LIFE AS A STAFF MEMBER

by Cheri Roland

“Ach, shame!” is the Afrikaners' response when we relay the events of the past two weeks to our walking club pals. “Whew!” is probably the equivalent American exclamation. Who knew how complex and time consuming registering and orienting 99 students would be? After this adventure, our hats go off to teachers and administrators at all levels of the educational spectrum. It is just short of a real life miracle.

As I was emailing friends a thumbnail sketch of our activities the first six months as staff members of the Seth Mokitimi Methodist Seminary (SMMS), it occurred to me that we haven’t really explained what has kept us occupied from 7:30-4:30 Monday through Friday since August 2010. Since neither of us has ever been on staff (pronounced staaahf) of an institution of higher learning before, we had no clue what we would actually be doing when we bid goodbye to the familiar last July. Additionally, our son suggested that perhaps several of our blog readers might be puzzled by how we became staff members of a seminary in South Africa.
“Why are you here?” is the frequently asked question. Our pat answer is, “Because the Lord told us to come.” That sounds rather presumptuous or sanctimonious or preposterous, and perhaps all three. But the fact is for several years we had been focused on our desire to give back, to step out in faith, to be used for something bigger, all those warm and fuzzy phrases that make you want to retch. There was a lot of discernment during this process that didn’t make sense until His timing and plan came together, and BLAM - there we were, and our prayers to be used by Him actually caught up with us! As it came to pass, Doug’s background of 4 ½ years teaching plus 35 years in transactional law and mediation translated into a skills set perfect for our current task. My job nursing for 22 years with Tampa’s jail population provided me with great stories and a wide range of experiences teaching, assessing and managing diseases, people and processes. Through an amazing journey guided by other Christians’ encouragement and faith, we finally landed in this small university town charged with helping to birth an infant ministerial training center for all of southern Africa.

Before leaving,one of our biggest concerns in coming here was that we would be bored. Ach, shame! But not to worry! God heard that prayer, too. We, in typical American fashion, hit the ground running in August and haven’t looked back. Now we run out of hours in a day. You should see my desk, or not…

Seminarians are different animals than theology trained students at a university: seminarians are being prepared to be pastors with their hearts and hands engaged to serve others, not simply their intellect. And that is where “the Americans” fit into the plan. Our first priority was to assess the current “field work” program, experiences designed to introduce the seminarians to encounters with the widest range of vulnerable people possible. What parts of the existing program were or were not working? We found a structure that had potential but lacked oversight. Because of a three way breakdown in communication, the program had imploded before we arrived. Yet, because this is a required core course, we needed to be able to evaluate seminarians at semester’s end. Oddly enough, the country-wide strike of hourly paid workers came to our rescue.

One day in September the entire seminary volunteered en mass at a huge psychiatric hospital across town to help reduce the suffering of those patients and support the few committed nurses brave enough to cross the strikers’ picket lines. Several seminarians even continued to help out for weeks, whenever their schedule allowed. So, when SMMS needed an agency to accommodate all those registered in the field work class, the hospital kindly accepted 70 volunteers every Thursday afternoon for a month, with the nursing supervisors dutifully filling out evaluation forms for us. The processes, paperwork and organization involved in mobilizing 70 people for this task was eye opening. Besides stationing students in the wards to foster one-on-one relationships, we had painters who transformed the day care center and crews who weeded the huge on-site vegetable garden, using supplies and equipment provided by the Seminary.

So we were able to avert a potential red tape crisis. But after the Academic Board meeting earlier this week, we were welcomed into the real world of realities and responsibilities of having detailed course outlines and class notes submitted before the course even begins, of intricacies of evaluating students’ work, of moderators who continually check if your course and grading are consistent and with your projected outcomes. There is so much more behind the scenes happening that funnels into that final grade on a transcript. May I again offer a heartfelt “Ach Shame.”

Concurrently with rescuing the existing field work we were building creating a directory of humanitarian organizations already doing the Lord’s work in and around Pietermaritzburg. I’ve lost track of how many agencies we surprised with cold calls, and how many referrals we followed up. We think our strange accent was an asset; doors were opened out of sheer curiosity. Brits, Canadians or Americans too naïve to know better? Soon we were getting around town with the help of Garmin and our new car (another story). We invited prospective partners to visit us in our (impressive) facility, offering them a sense of the mission driving these partnerships. As we forged relationships and and set up training for the seminarians, we quickly concluded the program needed a fresh face. Even the name needed tweaking; seminarians equated “field work” with slave labor. How could their perception of punishment be transformed into an emulation of Jesus’ servanthood? Or in nursing language, how does one become infected with compassion?

While we lined up the agencies which mutually fit our requirements, we were still struggling with the details of the overhaul. How could we effect a critical attitude change, credibility, supervision, on-going evaluations, weekly attendance, topped off with ensuring communication between seminary staff and agency, agency and seminarian, and staff and seminarian? In November, shortly before the close of our first semester, one of the seminarians brought us her workbooks from a previous Bible college course. Voila! This was another answer to prayer, providing us with the idea for a framework upon which to hang our proposed program. As the seminarians left for the end of the 2010 year, Doug and I were frantically cranking out document upon document, culminating in a folder for each agency and a workbook for each seminarian, hopefully solving our multifaceted dilemmas. Ross, our president, worked for hours with me and my ignorance of the computer’s capabilities to turn out the finished products. What a wonderful Christmas present those prototypes were! We were able to leave for our time off without the nagging anxiety of unfinished business hanging over our heads.

In the meantime, I was the “school nurse”; another story. Sufficient to say, we continue to learn what it means to be a Seth Mokitimi Methodist Seminary staff member. Never a dull moment :)