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| Christmas Mass at St. John the Baptist |
I’d like to begin with thanking you for your continued
prayers and support! And for being patient as it’s been several months since
we’ve last written in our blog. Quite honestly, it has felt like we haven’t
“accomplished” much or had anything fun to share. That’s what it felt like
anyway but thinking back, we have so much to share it’ll take more than one
entry to get you updated!
Ministry of Presence – we learned about presence being a
ministry in our formation training. I remember Paul, our Program Director,
saying more than once that we’d need to learn to be okay with just being and
not always doing. For most American’s this is not an easy task. We focus on
productivity, accomplishments or to simply put it – getting things done.
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| Typical kitchen scene, Ruthie 10yrs old |
Looking back to mid-November it started getting difficult for us to be content
“just being present.” Our daily life was becoming a bit more routine; we spend
quite a bit of time at the 2 preschools we work with and attended various
meetings at church. In our spare time,
we typically play with the neighborhood children or the children who come to
the church property on the weekends for tilitonse (Sunday School, but on
Saturday’s—all morning!). Life was beginning to feel “smooth”. But it also felt
like we weren’t doing anything different and didn’t have anything to share in
our blog. And quite honestly, homesickness hit me pretty hard around the
holidays. Writing a blog update forces me to think of my family and friends, so
not writing was just easier than getting sad. (I’ll return to homesickness in a
bit)
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| Laundry time |
Many of the Comboni Fathers we work with in the
Malawi/Zambia Province have told us the importance and huge impact the ministry
of presence is especially with us being a family with two small children. We
are still struggling with the language. Unfortunately the 50 or so hours of
language training we received early on was only enough for greetings and very
basic communication. Because we are not even close to fluent in Chichewa, we
get discouraged and feel we’re not able to be as involved as we’d like to be.
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| Lily, Josie and their friend Febe |
To impact the feeling of being discouraged and not
comfortable with the ministry of presence, after Mass on Sunday I had a woman
tell me I should know the language by now and she was disappointed in me. This
comment made me feel bad for about five minutes. It only took about five
minutes for me to receive 4 comments regarding our presence being so impacting
and beautiful to our church community. The Treasurer of the church told me with
a huge smile, “you do good work, we are so blessed to have you and your family
here.” Then a preschool teacher we work with came up and introduced me to his
friend. He told the friend how wonderful it has been having us at the
preschools and he spoke of all the “great changes and contributions” we’ve
made. One woman stopped me as I was leaving to ask if we were leaving for
America soon (in Chichewa and I understood her!). I told her no, we’d be here
for at least two more years. You should have seen her smile; she shook my hand
and thanked me many times for not leaving!
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| Tonya & Febe |
My point isn’t to tell you all the
great compliments I received in this 10 minute timespan one Sunday after Mass.
Rather its to demonstrate how in only 11 short months, with only knowing a little
of the local language our family was able to make connections, to build
relationships, to show others we care and we love them. Yes, I’m confident
there is more than one person here who is disappointed or frustrated that we
still struggle with Chichewa. But, clearly for each person who is disappointed in
our lack of language skills there are 4 more who are touched at our mere
presence among this community.
God sure knew what I needed on this particular Sunday. I was
feeling stale and after the first woman’s comment about her disappointment I
was feeling downright bad. Then, these people just started saying things to me
about our ministry and most were referring to our ministry of presence. I will
continue to pray for peace and acceptance that I am right where God wants me to
be. I pray for an open heart, calmness, and patience everyday. I am humbled to
be reminded of our training session as well as what the Comboni Fathers have
told us – Ministry of Presence is important, we need to embrace and accept it.
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| Lilyanna & her wonderful personality |
Don’t let me mislead you; we have plenty going on though
it’s the things we’ve basically already told you about. We’re still overseeing
the two Comboni Preschools, I’m helping in the Comboni Provincial Finance
Office and Jacob has been extremely busy launching a new café at Lilyanna’s
school. Plus we attend various church meetings, assist Fr Somanje, our Comboni
Parish Priest, in grant writing requests and have most recently become the
neighborhood First Aid Nurse, ambulance driver and human jungle gym. (next blog
update we’ll elaborate!)
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| Josephine learning to balance |
I mentioned being homesick around the holidays, I’d like to
return to this thought. I’ve never lived more than 45 miles from my parents,
until moving to Malawi at 35 years old. The holidays were a bit tough though we
made it through and our family enjoyed them. Right around Christmas, we began
receiving emails, MANY OF THEM, from our St. Ann’s and HMC Church Community.
Every time I’d open my email, there would be 5 or 10 more messages. These
messages continued to come for a few weeks after Christmas.
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| Jacob after a morning run |
I can’t even
express how beautiful it was for our family to hear from so many of you! The
messages were touching, we didn’t feel forgotten, and instead we felt love and
support! And most of all, it helped cure the homesickness! Technology sure has
made being a missionary much easier than it must have been before the internet
was widely available! Thank you so much for your Christmas wishes, each and
every one of them means so much to us! We didn’t delete a single one, they have
their own email folder. When one of us is feeling a bit homesick or lonely, we
simply open up the emails and begin reading.Thank you so much for the
beautiful blessings so many of you gave us this holiday season!
Please know you
are always in our prayers, multiple times each day! We love praying on specific
prayer requests so please include us when you have something specific you’d
like us to be praying for. Why not have prayers being said from literally all
over the worldJ
Thanks again for being patient as this blog update is long overdue! We’ll write
again shortly with some specifics of our encounters over the past few months.
In Christ’s Peace,
Tonya, Jacob, Lilyanna and Josephine
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| Kleven Family, Christmas morning |
