Cameroon Hymnal Initiative - Phase One - August 2005

Getting a Handle on What I Experienced

Overwhelming

• being in west Africa for the first time and being immersed in a multi-lingual culture
• being told at the baggage carousel that the missionary with whom I would be working had been threatened with deportation the day before I arrived
• driving through a city in which poverty and wealth, kindness and corruption, cleanliness and filth, exist side by side
• realizing that Cameroonian drivers are so reckless that we could have an accident at just about any moment

Surprising

• hearing the Cameroonian observation that one of the defining characteristics of Americans are that they are ‘dirty’ (i.e. that they pay little attention to their appearance)
• being asked to address a worship conference of west African Pentecostals (it never materialized, but was still surprising)

Amusing

• arriving at an airport for a city of 1,300,000 at which they turn the lights off and leave when no planes are expected for a while
• realizing that I felt no less alive for not having the Starbucks ‘experience’ for three weeks
• visiting a golf course where the principle hazard is not sand or water, but poisonous snakes
• seeing a 6’ X 6’ wooden shack with a dirt floor called “Hollywood Coiffure”
• realizing that a mason working on home-building project was using a Texas Rangers baseball helmet as a hard hat
• asking one of the pastors to take us to a place where we could buy a tire, only to be taken to a tailor shop (to get ‘attire’)

Exhilerating

• realizing that God was paving the way for this experience
• feeling the joy of introducing new songs to people from outside their cultural context even though I myself was a stranger
• hearing music in the air, on every street corner, from all over the world, all day long
• visiting a hospital to meet the newborn baby of one of the pastors

Frustrating

• experiencing the every-day challenges that the mission faces because corruption is such a part of the everyday life and commerce of Cameroon
• seeing such incredibly hard-working, generous, funny people struggling simply to survive
• feeling defensive as I was repeatedly approached by church members for money, as if the only thing Westerners are good for is bringing money

Humbling

• taking one of the pastors and his spouse out for a meal in their own village and having him ask if he could eat the meat that I decided it would be unwise for me to eat
• realizing that with that same couple, if she sewed 75 shirts a month, and received the equivalent of $6 per shirt for her labor, she would earn almost twice as much as her husband in a month

Reassuring

• experiencing the fact that Cameroonian Christians face many of the same challenges, fight many of the same fights, struggle similarly in the pursuit of being a faithful church
• having my romanticism about Africans’ musical ability punctured based on hearing some perfectly awful choirs and witnessing some atrocious song leadership

Awesome

• knowing that some people had walked a great distance to attend the singing festivals
• seeing the talent that God is nurturing
• meeting one of the ‘cell’ groups (groups of 12 people who intend to be the core of a new congregation), and seeing their fervor
• sensing that God fully intended to ‘prosper the work of our hands’