A Farewell

We've been gone from Interface for over a month now, and all of the staff have been living at the main New Tribes Mission center about half hour away.  We were surprised to have to leave a lot sooner than we'd expected due to an increase of theft on our campus.  We ended up having two days to pack all of our final belongings and move out, and needless to say we were overwhelmed.  How do you pack up your lives in two days?  Because we left so quickly we weren't able to say goodbye to our village friends, so a few weeks later we went back to the Interface campus to put on a huge day of celebration to thank the village community for their part in our lives. 

 

Part of celebrating here is making a "mumu," which is, in essence, food cooked in a huge underground steamcooker using hot rocks and water.  We anticipated feeding hundreds of people so we made two mumus consisting of 1 cow, 2 pigs, 20 chickens, 5 cases of lamb flaps, hundreds of sweet potatoes and several bags of greens.   

 

 Some of us headed out to Interface a day early to help with the preparation.  There aren't many more times that I'll get to enjoy this incredible view.

 

This is the start of one of the mumu pits.  A fire is started and then rocks heated up.

 

The cow was brought in from a local cattle farm. 

 While the men worked on prepping the mumu pits and the cow (they were up all night working on it), the women began working into the night peeling sweet potato and cooking bananas. 

 Little kids wielding sharp knives aren't unusual around here.  This girl was helping her mom peel bananas.

 In the morning we awoke to see one of the pigs heading to his fate. 

 The hair is singed off before preparing the meat for the mumu. 

 

 Poor chickens didn't know what they had coming.

 Celebrations are decorated big with traditional decorations of banana trees and other flowers.  And balloons, of course. 

 Women and men started trickling in carrying greens to either cook in the mumu or build it.

 

 One of my favorite girls in the world, Mopo.

 While the preparations were being done we had a program planned which was MC'ed by a teacher in the village.  There were speeches (lots and lots of speeches) by Interface staff, village leaders and many others, and Drew Scholl performed a few of his own songs including a song he wrote for the village.  We thought the people would be honored by the song and love it, which they did, but a large group of ladies began crying and wailing in the middle of it to show their sadness that we were leaving them.  The song was a hit, though, and the people quickly adopted it as their anthem.    

 The final meat and veggies are put on the mumu.

 After being covered with its final layers of leaves and dirt, water is poured into pieces of bamboo down onto the hot rocks underneath.

 A few hours being cooked like this and the food will be ready to enjoy.

 A group of our closest friends and employees covered themselves in dirt to show how sorry they were for us leaving.  We considered this a day of celebration to honor our village family, but they saw it as a day of sadness that we would be leaving.  They were honoring us by their sadness as we were them by the celebration.

 We figure over 600 people showed up for the event. 

 Nikki Ray, Lesley Doerksen, myself and Bobbi Scholl - not just co-workers, but family.

 It's ready!  Layer by layer the mumu is taken apart and piles of piping hot food are laid in piles for everyone to eat. 

 

 Once school was out all the school kids flooded onto campus to join in the events.

 

From 7:30am to 5:00pm we sat, talked, cried, laughed, worked, and waited with our friends.  By the end of the day we were exhausted, but so thankful for such a great day to remember our friends by and to say goodbye to our Interface home one last time. 

 

Thank you, Lord, for the opportunity to serve in this amazing place.