DennisinMalawi.com

This man from my church, Dennis, is currently on a 6 week stint to Malawi, Africa to work with an organization called Opportunity International. I guess they have a bank there that helps the poorest people in the region. The bank was founded by a group of Christians and it's not for profit. I don't know much about it at all, but I do know that Dennis took his tenure time that he earned from work to spend serving others. He went with our youth back in March to Romania on that missions trip to help us out and he is such an awesome, integrable man of Godly character. Anyway, I was just reading his site dennisinmalawi.com and was touched by some of the stories of the locals there that he has met. So I wanted to share a bit with you.

Working with Opportunity International Bank of Malawi
Where do I start?After arriving at OIBM I have spent the last 3 days getting to know the staff, their clients and their vision for the future. They are looking for me to help them develop a marketing and brand strategy for the bank to allow them to plan the next 6 to 24 months advertisements. So the past few days have been mostly information gathering for me. I have met 10 of their micro lending clients in the market here in the city and in the village about 25 miles in the bush. My experiences are one of such sorrow and yet hope. It’s best to share this with you in just a few stories of some amazing women.

Agnes- This woman started out making donuts in her kitchen and having two boys sell them in the market. She also did hairdressing in her home. When the hairdressing began to expand, she wanted to open a shop so here home would be less noisy. First she rented a space in a building and later she bought her own little shop outside of the city centre. Her hair saloon was a big success and she started to offer various goods in her shop to allow the locals to buy things from her instead of having to go into town. This later developed into a small convenience store which later expanded into a small grocery store offering food, soap, cold drinks and other household goods. Not finished yet, Agnes returned to her cooking roots by opening a restaurant near her shop where she serves food from 11:30 till 6pm. This is managed by Irene while Agnes works behind the counter of the store when she is not cutting hair.She came to OIBM when the bank she got her first loan, turned her down for her second. She is motivated by her responsibility to the poor in her country and as she says it “looking for something nicer than I have”. She employs 18 people in her three shops and has bought land nearby which she hopes to open an even bigger grocery store someday.

Mrs. Chunda – This miraculous woman started out carrying baked good on her head to the market everyday. One day she asked the government for the piece of land adjacent to the main bus station which they were using as a dump site. She cleaned it up and set up her own restaurant. She now served people from 10am – 6pm cooking on open fires and serving a simple choice of meat or chicken with maze or rice. The price is about $1 and the customers sit under a plywood roof on tables and chairs. She says she has served over 17,000 per day and hopes to someday put down a cement floor rather then the dirt one and get electricity and a refrigerator to serve cold drinks. She has 7 of her own children and has taken in 18 others from her brothers and sister who have died. Their ages range from 21 to 3 years old. She heard about OIBM from a friend and decided to become a customer and then a client to expand her business. She has 10 people working for her cooking, serving and washing up.

The village meeting – I sat with over 60 men, women and their children this morning as a member of OIMB gave them a presentation under the meeting tree. Brown told them of the importance of working together to make their business grow and to help each other if they were to continue to be successful. These people are borrowing between $10 and $15 in order to buy more food or soap to sell in the small stall under some cardboard or in their small hut. Some used the money to buy galvanized steel to make water pails or wood to make chairs and beds there in the village. These people greeted me and my colleagues from OIBM with songs and smiles. The women of Malawi love to sing and so quite often when they are together the just break out in song. The village chief was there to monitor the presentation and to participate. I was introduced as a man from Britain coming to help them. For my part I took lots of pictures which I am hoping to get uploaded into the site soon. Email and other forms of communication can be quite spotty. As I took their pictures I would show them the results on the TFT screen and they were all amazed. For some this may have been one of the first times they had their picture taken.But what really impressed me was their faith in Jesus. It stared this morning at 7:15 at the OIBM satellite branch which opened in Oct 2004. (These were 3 containers they crafted together and created an amazing place with air conditioning, and ATM machine and a garden to have their customers sit outside in comfort.) The whole staff met for morning devotionals before opening the bank at 8. When we went to the village we also opened and closed with prayer and sang songs of praise. These people have so very little yet they have the love of God and the feeling that the Holy Spirit is with them. The children are full of smiles and joy. I was saddened when I realized that one out of every 4 would not make it to their 5th birthday. Yet through this all they were amazing friendly to me and I never felt threatened in any way. This was the same the day before when I walk around the market where 10,000 people work and try to survive in this very poor country.You get the sense of how poor when all day long you see people walking barefoot, picking up wood along the road, trying to sell a fish or a pigeon they just caught. People selling all sorts of things that they hope will get them some money. Yet there does not feel like there is hopelessness in the air or with the people. They want to work, to earn a living so they can get shoes or a better roof on their house or just to have some other clothes to wear. And they all feel a sense of obligation to each other. They know they are a poor country but they are also looking for ways get out of this poverty.

Relevant Rocks

I just read a great article that I wanted to share with you and discuss! So post and give your two cents!

Grow Up and Give Up

Twenty years from kindergarten, and we’re still publicly bombarded by one inquiry: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Except, now it’s been not-so cleverly morphed into the weightier “What are you going to do with your life?” If you’re like me, you look blankly at the asker and rattle off whichever occupation seems cool at the moment. (Did I say “cool”? I mean God-inspired.) The problem with this question seems to be a conflict of considerations. The first, and most obvious, is money. Whoever doesn’t have student loans or other forms of debt, raise your hand. Unless you want to live out of your parents’ basement, downing Pixie Stix and chili-flavored Ramen for the rest of your life, money’s important. So we listen to the chants around us: “Be successful! Make more money!” and our parents: “Put me in a nice nursing home!” and think, “Hey … I could use more money. I should find a job that gives me money. More money.” And it really starts and ends there for a lot of us. We want it, we need it, and it’s the only way we’ll get a nicer car, a nicer home and those 10 new CDs we want (and those five DVDs, and maybe a couple books and some nice soda crackers for the pâté party on Saturday). It’s the only way we’ll be able to buy (I mean “provide for”) a nice spouse/family … and that’s important … so money takes precedence in our lives. We believe if we seek it, we will get it, as long as we can tolerate the job that puts it in our burning pockets.Then there’s this other notion, floating behind the images of Benjamins and sugarplums in our heads. Rumor is it’s called happiness. OK, so maybe a fair number of us believe in doing something we enjoy. The problem is, a lot of the time the things that make us happy don’t make us wealthy. So, we discard them to go make money, or we decide the sacrifice is worth it, suck it up and tell ourselves for the rest of our lives that we could be making the big bucks if we wanted to, but our work is just too meaningful and enjoyable to give up.And really, those are the two biggest factors that our generation, in order to form a more perfect lifestyle, considers. They’re the factors our parents, our relatives, our professorsall want us to consider. And that’s cool for most of us, for a while, because as we pursue our lives, liberties and bigger DVD collections (and happiness), we get the feeling that we’re finally growing up, we’re finally maturing and moving out. And that’s life. We keep up the good work for another 60 years, bite the bucket and send posthumous donations to the American Heart Association in lieu of flowers. And most Christians are satisfied with that definition of life, as long as you’re “glorifying God” in the process.But I have a problem with that. I think a lot of people do, but they don’t realize it until they’re writing articles like this one. Where’s the sense of purpose in that? What does my pursuit of my inalienable rights contribute to anyone, or anything, but me? Sure I tithe. Sure I get involved at church. But honestly, at this point in our lives when we’re deciding what to do for the rest of our lives, do we really want something that will just make us money or just make us happy? Or do we want more?I think there’s an X-factor required in all this to make our striving finally significant … we need significance itself. Meaning. Purpose. Seven-letter words with big definitions. But all the greenbacks and feel-goods in the world are crap unless we have meaning first. And to take it one step further, let’s talk about eternal meaning. About doing something for God with significance beyond the confines of our bipolar planet. Because when God asks me to account for my life, I don’t want to tell Him, “I worked a day job in an air-conditioned office … for You!”Often the greatest feeling of significance in our lives comes from directly serving Him. I’ve talked to numerous Christians who return from missions trips and other various services to tell me how awesome it was—how they left their hearts back in the village, or in the soup kitchen, and I can’t help but think, “If your heart’s there, why aren’t you?” I know there’s a lot of factors. We think we have to worry about money. We think we have to worry about our happiness. But we don’t. We don’t have to worry about anything; even the sparrows are covered by God’s providence. The only thing we should worry about is doing something worthy of the name of the God who saved us. And at this point in our lives, when we’re young and not stuck in mortgages or other long-term commitments, why not send a giant “screw you” to the consumerist powers that be and do something of eternal significance? Why not give our lives over to the God that’s brought us here, now, before we’re weighed down by all the anchors “maturity” brings?Some heads are nodding (mine was), until I realized that if I truly seek to serve Him and do something of eternal significance, I just might lose myself and my right to my desires. And that’s completely true. With God, there’s no promise of inalienable rights. And that, coupled with the notion of devoting my life to what He wants to do with me, not my wants and wishes, scares me crapless. There’s so much to give up. But this life isn’t about what I want. It’s about what He wants. And when we do what He wants, we’ll slowly see His wants become our wants, and that’s when the “eternal significance” wheels really start rolling.

[Peter Hypki is a 21-year old former English major and InterVarsity Press intern with an impressive knack for sitting quietly, tripping loudly and falling for the most amazing girl he’s ever met.]

6 miles...42 minutes

Reasons I hate England:

• Traffic-it just took me 42 minutes to drive 6 miles at 2 in the afternoon. Now if this were a once in a while occurance, okay, but this happens practically ever day.
• It takes 4 days to deposit a check. You CANNOT cash a check ever apparently.
• You cannot park at the store you want to go to, you park in a garage, which you usually pay for...and it can be almost impossible to find a spot in these garages much of the time.
• Petrol costs about $5 a gallon-making it about $75 to fill up my '89 VW Golf
• I now FULLY understand the reasoning behind the large plate of glass that separates the customer from the bank teller. I almost had a thrown down fight today with the teller over the fact that the back of my credit/debit card says "see i.d." as opposed to just signing my signature. My reasoning behind this is that if my card gets taken ANYONE can easily forge my signature, so I like to sign with a little reminder for the cashier to ask for the i.d. in which case the alleged thief would be caught!! But she was very adament about the fact that I did NOT read the fine print under terms and conditions and if I had, I would know that my card is invalid because it is not SIGNED.
• Ridiculously narrow roads in which massive trucks drive down toward me...basically the whole driving thing and everything it entails. Except roundabouts, I LOVE roundabouts!
• The weather
• The lack of Mexican food
• Drunk people on the trains/tubes at night

That's about it for now I think. Luckily there are many more reasons why I LOVE England and the whole UK!!!

My heart belongs to Scotland

If only I could marry a Scot, ay! Scotland might be the most beautiful place my eyes have ever seen. But "beautiful" seems so unappreciative of the indescribable land I have just encountered. Breathtaking, majestic, incredible, awesome, brilliant, amazing, splendorous, unreal, GREEN...some of the words that rolled through my head as our bus scooted across the country from loch to loch and mountain to mountain. I wish I could describe what it looked like and I wish my pictures did it justice, but no...there is just nothing to say or show for it...it has to be viewed by your own eyes to fully understand.
We left for Scotland Thursday morning (july7)-had to rise at 4 a.m. to be at Megen's for 5 to go to the airport! Edinburgh was pretty sunny and warm when we got there so we walked down the Royal Mile, which is the historic high street of Edinburgh. At the top is Edinburgh castle and at the bottom is Holyrood house, which is the official Scottish residence of the Royal family. If you choose to continue past Holyrood house and to the right, you will reach this huge "park"-Holyrood Park- and there is this massive hill. At the top of the hill is Arthur's Seat. It's quite a little hike up there, but Meg and I took it on and got some great views of the city and the sea. After that we went to the cutest little tea room for cakes and iced coffee! During the afternoon sometime we got the news about the attacks in London. It was pretty crazy and strange because we know so many people in London...just weird...so we watched the news for a while and contacted a couple of people in London to make sure they were fine. Then, that night we went out to a pub-The Malt Shovel-for some local Scottish music. We had a crackin' good time.
The next 3 days we were on the Scotland/Isle of Skye tour all over the place! Saw incredible sights, the true Scotland-outside of the city. We stopped in precious little towns, lunched at a loch, took a boat ride on Loch Ness, heard loads of legends, went to Saucy Mary's pub in Kyleakin for some more live music-all on Friday. Saturday we went on a seal cruise and saw lots of seals and lots of jellyfish-who knew there were jellyfish up there?? Went to Portree-the Isle of Skye "capital," fairyland which is my favorite place in the world, hiked on a mountainside in the rain-I got scared of the heights and this nice boy Simon offered to hold my hand so that I could make it up :-), had to hold Meg's hand on the way down. Sunday we took the ferry from Skye to mainland Scotland, went to the beach and got some shells, grabbed lunch for a picnic and then ate next to a river at Glen Nevis (bottom of Ben Nevis which is the highest mountain in the UK) where some of Braveheart was filmed, on to glencoe overlook with beautiful waterfall/river views, to another waterfull near a town called Callander, saw a hairy coo named Hamish...and ended up back in Edinburgh that evening. We went to this awesome African restaurant called NDEBELE. I love African food! The next day we bought the souveniers we had previously picked out and since it was the most beautiful day ever!!! we grabbed food from a supermarket and picnicked in the park for lunch. Then we ended up spending the rest of the afternoon laying out in the park reading...and also had a picnic dinner there as well! It was a great day under the sun and I read a book called Purple Hibiscus-which is by a Nigerian author and takes place in Nigeria-really good story. Then we flew back to London and our wonderful holiday was sadly finished.

Finally a free moment...

I got back late Monday night from Scotland and haven't had a minute to blog about the best place in the world yet...and still don't except for a moment. I cannot do my full blog at this moment, but Megen has done a highlight which you can check it out if you so desire on her blog. I will write all about everything soon.

Back in town

I would like to say that I arrived safely back to England with minimal problems. Had an airport issue when I went to fly out-apparently my reservation had not been paid for and was canceled, so I had to fork out $940 for one way on the spot. It went to my credit card. Don't worry, it will be reimbursed, but it just stinks cause I had booked such a cheap return trip that didn't get taken care of. No comment. Anyway, my time home was great. Sort of bittersweet though-time in Texas was great, but South Dakota was just okay. I just wish I had more time with my grandma and other fam from Arizona, but it was great to spend some time with them at least and a lot of time with my immediate family. Kinda boring, but not horrible-other than the breakdown in Liberal, Kansas. My 2 days in Amarillo flew by and then San Antonio was the highlight. I really like San Antone a lot. It was good fun and Sofia came which was greatness. Shane and Beth are just so fun and we have a great time together. I look forward to living near them in the future and hanging out lots and lots. The best part was floating on the Guadalupe for 3 hours. My shins got extremely sunburned (for me) and hurt for a week, but man, that was the best day ever. The other greatest thing was eating tons and tons of Mexican food all weekend in preparation for coming back to the country that is void of any great tasting Mexi. So thank you Shane, Beth, and Sofia for allowing me to choose the restaurants all weekend and eat Mexi every meal! Being back in London has been okay, but a little lonely since Dustin and Travis are gone. I was in the office all alone for a couple days and it was pretty uneventful. But now I am in Edinburgh! Just arrived this morning...so now I will go off and explore the city!