Farewells

            Sausage rolls, fried chicken wings, potato chips, peanuts, a spicy snack mixture, and a carrot cake are on the menu. Not the norm for a healthy diet, but it smells good and tastes even better when, after a few speeches and presentations, we get down to eating.

            We’ve gathered once more at the St. Augustine Theological School: The ordinands, lecturer John Hamathi, Florence Bogopa, Karen and me. (Fr. James Amanze, the Principal, is away in Uganda.) It’s my final time with them. The next time I see them, if there is a next time, they likely will have been ordained.

            They say some kind things, then present me with a framed basket, for which Botswana is renowned, and two cups with Botswana drawings – distinctive, they say, so Karen and I will not disagree about whose is whose. I then present them with some books for the library – useful for the library to have, no doubt, but also reducing our luggage weight considerably.

Thanks to Fr. Murdock Smith, who chaired the North Carolina-Botswana link for some years, I also present each with a copy of N.T. Wright’s Luke for Everyone. Our students do not have texts, and the list of books on theology that they may have is very short indeed. This is a beginning. This church year the default gospel in the lectionary is the Gospel of Luke. We hope to give them commentaries on the other synoptics during ‘their’ year in 2014 and 2015, and the Gospel of John as they are ordained to the priesthood.

That’s the plan, anyway. In the meantime, I encourage them to read (they have heard this from me before), and remind them of the practical help commentaries can give them when they are preparing sermons. John Hamathi concludes: ‘I don’t want this book to collect dust!’ They laugh, and vow that it will not.

Then we eat. We talk about the Zebras’ loss to Ethiopia in a World Cup qualifiers match last Saturday, which Bonny Bashe and I attended. We complain about continuing electricity outages and water shortages and why the stadium in Gaborone still isn’t repaired after five years. It’s all in good humor, with a nice twinge of frustration. They want to know, with more seriousness, when grades will be posted.

Conversation slows down, and we clean up a bit, and we close with the Grace, and go our way.

Exam time at the St. Augustine Theological School

          I am grading the last of the exams: ‘Marking scripts,’ as it is called in England and in many parts of Africa. The burden of giving them – ‘invigilating’ – has been largely upon my colleagues, as I have been traveling with my sister and brother-in-law during their first visit to Africa. We sent the examinations by e-mail up to Francistown for the students there, and the vicar at the parish kindly gave them for us. One ordinand is still to go, as his English skills are limited. We will give his orally, in Setswana, through an interpreter.

I admit that I have given more care to setting these exams than I do at the Wake Forest University School of Divinity. There I am concerned with students’ mastery of the material in the course. Here I ask myself again and again, what is really important for our ordinands to know in their ministry? Course mastery and foundation for ministry are not always the same.

So, in my sacramental course, I am keen to know their theological understanding of the Eucharist: How might they explain to our congregations what we, as an Anglo-Catholic diocese, do each Sunday? I am keen to know, now that they have studied the history of the Reformation, how they might appreciate the differences between the various Christian traditions in Botswana, for the legacy of the Reformation is alive and visible throughout the country. And I am keen to know, now that they have studied biblical interpretation, how they might approach the lectionary as they prepare a sermon on a given Sunday. What, I ask, do you know about this passage, and what would be helpful to you to know if you could? Exegesis and hermeneutics as a practical matter.

Now, having posed such questions, I have quite a stack of papers to mark. This task, I find, carries with it some emotion for the lecturer. Of course there is an ‘objective’ aspect to it all; some answers are simply right or wrong, and we mark accordingly. Others are more nuanced; even then, we try to be ‘objectively’ fair. The emotion comes in because I want them to do well, and when they do not, I cannot resist asking myself what I might have done differently, how I might have taught instead that would have helped them understand more fully. It is worrying when I envision those who do poorly leading congregations without the firm foundation in biblical and theological knowledge we desire.

But the fact of the matter is that many do very well indeed, and those who have not always have the capacity to grow in knowledge and understanding as time goes by. I recall a rather silly piece I wrote for our student publication when I was in seminary, in which I argued that it was unlikely that any of Jesus’ disciples would have survived the Anglican ordination process, including seminary. All of our ordinands here at the St. Augustine Theological School have gifts for ministry. That is clear, so perhaps I should not be anxious about their performance on an exam. There is more to it than that.

Water, and its absence, in Botswana

            Water-rationing has come to Botswana. I’m sure it’s not the first time.

The Sunday Standard has a full page ad in which the Minister of Minerals, Energy and Water Resources announces that, country-wide, we can’t use potable water to wash cars and stuff like that, construction companies can’t use potable water to mix cement – no doubt a major matter when there is so much building going on around Gaborone these days – and, this is the one that intrigues me, hotels and restaurants with automatic-flush urinals have to convert to manual within two months. I’ve never felt that flushing is one of the male species’ strong points, so maybe this will save tons of gallons.

            Gaborone, the major city in the country, goes further. They’ve worked out a rotation system, whereby they cut off our water on particular days. Ours here in the Village, where we live, is Saturday from 8:00 a.m. to about 4:00 p.m. Karen or I take a big tub bath on Friday nights, set aside a bucket, and we’re ready for emergencies on Saturdays.

            Water, of course, is a serious matter in a largely desert country. Rains have not been good (some of my Batswana friends use much stronger words) in the last several years, and the Gaborone dam is down to 24% capacity. One Motswana tells me that Botswana should run pipes from the controversial Lesotho Highlands Water Project, which is intended to help South Africa solve some of its water problems. That strikes me as quite a distance, and quite unlikely.

            So, we try to limit our consumption, and we look with dismay when we drive past a burst water line on the street this afternoon.