Category Archives: Personal transformation

God and Nature in Belize, Part 2

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In an earlier post I mentioned that I had just arrived in Belize for a week of teaching (September 8-12). At the time I promised a more substantial report.

In short, my week of teaching was a wonderful experience. Now for the details.

Creation Care Study Program

The course I taught was called “God and Nature I” and was focused on the Bible’s teaching about creation, including the role of humanity, and how redemption in Christ affects both humanity and the entire created order. “God and Nature II” (later in the semester) tends to be focused more on theological and justice issues concerning the environment.

These “God and Nature” courses are foundational components of a semester abroad program for North American students in Tropical Ecology, sponsored by the Creation Care Study Program (CCSP). The CCSP sponsors study abroad semesters in both Belize and New Zealand.

Besides the “God and Nature” courses, the students also take courses in forest ecology, stream ecology, field ecology, environmental literature, and three weeks of internships with various organizations around Belize. And they get a couple of travel weeks during the semester, when they can visit other places in Belize or other Central American countries.

The students are drawn from about thirty Christian colleges and universities in the USA and Canada that have a standing agreement with CCSP. The students I taught this semester were from Gordon College, Messiah College, Dordt College, and George Fox University.

Belize

The Belize Program is located in a lush, almost jungle-like area, near the Guatemala border. The closest populated area is known as the Cayo District, consisting of the towns of Santa Elena and San Ignacio (joined by a bridge across the Macal River).

I arrived on a Saturday afternoon and was met at the airport by Josh and Nina (two of the US staff) who drove me two hours inland from Belize City to the Cayo district. The landscape gradually changed in the last half-hour from drier scrub and sparser trees to lush jungle at a slightly higher elevation.

Belize is twice the size of my home country of Jamaica but with a population of just over 300,000, whereas Jamaica has a population of nearly three million. It is really still in many ways a frontier country.

English is the official language, taught in schools, and is spoken by the majority of the population, along with Spanish, Creole (which is similar to Jamaican English) and a variety of other languages. I found Belize to be an amazingly multi-cultural country, where diverse people and language groups live side-by-side.

The population of Belize is made up primarily of:

  • Maya (descendants of one of three language groups of the Mayan civilization which populated central America a thousand years ago; many still speak their ancient languages); this is about 15% of the population.
  • Mestizos (descendants of Mexican and other Central American immigrants, often with some Mayan heritage, who tend to speak Spanish); this is about 50% of the population.
  • Creoles (descended from Africans with some European heritage, who speak Creole); about 20% of the population.
  • Garinagu—plural of Garifuna, which describes the language and culture (descendants of African slaves who intermarried with indigenous Caribs on the island of St. Vincent; after the British took over St. Vincent, many were exiled to Honduras and some arrived in Belize in 1802); about 7% of the population.
  • The remaining population is East Indian, Chinese, and Caucasian (including a substantial number of Mennonites, who speak Plautdietsch, a form of low German).

My Teaching and Other Activities

I taught three hours in the morning and two in the evening, with afternoons off.

The weather wasn’t overbearingly hot (low 80s, and even down to 75 at the end of the week) with some rain most days or overnight. But the humidity was very high (over 80%), which required me to change my shirt multiple times each day (I haven’t had to do that since living in Jamaica, usually when the temperature was in the high 90s).

The buildings on the CCSP campus were all brightly painted. There were a couple of two-storey buildings, one that included student and teacher dorms and a sizeable area for classroom and library (blue), while the other consisted of staff housing, along with the main kitchen, dining area, and lounge (red). There were two smaller buildings—a cottage (orange) for the program administrator (and spouse) and a supply shed and laundromat (yellow).

On the first full day there (Sunday) I went with the staff and students to an 8:00 am service at an English-speaking Anglican church in nearby San Ignacio, followed by breakfast in town.

Since my afternoons were free, I got to visit a small waterfall (Monkey Falls) for swimming (no monkeys), an internet cafe, an outdoor restaurant, and a Mayan ruin (Cahal Peck), all in or near San Ignacio.

On the campus (on different days) I saw a (non-poisonous) snake on my path as I was walking down to the nearby river, a lone iguana by the side of the driveway, and seven toucans playing in a nearby tree, chasing away the other birds and eating berries. I also heard a howler monkey at lunch one day, but didn’t actually see it (it sounded far off). One afternoon I was able to see a baby armadillo up close that one of the staff (Jesse) caught (then let go).

The People I Met

The most memorable thing about the trip was getting to know some wonderful people.

I had a great group of students, who were very engaged with the course content and worked to internalize and reflect on the significance of the Bible’s worldview for their lives.

The program staff included two married couples, Micalagh (the program director) and Josh (the facilities manager), and Annie (the program administrator) and Jesse (internship and cross-cultural coordinator). Nina and Tess were both student life coordinators and teaching assistants, with other duties too (such as managing the kitchen). It was a joy getting to know this committed and principled group of Christians, whose care for both people and the environment was evident.

We had two great cooks, Ms. Flora and Ms. Shirley, who consistently provided wonderful meals. The food was almost entirely vegetarian—rice and beans, tacos, vegetable stews, guacamole, fresh fruit, eggs, and (a couple of times) chicken. Everything was tasty and well-spiced (I didn’t need to pour on the habanero sauce that almost everyone added as a condiment to their meals).

There were four security guards who did shifts round the clock. I got to meet three of them, and had great conversations with Abner, whose family is originally from El Salvador. And there was a dedicated groundskeeper named Trinidad, whose efforts made the entire campus beautiful.

A Different Pace of Life

The next most memorable thing bout being in Belize, besides the people I met, was the pace of life. I had been preparing for the teaching (developing a syllabus, with readings, assignments, etc.) with a certain amount of anxiety, which came from knowing I would be in a new place with five hours of teaching each day and no first-hand knowledge of what to expect.

But this anxiety dissipated entirely by mid-week, to be replaced by a sense of relaxation and mellowness. This was quite a change from the stress of the past summer, as I had been dealing with writing and editing deadlines for a book and some essays (which thankfully all got completed), as well as negotiating speaking engagements for the upcoming year.

By mid-week (Wednesday afternoon) I found myself in rhythm with a slower pace of life, with few distractions (only intermittent Internet access and no committee meetings), and I began to feel part of this small community of faith and learning. Near the end of the week, I went with the staff to do shopping in San Ignacio, including a stop at the local market.

One afternoon I picked up a guitar (resting in the corner of a communal lounge) and began to play, after having hardly played for the entire past year (life had been that busy). Initially, my fingers seemed stiff and the music didn’t come easily, but by the end of the week I was in the groove, playing an hour or more each day.

Since Belize, there has been an undeniable element of culture shock at being thrust back into American life. Besides the much faster pace, plus having demands, deadlines, and meetings suddenly piled back on me (not to mention the desperate emails from students, needing help with different things), I found I was surprised at attitudes to food and portion sizes in restaurants (after eating lower down on the food chain for a week).

Yet I’ve been able to bring some of the mellowness back to Rochester (my wife keeps mentioning that I am nowhere as stressed as I had been). Among other things, I’ve been playing the guitar more and I’m trying to swim regularly at a nearby gym. Drinking my coffee black (as I had done in Belize, since milk wasn’t always available) has also helped; I found I can taste the coffee better now.

Would I return to Belize to teach “God and Nature” again?

No question about it; I hope it will be soon.

The Canadian Evangelical Theological Association

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I just returned from the 2014 annual meeting of the Canadian Evangelical Theological Association (CETA), which was part of the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences, held at Brock University, in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. The Congress is an annual meeting of about 80 academic societies and it moves around to a different Canadian university each year.

The CETA meeting was held on May 25 and there were eight excellent papers on topics ranging from violence in the Bible, to the (im)mutability of God, using jazz as a metaphor to understand the church’s mission, and the application of trauma studies to the Hagar narrative in Genesis 16. The meeting was marked by a wonderful sense of collegiality between graduate students, new graduates, and senior scholars. For a schedule of papers and abstracts, click here.

A particular highlight of the CETA meeting was the presence of J. Gerald Janzen (professor emeritus in Old Testament at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, who was born in Saskatchewan). Janzen gave a brilliant paper on Paul’s thorn in the flesh. Not only did his gentle manner and stunning intertextual reading of the New Testament, the Old Testament, and evidence from Hellenistic literature convince those in attendance about the meaning of Paul’s “thorn,” but the paper had profound practical implications for living with under the sign of the cross.

I also gave my “exaugural” address as outgoing president of CETA (yes, that really is a word; the opposite of inaugural). I’ve had the privilege of being president of CETA for the past three years, and I took the opportunity to give a brief history of the organization (including the  rationale for its founding in 1990). I also highlighted some of CETA’s exciting recent initiatives (such as a peer-reviewed journal and an annual Fall conference that moves around to different theological schools). And I shared my vision for the future of CETA. The text of the presidential address is available here.

CETA’s journal, the Canadian Theological Review, is actively soliciting articles and book reviews, which may address any area of theology—including biblical studies, systematic theology, historical theology, practical/pastoral theology, and philosophical theology. Information for contributors can be found here.

CETA will be having its next Fall conference in Toronto, at Wycliffe College on October 18, 2014 and a call for papers will be going out soon.

Learning to Ask Good Questions

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I absolutely love when students ask questions in class.

Questions outside of class are great too, whether they come by email or through one-on-one conversation over a cup of coffee. I’ve often come to clarity about some of my own ideas in trying to answer a student’s out-of-class question about some complex issue.

But questions in class have a special importance. I learned as an undergraduate student that once you start asking questions in class something important happens.

Two things, actually.

First, the quality of your own learning goes way up.

You become more engaged with the material being taught and you develop a better grasp of it. I think the way human psychology works is that when you say something out loud you become more personally invested in the topic. And when you articulate your inchoate thoughts (even in the form of a question) it helps you gain a degree of clarity you hadn’t yet achieved.

But something also happens to the class as a whole.

The learning of the other students goes up. The interactive aspect of a class (the back-and-forth between student and teacher) helps other students pay more attention. And it stimulates their thinking. Just one person asking good questions can get others talking, and then the effect snowballs.

The Value of Questions for Shy People

But it’s certainly hard to get started, especially if you’re a shy person.

I was shy from childhood right through my late twenties. So I know that it requires a certain amount of effort to start speaking up in class. As an undergraduate student, I used to have to spend time thinking about the assigned readings in advance of class and I would jot down comments—and especially questions—to bring to class.

The good thing about questions for a shy person is that you don’t have to worry about being right or wrong. You aren’t trying to show off your knowledge by giving answers. You’re trying to expand your knowledge by seeking answers.

I didn’t begin asking questions in class until my junior undergraduate year—yes, I really was that shy! Although I didn’t always get the answers I sought, my professors graciously hosted my questions. And the process of raising questions (and having them welcomed in class) turned me into a much more active learner.

After a while I started thinking of questions even while the professor was speaking, and I would raise my hand, and off we’d go.

I remember one episode in graduate school when my back-and-forth with a philosophy professor lasted for a full ten minutes (I kept asking about the basis of a particular idea—see below—and then about the basis of that one, and so on. The back-and-forth only ended when the professor lapsed into silence for what seemed like an eternity (but was perhaps only a few seconds). Finally, he admitted: “I have no idea. I really don’t know.”

But that wasn’t a problem, either for him or for me. It was simply an honest moment. And I even gained the professor’s respect for probing so deeply.

Three Kinds of Questions to Stimulate Learning

Looking back at my intellectual development, I’ve found there are three main kinds of questions that I’ve learned to ask, which have contributed most to my learning. These sorts of questions are the basis of developing critical habits of thought.

They set me in good stead for interacting not just with the classes I took, but also with any points of view I’ve encountered in my interactions with others, whether orally or in writing. So I ask these questions also of the books and articles I read.

But since I learnt the importance of these questions when I was a student, I’ll phrase them in terms of a classroom context.

Where Does That Come From? 

First, there are questions about the basis of an idea.

You’re in class, listening to the professor say something and a nagging question comes to mind:

  • “Why would we think that?”
  • “How do we know that is true?”
  • “Is there some ground for that idea?”

So, put up your hand and ask the question. (This was the sort of question that reduced my philosophy professor to silence.)

How Does That Relate?

Then there are questions about the relationship of different ideas.

You wonder about something the professor says in class that doesn’t seem to jibe with something you read in the assigned text or with something you thought the professor said in a previous class (or simply with something you know—or think you know—is true).

So you ask (respectfully):

  • “How would you reconcile what you said last week about this topic (or some other topic) with what you’re saying in class today?”
  • “If what you say is true, how does that fit with what today’s reading says on the same subject?”
  • “I’ve always thought thus-and-so, but now I’m wondering if it’s compatible with what you just said. Do you think there is any tension there?”

The point isn’t to try and trip up your teacher (though you might well do that). Rather, you learn the meaning of one idea by having its relation to other ideas clarified.

So What?

Finally, there are questions about the implications of an idea.

No matter how interesting an idea sounds, the rubber hits the road when you address the consequences of what is being taught. These consequences might have to do with how you think about something, but they might be relevant to practical action in the world. So you verbalize your question:

  • “What follows from this idea?”
  • “If that is true, what are the implications for X?”
  • “What would this mean for how we think about topic Y?”
  • “Does this mean we need to change our behavior?”

These kinds of questions engage your higher critical functioning, and after a while they become second nature to you.

Of course, not all questions have definitive answers. But in learning to ask good questions, your learning in all your courses goes up. And you get more out of conversations with others. And your reading comprehension improves drastically.

Have you had any positive or negative experiences asking questions in class?

Are there other questions that you’ve found helpful to ask?