Prayer Camp

Again this weekend I found myself on a bus towards Lobatse, this time with the final destination being Bio’s 7th Day Adventist church youth camp, just outside the town of Otse. A large tent had been set up in the bush, under which the weekend’s activities were taking place, starting with sundown vespers on Friday. I arrived Saturday afternoon just in time for their panel discussion on “Health by Choice, not by Chance” followed by a lengthy vespers session (and some uncomfortable kneeling and praying). “Health by Choice, not by Chance” was fascinating to me—the church youth group leader, who by profession is a doctor trained overseas, opened the discussion with a brief lecture on how the topic of health might be tackled in a number of different ways by looking at the choices we make about food, water, exercise and other health-related behaviors (including deodorant choice—but do they really have aluminum-free Tom’s here, I wonder?). “Africans are often followers when we should be leaders”, she said, citing the fact that stores in the West now have special organic sections selling expensive produce grown without chemicals when our (Batswana) grandmothers have been growing fruits and vegetables that way since time immemorial. The youth then broke into groups, each assigned a different topic to discuss and to then present back to the whole group. Here’s where I got a little lost/disconnected. Our group was assigned food and water. I was thinking this was a particularly interesting topic, given that based on my past month here, it seems as though there is a huge gap between the type of food that gets cooked at home (cooked greens, rice, a little meat/chicken, all pretty healthy) versus what people buy on their lunch break or way home from work (greasy fries, KFC chicken buckets, fizzy sodas, etc.)—what do people think of these hugely disparate food options available to them and which each have their own connotations and stigmas (KFC = food from the West, a sign of modernity? vs merogo= traditional greens, old-fashioned)? But after a brief silence, there was an intense flipping of Bible pages and a discussion commenced out of what the Bible tells us we should and should not eat. The kinds of meat that are or are not okay, an old testament focus on fruits and vegetables, a close reading of what exactly was or was not said about consuming wine (a confusing topic based on apparently conflicting passages). Clearly this opens up a huge conversation that I am not prepared to tackle about how the degrees to which the Bible gets read literally, treated as a moral guide, or in my case, viewed as largely unnecessary for a discussion about health. But in any case, the fact is that the youth here (all about my age) were intent on using the writings of the Bible to guide them in their understandings of what constitutes health and healthy behavior. Watching them skim the pages, looking for answers, I had a hard time restraining myself from asking what insight Mark verse xyz might provide in regards to the pitfalls of fast food and car-based lifestyles that require us to go to gyms to get exercise—a question I realize to be limited in itself. I think what I found most hard to swallow was not that these youth were looking for guidance in the Bible, but that their intense focus on what the Bible had to say about x or y or z seemed to preclude any creative or analytical thinking of their own about the topic. I couldn’t help but wonder if this type of approach was a continuation of the type of rote learning that still happens in so many schools outside of the West today—listen to the teacher, spit back what you are told is the “correct answer”, no room for your own opinion or thoughts, etc. Perhaps I’m being too harsh—there were a couple folks in the group who had some thought-provoking questions and sharp counter-responses to biblical citations, and plus, we all learn from stories, whether they are the ones we are told in our yoga classes or in school or in church—but still, the overwhelming feeling was that this book, that was written so long ago by a few guys, somehow held the final authority. It didn’t feel so different from a Bible study group I attended once in North Carolina, which on the one hand might seem strange since I was at a camp in the middle of the bush in Botswana this weekend, but on the other hand maybe isn’t so strange when I think about the decades of missionary work that has been done in this area, and the lifestyle of many people who live in Botswana’s capital (more similar to my lifestyle than the lifestyle of say, the Malagasi people I visited in Madagascar after Christmas). I know I’m hugely glossing over major differences between Christian church groups in the U.S. and here—maybe just because the similarities are more striking or surprising than the differences—but one thing I can say for sure is that the 7th day Adventist preachers I have seen here in Botswana are no more interesting than any Catholic priests I’ve heard back home and perhaps like the sound of their own thundering voices even more. After a painful hour and half of their moruri (pastor) saying what could have been said in about two minutes (“pray, pray and PRAY even more!!), I suddenly very clearly understood where the phrase “stop your preaching” comes from, and was ready to go home to Matheba, Lesego and little baby Aneele. However that wasn’t quite in the cards. I ended up at a gospel acapella concert in Gaborone (invited by the girls who gave me a lift back, who funny enough stopped at a convenience store for fizzy drinks and cookies for supper, post health panel discussion ) for a couple of hours before I saw bed…and that was my Saturday night.