Feeling the trip

There is a great comment by one of the characters of Willam Gibson's book Pattern Recognition. She says that when you fly long distances you move faster than your soul and leave it behind. It takes a few days for it to catch up. Today it feels like our soul has come crashing into our body. Since Wednesday when we arived we have been doing OK with the jet-lag but today it has hit us like a ton of bricks almost at the exact same time. We are doing alright but are having waves of dizziness and upset stomachs. I am sure it will pass. Please join us tomorow night at St. Francis of Assisi in Indian Springs for our first official dinner and talk if you can. Blessings and Peace, Jeremy and Penny

We're Home!!

Hey everyone just wanted to send a quick email to let you all know that we arrived home safely yesterday around 12pm. We stayed awake until about 7pm and got up around 7am today. We are just hanging out recovering at my Mom's house in Bham. If you need to call us the number is 205 871-1084. We will be getting a cell phone in the next few days to have while we are home and I will send the number when we get it.  Our first official event will be this Sunday evening the 24th at St. Francis of Assisi in Pelham. I think it is at 6:30pm. We will have dinner and then we will have a talk and give people a chance to buy a few things we brought home.  Hope you are all well and thanks for the great weather in Birmingham. We are really looking forward to seeing everyone. Peace, Jeremy and Penny

Coming Home

We hope that everyone is doing well. This will be our last post before we come home on May 20. On Sunday Penny and I are headed to the North for a week. Penny will be helping with an HIV/AIDS prevention and home based care training of trainers. I will be going for the second week of the clergy training program. We will be back in Windhoek on Sunday the 17th and begin our travels on the 19th. The last few weeks have been really great and we have made some great connections for our return. A few days ago Penny had a meeting with one of the directors of I-TEC (International Training and Education Center for HIV/AIDS), Yesterday we had the blessed opportunity to meet and have tea with Father Michael Lapsley and members of the training team from the Institute for the Healing of Memories. Here is a little about his story from the Forgiveness Project. Today we are going to sit down with Father Rick Bauer who is the director of Catholic AIDS Action in Namibia. It is great to be able to make these connections. We realize how much they could help with the work we are doing with the Diocese. This past week the Cathedral hosted meetings of the Cathedral Chapter and Standing Committee. The meeting included the Archdeacons from around the Diocese. There are so many stories from this country and diocese and the faith and hope of Anglicans here is beyond almost anything I have ever seen. Most priest in this country work for less than $200 USD a month. They are usually responsible for more than one parish and several outstations. Since almost none of them has a car they hitchhike between locations and then walk many kilometers to get where they are going. The parishioners go months sometimes without seeing priest but carry on with Lay Ministers doing Morning Prayer. The situation is desperate but there is hope. Next week will be the second seminar for out new clergy trainees and they are excited to take up their place in a few years. The Rev Deacon Linea Haufiku is now studying in the U.S. at Seminary of the Southwest and will be coming to the Diocese of Alabama for a three month internship this summer. She will be based at St. Matthews in Madison but will do some travelling to tell people about Namibia and share her own stories. She is an incredible person. I want everyone to know that your support for us has been turned into support for Linea.
We are really excited to be coming home for a month and look forward to seeing as many people as possible. On this trip we will be in Birmingham, Athens, and Gadsden to see family and friends and to do some preaching and presenting about our work in Namibia. Unfortunately we will not make it to the south or west of Bham on this trip. We won't make it to Montgomery, Auburn, Selma or Demopolis or to the Tuscaloosa area. On our next trip home we will make sure to put you all on the top of the list. If you are able to come to Birmingham, Decatur or Gadsden we would love to see you there.
Our next post will be from the U.S. Blessings and Peace, Jeremy and Penny

The Last Two Months

Ok, so two weeks turned into two months without a post on the Blog. Hopefully you haven’t all forgotten about us. So many things have happened over the past two months that I will only give a summary. In mid February our friend Monica Romano from St. John’s Montgomery came for a visit. She brought four suitcases. Only half of one was her stuff. The rest were gifts and supplies generously donated by our friends in Alabama. We cannot say thank you enough for all the wonderful reminders of home and of the supplies for Sunday school.

While Monica was here we took 6 days and travelled around the country. We went North to Oshakati and ended up spending the day with an incredible group of people from the HIV support group at the village of Onakunghundi . I have sent out the web album to our email list but if you didn’t get that, here it is again. Click Here. The structure made of sticks is actually the Church/Preschool/meeting hall, etc. The people there were beautiful and generous, they cooked us a chicken and served us omalodu, traditional millet beer. We sang and prayed with them and were generally inspired by their hopefulness. You can see in some of the photos how high the water was when we visited. The flooding got much, much worse after that in the North. After leaving the North we took Monica to Etosha for some game viewing and to Swakopund for some ocean & dune viewing. It was a great trip and we were excited to see a friendly and familiar face. Just after Monica left we had a major computer crash and lost most all of our photos from the first 9 months. We thought they were backed up to another hard drive, but...

A couple of weeks after Monica left Penny and I were asked to come to an orphanage just across town with a friend from the U.S. Embassy. It was a life altering visit. I cannot go into detail about it here but here is what I wrote the night after our visit on my Facebook page:
Sometimes it happens before you know it. You walk into a place, a relationship, or a situation and before you know what is going on, your heart is removed from your chest and smashed on the ground in front of you. You feel your gut tighten and it hurts in a way no words could ever touch. A voice in the back of your mind says "What did you expect? This is the way it goes, this is life." Then you think you hear laughing, at how naive you were, at how silly your expectations about the world were. And all the time you stare down into the face of that child, crushing you heart beneath her feet. She smiles at you, it's her laughter you heard, and she's holding the first toy she has had in months. It only makes you happy that you once had a heart, it makes you remember where it was. Then the little boy comes to you wanting his photo taken and again you feel this ripping in your chest. "Wait" you think "isn't that over, isn't my heart destroyed beneath another foot?" And so it goes on and on and on for what seems like days, but is in reality only a few hours. The six month old infant, horribly thin and nursing a surgery wound bigger than her. A little girl unable to control her urination after being repeatedly raped by her step-father. 37 little children from 6 months to 17 years old, many HIV positive, living in a run down house, also known as an orphanage. A woman does her best to run this place with the help of German donors and provides a place and a home for those without a home. Each one of them now holds a piece of the heart that once lived in my chest. I'm happy I can still feel it hurt.

For the past few weeks everything has revolved around Easter. It is tradition at the Cathedral to invite a Holy Week presenter from outside the Diocese to spend Holy Week with us. To preach and celebrate and do a program associated with the themes of Holy Week. This year The Rt. Rev Garth Counsell, Bishop of Table Bay, and his wife Marion were our visitors. Bishop Garth is actually the Bishop of Cape Town in South Africa, but because that title is reserved for the Archbishop of Southern Africa, he is known as the Bishop of Table Bay. Bishop Garth and Marion stayed with us at the Deanery from just before Palm Sunday till the Tuesday after Easter. They are an incredible couple and we were so honoured to host them. It was truly a blessing and we feel as though we now have new friends in Cape Town. Easter at the Cathedral was an incredible experience and I learned so much. It is a blessing to celebrate the resurrection with so many incredible people.
Well that is all to say for now. I am trying to recover from multiple respiratory infections, from sinus to chest, I picked up over the past couple of months and finally went to the Dr. for. We took a few days at the coast and are resting and getting ready for our next busy time before we come home. In two weeks Penny goes North to help with HIV training and the following week I go North for the second session of our Clergy training program. After that we have a few days to pack and then we are in the States for a month. We will be arriving in Alabama in May 20th and be there until June 22nd. Two dates are organized for preaching and dinners. On May 31, Pentecost Sunday I will be preaching at St. Stephens in Birmingham. Penny and I will also present for the Sunday School that morning. That night we will be hosted for a dinner and talk at St. Francis in Indian Springs. On the following Sunday June 7th I will be preaching at St. John’s in Decatur, and we will have a dinner and talk at St. Timothy’s in Athens beginning at 5:30pm. More gathering times are sure to be added and we will do our best to keep everyone updated as to our whereabouts. We have added a Twitter feed to the blog and we are trying to Tweet regularly. We love you and appreciate all your prayers and support. We could not do this without you. Jeremy and Penny

Two weeks

Looks like it will be at least two weeks until we get our laptop back. We will update the blog just as soon as we can.

Computer Crash

Hi everyone we just wanted to give you a quick update and tell you that we are doing fine. We had planned a long update and many photos from the past month but on Friday we had a major computer crash. We are hoping they can save our photos. We backed up two weeks ago so mostly we are ok. We are now using the Parish office computer. We hope to have our computer back in the next week or so and when we get it we will send out a big update.

Two quick notes; 1.) Thank you again to everyone who sent thigs with Monica on her visit. you do not know how much it means to us and to those you are helping. and 2.) It was wonderful to hear everyone at Diocesan convention. Your voices were beautiful and really gave us a lift. Thanks.

Orientation Week

Hi everyone we hope you have had a great start to the new year. We had a rather quiet evening with some new friends from South Africa on New Years but the 2009 has quickly picked up speed. From early December to mid-January Namibia pretty much takes a break and shuts down. But now as school is going back into session people are coming back from their holiday and picking up on things they didn't finish in November.

We started off the year by Jeremy going North to help with the first week of the Theological Training Program for the Diocese of Namibia. We have had the question from a few people about what it means to go "North" so hereis an explanation. North is the area of the country mostly populated by the Ovambo tribes. It was once known as Ovamboland. It is an 8 hour drive from where we live to the Anglican Center at Onekweya. It is a long drive with almost nothing to break up the drive. There are towns every 200 kilometers or so, but in between, nothing. So going North generally refers to that drive to historically Ovambo territory. The conference center is located about 10 kilometers into the bush off the main road.

As most of you know one of the main reasons we are in Namibia is to work on this theological training program for the diocese. We have been working really hard over the past six months to put the final touches on the framework or outline of how the program will run. This week from January 5-10 was our orientation. We had 49 students that showed up to begin this program. Each of them had gone through an interview process with the Diocesan Selection Committee and been recommended by their rector. There are 20 women and 29 men and 20 of the students are under the age of 25. These students will be using a curriculum from TEE South Africa. TEE stands for Theological Education by Extension. The difference in this program and other extension programs is that we wanted to give the students a sense of community and form a floating seminary. Each month students from each geographical area will gather to meet with a tutor, generally an archdeacon. Four times a year (January, May, August and October) they will come together as a large group in Seminars that will cover topics not included in the TEE program. In May we will begin our study of Anglican liturgy, music and the Prayer Book. It is an incredible group. Their commitment is already evident. Two of the students travelled over 1000kilometers to attend and most of the students slept on mattresses on the floor of old classrooms during the week. One student, Daniel came from over 70 kilometers in the bush from one of the parish outstations to attend. Only two of the students had cars so most either took a "taxi" or got a ride with someone in the program staff. I am amazed and inspired by them. I have posted a web album of photos from the orientation. Just click here to go and take a look.

There are so many things I could tell you about this week. One interesting statement came up when Lukas Katenda was talking about what it meant to be a shepherd. He asked the class how many of them had actually tended sheep or goats or cows at some point in their life. Every hand in the room went up. Each and every one of them had, at some point in time, tended animals. Scriptures speaking of Jesus as a shepherd will have a very different meaning to them than they do to most priests.

Another incredible find was to recover the Bill Yon library of books that were left at Etameko back in 1988. We had heard last year that the books had either been lost or destroyed but a little digging found them in a large room at Onekweya. They were probably 85% intact and just a little dirty. The room being cleaned in the photos is the library and almost all of the books you see were donated by Bill. The students were so excited to have their very own seminary library and we have committed to continue building this resource. Any priests that are looking for a way to clean out all those books from seminary? Put them in a box and mail them to: The Rev. Jeremy Lucas, Box 65 Windhoek, Namibia. A large box will probably cost you a couple of hundred dollars but there are much worse things you could spend your money on. Don't worry about duplicates we can organize several resource libraries around the diocese to house them. Any books about theology, liturgy, biblical studies, pastoral care or preaching. Classic books like City of God or any other standards. Just send them. They will do more good on the shelves here than on the shelves there.

Another find was a beautiful stained glass made by Bill while he was here. It is a cross laid over Africa with the words God Bless Africa across the bottom. This is part of the prayer for Africa;

God Bless Africa

guard her children

guide her leaders

and give her peace

for Jesus' Christ's sake. Amen

We rescued the window from the floor of the room we cleaned out and brought it to the deanery to preserve this piece of history.

We will continue telling stories about the Training Program and its students and I hope you will realize how much your support means to the Diocese and people of Namibia. Just as a reminder February 22 is World Mission Sunday. It would be a great time to ask people in your parishes to donate to Mission to Namibia. Mail checks to 521 North 20th Street, Birmingham, AL 35213. Memo the checks Mission to Namibia.

The month of February would also be a wonderful time to organize a webcast via Skype. Send us an email and we will set up the details. February 15 will be the only time we know we will be out of town in the North.

We hope you are having a blessed Epiphany. Peace, Jeremy and Penny