price,
and fewer yet have read them – perhaps none.
So you have members who were baptized because they experienced a miracle
or felt the Spirit testify to them but with so little to build on that they
really don’t progress. Most have never
heard of Home or Visiting Teaching and weekday activities to strengthen the
youth are non-existent. In the villages,
there is a little Christian church of some sort nearby (usually, Methodist), and it serves people
well because it’s right there and people just walk a little ways to it but for
us, everyone has to travel. The only
affordable travel is public busses, but they don’t run on Sundays so that
leaves Taxis, “transports” – which are little Toyota trucks with a cover over
the back that bunches of people huddle under, or, walking 30-90 minutes. It’s common for people to do both, walk out
of the village to a main road, and then catch a transport for part of the
way. It is, by comparison to their
meager incomes (0-$100/week), so expensive to take a taxi or transport that
people must make deep sacrifices to come to Church even semi-regularly. So how do you extend callings? How do you know if someone asked will even
show up – or remember?
Annie and I decided to clean up and organize the clerk’s
office the other day to help our new bishopric get a good start. The bishop is a wonderful humble, hard
working man but with little education of any sort. His only counselor has been a member one year
but inactive for 7 months of that year. These
brethren know little about any Church organization (what is Primary, YW, YM,
RS, etc?), and have never seen the Church “work.” They have no leadership experience, have
never seen a handbook, don’t know how to interview or extend callings, and
can’t begin to grasp how many interviews they should be doing (regular youth
interviews, adults in trouble, welfare, transgression, etc.). I have been meeting with them to help out and
we do things like “how to plan a sacrament meeting and fill out an agenda”
(doing one planning sheet took us over 20 minutes the first time). I love helping them but we are starting from
absolute ground zero.
So anyway, we thought we’d help out if possible by starting
with the clerk’s office, which is the only location for storage of any
kind. It has a computer, which no one
knows how to use, a printer that has no paper, one filing cabinet that
someone forgot to order file folders and a hanger apparatus for so everything
has just been thrown into the drawers, and a few shelves. We removed boxes full of old things that
never got passed out, used, or have become outdated. We tried to clean the dirt, dust, and gecko
poop off of the shelves and counter (people in Fiji don’t really clean up
things – they live in dirt so they don’t have much of a concept of
cleanliness). Fijians also own very
little, so they generally have no need to learn organization and the Church
shows that. File drawers had old records
shoved together with tithing slips that had either never been processed or
never returned to members, and stacks and stacks of things that were intended
to be passed out to members but never were.
Since people don’t use computers everything we know about Church record
keeping is different and they have long, drawn out procedures to keep track of
things – so by and large nothing is actually done. There has been immense waste of Church funds
in our opinion and mismanagement of others.
But who knows how to manage anything?
And even if they did, when would they do it? They travel with their families into Church on
Sundays and afterward can’t really stay to do much because the kids all need to
get home and they can’t afford to go
separately (the average Sunday experience with travel is already 5-7 hours for
most with no added meetings). And most
can’t afford to come back during the week.
So when do you clean up, learn your duty, perform a calling, or get
training??? Even if they could get to a
training, who would do it – since the members we have exposure to have never seen the
Church work and stake leaders have the same challenges as all the rest of the
members.
Well, enough of the problems and challenges. You’d think with all these circumstances we
should be happy knowing that whatever we do it will be a contribution. But we often still find ourselves in the “Laman
and Lemuel” stage of spiritual immaturity and murmuring. The only thing that brings us to our senses
and ameliorates the concerns is when we are with the people and reminded of how
little they have and how much of everything we have (wealth, education, opportunity,
etc.).
Two days ago we went to visit a less-active member who is 36
years old and has no arms (one finger grows out of his right shoulder). He was so humble, and so sweet as we invited
him back to Church. He lives so far away
that if he were to return to activity he’d likely have to move in with a
relative somewhere nearer to town. Think
of the irony of our invitation – “Oh, you can do this even though you have no
arms, must depend on others for food, and to succeed you only have to pick up
and move to someone else’s home!” But as
we shared with him the invitation, we felt to promise him that the Lord would
make it possible if he desired to return (we read 1 Nephi 3:7 and other similar
promises). As we shared with him, we
were pricked in our own hearts with the scripture; “physician, heal
thyself.” We need to have more trust in
the Lord, more faith to accept our circumstances, and less egocentric
complaining about difficult things. More
than others, we need to apply the great advice President Hinckley’s father gave
to him in a period of missionary discouragement: “Forget yourself and go to
work.” We often feel like complaining
children who need to be taught a few lessons about the difficulties of life and
about pulling up the boot-straps and trudging forward. In that regard, our mission has taken all of
the “accomplishments” and supposed spiritual maturity we thought we had and
shaken us to the core with the reality that we have much to learn. Things are more tenuous than stable, more
difficult than pleasant, and our missionary success and happiness more fleeting
that we could have imagined. We are
prayerful that we will succeed and aware that it will only happen with the
Lord’s help, but that He is unlikely to give it while we are focused on our own
difficulties. We need more of the simple
faith and dogged determined attitude of Nephi.
