Missionaries
gregladen | August 18, 2009But they can't, because they don't freakin' live in Utah.
But I wish they did. Hey, has anyone noticed a marked increase in these drones from Utah in South Minneapolis lately? What do they think they are goig to accomplish there?
Anyway:
SALT LAKE CITY - The U.S. Census Bureau has told Utah's elected leaders it won't count Mormon missionaries serving overseas in the nation's next head count.
Census Bureau officials, rejecting Utah's lobbying efforts for the better part of a decade, say there's no way to reliably count the overseas missionaries.
Utah leaders say the omission cost the…
gregladen | June 28, 2009As you know, there has been quite a bit of discussion about missionaries in the Congo on this blog. This is the central post pointing to everything else, and at Minnesota Atheists you'll find a link to today's radio show on the topic.
It turns out that a number of calls and emails did come in to the station today but we were unable to get to them. Among the emails, there is this two parter from from Jason Thibeault:
I have a two part question for Greg Laden. In conversations on your blog related to the topic prior to this show, you mentioned that there are secular missions to many of…
gregladen | June 28, 2009Whenever I sat at Joseph and Mary's dinner table, Mary showed a great deal of interest in my work. In between her frequent forays away from the dining room table to get this or that food item, or to issue instructions to a servant, or whatever, she would sit at the table across from me and ask questions.
"So, have you found anything interesting?" which is a standard question to which the answer was always "no" ... we do not want to give people the idea that they should head out into the bush with a shovel. "So, what to the Pygmies think of your research." And so on.
I remember that during…
gregladen | June 27, 2009Joseph and Mary, and Little Joe and Mary, and Grinker and I, sat around the table where most of the dinner had been laid out. Additional bits and pieces of the dinner would be brought out as needed shortly, but now it was time to pray.
So we held hands and bowed our heads, and Mary led a prayer to Jesus for the bounty we were about to receive and stuff, and we all said Amen and were about to dig in, when Mary interrupted with a tone of voice and a hand signal that made everyone stop with their forks in mid air.
"We have a new tradition we'd like you to participate in," she said. Her husband…
gregladen | June 26, 2009 Actual missionaries As you may have noticed, I have written a series of posts about missionaries in eastern Zaire in the 1980s and early 1990s, focusing on my own personal experiences. These seven posts represent only a small number of these experiences, but they are more or less representative. They are meant to underscore the down side of missionary activities in Central Africa. To some extent, the negatives you may see in these essays are part of the reason for missionary activity being illegal in many countries (although the reasons for those laws varies considerably). It is my…
gregladen | June 26, 2009As I've mentioned previously, the study site I worked in was beyond the Peace Corps Line. It was beyond the Blender Line. And it was beyond the Beer Line. Out here in this arguably very remote area, we were never short of remoteness. Every year the study site become more and more remote, as roads deteriorated, air strips grew over, bridges became more and more questionable. Over the previous decades there had been more of a missionary presence in this area, but the missionaries had withdrawn and now only passed occasionally down the ribbon of mud we laughingly referred to as the "road…
gregladen | June 25, 2009It was a rare day that I was at the Ngodingodi research station at all ... usually I was off in the forest with the Efe Pygmies, up the road excavating an archaeological site. It was also rare that Grinker, my cultural anthropologist colleague, was at the research station. He was spending most of his time in the villages learning language and waiting around for the other shoe to drop (he studied conflict, so on the average day ... not much conflict).
But then an even rarer thing happened.
As we sat, being rare and chatting about the weather, we heard a the sound of a distant truck…
gregladen | June 24, 2009A couple of "missionary" posts back, I intimated that we got to stay at the missionary stations while visiting various cities or en route between points in return for our work giving out medicine and such at our research camp. In truth, the arrangement was a bit more complex and subtle than this, and in fact, I think the arrangement and its nature changed over time. The various missionary entities that existed in the Ituri Forest and nearby cites that would be used as jumping off points were actually hospitable to us for three reasons. 1) Almost everybody is almost always hospitable to…
gregladen | June 23, 2009Near the end of the earth there are lines one might not cross for fear of falling off.
OK, you won't really fall off, but you will become scared and lost.
The area of my research in the Ituri was, by many standards, one of those places near the end of the earth, with the lines that have consequences if you cross them. This region of Africa, with complex and important topography, was the last to be figured out by Western explorers and geographers. As recently as 1889, Europeans thought that the Semliki River flowed from the Rwenzori Mountains into Lake Albert, and most people did not know…
gregladen | June 22, 2009Lately I've been reading the 19th and early 20th century traveler's accounts of what is now known as the Western Rift Valley and the Ituri Forest, Congo. Some are written by the famous 'explorers' such as H.M. Stanley, others written by scientists on expeditions in the area, and still others by missionaries. Reading these accounts puts me in mind of my own experiences, as a scientist working in that same area, with the missionaries that live and work, or sometimes just visit, there.
So, a few missionary stories are in order.
There were several different 'kinds' of missionaries working on…
gregladen | November 20, 2007I live in Minnesota and work in South Africa. That means that every time somebody I don't know hears that I've been to South Africa more than once or am going there for an extended period, they say "Oh, is it mission work ... my [cousin/aunt/uncle] is a missionary there."
Thankfully, I have yet to meet a missionary in South Africa, but when I lived in the Congo, I often lived among them. And there are two kinds. The good ones (as far as I know they all speak only Italian and KiSwahili and are Catholics) and the evil ones (American, Australian, and British, mostly).
OK, they've helped me…